The forthcoming issue of TAC includes my review of one of my favorite books of the past year — Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America. Get it by subscribing to TAC here (or give a friend a gift subscription).

Meanwhile, my review of Gregory Schneider’s The Conservative Century is online at First Principles. Here’s a bite:

Gregory Schneider’s new book puts recent discussions about “the death of conservatism” in perspective, for many of the disputes that rage on the Right today have antecedents in the controversies of a century ago. Indeed, The Conservative Century (just released in paperback) begins at the turn of the twentieth century with two distinct strains of conservatism contending with one another—what Schneider calls the “laissez-faire conservatism” of such nineteenth-century thinkers as William Graham Sumner and Herbert Spencer against the “nationalist conservatism” of Theodore Roosevelt. The one side wanted smaller government, a noninterventionist foreign policy, and almost unfettered capitalism. The other believed that the federal government should exercise a strong regulatory role at home and had a mission to spread American values abroad. All this may seem disconcertingly familiar in 2009.

Neither the nationalists nor the proponents of laissez-faire typically called themselves “conservatives.” The former often styled themselves as “progressives,” the latter were classical liberals or radical individualists. But Schneider is not making a normative judgment by classing them all together as conservatives—however paradoxical it may seem, progressive nationalists and laissez-faire liberals alike strongly influenced later, self-described conservatives. The Cold War conservatism and popular Right of the mid-twentieth century drew upon national-security and free-market rhetoric (in different proportions at different times, to be sure), while throughout the postwar era noninterventionism and “Red Tory” economics have informed conservative critiques of conservatism. They represent paths not taken that nonetheless have roots on the Right as deep as those of the dominant traditions of nationalism and capitalism.

Schneider, an associate professor of history at Emporia State University, has demonstrated his understanding of the nuances of modern American conservatism before. His sourcebook Conservatism in America since 1930 was arguably the best and most diverse anthology of twentieth-century traditionalist and libertarian writing since William F. Buckley Jr.’s Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking? Before that, Schneider’s Cadres for Conservatism, a short but comprehensive history of Young Americans for Freedom, illustrated his knack for integrating political, institutional, and intellectual histories into a coherent narrative. The Conservative Century is a successor to both earlier works: a narrative companion to Conservatism in America Since 1930 that weaves political history together with the development of conservative thought over the last century—all in a mere two hundred pages.

Lastly, a not-so-recent review of mine is now online for the first time here at TAC: my take on Robert Higgs’s Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society.

Filed under: Books, Conservatism