Jacob Levy wants to know why he can’t come up with suitable modern American conservative thinkers “to teach alongside Theory of Justice and Anarchy, State, and Utopia.”
He could teach the Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand. You can find their principles stated here. But he doesn’t want to allow “everything will go to hell if the South isn’t allowed to remain the South” in to the “suitable” camp. The problem is, if you throw that out, you don’t have a lot of American conservatism. (And why, if you’re a conservative, shouldn’t you very strongly believe that the South should remain the South?)
Some folks suggest Whittaker Chambers, Witness. Which is a nice piece of conservative, Christian anti-Communism, and has an intelligent-design argument in it, but probably fails on the “datedness” test. You can find Chambers’s foreword here.
Why not Samuel Huntington, “Conservatism as an Ideology,” from the APSR (June 1957), 454-473? Here you find Huntington making what I regard as the best possible intellectual argument for modern American conservatism (which doesn’t mean it’s very good, especially not in the context of 1957, but): “Today, the greatest need is not so much the creation of more liberal institutions as the successful defense of those which already exist. This defense requires liberals to lay aside their liberal ideology and accept the values of conservatism for the duration of the threat….” Certainly, that’s an argument that has stuck around.
UPDATED: I read further that Oakeshott is the echt conservative, although he’s not American. Very well, then, Oakeshott:
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
Which means you really ought, if you’re a mid-century American conservative, to defend racial segregation, in all its tried familiarity, its actual factuality, its near and limited sufficient convenience. And they do that. So why does Levy rule out teaching the relation between conservative principles and defense of segregation?
The Edge of the American West 
43 comments
March 4, 2008 at 10:25 am
zunguzungu
Your gloss of Huntington strikes me as not exactly the same as H.G. Wells “liberal fascism” but not so dissimilar either: while Wells thought that you needed technocratic authoritarianism to create the foundations of the utopian liberal state, Huntington seems to want to presume that we’ve already got more liberalism we can even take care of, so we need authoritarianism (does the technocratic stuff fall out of the equation?) to defend it.
But both seem to go by the logic that the ultimate goal still is some kind liberal state, which suggests to me the *real* problem: “conservative” and “liberal” are not analagous ideologies, that one can have all the trappings of an ideology that the other has (the way every nation needs a soccer team, a capitol building, and a beer). Conservatives actually *are* liberal, in all sorts of ways that they have to themselves deny, producing weird schizophrenic formulations like Huntington’s; as a reaction to liberalism, conservatism can’t have an intellectual tradition distinct from liberalism because *it* itself is not distinct from liberalism. I know I’m playing fast and loose with the definition of “liberal” here, but that’s how the game is played by conservatives as well. They get to *be* anti-liberal even as they espouse policy that only makes sense in a “liberal” paradigm (no child left behind, or the war to “liberate” Iraq, for example) because they’re so good at pretending conservative and liberal are diametric opposites. But maybe then they can’t be *intellectually* conservative without giving up the game and showing themselves to be liberal?
March 4, 2008 at 10:56 am
bitchphd
Of course I agree with the implicit argument in this post. But I’m not sure how to read this:
why, if you’re a conservative, shouldn’t you very strongly believe that the South should remain the South?
I can’t tell if you’re serious about this question or not. If so, arguably, because “the South,” in that sense, is about a historic sense of racism, yes? Which is inimical to the American ideal of equality under the law, equality of opportunity, etc. I don’t see why those things *couldn’t* be construed as conservative values, though I do see that, at present, they aren’t–except in the intellectually dishonest sense that they get trotted out as an excuse to paper over entrenched inequality.
March 4, 2008 at 10:59 am
eric
What I mean is, B, if you’re a conservative, you don’t get to challenge segregation. It has its problems, sure, but you prefer present laughter to utopian bliss. In other words, as a conservative, you don’t get to challenge that particular institution. “Ideals” aren’t in it for you if you’re a conservative.
March 4, 2008 at 11:03 am
Ben Alpers
Among my suggestions (chosen more for their influence on U.S. conservatism than their intrinsic merit) would be…
• Herbert Agar’s “Culture vs. Colonialism in America” (1935), which is sort of a midwestern variation on the Nashville Agrarians (who are also worth reading).
