Patrick Deneen warns that “CLS vs. Martinez will foster a number of discrete efforts to crack open existing ‘exclusive’ associations that do not advance the liberal agenda.” This is in keeping with “the logic of liberalism … the evisceration of associations in the name of the individual, achieved by means of the centralizing power of the State.” Christian groups at state colleges and universities have lost a measure of independence, and centralizing power has again advanced in the name of tolerance and legal individualism.

Trouble is, in this case the plaintiff is at least as guilty as the accused. The Christian Legal Society was not fighting under the banner of localism. On the contrary, its members appealed to federal power against the decision of a local authority (Hastings College). If CLS had won, consider what the upshot would have been: it would have refined and reinforced the power of federal courts to overrule the policies that college and universities (which are of course not individuals but associations) set for themselves. Hastings College was wrong to use its nondiscrimination policy to deny recognition to the CLS, but by localist lights CLS was more wrong to make a federal case out of this, since doing so could only undercut local institutional independence.

One might retort that colleges and universities are not really independent institutions, they are already de facto appendages of leviathan, and anyway, no one could imagine federal courts upholding the same case with the values reversed: a state university that forbade its student groups to admit certain minorities would clearly not be tolerated by the Supreme Court. There is an argument to be made that because universities are already effectively nationalized, they no longer count as corporations or associations, and only smaller groups like CLS really deserve the support of localists or associationists (to employ an awful neologism).

Yet universities, as degraded as they may be, are rooted institutions in a way that student groups, including national student organizations like CLS, are not. Indeed, CLS is a more voluntaristic and liberal institution — in formal terms, more individualistic, regardless of how politically incorrect its beliefs may be — than any state college or university. For localists and associationists to side with a transient group against a placed institution like a university (or universities in general) strikes me as highly misguided.

If the greater issue behind CLS v. Martinez is religion vs. secularism, conservatives’ sympathies will be on the side of CLS. But if localism is the lens through which this fight is to be seen, then CLS should not be attempting to use federal power (indeed, individual constitutional rights — including the individual right to form voluntary associations) to overrule local authority, even if that authority rules in a way that neither decentralists nor conservatives like. What CLS tried to do was much like what businesses did in the 19th century by invoking the 14th amendment and the incorporation doctrine to acquire the full constitutional rights of personhood and thereby circumscribe the powers of state and local authorities. Decentralists of all stripes, from the libertarian Felix Morley to the radical Ralph Nader to various Front Porch traditionalists, have seen this as a fatal perversion of the federal system. Is it any less of a perversion if the groups seeking to vindicate their rights through national power are religious rather than economic in character?

It is not even the case that CLS would have had no redress without recourse to the federal judiciary. Califorina, after all, has passed referenda against affirmative action in the UC system and banning gay marriage. The rights CLS wanted to acquire at Hastings College might well have found favor among California voters. But CLS chose to seek justice from leviathan instead. (In fact, it sounds as if the Hastings chapter of CLS may have been started specifically with a view to challenging the nondiscrimination policy in federal court in order to set a national precedent — this is a common tactic of liberal and conservative legal groups alike, both of whom use it to establish new civil rights.)

Professor Deneen is right that liberals, especially those on the federal bench, tend to subscribe to an ideology that would reduce society to an undifferentiated mass of equal individuals overseen by a supreme centralized power. Yet “conservative” groups like CLS are willing to adopt the practices of that very same ideology when doing so will secure them some advantage. There is no room for localism in the culture war — each side employs the same weapons of mass constitutional destruction in the service of its own cause. Ironically, this is something that Thomas Hobbes would have understood very well.

Some people already have unrealistic expectations of what the Apple tablet might do, however. Consider this post at Gizmodo, which promises the tablet will “redefine newspapers, textbooks, and magazines.” Redefining magazines and newspapers turns out to mean cluttering them up with video, music, and other multimedia detritus. You know when they put the KFC and the Taco Bell and the Pizza Hut together under one roof? That’s how some techies think the tablet should redefine newspapers. So you can watch MTV while you read the New York Times.

Multimedia has its place, but a video isn’t a newspaper and a book isn’t an album. (As an aside, one of the things that really annoys me about multimedia content is how servile it is: watching video content foisted upon you by, say, the New York Times is just as bad as watching television. Text gives the user much more control over his experience than multimedia does, since one can skim the text and read as much or as little, as quickly or as slowly, as one likes.)

