Customer Reviews

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As someone who has come to conservatism at the end of the twentieth century, this book opened to me my own political prehistory, the thinking underlying conservative ideas. To some extent, it forced me to decide what kind of conservative I am.

The book is not strictly chronological in its discussion. Nash begins with one chapter apiece on each of the three principal strands of American conservatism post World War II: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-communism. Each strand is discussed chronologically and in terms of its principal proponents, leading works, publications, organizations, roots and, of course, theory.

Subsequent chapters discuss the efforts of these three groups to cooperate and to consolidate, the efforts to find specifically American roots for conservative ideas, and the growth of the conservative movement in the thirty years or so following 1945. An Epilogue written for the 1996 edition discusses subsequent changes in American conservatism, including neoconservatism and the religious right.

The title correctly identifies the subject matter of the book -- it is a history of an intellectual movement, and only secondarily a political history. Certain watershed events in contemporary conservatism (the McCarthy investigations, the election campaign of Barry Goldwater, and similar) are touched upon, but principally as phenomena to which conservatives react or by which they are shaped.

Highly recommended.

I consider this book to be a continuation of the conservative history documented in Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind." Kirk covered from Edmund Burke to T.S. Eliot (i.e. from the American Revolution and into the New Deal) and Nash has covered from post-World War II to the mid-1970s (i.e. out of the New Deal; into and out of the Fair Deal, New Frontier and Great Society and into Stagflation and National Malaise). Nash has done a superb job of writing a cohesive and seamless history of the events, literature, people, struggles and ideas that contributed to the emergence of late 20th century conservative ascendance. The book is extremely well documented and is a virtual smorgasbord of bibliographic information for further study and examination. The revised synoptic epilogue doesn't do justice to the final culmination of conservative victory and I believe another historian will have to meet the challenge of finishing the story (or at least bringing it up to date). But it is going to be difficult for any author to do the stupendous job that Kirk and Nash have done in covering the conservative movement in America. The book is a must-read for conservatives and anyone else interested in the ascendancy of conservatism in America.

This is an excellent book that traces the historical development of the intellectual conservative movement in the United States. To understand current events, it is essential to understand the historical context from which today's political environment has sprung. It was interesting to me how the author distanced the "intellectual" movement from the right wing social conservatives of today. All political parties are made up of uncomfortable aliases and the present day Republican party is no exception to this rule. The author makes the necessary distinctions between that which is important to libertarians, traditional conservatives, and neoconservatives. I would especially recommend this book to anyone who is baffled by today's brand of conservative political thought.

This is a very good book, but readers should be aware of what is and isn't prior to picking it up. Apparently an expanded version of the author's PhD dissertation, this book covers the intellectual aspects of the Conservative movement from the immediate post-war period to the early 1970s. It is not a history of conservatism as a political or social movement. The author does not cover the last 30 years, though there is an appendix chapter added in the late 80s or early 90s which is surprisingly dated. Within these limits, this is a fine book. Nash does a very good job of showing the diversity of conservative intellectuals, describing the libertarian, conservative Catholic, traditional elitist, and backward looking romanticism that came to make up important features of the modern conservative movement. He is quite good in describing the broad variety of important conservative writers, the interactions between the different strains of the movement, how they developed institutions like the National Review to support the movement, and provides some information about their broader impact. This book is very well written with particularly good combinations of relevant quotations from primary sources and the author's descriptions. The scholarship is excellent, based both on a careful reading of a large volume of literature and quite a few interviews.
There are some significant limitations. Despite Nash's serious effort to give a broad view of the conservative movement, this is something of a National Review version of the conservative movement. There is no treatment of fundamentalist conservatism or its theological underpinnings. Also symptomatic of the limitations of Nash's approach is the treatment of Ayn Rand. The latter is discussed only in the context of the reception of her writings by figures that Nash considers central to the movement. Rand may not have had very good ideas (one critic, cruelly but accurately referred to her as a pseudo-philosopher) but she did have ideas and has been influential. Its likely that more people have come to the libertarian version of conservatism via the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged than through the pages of the National Review. Nash's view of the mainstream of the movement tends to ignore popular but important figures like Rand.
Another problem with Nash's narration is that he often fails to provide context for the writings under discussion. Nash is generally sympathetic to the conservative movement and many of the writers he discusses. This is generally good because he takes them seriously and writes insightfully about their work. There are times, however, when some critical distance would be useful. For example, it would be worth mentioning that the Spanish "christian social order" much admired by L. Brent Bozell was Franco's regime, or that J. James Kilpatrick's "able polemic" of 1957 was an effort to defend Jim Crow, or that the influential Richard Weaver's inspirational view of the antebellum American South was a romantic delusion.