• Something by James Burnham (can we retrospectively consider The Managerial Revolution to be a conservative book?)
• An excerpt from Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (not American but very influential in the US)
• An excerpt from Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences
• An excerpt from Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind
• Whittaker Chamber’s Foreward to Witness. (In my experience this one teaches quite well.)
• An excerpt from God and Man at Yale.
• Something by Willmoore Kendall.
• An excerpt from Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.
• An excerpt from Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative
• Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictators and Double Standards”
• Something from the ’80s culture wars (an excerpt from Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind or an essay by Hilton Kramer)
March 4, 2008 at 11:49 am
charlieford
I was going to say, why not just cut to the chase with MEIN KAMPF? But that would be adolescent.
Something from Sidney Hook might fit to balance Rawls, since JR was a philosopher.
March 4, 2008 at 11:52 am
bitchphd
I’m still not following you, Eric. YOu mean “as a conservative” in the sense that “conservatism” = a sort of lock-step ideology that includes unacknowledged racism, yes?
you prefer present laughter to utopian bliss
??
March 4, 2008 at 11:55 am
eric
B, read the post—I’m quoting Oakeshott. I mean conservative in the Oakeshottian sense. Read what he says, and tell me how you get to oppose segregation.
March 4, 2008 at 12:03 pm
charlieford
Conservatism from Burke to Eisenhower to Ron Paul, it seems to me, HAS to oppose the Civil Rights movement/legislation for several reasons, none of which necessarily involve racism: A) Conservatism must favor entrenched, culturally embedded values and attitudes, as these have arisen “naturally” (Burke); B) Conservatism must oppose all use of (federal) government to engineer “progress”, as these attempts backfire and grow the federal bureaucracy and taxes (Hayek, von Mises); C) Conservatism must oppose putting government on the side of the “losers” and against “winners,” as that is unjust and economically counterproductive (Willaim Graham Sumner).
March 4, 2008 at 12:11 pm
bitchphd
Oh, right. So “conservatism” means not believing in improvement.
That seems wacked to me. I thought the whatever it’s called, the idea that history is always everywhere improving, was a conservative one.
March 4, 2008 at 12:28 pm
charlieford
Wow, B. We’re really talking past each other. OK, well, somebody’s got it wrong. I’m happy to concede it might be me. But I don’t think it is. Conservatism has its dour (pessimistic) and sunny (optimistic) sides. The former–which a lot of conservatives consider the only REAL conservatism, flourishes mainly among Europeans, Catholics, and old-school southerners (see Spengler, de Maistre, and, perhaps, Mencken). That pessimism IS, I think, an essential aspect of the conservative mind–it has dark view of human nature, and tends to view liberalism as naive, obtuse, hopelessly chuckleheaded. That dark view has never been a winner in the US, and we can credit Reagan for putting a smile on the movement, and making it popular in the process, but Reagan was more an American than a true conservative, and an actor/politician, not a thinker. Conservatives who believe “history is always everywhere improving” don’t understand conservatism; or, they’re just insisting, Cheshire Cat like, to use words any way they wish. That there may be improvements occuring here or there, some will grant, but they DO NOT and CANNOT attribute these to government action and seriously claim the mantle CONSERVATISM. Where it occurs, it occurs slowly and organically. This is especially true at the level of culture, attitudes, and prejudices–hence the necessity of opposing Civil Rights. (You could do worse than read Ron Paul’s statement on why he opposed renewing this legislation, available on his web-site.)
March 4, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Vance Maverick
It’s been a while since I looked at that Agrarian statement of “principles”. It’s astoundingly vague. They’re reasonably clear about a list of values (happiness in labor; religion; the arts; the “amenities of life”), though they don’t clarify for whom these values are to be achieved or preserved. They’re quite clear that industrialism is the enemy of these values. But they’re mystically obfuscatory about an “imaginatively balanced” life, a “definite social tradition”, a “concrete” or “genuine” humanitarianism, an acquaintance with the arts that’s more than “inconsequential”, etc. And they explicitly punt at the end — agrarian society “does not stand in particular need of definition”, and they propose no “practical measures”.