Gizmodo thinks that the Apple tablet will redefine textbooks by slashing their costs. College texts in the non-humanities can be astonishingly expensive — $100, $200, even more. If Apple can provide textbooks for a tablet reader through the iTunes store, cutting out printing costs, won’t that bring prices down?

Not really. There are two reasons that textbook prices are so high. The first is that channels of supply are severely constricted: for the most part, the only place you can buy college textbooks is at college bookstores, which don’t have to compete with Barnes and Noble. The Internet has introduced a bit more competition, but supply is not only constrained at the retail level: there are no “substitute goods” for whatever textbook a course demands. You can substitute an earlier edition of a textbooks sometimes, but you can’t go out and buy a competing, cheaper textbook. (Actually, you can, but doing so might make it difficult to do assigned problem sets, for example.)

Those constraints are only half — maybe less — of the problem. The other half or more is that $100 or $200 textbooks are not terribly expensive relative to all the other inflated prices in higher education. If a family is already borrowing and spending $30,000 a year or more just for tuition, what’s another couple of grand? An income or credit line that can handle tuition can afford the textbooks, too. What drives the price of textbooks is not the cost but what consumers are willing to pay. They’re willing to pay hundreds of dollars for textbooks. So why would textbook companies charge anything less?

I expect for a time you will see some discounting of e-textbooks, maybe as much as 25 percent, which is nothing to sneeze at. Lower production costs will indeed allow textbook companies to keep profits high even if prices fall a little, and the online store’s need to claim market share will give the store an incentive to undercut the prices of college bookstores. (Which are already facing tough times in competition with online sellers of physical books.) But selling textbooks for Apple tablets won’t introduce any more competition in the production of textbooks, and it won’t do much to change the willingness of students’ parents to pay for overpriced goods. And over time, as the iTunes store gets a larger market share for the textbooks, Apple and/or the publishers will raise the price, as Apple and the record companies have already raised prices for individual songs from popular recording artists by a whopping 30 percent. (Songs on iTunes used to sell uniformly for 99 cents. Now popular songs sell for $1.29.)

The comparison with music sales is instructive. At $1.29 a song, a 12-song album would be $15.48 and a 14-song album would be $18.06 — the same price range that new CD’s sell for in many retail outlets. The iTunes store isn’t yet charging that much for full albums: most albums still sell for $9.99, even if individual tracks at 99 cents or $1.29 would add up to more than $10. But the market for music is far more diverse and competitive than the market for textbooks, and there’s a much greater range of substitute goods. Moreover, $15 to $18 is already too high a price for, say, the latest Blackeyed Peas opus — CD sales have been falling for a long time as prices have crept upwards. Without competition from iTunes and free file-sharing, record companies would face a great deal of market pressure to lower CD prices. The reason they don’t do so is attributable (at least in part) to the market segmentation that new distribution channels have introduced. CD’s sell to an older demographic: a thirtysomething or fortysomething can afford $20 for the latest Coldplay album. The kids, who have less money to spend, are buying their stuff online.

College bookstores are already uneconomical, and I expect many will disappear over the next decade. And if e-textbooks catch on, there will be many fewer used copies of up-to-date physical textbooks in circulation, which will reduce the competition an e-distributor faces from online sellers of print textbooks. No permanent new competitive pressures will push prices down, and the belief that reductions in the cost of production should translate into savings for consumers is naive — that’s not the way markets work. As long as there aren’t substitute goods and consumers are willing to pay $100 or $200 for a textbook, textbooks will sell for $100 or $200.

(The one wrinkle in this analysis is the availability of DRM-cracked e-textbooks. Universities, textbook publishers, and government will collude to try to head off this threat to profits, but the hassle and bad publicity of cracking down on students — who are, after all, customers to the tune of $30,000 or more a year for the universities — might lead to a truce in which prices decline somewhat or some black markets are tolerated.)

Addendum: Why treat students as consumers at all in an age of e-textbooks? Consider: if a student uses cracked e-textbooks every semester in all his classes, a textbook company might lose (calculating this liberally) $10,000 over four years — probably a good deal less than that. The university, assuming a very conservative annual tuition of $30,000, stands to gain $120,000 from the student (or his parents, or Uncle Sam) over four years. Does it make sense for expel a student for $10,000 worth of e-textbook theft and forgo $120,000 in revenue? Not at all — it would make more sense for the university itself to pay the $10,000 to the textbook company and keep $110,000 in tuition.

