Customer Reviews

The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History

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Patrick Allitt had essentially given a scholastic survey of historical figures he considered to be conservatives throughout the American history. Starting from the Founders of the American republic to the present day modern conservatives, Allitt tells their ideologies, personalities and what make them to be American conservatives in a lively manner. I recommend this book to any general reader who has interest in the history of American conservatism. In this book, I find it fascinating how the clashes of ideas within American conservatism played out in history. Overall, this is a very good book that gives the historical perspective of American conservatives.

If you're interested in reading a history of American conservatism that comes neither to panegyrize nor pathologize, then this may be the book for you. Allitt's fair, dispassionate account of various strains of conservative thought throughout American intellectual history keeps on the high road throughout, touching upon present-day debates when necessary but focusing on ideas first and foremost. Allitt identifies the following as characteristic of American conservatism:

1. an attitude to social and political change that looks for support to the ideas, beliefs, and habits of the past and puts more faith in the lessons of history than in the abstractions of political philosophy;
2. a suspicion of democracy and equality, more specifically, the confusion between the notion of men as being legally and politically equal and being equal when it comes to virtues, abilities and talents;
3. the view that civilization is fragile and easily disrupted and we need virtuous citizens to keep our civilization whole;
4. the desire for a highly educated elite as guardians of civilization.

That's as elegant a summary of basic conservative ideas as I've ever read. Of course, being in academia, I know that we've got a "highly educated elite" in place; the problem is that too many of them are on the other side.

Liberals are especially encouraged to read this book. The first step to good debate is knowing and respecting where your opponent gets his ideas from.

The worst thing about no longer being a student at Emory University is not being able to take Dr. Allitt's history classes anymore. Luckily, he keeps writing incredible books with universal appeal that even non-historians like me can enjoy. And with his latest opus, THE CONSERVATIVES, Dr. Allitt raises the bar even higher. No wonder Booklist awarded it a starred review.

With his signature wit and insight, Dr. Allitt has created an endlessly fascinating, remarkably thorough, and completely unbiased history of notable conservative figures and movements in the U.S. During a time when merely the word "conservative" can have polarizing effects, Dr. Allitt tackles this normally controversial subject with no agenda other than to provide a gripping, well-researched overview of an ideology that has figured largely in this country's past, from our Founding Fathers right up through 9/11.

Best of all, THE CONSERVATIVES escapes the fate of far-too-many scholarly works which overwhelm with names, dates and boring facts. Dr. Allitt's book is so deftly-paced and structured that it reads more like a non-fiction "great American novel" than an exemplary and definitive historical treatise, which it is.

Allitt's book made the history entertaining and educational without sacrificing either. It is admirable that he handled a complex topic without oversimplification; this is as a go-to book for understanding some of the traditions of American history. It is (usually) fair to the movements it describes (although it is a bit snarky in places) and should be good reading for intellectual Americans, regardless of whether they are liberal, conservative, or something else.

I have hesitations about this book, mainly that the most reasonable forms of conservatism are almost invariably juxtaposed against the most extreme forms of radical leftism, i.e. the liberty of the free man vs. the totalitarian state-run life of the directed individual. It thus wraps conservatism, very subtly, in Right-exclusive historical gauze, while making anything to the left of Grover Cleveland, implicitly at least, a dangerous and ahistorically wreckless affront to sanity and decency. He barely acknowledges when conservatism had made mistakes, like the defense of slavery. Or that detailed historical analysis--or simply hard-won experience, a very real sort of history---was the basis of the working man's consciousness and the intellectual's defense of it. His belief that the Left is "Here/Now!" only, with no sense of, or roots in, history is his most seriously misguided notion in the text. It is an easy error since indeed those identified with the left are the first to pour out into the streets, even if the participants cannot always articulate the historical process behind their protesting. (Of course, the average conservative-voting middle class person often cannot grasp, say, regressivity, in sales tax vs. income taxes or tax on corporate stock profits, either. He or she just wants "lower taxes" Here/Now. The current Tea Party---after this book was written---is a rare exception to the low-profile standard of most conservative discontent.)