I’m in sympathy with all this stuff — up to the point where we realize that the other shoe will not be dropped. Evidently, the real conclusions, whatever they are, have been left implicit. Pretty weak tea….
March 4, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Bruce Baugh
B, in my experience/reading, conservatives are likely to denounce any general belief in (or expectation of) progress as Whiggish at best, playing into the hands of totalitarians at worst. Optimistic conservatives believe that goodness can be restored, rather than that it can be invented, and their vision of a functioning good society is an edited version of the past rather than something on really different foundations. And as charlieford says, it has to happen without leadership or direction, which puts it in pretty much the same category as the libertarian belief that businesses are accountable via market interactions but boycotts and unions are unacceptable restrictions on commerce.
March 4, 2008 at 1:08 pm
charlieford
“But they’re mystically obfuscatory about an “imaginatively balanced” life, a “definite social tradition”, a “concrete” or “genuine” humanitarianism, an acquaintance with the arts that’s more than “inconsequential”, etc. And they explicitly punt at the end — agrarian society “does not stand in particular need of definition”, and they propose no “practical measures”.”
Which is exactly why I found reading ITMS excruciating. It’s a politics of nostalgia, more about sharing a mood, and deriving consolation from that, than actual proposing anything. I thought I would like that book–until I actually read it. It was like a nail in the coffin; there was a slow dawning, a la Michael Novak, that “these are not my people.”
March 4, 2008 at 1:16 pm
urbino
It seems to me a perusal of George Nash’s post-1945 history would turn up any number of names, including the ones on Ben’s list.
Are any of them really suitable to teach alongside Rawls and Nozick? Well, in the sense of being serious philosophers, no. None. But if that’s what Levy means by, “Why can’t I find any…,” ISTM the answer is incredibly obvious: there aren’t any.
March 4, 2008 at 1:17 pm
urbino
One could, OTOH, find quite a few serious conservative legal philosophers, if Levy is willing to widen his scope just a bit. (I haven’t had time to read his post.)
March 4, 2008 at 1:19 pm
urbino
On further thought: Strauss and Voegelin, maybe? But I’m not sure they’re “modern.”
March 4, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Ben Alpers
I think that depends on what one means by modern, urbino.
I’d call Strauss postmodern. And it’s hard to select anything by him (particularly anything short) that would really allow students to get a handle on his ideas, especially since all his mature works are written in an “esoteric” style.
Maybe the first chapter of Persecution and the Art of Writing or On Tyranny (which has the virtue of being a fairly short analysis of a short dialogue–Xenophon’s “Hiero,” which is reprinted in the text–so students could get a sense of some of the advantages and disadvantages of Strauss’s manner of reading books) would be the best, short thing to read by Leo Strauss in this context.
At any rate, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, which is a somewhat easier read, functions as a pretty good introduction to Straussian thought.
March 4, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Ben Alpers
And I second urbino’s suggestion of the Nash book, which remains a really good introduction to the main strains of post-war conservative thought in the U.S.
March 4, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Buster
In addition to Ben’s great suggestions above, I might mix up the race and conservativism question by tossing in the self-professed black conservative George Schuyler. If nothing else, he’s a great stylist.
March 4, 2008 at 2:24 pm
ben wolfson
It was Humpty-Dumpty, not the Cheshire Cat, who used words however he pleased (and sometimes payed them extra).
March 4, 2008 at 2:26 pm
ari
Hey, Wolfson, some weird dude just delivered this scrawny little book to my office. And I have to say, it’s clearly a trainwreck, but the index is sweet.
March 4, 2008 at 2:39 pm
urbino
I’d call Strauss postmodern.
Interesting. In what sense? I agree about the difficulty of coming up with a selection from Strauss that’s easily digestible. Not having read Levy’s post, I didn’t know we were going for digestible selections. I figured if they were reading TJ and AS&U, they could handle, say, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism.
Now that I’ve skimmed through his post, I’m still not sure why they couldn’t. It doesn’t sound like he’s looking for excerpts; it sounds like he specifically wants something book-length.
I also find that, tee-hee, he’s already disqualified Finnis and George, of whom I was thinking when I mentioned conservative legal philosophers. I think, however, he’s already got the best available answer to his question: MacIntyre. I suspect that’s as good as he’s going to do, given his parameters.
