The Conservative Movement

by Paul Edward Gottfried

Book by Gottfried, Paul

Genres: Politics, History

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former Professor of Humanities at Swarthmore College and Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Library Journal

The authors provide a short history of the conservative movement in election politics, academia, and publishing since World War II. They describe the positions on economics, foreign policy, and social issues of the Old Right; neoconservatives; the New Right, including the Religious Right; and Libertarians. Despite reservations, the authors appear optimistic about the future of conservatism and the longevity of its publications, such as The National Review.

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Amazone

The Conservative Movement.

The Conservative Movement by Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming is an account of the conservative political philosophy and its growth in post World War America featuring the conflict between rival factions of the conservative vision.

The authors note how this movement consists of several different, sometimes discordant, features. These include libertarianism and individualism (often carried out to extremes) which emphasizes anti-statism and resistance to the welfare/managerial state of the post New Deal era as well as isolationism as a general principle.

This philosophy originally upheld by certain segments of the "Old Right" rose to prominence with the publication of Friedrich Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom which argued against the controlled economy.

In addition, certain segments of the original conservative movement were traditionalist in aspect, often composed of Catholics or Anglo-Catholics, and advocates of traditional morality, religion, and classical literature. Traditionalists including Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver as well as a whole host of Southern agrarians played an important part in shaping the philosophy of conservativism (rooting it in the writings of Edmund Burke or in Platonic philosophy or neo-Thomism under the influence of Aristotle).

These two aspects of the conservative movement were combined in the early years of the journal National Review put out by William F. Buckley. Buckley's journal maintained a virulently anti-communist stance (Buckley at one time wrote an apologetic piece for Joseph McCarthy) and advocated an interventionist foreign policy against communist tyranny.

However, as the authors note, conservativism came to lose sway in the universities as the original mentors of the right abandoned their posts for more practical endeavors.

With the social unrest during the Sixties, conservativism completely lost hold of academia which was abandoned to social protest and subsequently political correctness. While certain parts of academia, especially including key areas of the social sciences which lend themselves to an hereditarian interpretation (as opposed to environmentalist), may be interpreted in a conservative manner, those who have discovered these key features of the human animal have been almost unanimously shunned.

The authors then note how conservativism subsequently underwent a split, possibly brought about by conflicting elements within its philosophy and the decline of the Soviet empire.

On the one hand, a new brand of 'conservative', remnants from the Old Left who no longer upheld the radical tendencies of the newer Left, came to the fore. This was the neoconservative, a primarily Jewish sect centered in New York, but which subsequently came to take hold of the Republican Party.

Alternatively, a more populist approach was advocated by those on the New Right, composed almost entirely of Evangelical Christians (with some Catholics) and focusing almost completely on single issues, such as abortion, homosexual rights, feminism, education, and the family.

Both of these were opposed by members of the remaining 'Old Right' who came to be known as paleoconservatives, in contrast to the newer conservative upcomers.

One stark contrast between these two brands of conservative concerns matters of foreign policy, where many paleoconservatives continue to advocate a more isolationist stance, while neoconservatives call for a "global democratic revolution".

The authors show how the influence of neoconservativism came to play a role in the two prominent conservative politicians of the era, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

This book is somewhat dated, being originally written in the late 80s and since that time the difference between various 'conservatives' has widened.

Particularly difficult remains the necessity of hammering out the various contradictions within the conservative movement.

For example, the libertarian element (advocating laissez faire free market capitalism and anti-statism) seems opposed to the more populist brand of conservativism (whose economic platform can often approach that of socialism) which seems at odds with the elitism innate to the traditionalist and classical brands of conservativism.

It remains unclear how these contradictions in the movement can be ironed out. In sum, however this book remains a good introduction to the conservative movement, written from a particular point of view sympathetic towards the 'Old Right'.

New Age of Barbarism

[Constantin C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

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