Nor does he seem to be able to assimilate the reality that full-blooded liberalism as we understand it in the twentieth century should most certainly not be equated with, or even marked as, invariably fascist, or a monster-state repression of the free individual. The latter is an ironic pose, given history's predominantly conservative economic rulers, but this left-is-totalitarian reductivism is a current fallacious tendency that even Allitt may faintly echo once or twice, but he is too good a scholar to blatantly endorse that view despite the suggestions.

So Allitt should not by any means be ignored; he is a fairly careful and calm scholar, respecting the standards of Yale University Press which asked him to write it. Although I don't really buy the argument he is insinuating throughout the book, it is a very good survey indeed, and very representative of the new views. It is a significant part of the current conservative project of finding intellectual legitimacy as a separate and real thing. He wants it apart from "liberal" (all evolving historical senses, from old free-marketism to more recent social democracy) post-war attempts at exceptionalist consensus that tried to merely sweep conservatism into its own capacious arena in the '50s. The importance of minor errors in the book (that others have noted) may be indicative of something else but concerned me less, so I choose to reflect on the larger issues.

If you know it is coming from an intelligent, albeit deeply religious, and very conservative academic, then you can proceed carefully and get some good insights "from the inside," as it were---to take with a grain of salt. But as a relatively brief but wide-ranging and mostly coherent contemporary outline, it is a reasonable place to start, and then one can round out the picture elsewhere with a fuller perspective.

A non-partisan history of the Conservative movement. As a non-American conservative, I've always looked at the US conservative movement of the 2nd half of the twentieth century to draw my own lessons. The author has written a very well balanced history book about the ideas/persons of the Conservative movement since the beginning of the republic. I enjoyed it and above all, its simplicity in story telling was of great value. I liked it. 5/5

This is an excellent overview of the development of conservative thought and conservative movements in the United States over the last two hundred years. I particularly like Allitt's academically unbiased approach. Through brief biographies he leads the reader through the ideas of conservative leaders and thinkers from Burke through the Moral Majority.

Having read many earlier books on American conservatism, before undertaking to buy this book, I decided to sample a few pages about the people and period I knew best. Unfortunately, Prof. Allitt's breezy handling of facts, dates and labels does not inspire confidence in his work. On p. 161, he gives the wrong birth year for Ludwig von Mises; it should be 1881, and two pages later he generously adds an extra decade to the life of Murray N. Rothbard, who actually died in 1995, not in 2005. More serious, he says that Mises and F.A.Hayek, like Rothbard (who was an anarchist) thought of "government as an enemy." That is nonsense; they were passionate defenders of LIMITED government, which hardly makes anarchists. In his discussion of Ayn Rand, he errs when he says that she "wrote essays with titles like 'The Virtue of Selfishness'; it is actually one of her books, but she wrote no essay with that title. One suspects that his knowledge of Ayn Rand derived entirely from second-hand sources, e.g. his claim that John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged filled one hundred pages-- it was actually sixty (pp.1009-1069) in the 1957 hardcover edition. Instead of using a reliable source for his discussion of Alan Greenspan (e.g. the biography by Justin Martin), he relies on the superficial and salacious book by Jerome Tuccille, and he misspells the name of the author of the 2005 Berkeley doctoral dissertation on Ayn Rand -- it should be Burns, not Bryne. Based on this admittedly small sample, I shall re-read George H. Nash's magisterial work and buy the newer book by Paul Gottfried. Six errors in three pages is scandalous for a scholarly book from a major university press.

"The Conservatives" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Allitt's book interview ran here as the cover feature on February 26, 2010.

Husband is the history buff, he seems to be enjoying it. He reads me passages from it and discusses it freqently with me.