One could thrown in somebody like Charles Taylor, who, though not a conservative, at least criticizes Rawls from the right. Taylor isn’t exactly the most readable guy in the world, either, but there may be just no getting around the fact that Rawls and Dworkin are not only the leading philosophers of liberalism in the last 50 years, but also the clearest writers of political/legal philosophy. Among conservatives, the thinkers are either readable but shallow (Kristol, etc.), or philosophically sophisticated but pretty opaque (Strauss, Voegelin, etc.).
March 4, 2008 at 2:43 pm
urbino
It was Humpty-Dumpty, not the Cheshire Cat, who used words however he pleased (and sometimes payed them extra).
Which, in this context, reminds me of this.
March 4, 2008 at 3:15 pm
charlieford
Righto. Humpty-Dumpty would do something like that.
March 4, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Ben Alpers
I’d call Strauss postmodern in the sense that his whole project is about moving beyond modernity, which he sees as fundamentally flawed. Although he frequently writes about this as a return to Platonic political philosophy, he’s not actually interested in turning the clock back (which he admits is impossible). Strauss is in many ways similar to, e.g., Martin Heidegger, who like Strauss criticizes modernity (and technology) and calls for a return to an imagined philosophic past (though for MH it’s the pre-Socratics, not the Platonic philosophers are are the ideal).
Strauss sees philosophy as essentially radically skeptical (or zetetic), while society must be built on a series of necessary, though ultimately untrue and conventional, beliefs.
To give credit where it’s due, many folks who’ve written about Strauss (including some Straussians, a number of pretty bitter critics of Strauss, and many people in between) consider him a postmodern thinker, e.g. Stanley Rosen, Catherine Zuckert, Anne Norton, Laurence Lampert, Robert Pippin, and Shadia Drury.
March 4, 2008 at 3:59 pm
urbino
Sounds reasonable enough to me. I never got around to the secondary lit on Strauss.
March 4, 2008 at 4:45 pm
jim
Oakeshottian conservatism isn’t really possible in the US. Things don’t remain the same for any length of time. The US really does work on a basis of creative destruction. So the conservative is put in the position of defending a status quo which has held for several weeks now. I exaggerate, but not by much. The Agrarians were defending a Southern way of life which, at that point, had existed for about a generation. Of course such a position is not going to wear well. The status quo that they defended was thoroughly timebound and as time went on it changed and left them hanging out to dry.
March 4, 2008 at 5:29 pm
charlieford
“Among conservatives, the thinkers are either readable but shallow (Kristol, etc.), or philosophically sophisticated but pretty opaque (Strauss, Voegelin, etc.).” What about my suggestion of Sidney Hook?
March 4, 2008 at 5:36 pm
urbino
I’ve never read Hook, so I don’t know. Do conservatives generally consider him one of theirs? On the basis of what little I know about him, it’s not clear to me that they would.
March 4, 2008 at 6:32 pm
charlieford
“Do conservatives generally consider him one of theirs?” Yes, very much so. One of the enconiums over at NRO about Buckley mentioned Buckley, Hook, and maybe Goldwater as the big 3 that pulled conservatism out of the mire in the 1950s-60s. Hook identified as a conservative in the ’80s, and was often featured in their publications (American Spectator, eg) and promoted by their book clubs (OUT OF STEP, his memoir, eg).
March 4, 2008 at 7:08 pm
urbino
Well, if he wrote clearly and with the scope and depth of Rawls or Nozick, then he seems like an excellent suggestion, to me.
I’m still kind of surprised conservatives identify that much with him. I mean, I knew he was an anti-Communist by the 1950s, but didn’t he still pretty much identify himself with the left for a long time after that? That is, wasn’t sympathy with Communism really his only beef with the American left until much later in his life?
That’s the impression I always had, but that could very easily be wrong.
