Although it is four decades since the United States entered World War II, some aspects of the nation's wartime experience are still virtually unstudied. Military and diplomatic historians have labored productively for many years, but historians interested in American social and intellectual developments are just beginning to turn their attention to the wartime era. Recent general studies by Richard Polenberg and John M. Blum are especially welcome since, by drawing greater attention to the period, they should stimulate further research. There is much left to be done because the war affected practically every dimension of American life. The present essay deals with one of its less obvious effects —the way in which it shaped the thinking of a whole generation on the subject of American identity.

A number of analyses of American foreign policy suggest that over the course of some two hundred years there have been two distinct themes in the American diplomatic experience. These can be labeled the realist and idealist. At various times first one and then the other appears to have assumed at least a temporary predominance in American thinking and diplomatic activity. The classic statement of the realist approach still remains that which was offered by John Quincy Adams in 1823 in response to pressure on the United States to intervene to assist the Greeks in their war of independence against the Ottoman Turks. “Wherever the flag of freedom may be unfurled,” remarked Adams, the heartfelt sentiments and sympathy of the American people go out to those struggling for freedom. On the other hand, the United States should and could not assume a direct responsibility in such struggles. In Adams' vivid phrase, America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Adamsonian or realist approach to American foreign policy then posits that altruistic or moral concerns are essentially irrelevant to the real objectives of a sound national diplomacy, which are the protection of one's own sovereignty and political and economic well-being. In our external relations, then, the focus ultimately must be on power considerations, the development of our strictly personal national interests.

Since the nineteenth century, Mexican history has encompassed many social conflicts that range from local rebellions to full-scale revolutions. Church-state relations have been closely related to, and affected by, these conflicts. The struggle between church and state led to the War of the Reform (1858) and to the Cristero Rebellion (1926). Both of these armed conflicts were resolved through an improvised and cumulative process that eventually did as much to obscure the causes of conflict as to remedy them. After independence, the liberals initiated the first phase of conflict, a conflict eventually extended into the twentieth century by various advocates of a strong, secular state. The conflict began as a resistance to the efforts to reform the church and to give the state a neutral orientation and subsequently escalated into a divisive cultural war. Conservative politicians and religious leaders took up the liberal challenge with a doctrine justifying a specific political order at almost any price, thereby involving the church and the state in a mutually destructive and increasingly bitter struggle.

The debate over abortion in America is at a standstill. The pro-life and pro-choice groups, having settled firmly on incompatible premises, have nothing to say to one another. Their “debate” is only “a battle of bumper stickers between people with their minds already made up.” More importantly, they have nothing to say to all the people in the middle who feel uncomfortable with both positions. If the crux of the abortion issue is choosing between being pro-life and pro-choice, then the undecided citizen who sincerely wants his country to act rightly has the dismal opportunity of deciding whether to be anti-choice or anti-life.

It is now almost a third of a century since George Orwell's publication of Animal Farm made him famous in the United States. Outside of certain radical and literary circles Orwell was virtually unknown in America before 1946. He had written an occasional piece for journals like the New Republic, Dwight Macdonald's idiosyncratic Politics, plus a series of “London Letters” for Philip Rahv's radical magazine, Partisan Review. In the early 1930's Harper's had published some of his earlier works, novels like A Clergyman's Daughter and Burmese Days, and non-fiction pieces like Down and Out in Paris and London. They were largely ignored, unread, and unreviewed.

In the more than fifty years since the publication of Carl Mannheim's classic essay “Conservative Thought,” a sizable body of literature has come into being concerning the nature of modern European and American conservatism. In this article I propose to review and assess some of the more significant pieces of this literature, to indicate my own views on the nature of conservative thought, and to map out some areas I think students of conserivatism might want to explore further. Such a study of the problem of defining conservatism is, I believe, a worthwhile enterprise, not only because of the intrinsic historical importance of modern conservatism, but also because of the light which our understanding of conservative thought may shed on the development of political theory as a whole during the last two centuries.