The university itself could be the consumer. A professor, department head, or college bureaucrat would look at what textbook is assigned and what the enrollment in the class is, then he would buy that number of textbook licenses. If this money comes out of departmental budgets, the professor or department will have an incentive to assign less expensive textbooks. If the university as a whole bears the cost, professors will assign anything they want.

This will guarantee the textbook companies their revenue, and of course the universities will ultimately pass the cost on to mom, pop, and Uncle Sam, whose loans underwrite price inflation in higher education. Pirating ceases to be an issue. This wouldn’t work with traditional textbooks, where physical depreciation is an issue, and where in any case pirating content is more difficult; it works just fine to leave students directly on the hook. But with e-textbooks, logic points in the direction of having universities license the content directly. It’ll be interesting to see if this plays out.

The word ‘conversation’ evokes the manner of the ‘conversationalist,’ taken by Oakeshott as one who is the agent of a flow of sympathy, not the utterer of a truth. The conversationalist is neither a lawgiver nor a prophet, much less a revolutionary reformer choosing to live for a future age. At any rate, if an entrant to a place of learning is inclined to be any of these things, he should know enough to check his guns at the door.

Fuller writes that Oakeshott might agree with some of the critical observations on the state of higher education in Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. But there’s a world of difference between Bloom’s desire for reformist action and Oakeshott’s confidence that the practice of education itself gives us the means for educational regeneration:

There can be no doubt that Bloom’s call to construct a strategy for preserving our civilization rests on persuading us that we are encountering a unique moment of threat (and opportunity) in which it is clear what needs to be said. Oakeshott characteristically resists all apocalyptic formulations, seeing in them recipes for suspending conversationality in favor of a politicizing counterrevolution that will define education as the carrying on of war by other means.

If conversationality is the essence of liberal learning, anti-Left agitation against the universities is just as pernicious as left-wing agitation within them. What has to be cultivated is generosity of spirit and a distance from polemical concerns. You won’t get that from David Horowitz. Even many paleo-populists who turn their attention to the universities are really the children of Bloom. In the education wars, this country doesn’t have a Right, we have a Left and a counter-Left. That’s more or less true in politics as well.

A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls

The Vital Center, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling

The Liberal Tradition in America, by Louis Hartz

The New Industrial State, by John Kenneth Galbraith

Although I’m on the record as being skeptical of the National Association of Scholars’ project of counting up how often “liberal” and “conservative” works are assigned in college curricula, I would be curious to see whether these works are widely read in class. Rawls definitely is. But I know I never encountered any of the others on a syllabus in my undergraduate years. Academic historians today consider Hartz quaint. I didn’t take enough English courses to know what Trilling’s status might be, but I suspect his Freudianism is seem as terribly outmoded. Schlesinger’s book, like those of many leading conservatives, is nonacademic and probably not assigned. Galbraith, too, is almost certainly not technical enough (or in the right ways) for contemporary economists. This tentative “liberal” list is marginally more scholarly than the conservative list, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I doubt that any of the books on either list, save Rawls, are common in classrooms today. Perhaps in addition to efforts to get “conservative” classics into college courses, we need an effort to get old center-Left consensus classics onto syallbi as well.

(While my initial objections to the NAS project centered on the question of whether many explicitly conservative texts are even suitable to an academic milieu, the comments thread on the NAS page points to the flipside of the problem: should serious scholarly works really be press-ganged into classification as “liberal” or “conservative”? Even lesser, contemporary authors are hard to peg. NAS wants unambiguous examples, but the commenters seem to be having some difficulty coming up with any. The first suggestion is Francis Fukuyama. But is Fukuyama a conservative or a realistic liberal or a quasi-classical liberal? Nonacademic works, such as those included in my liberal and conservative lists, are more easily categorized than academic works are. But one shouldn’t find too many of those, of either Left or Right, in classrooms today, not because of political biases but because of the nature of what modern universities do — and don’t do.)

Over the past 40 years, the trend among young political activists has been the same: The young Left has fought the older generations of the Right (perhaps because it’s simply more fun), with no thought to their emerging antagonists, focusing attention instead on people whose influence and power will naturally wax and wane (i.e., they’ll die soon.) The young Right, oppositely — since the days of Goldwater onward — has insisted on confronting the young Left in a no-holds-barred battle for future generations of influence. This strategic difference goes far toward explaining the inevitability of the Reagan Revolution and, to a lesser extent, the success of George W. Bush.

