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IN SEARCH OF A USABLE PAST: CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT IN AMERICA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2010

JENNIFER BURNS
JENNIFER BURNS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Virginia E-mail: jenniferburns@virginia.edu
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Extract

There is no conservative thought in America, only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, thus providing a generation of historians with a convenient set piece to demonstrate the inadequacies of mid-century liberalism and its blindness to the nascent conservative intellectual movement gathering strength and purpose just as Trilling wrote. Two excellent new books about American intellectual history cast this quote in yet another light. Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History carefully documents a centuries-long tradition of conservative thought in America, from the founding era through the end of the twentieth century. In The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, Michael Kimmage asserts that Trilling himself be considered a source of conservative ideas in postwar America. Taken together, the books by Allitt and Kimmage indicate that a new cycle of writing about conservative thought has reached full flower. For far too long, the field of conservative intellectual history has been dominated by the figure of George Nash, author of the classic 1976 The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. These books provide an updated and more critically sophisticated way to examine the terrain Nash strode alone for so long. More significantly, they indicate that intellectual historians are ready to consider conservatism in dialogue with liberalism, bringing new balance to the study of American ideas. Furthermore, both books, Kimmage's in particular, suggest that some of what we are calling conservative and liberal might be flying under the wrong flag. The key to sorting out the confusion will be drawing a more careful distinction between conservatism as a “movement” and as a body of ideas, and looking at both conservatisms as part of a typically American response to historical change, rather than as an exotic and abberant specimen.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 479 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), iGoogle Scholar.

2 Nash, George H., The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996; 1976)Google Scholar. For the influence of Nash's book see Burns, Jennifer, “In Retrospect: George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,” Reviews in American History 32 (Sept. 2004), 447–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 European historians will notice the considerable semantic muddle intrinsic to the topic. In the 1930s, during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, “liberal” came to connote a political agenda more akin to social democracy, while classical liberalism came to be seen as conservative. The linguistic shift underscores the divergent perceptions of the New Deal, seen by its defenders as a natural outgrowth of well-established reform traditions, and by its opponents as a terrible and radical break with the past. Opponents of the New Deal order are generally termed “conservative” by American historians, though others may recognize them as “neoliberal,” a term that signifies the transnational dimensions of free-market thought in the twentieth century. For definitions of neoliberalism and a discussion of its relationship with American conservatism see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. Introduction and Postface.

4 Allitt, Patrick, The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 2Google Scholar. Further citations will be internally referenced.

5 Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot (Chicago: Regnery Publishers, [2001] 1953)Google Scholar.

6 Kirk's canons, which can be said to limn an “essentialist” definition of conservatism, are as follows: (1) “belief in a transcendent order”; (2) respect for “proliferating variety and mystery of human existence”; (3) “conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes”; (4) “persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked”; (5) “faith in prescription . . . custom, convention”; (6) “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform” (ibid., 8–9). These are counterposed against four emblematic radical beliefs: perfectibility of man, contempt for tradition, social leveling, and economic leveling (10).

7 Huntington, Samuel P., “Conservatism as an Ideology,” American Political Science Review 51/2 (June 1957), 455CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement, xv.

9 That there was a conservative flavor to much of Roosevelt's writing, particularly his embrace of martial values and aristocracy, is true; the question is whether considered as a whole Roosevelt's political record aligns him more with the reform tradition or with the conservative legacy.

10 Absolutism had special resonance for Catholics, as Allitt shows in an earlier work, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). However, Kirk's attacks upon “utilitarianism” indicate that a desire for objective truth was widespread among conservatives of diverse religious backgrounds.

11 Kimmage, Michael, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anticommunism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Further citations internally referenced.

12 In fact, Huntington's 1957 essay can be seen as part of this general reaction against radicalism. Huntington wanted to rehabilitate the term “conservative” and make it safe for liberals.

13 Arthur Schlesinger, “The New Conservatism: The Politics of Nostalgia,” The Reporter, 16 June 1955, 10.

14 In my own work, I have attempted to deal with these problems by relying on the category of the “American right,” a more capacious category that includes, but is not limited to, “movement” conservatives who see the Republican Party as fundamental to their goals and aims. The concept of an American right brings into focus a panoply of groups and individuals who share some affinities with conservatism but who take a meliorist or radical stance towards social change and highlight individualistic rather than social values. I have found this added terminological precision is helpful particularly when discussing libertarians like Ayn Rand, who is both adamantly not conservative yet admired by many who consider themselves conservative. Rand, for example, denounced Ronald Reagan for his opposition to abortion rights. Burns, Jennifer, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 275Google Scholar. Along with Rand and her Objectivist movement we might find figures like Hayek, Mises, Chambers, and Sumner who are better considered “on the right” than “conservative,” and the boundaries might also be drawn to include a more radical right of militia and paramilitary groups (though this is not a connection that has been firmly established in the literature thus far).

15 I have in mind here an investigation along the lines of Kloppenberg's, JamesUncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, but oriented to conservatism.