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The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back Hardcover – October 10, 2006
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Andrew Sullivan
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Print length304 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherHarper
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Publication dateOctober 10, 2006
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Dimensions6 x 1.09 x 9 inches
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ISBN-100060188774
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ISBN-13978-0060188771
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Andrew Sullivan is one of today's most provocative social and political commentators. An essayist for Time magazine, a columnist for The Sunday Times of London, and a senior editor at The New Republic, he is also the editor of "The Daily Dish," one of the most widely read political blogs on the Web. He lives in Washington, D.C.
From The Washington Post
Conservatism is facing a crisis that won't be solved, one suspects, merely by switching presidents. To those of us far removed from Beltway philosophical battles, Andrew Sullivan -- a columnist for Time magazine, a prominent blogger and a senior editor at the New Republic -- might seem an unusual candidate to parse the problem. He's British. He's Catholic. He's gay. But Sullivan is also smart and well read, and in his new book, The Conservative Soul, he calmly and rationally attempts to deduce the malady that in barely 15 years has rendered Reagan-era conservatism all but unrecognizable.
The pathogen he identifies is Christian fundamentalism. The Conservative Soul, in fact, is one of several similar books issued this fall that collectively serve as a call to arms to American elites to put down their New York Times crossword puzzles and their glasses of Fumé Blanc and wake up to the idea that the fundamentalists most dangerous to our future are not Islamic and foreign but Christian and homegrown. Sullivan's is at once an obvious yet much-needed siren; his text calls to mind the book Mary Lefkowitz wrote several years back, Not Out of Africa, to rebut charges that the foundations of ancient Greek culture were built by black Africans. Afrocentrism was so nutty that most intellectuals couldn't be bothered to answer it. The same, I fear, is true for Christian fundamentalism. Its political tenets are so addlebrained and its leaders so difficult to take seriously that it's only now -- after the country has been run by a born-again Christian for six years -- that thinkers like Sullivan realize that it's time for reasonable people to do something about it.
The Conservative Soul, unfortunately, is not only too polite but too high-minded to galvanize anyone without a graduate degree in philosophy. This is not a bad thing, just a warning. If you belong to the Elks Club, apply catsup to your scrambled eggs or have ever read anything by Ann Coulter, this is not a book for you. It is written by a card-carrying intellectual and aimed at card-carrying intellectuals. Sullivan wades deep into the high grasses here; he is more interested in Hegel, Hobbes and Leo Strauss than anyone you've seen arguing on television, much less voted for. Further, the book doesn't really explain how conservatism lost its soul, just that it did, and it doesn't offer any real prescription for getting it back.
Instead, and this is the book's great value, Sullivan takes us back to basics -- we're talking Plato here -- to remind us of the bedrock differences in the two schools of belief that, like squabbling conjoined twins, inhabit the Republican Party's tortured body. The first half of The Conservative Soul, which explores the philosophical underpinnings of Christian fundamentalism and explains how they are anathema to a free society, made me as angry as anything I've read in months. That there are people in 21st-century America who believe the Bible is literally true, who believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, and who believe that our lives today should be dictated by codes of conduct written by people who lived 2,000 years before modern medicine, electricity or equal rights -- and that these same Americans have influence in national affairs -- should infuriate anyone with a functioning mind. Fundamentalism, Sullivan reminds us, is the antithesis of reason. Its adherents -- Christian, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise -- have been handed The Truth and cling to it, facts be damned. Quoting figures as varied as Pope Benedict XVI and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Sullivan repeatedly emphasizes how fundamentalism abhors the thinking mind, insisting that an individual's conscious choices -- whether to have an abortion or what to order at Burger King -- amount to moral anarchy.
In the book's second half, Sullivan switches from anger to nostalgia, reaching back to remind us of the things that made Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's brand of conservatism so appealing and so successful as a mode of governance. He traces the influence of fundamentalists to Bill Clinton's various personal deficiencies, which triggered a moral counterattack from Christian leaders who felt they knew something about morality. It's a good story, but Sullivan doesn't tell it with any narrative grace. Instead, he gnashes his teeth in frustration at the changes this period brought to conservatism. It's the hallmark of his book -- a fine intellectual effort that, for all Sullivan's clear thinking and clear prose, probably won't change any minds that fundamentalist beliefs haven't already ossified.
Reviewed by Bryan Burrough
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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Product details
- Publisher : Harper; First Edition (October 10, 2006)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060188774
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060188771
- Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.09 x 9 inches
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Best Sellers Rank:
#1,410,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,290 in Political Parties (Books)
- #3,685 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
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Sullivan is at his best when explaining why these ideas have such power and vitality and specifically why they have found such a direct expression in the creation and historical development of the United States of America.
As readers of The Dish will know Sullivan is an expert rhetorician and a highly-skilled advocate of this view of conservatism. What they may not appreciate is the depth of the philosophical well from which he has drawn and the extent to which he has learned from conservative thinkers of the past before developing and applying their ideas to our current political situation. The strength of the position he outlines is that it is flexible and humble in the face of new policy questions and challenges, it does not pretend to have instant answers from either divine revelation or an ideological recipe book. Precisely because it is flexible it can free human creativity to find new solutions.
The passage with which I most heartily agreed was:
"The real leaders of a free society are not its politicians. They are its artists and laborers, scientists and teachers, bloggers and social workers, sportsmen and movie directors, day traders and research students, architects and farmers, waiters and comedians."
My only complaint about that statement was that he did not include writers, of which Mr Sullivan is himself a most worthy and shining example.
He begins with an exploration of fundamentalism: its reliance on certainty of belief, rigid enforcement of rules, and the notion of the State as a force for pushing its citizens in an allegedly ideal direction. He then pivots to conservatism and its defining characteristics as he sees them: curiosity, doubt, skepticism, acceptance of human fallibility, and the notion of the State as minimalist guarantor of security and the individual citizen's ability to pursue his or her own happiness.
All of this is laid out understandably to the lay reader and convincingly to the skeptical reader (including this liberal). Sullivan takes what could be an esoteric exercise in definitions and terms and makes it enjoyable and down-to-earth, with the deeply-felt humanity that his longtime readers have come to expect.
Andrew Sullivan has long been one of my favorite writers, and since I began reading his blog in 2009, he has had an outsized influence on my political philosophy. The Conservative Soul represents the type of long-form expression he intends to return to after years of sharing his thoughts in bits and pieces. If his future books and articles are anything like this one, they will be worth waiting for.