Young Americans for Liberty is, as of now, a fledging organization (though I counted 168 campus chapters nationwide on their website). But it has my vote for the right-wing student organization likeliest to effect genuine realignment within the Republican Party as we enter the era of bank takeovers and public option health care reform. Now economic issues, not foreign policy matters, have taken center stage in American politics. Many conservative young people, who will be responsible for whatever realignment takes place, seem utterly uninterested in obsessing about terrorism and foreign policy matters; the Ron Paul line works just fine for them. Ron Paul is, at least from my calculations, a rambling reactionary. But there is a modest chance he — and not Mssrs. Obama and McCain — will emerge as the transcendent figure from the 2008 presidential race.

This is a good place to mention that the third issue of YAL‘s official publication, Young American Revolution is out now and includes articles be Jim Antle, Justin Raimondo, Glenn Jacobs (WWE’s Kane), former Rep. John N. Hostettler, and yours truly, as well as young talents such as Bonnie Kristian, Kelse Moen, George Hawley. Subscribe by joining YAL (if you’re under 40) or donating $50 or more (if you’re an older American for liberty). Help take the campuses, and the country, back from the militarists of the Right and the centralizers of the Left — and the centralizers of the Right and militarists of the Left, for that matter.

Believe it or not, Washington University once awarded academic credit for the study of conservatism. It was just for one semester, for a sophomore honors colloquium taught by visiting professor Paul V. Murphy, author of The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought. The class was not, of course, an exercise in advocacy: it was not teaching conservatism, but examining an overlooked area of American intellectual history. My impression from auditing the course was that Murphy was probably not a conservative himself. Nevertheless, he gave a fair and surprisingly broad survey of the 20th-century Right.

Scattered here and there in other courses one can find a few conservative or counterrevolutionary texts: Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, perhaps Joseph de Maistre’s St. Petersburg Dialogues. On the whole, however, a student who wishes to familiarize himself with right-of-center thought must do so on his own. But where to begin? The literature of conservatism is vast and, like any vast body of literature, is largely full of rubbish. One could read wonkish tracts and screeds by talk-radio personages all day long and never learn a thing about serious conservatism.

Even among thoughtful men and women of the Right there are real and often bitter differences of opinion as to what constitutes genuine conservatism. But the five books below come as close to being canonical as any text can: one might disagree with particular passages in these works, but each made an indisputable contribution to the formative stages of the modern Right — and each tends to be revisited whenever conservatives seek to return to their intellectual roots.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) (pdf)

by Albert Jay Nock

In the midst of World War II, the American Right had reached its nadir. The two great causes for which individualists — few called themselves conservatives back then — had fought were lost. After the horrors of the First World War, they had fiercely opposed U.S. involvement in European wars or conflicts elsewhere, for that matter. And they battled against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal at home. These two efforts had a common denominator: the individualist Right of the ’30s and ’40s was opposed to the aggrandizement of government and agreed with the radical journalist Randolph Bourne that “war is the health of the State.”

Albert Jay Nock was not a leader of this anti-war, anti-statist Right; he was fond of quoting Jefferson to the effect that if he could not go to heaven but with a party, he would not go at all. But Nock was in several respects the individualists’ lodestar and most articulate voice. In 1935 he had published a book called Our Enemy, the State, a comprehensive statement of the Old Right’s informal creed. The decade before he had been the editor of The Freeman, one of the most influential political weeklies of the day-smaller in circulation than The Nation or The New Republic, but more highly esteemed than either.

Collectivism was ascendant in the 1940s, with the apparent success of Communism abroad and the entrenchment of FDR’s welfare state and wartime direction of the economy at home. In politics, and also in culture, the 20^th-century had already proven to be the era of the mass man. But The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man offered an uncompromising vision of an alternative: men like Nock might be rendered “superfluous” by the 20^th century, but they could still hold on to their principles and their personalities. Nock’s book, which was really more of an outline of his intellectual development than a conventional memoir, was pessimistic in outlook, but proved enormously heartening to nascent conservatives: they did not have to accede to collectivism, endless war, and vulgarity. Orwell’s 1984 would not be published for another five years, but in substance Nock’s Memoirs showed conservatives that they could say no to Big Brother in all his forms.

