More important, while I havn’t read Hayek’s book about serfdom, I have read his “Why I am not a Conservative”…

Although I must say that I find Rothbard’s view that socialism is “achieving liberal ends by conservative means” more interesting.

In his Washington Diarist column, “With Respect to What,” in the latest issue of The New Republic, the paper’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, takes up that very question, with his usual rabbinical finesse, already…

“We are in the middle of yet another Burke revival. Jon Meacham, who relies on the identification of trends for his professional survival, ruled so last spring. The evidence is everywhere. Sam Tanenhaus smartly explains the fate of American conservatism as a contest between Burkeans and ‘revanchists.’ David Brooks calls President Obama a Burkean, though Thomas Sowell disagrees. In merry complicity with his own manipulation, Brooks tells of David Axelrod greeting him in the White House with a copy of Reflections on the Revolution in France in his hand. (No doubt liberal columnists are met with On Liberty.) A few years ago Arnold Schwarzenegger invoked a school of political thought that he unforgettably described as ‘Schwarzenegger, Edmund Burke, [and John] Kennedy.’ In a CNN discussion of health care hysteria last summer, Mary Matalin spoke obscurely of ‘Edmund Burke–type linguistics.’ Even Patrick Leahy cited the right’s idol in a speech on government reform. And so on. (I do not include George Will in the fashion, because he really is a Burkean and has the study to prove it.) Many decades ago Kirk noted with some astonishment that ‘nowadays Burke is praised in such journals as The New Republic.’ I am happy, in the spirit of the subject, to conserve the tradition of the house.”…

Conservatives certainly can use Hayek’s arguments against the Democrats, probably there will have to be more liberal mistakes before they’re compelling enough to make people forget the Bush mess.

Chambers’s twilight mood and sense of desperation also look overdrawn right now — the sort of dramatics one wants to avoid right now, and save for truly harrowing times.

Just how Burke or Kirk relates to actual, real-world politics can be hard to say. You may find people who seize on different parts or interpretations of Burke or Kirk on opposite sides of many issues. The more political, individualist interpretations conflict with organic, traditionalist thinking, so which do you choose?

To suggest our more cultural conservative canon, which word we might replace from overuse, we might toss, along with Ortega, the names of T.S. Eliot, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, Josef Pieper, the Southern Agrarians and New Critics, Mencken, Dwight Macdonald, John Lukacs, Jacques Barzun, George Kennan (Lukacs’ friendships with Macdonald, Barzun and Kennan are interesting sidelights here), Jacques Maritain, Georges Bernanos, Wendell Berry, E.F. Schumacher, Christopher Lasch, Alasdair McIntyre…who else, O scholars? Anyone who has spent time with the sort of academic/philosophic paperbacks much in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s, many issued through non-university trade publishers, in the wake of the attempted post-totalitarian recovery of cultural values, will have noticed how open mainstream publishing was in those years to a certain type of spiritual “conservatism” issuing from Catholic, Aristotelian, Thomist, and stoic strains alike, kin to the renewed engagement with theology suggested in Protestant circles by Niebuhr, Tillich, Barth, Bultmann, &c. There was also a huge rediscovery of Kierkegaard after WWII as well.

We will now take comments from the floor, the better to join the crickets in our less-than-Greek chorus, aka One Against Thebes…

My obvious favorite from your list, Albert Jay Nock, had one equally obvious advantage denied us lesser and later mortals: he came of age long before there was such a thing as a conservative movement, intellectual or populist. No one who reads his Memoirs from 1943, and, so lit for the skies, hopes to make of himself a country-fair c. 2009 apprentice, would dye himself in movement vats except for tangential accent, as one dashes cayenne into a stew. If approached by a group of high-school or collegiate Nockians asking you What to Read?, give them each a copy of The Columbia Encyclopedia, a library card, a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate to the best-stocked used bookshop within a fifty-mile radius and a state-resident’s card to the nearest public-university library, and a subscription to The Times Literary Supplement, before clapping them on the back with a hearty “Go to town!” Soon, your Li’l Chips off the Ol’ Nock will, among latter-day writers, be on the most intimate terms with, say, the short stories of Tatyana Tolstaya and Harvard’s recent I Tatti library of Renaissance-humanism translations, and when asked their opinion of “Ann Coulter”, will wonder why, of all characters from Silas Marner, their interlocutors chose one of such wafer-thin import and remark:

“There were women in Raveloe, at that present time, who had worn one of the Wise Woman’s little bags round their necks, and, in consequence, had never had an idiot child, as Ann Coulter had.