March 4, 2008 at 7:18 pm
charlieford
Well, I’m not an expert on the chronology of Hook’s ideological twists and turns. He was a Trtskyite in the 30s, linked with Dewey in the 40s, anti-Communist in the 50s, by the 60s he was turning against the New Left, and by the 80s was well ensconced with conservatism, so maybe the 70s was his critical turn. That would make sense, actually. Here’s Murray Rothbard (in what is a pretty negative assessment actually): “. . . undoubtedly the most beloved figure among all these groups, as well as in the modern conservative movement [was] the late Sidney Hook. Long a fixture at the conservative Hoover Institution, Hook was everywhere, at every conservative intellectual gathering or organization, his every word and pronouncement hailed adoringly by all respectable folk from the AFL-CIO to the New Republic through National Review and points right.”
March 4, 2008 at 7:37 pm
urbino
Checking my copy of Nash, 1972 seems to be the turning point. Before that, Hook had cooperated with conservatives on Communism, but was still regarded by them as fruit of the poisoned tree, as it were. In ’72, Hook voted for Nixon and wrote his first article for National Review. From then on, he seems to have been clutched to the conservative bosom.
Sounds like he was very much part of that lost generation of Scoop Jackson Democrats.
March 4, 2008 at 8:08 pm
bitchphd
conservatives are likely to denounce any general belief in (or expectation of) progress as Whiggish at best, playing into the hands of totalitarians at worst.
But, but?!? Whence the conservative worship of Teh All-Powerful Market? Surely that’s (1) Whiggish as hell (pretty much by definition); (2) not an Eternal Verity.
I really am sorry that I’m being so daft here. Not A Historian.
March 4, 2008 at 8:34 pm
ben wolfson
Urbino: since the author is part of Chicago’s div school, I used to see that book all the time when I entered Swift Hall, so as to descend into its depths and purchase some pizza, and could never quite refrain from congratulating myself on recognizing the allusion in the title.
March 4, 2008 at 8:38 pm
teofilo
Whence the conservative worship of Teh All-Powerful Market?
Historically, that’s really more of a liberal thing. As for its current association with conservatism, see jim’s comment.
March 4, 2008 at 8:42 pm
urbino
You lost me, ben.
March 4, 2008 at 8:46 pm
bitchphd
Historically, that’s really more of a liberal thing.
Well, yes, I realize this.
March 4, 2008 at 9:02 pm
ben wolfson
See your comment of 2:43 pm.
March 4, 2008 at 9:42 pm
teofilo
American “conservatives” are generally just people who stick with the “liberal” positions of a generation or two earlier.
March 4, 2008 at 10:06 pm
urbino
Oh, that book. Wow. I was trying to figure out what the deuce George Nash was teaching at Chicago div school.
March 5, 2008 at 6:04 am
charlieford
B, your not being daft. Depending on where you’re coming from and what angle you’re looking at it from, these things look very different. Forexample, “the market” and even “capitalism” are regarded by certain conservative thinkers (especially in Europe and to a degree in the Old South) as evils, since they a) destroy the traditional basis of societies; b) introduce constant change; c) elevate ambition and materialism. In this sense, US conservatism and liberalism are both varieties of European “Liberalism”–each breaks the bond by which state or church used to restrain the market, ie, they advocate liberating the market. The differences between them, it seems to me, have been over the question: who will the state protect and empower? Both, of course, empower business and accumulated wealth (hence radical criticisms of liberalism as inherently compromised). But our current liberals want to empower the “have-nots” in order to redress the imbalance in opportunity that accrues to families, classes, races over time. That means redistribution–taking some money from the “haves” and giving it to the “have-nots.” For most of its modern history, conservatives argued that that was a) unjust (or the lite version, the idea that an unbalanced budget is immoral), and b) counterproductive because the “masses” were vicious and would waste it or enhance their visiousness. The New Deal showed them that most Americans don’t care that much about abstract rules of “justice”; nor do they take kindly to elites sneering at them as some kind of lumpen-numbskulls. Conservatives needed a new way to argue that was optimistic, comprehensible, flattering (or at least not insulting) to the people, and above all one that could tap into the self-interest of the regular folk. Voila! The market will make you ever more prosperous (if you’ll just let us cut taxes, eliminate services, slash regulations)! It strikes me: shouldn’t Eric be explaining all thei?
April 8, 2008 at 11:49 am
andrew
I’m finally catching up with your blog, and I’m way late to the thread and have nothing to add, but while I’m here, I’ll say that I can’t help reading this and thinking of Hartz.