In the Pacific Theater of Operations, a young infantryman named Robert Nisbet “practically memorized” the Memoirs. A draftee named Russell Kirk, stationed in Utah, similarly took the book to heart. It soon became a favorite of a prep-school senior named William F. Buckley Jr. as well. All three young men would become prominent figures in the rise of postwar American conservatism. Nock’s works would also provide inspiration for such staunch libertarians as journalist Frank Chodorov and economist Murray Rothbard.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man itself is a peculiar book; latter-day conservatives are likely to bristle at Nock’s intermittent criticisms of marriage and organized Christianity. The author had been a married man and an Episcopal minister at one time, finding neither to his liking. The social conservatism that has become popular in the last three decades is largely absent from Nock; but a high-culture conservatism and a Jeffersonian emphasis on limited government (so limited that Nock called himself an anarchist) abound in the Memoirs‘ pages.

The Road to Serfdom (1944)

by Friedrich A. Hayek

Perhaps surprisingly, considering their devotion to the free market, the individualists of the ’30s and ’40s had, by and large, little formal economic training. They were thus at a considerable disadvantage in attempting to do battle with academic Marxists, socialists, and proponents of the mixed economy. And again, by the mid-’40s the battle seemed to have been lost altogether. The situation was even worse in Europe, where fascism and Communism alike endangered free-market economists — and so those who could fled to Great Britain and the United States.

Britain was Hayek’s initial destination, where he taught at the London School of Economics, and in 1938 he became a British subject. He was alarmed, however, by the popularity of socialism in Britain and at what he would call in preface to the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom “the complete misinterpretation in English ‘progressive’ circles of the character of the Nazi movement.” Beginning in 1940, in his spare time when not working on matters of pure economics, Hayek set about writing his own interpretation of the rise of totalitarianism. The project took on new urgency with the intensification of World War II. “I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political systems of our enemies, and soon also of our new ally, Russia, constituted a serious danger…. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere,” he wrote in 1956.

Hayek’s attempt to explain how socialism and statism more generally could lead to totalitarianism, a new serfdom, issued in The Road to Serfdom, dedicated in all sincerity “to the socialists of all parties,” whom Hayek hoped to dissuade from their ill-conceived project of planning the economy. The book met with success in Great Britain, but at first no one in the United States wanted to publish it — in part, at least, for ideological reasons. One publisher called the book, “unfit for publication by a reputable house.” Finally, at the urging Fritz Machlup, another free-market economist who had fled Europe, in this case for the United States, and University of Chicago economics and law professor Aaron Director, the book was published here by the University of Chicago Press. And The Road to Serfdom, by a then-unknown Austrian economist, written for a British audience, became a runaway American bestseller. Within a year it had gone through seven printings.

Hayek’s book is not an abstruse work of economics. It is breezily written, and it has as much to say about the deformation of human character under socialist and totalitarian regimes as about statist economic and political policies themselves — “there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because the ‘good of the whole’ is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done. The raison d’etat, in which collectivist ethics has found its most explicit formulation, knows no other limit than that set by expediency.”

Hayek was not, as some mistakenly think, an advocate of unbridled laissez faire. There are passages in The Road to Serfdom, particularly where his discusses social insurance, where he sounds like a social democrat. For the most rigorous defense of the free market, one must turn to Hayek’s mentor, the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and such works of his as Human Action, or to later students of Mises such as Murray Rothbard and his Man, Economy, and State. But for his exposition of how collectivism and State intervention in the economy can lead to totalitarianism, Hayek remains invaluable.

Ideas Have Consequences (1948)

by Richard M. Weaver

It was in part in hopes of duplicating the success of The Road to Serfdom that the University of Chicago Press published Ideas Have Consequences four years later, with a then-large publicity budget of $7,500 in support of the book. But the book was a sales disappointment, at least at first; a year after its release, Ideas Have Consequences had sold fewer than 8,000 copies, barely exhausting its first printing. In years to come, however, sales would hold steady, and the book has been in print almost without interruption for over sixty years now.

Weaver, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, considered the title Ideas Have Consequences “hopelessly banal”; his own title for the work had been The Fearful Descent, until his publisher persuaded him that their choice would sell better. Today conservatives who have never so much as opened Weaver’s book cite its title in support of any number of political initiatives and PR campaigns. But the ideas at the heart of the book are much more grand than that; while touching upon rhetoric, music, and foreign policy, Ideas Have Consequences is at root a work of metaphysics.