Indispensable as an introduction to the development of conservative thought in roughly the third quarter of the 20th century, Nash's history has no peers. Illustrating clearly the fractiousness (maybe even inherent incompatibility) of the factions gathered by necessity under the umbrella of conservative thought, he charts well the intellectual underpinnings of conservativism in the United States of America. Most importantly, he highlights that a generally uncelebrated cause for both the fusion and the success of the movement is the lack of correspondence between liberal legislation and quantitative results during this period. That being said, there are a few areas one would like to see fleshed out in more detail. Specifically, neo-conservatives as they emerge in the early seventies, the conservative "scene" during the first and second Nixon administrations, the Vietnam War in contemporary conservative intellectual thought, and the impact of conservative intellectuals on politics-particularly with regard to Goldwater and Reagan-are relatively undeveloped. Indeed, those themes are sufficient for book-length treatment themselves, so Nash cannot be faulted; moreover, his is an intellectual history, and to expect him to detail the political aspects of conservative thought and to chart accurately the time period so close to his writing of this book would be unreasonable. In sum, one cannot claim to have any insight into conservative thought without having perused this volume.

For anyone interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the right, "Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945" provides an astounding primer. Nash presents brief biographies of many of the major players in the conservative intellectual movement which trace their intellectual paths towards conservativism. Focusing on many of the major players in conservative and liberatarian thought (i.e., Buckley, Kirk, Van Hayek, etc.), it also presents the opinions of many lesser known but equally important conservative and liberatrian thinkers such as Frank Chodorov, Albert Jay Nock, and Murray Rothbard. Nash also shows the opposing views of conservativism from intellectuals like Arthur Schelsinger, Jr. If anyone you know makes massive generalizations about the "myopic" views of conservatives and liberatarians then present them with this book as it shows the diversity of strands in conservative and libertarian thought. All in all, one of the best books looking at any intellectual movement I have ever read and I've read quite alot.

I'd heard Nash's book referred to many times but avoided reading it because I thought I knew the modern history of conservative thought fairly well. I was wrong. Just as attending law school taught me I didn't know nearly as much about the Constitution as I thought I did, reading Nash taught me I didn't know nearly as much about 20th century conservatism as I'd believed. If you're a conservative, it's thrilling to watch the movement grow from a tiny group with little status into a powerful force capable of electing a president. It's also very practical because you can see the supporting structures of a movement develop through alternative institutions and endowed professor's chairs. Become a total conservative wonk-geek who will understand most of the oblique references you've read in National Review. Read this book.

What Louis Menand does for Pragmatism in THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, Nash does for Conservatism in this superb intellectual history.

I have to make one thing quite clear, as the author does in the Introduction: This is a book about intellectuals, not about politicians and campaigns. It's a book about the academic roots of modern American Conservatism, not to be confused with so-called neo-Conservatism or Evangelicalism. No, no, this is not a book about religion.

Nash proposes that modern American Conservatism comes from the gradual convergence of three important, critical analyses of American society after World War 2. First, the Libertarians reacted against what they believed was encroaching state control (i.e. FDR's New Deal) on personal freedom. Second, the Southern Agrarians believed that industrial society's ultimate goal was banal, mindless consumerism, and that traditional, hierarchical models of society should be preserved to protect what is sublime, honorable and sacred. Third, the anti-Communists reacted directly to the threat posed by new authoritarian regimes on legal [particularly property] rights. The author believes that Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and William F. Buckley led those schools of thought, respectively. Nash suggests that the excesses of the McCarthy era (on the Right) and the late 1960s (on the Left) encouraged these great minds to come together, on common ground, to debate the fundamental issue: What's worth saving?

How Nash tracks the debates and intellectual cross-connecting of these ideas is masterful and exhilarating work. Though originally published in 1976, the third edition includes a new final chapter, a new introduction, and extension of the original thesis into the 21st century. This is required reading for anyone wishing to better understand what it means to be American... Left, Right or Center.

To understand the rise of the Right as a political force Nash sheds light on the writers, journalists, and professors who have generated the ideas opposing Communism and defending capitalism and traditional values. The mixture of reporting as well as political philosophy really captures the essence of conservative thinking.

I read this book in a college history class and it changed the way I thought of myself and the progress of conservatism in America. It will challenge your views of conservatism whether you are liberal or conservative since it explores a broad range of views that make up the conservative movement from the traditionalism of people like Antonin Scalia to the Libertarianism which has spawned a new political party. Conservatism isn't a monolithic movement but a fragmented one that comes together on some issues and splits on others. If you want to understand the intellectual movement that underlies politial changes of the past 30 years, this book is for you.