The book was Weaver’s attempt to come to grips with the moral failures of the West that had lead to the Second World War. He located the source of the rot in the abandonment of belief in universals, a development Weaver traced all the way back to the fourteenth century. For proposing such a thing, Weaver is sometimes the butt of ridicule from people who have not read Ideas Have Consequences; he’s a crank, they say, who blames the purported decline of Western civilization on the nominalist philosopher William of Ockham.

The case actually presented in Ideas Have Consequences is more nuanced than that. Weaver rather tries to show that there are metaphysical assumptions behind everyday concerns — he recalls, for example, Plato’s interest in the morality of music and the potential for the written word to subvert thought. Indeed, Weaver’s chapters on mass communications and journalism, on the virtual-reality machine — made not of wires and plastic, but of words and ideas — that he calls the Great Stereopticon, are profound and prophetic, more relevant today than they were when Weaver first wrote them.

Despite its grand subject matter, Ideas Have Consequences is an accessible book, in large part thanks to Weaver’s moral intensity. It’s also a short book, under 200 pages. And it’s perhaps the best short introduction there is to the most important insights of conservatism

Witness (1952)

by Whittaker Chambers

Of all the works on this list, Witness would seem, at first glance, to have aged the worst. More than any of the others, it is an artifact of the Cold War. At least, at first glance it is.

Chambers was a prominent journalist of the ’30s and ’40s, eventually becoming a senior editor at Time. Before that, however, he had been a card-carrying Communist — and a spy. When he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 to testify about his knowledge of Soviet espionage in the U.S., Chambers named names. One of those he named, and accused of passing classified documents to the Soviets, was Alger Hiss, an adviser to FDR at Yalta, Secretary General of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference that chartered the United Nations, and, by 1948, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss denied the accusations and was later charged with perjury.

The Chambers-Hiss hearings became arguably the first critical episode of the Cold War within the United States itself, dividing the country between those who trusted Hiss — by and large, liberals and the genteel — and those who believed Chambers’s accusations. Congressman Richard Nixon first rose to prominence as a defender of Chambers and accuser of Hiss. The entire saga–which included two perjury trials for Hiss and a civil suit for libel against Chambers — presaged, as some would have it, the era of McCarthyism, not only in pitting conservatives and anti-communists against “anti-anti-communists” and liberals, but in foretelling a populist backlash against the Eastern establishment. For some Americans, the Johns Hopkins and Harvard educated Hiss represented an alien ruling class just as much as he did a foreign power. He was convicted in his second perjury trial, with liberals insisting then — and some insisting even now, despite the evidence of declassified KGB and U.S. intelligence documents — on Hiss’s innocence.

Witness tells Chambers’s side of the story, making it a crucial document in early Cold War historiography. But Witness is about much more than Soviet espionage, the Hiss trial, and Chambers’s own tormented life. Chambers cast the Cold War as a struggle between “two irreconcilable faiths,” not Communism or capitalism, but faith in man or faith in God. “The crisis for the Western world,” Chambers writes, “exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. It exists to the degree in which the Western world actually shares Communism’s materialist vision.” There is a religious and spiritual battle behind the geopolitical one.

The Conservative Mind (1953)

by Russell Kirk

As late as the mid-1950s, the most conservative Republicans — including Mr. Republican himself, Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft — still preferred to be called “liberal.” That word was already well on its way toward being redefined from denoting in politics a commitment to small government to a predilection for big government, but the term retained enough cachet that politicians were reluctant to abandon it. “Conservative,” by contrast, was in circulation primarily as a pejorative, a moniker for flunkies of big business. William F. Buckley Jr., who in 1951 had shot to fame with the publication of God And Man At Yale, and who would found National Review in 1955, still called himself an individualist. The largest conservative youth organization was the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (which later re-christened itself the Intercollegiate Studies Institute).

Russell Kirk’s book, together with Peter Viereck’s Conservatism Revisited (1949) and Clinton Rossiter’s Conservatism in America (1955), began the rehabilitation of the word. No one could mistake Kirk for a spokesman for the Ford Motor Company. The young instructor of history at Michigan State College was openly critical of industrialism in The Conservative Mind, his survey of the Anglo-American conservative intellectual heritage.

The subtitle of Kirk’s book, From Burke to Santayana (and later, in revised editions, From Burke to T.S. Eliot) suggests the scope of the author’s ambition. In an era when it was often taken for granted that America was a fundamentally liberal nation, a creation of the Enlightenment and revolution, Kirk argued that there was a persistent, if diversified, conservatism running from the English statesman Edmund Burke through the American Revolution, the Constitution, both the Federalist John Adams and the Jeffersonian John Randolph of Roanoke, through John C. Calhoun and Nathaniel Hawthorne all the way to such 20^th-century thinkers as Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer Moore, and T.S. Eliot. Furthermore, Kirk argued that this conservatism was closely akin to the English conservatism of Coleridge, Disraeli, and George Gissing.

The Conservative Mind is nothing less than monumental, and at over 500 pages covering often obscure figures, the work is not as accessible as some might like. But it is engaging, particularly for the reader who takes the time to savor its carefully wrought prose, and Kirk’s book is the fons et origo of today’s traditionalist conservatism — though it speaks hardly at all to what goes by the name of conservatism in partisan politics today. For Kirk, conservatism is above all the negation of ideology, a defense of a stable and organic society. Schemes for reforming government have relatively little place in such an order as Kirk envisions. But without a knowledge of Kirk, the political conservative is surely lost, a sucker for charismatic (or not-so-charismatic) leaders and policy prescriptions that promise to make centralization painless.

Further reading

Conservatives are woefully deficient in their knowledge of their own intellectual history. A student who reads these five books will only have covered the basics, but he will be better educated about who he is and what he believes than nine-tenths of his fellows. Above all, the knowledge he gains will be reward enough in itself, but at the lower level of practice he will be a better advocate for his beliefs and a better analyst of the world than those who are content to do but not think. Naturally enough, the liberal who is interested in understanding the modern Right as it understands itself will also profit from this course of study.

To supplement these five books, the next most essential work is George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, a thorough overview of the journalists, academics, and other men of ideas who shaped conservatism as it existed from the close of the Second World War to the 1970s. Nash relates extensive details about the five authors I’ve discussed, as well as the controversies that have roiled the Right in the last sixty years.

For a brief thematic discussion of conservatism, Robert Nisbet’s Conservatism: Dream and Reality, is second to none. Paul Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement, second edition, offers a concise and penetrating account of modern conservatism in its institutional as well as intellectual forms. The Conservative Bookshelf, published last year by Chilton Williamson Jr., a former literary editor for National Review and current books editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, presents short essays on fifty books of prime importance to conservatives, including the five above and such surprising (but worthy) selections as works by Edmund Wilson and the environmentalist Edward Abbey.

Likewise, in the field of politics there is a sharp division between political scientists and political theorists, and among political theorists even there are great methodological differences. (Straussians, for example, are not In politics, philosophy, and economics, the battle is less between the Left and the Right than between positivists and non-positivists (or, more generally, between older, more humanistic or theoretical approaches and later scientific or pseudoscientific ones). These methodological disputes are much less sexy — the worse for fundraising and media campaigns — than partisan conflicts.

We … want to be above reproach in building lists of authors and works of comparable importance in their respective traditions. The final lists may include both high-brow and mass-market authors, as long as they are suitable for college curricula, and provided the mix is the same in all categories.

“Provided the mix is the same in all categories” — there’s the rub. NAS wants to show that liberal books are being assigned disproportionately, but what if liberal books are disproportionately “suitable for college curricula,” while conservative books are more likely to be written by “mass-market authors”? Consider the tentative list Wood provides:

John Rawls, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, J. S. Mill, J.-J. Rousseau, Howard Zinn, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, Russell Kirk, Paulo Freire, C. Wright Mills, Ludwig von Mises, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin, Albert Jay Nock, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Alasdair MacIntyre, William F. Buckley, Barbara Ehrenreich, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, John Kenneth Galbraith, Charles Taylor, F.A. Hayek . . . Who is missing?

Try to imagine whether some of these books can reasonably be expected to qualify for inclusion in an undergraduate course. The question here is not whether these books are worth reading, nor even whether they are better or worse in an overall sense than things that might be assigned. I’m second to none in my admiration of Nock, but how would you even classify his work? He’s not an economist, not a political theorist (even Frank Chodorov thought Nock’s politics derivative, which is mostly true). The only context in which I could imagine an undergraduate being assigned his work is in a class on early 20th-century literature or politics. But Nock called himself a “superfluous man” for a reason — he’s not a representative 20th-century writer, not even among conservatives. This is not a criticism of his worth, but an objective judgment about his place in the Western canon. Few enough undergraduate courses might assign John Reed or Edmund Wilson, both of whom are more important than Nock for understanding the 20th-century mind.

Bill Buckley? One might include him in a course as an example of mainstream 20th-century conservative writing. But Buckley was not at all a scholar or theorist; he was a journalist. Not a lot of journalists who flourished in the mid-20th century are assigned in undergraduate courses these days — liberal Murray Kempton is even less likely to make the cut than conservative Buckley.

Eric Voegelin was a scholar who made lasting contributions to his field. Yet here the bias is not a political one: most university philosophy departments are devoted to analytic philosophy. Voegelin was not an analytic philosopher. Rawls, on the other hand, was, and a very important one at that. Nozick qualifies, but he’s had less influence on his profession than Rawls; in an undergraduate survey one would expect more Rawls than Nozick, quite apart from any question of political bias. Oakeshott too is somewhat out of the mainstream for his field for reasons that have little to do with politics. He’s certainly appropriate for an upper-level undergraduate course but probably not for a survey, and again one would expect much more Rawls.

Burke should, and in my experience does, make the cut for intellectual history surveys that also tackle Rousseau, Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Marx (depending on how one periodizes the survey). Even here, one would expect less of Burke than, say, Rousseau, again for conventional reasons — Rousseau and his epigones were more of a driving force in the late 18th and into the 19th century. And as worthwhile as European reactionaries such as Bonald and Maistre are, it would make little sense to assign them in a survey course in place of the likes of Paine or Wollstonecraft.

I’m giving a lot of weight to academic convention, but even if you oppose the conventional canon — if, like me, you think that Oakeshott is more profound than Rawls — you still have to be familiar with the intellectual center of gravity within a given field. Are philosophy departments also exhibiting liberal bias by assigning John Locke but not Robert Filmer?

NAS’s project smacks of nothing so much as attempts of left-wing grievance groups to show that there’s a bias in the canon against blacks, women, and homosexuals. There is a sliver of truth to the complaints on all sides, and a little good to be achieved by being more inclusive, but at root some books are just more important than others. The right way to reform the canon, it seems to me, is by carefully showing that individual overlooked works or authors make contributions to their fields as significant as those of more established names. Putting serious thinkers into crude categories and then demanding some ratio of every group be taught amounts to just another kind of political correctness.

Here’s a teaser vid YAL put together:

We’re going to have a launch party for the magazine on Friday, Feb. 27 (during CPAC), 9 pm at the Asylum Bar (2471 18th St NW, Washington D.C.). More details about that on Facebook.

Naturally, I’m keeping my eyes out for young talent to write for the YAR — we’ll produce two issues per semester out of the gate, and plans for the second issue are already being laid. Contact me if you’re a student or young-ish person interested in writing. One of the exciting things about YAR is the opportunity to feature the work of students and other not-yet-professionals alongside veteran conservative and libertarian thinkers.

There are two ways to get YAR, by the way: a four-issue subscription is complimentary with a donation of $50 or more to Young Americans for Liberty, or if you’re under 39, join YAL and a a subscription is included in your membership dues.

I happen to think the practice of awarding honoring doctorates is ridiculous, but Schlafly is one of Wash U’s most famous alumnae and a woman who has accomplished a hell of a lot more than any of her critics. One doesn’t need to agree with her politics to acknowledge that she’s an historic, even iconic, figure. So far, most of the lefty malcontents have been expressing their hysteria by joining a Facebook group, while the university is standing firm.

There are pro-Schlafly Facebook groups too — at least two that I’ve joined. I hope other students, alumns, and supporters will sign-up and, more importantly, make sure that the university doesn’t capitulate. Abolish honorary doctorates if you don’t want to court controversy by awarding them, but if you’re going to have them, Phyllis Schlafly deserves one. It’s about time Wash U recognized her achievements — when I helped bring her to speak on campus way back when, she mentioned that it was the first time in decades that anyone at the university had extended an invitation. Frankly, it’s the university that will be doing itself the honor by giving Schlafly her due.