The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans: Reflections on the Distinction between Conforming and Conserving

by Peter Viereck, Unknown .

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Philosophy

339 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006), was an American poet and political thinker, as well as a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College for five decades.

Viereck was born in New York, the son of George Sylvester Viereck. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in history in 1937 from Harvard University. He then specialized in European history, receiving his M.A. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1942 in history, again from Harvard.

Viereck was prolific in his writing, publishing much since 1938. He was a respected poet, who published numerous poetry collections. In addition, a number of his poems were first published in Poetry Magazine. His collection of poetry, Terror and Decorum, won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

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Author of Metapolitics (1941) and Archer in the marrow, (c1984)

Biog. resource center (Contemp. authors), Oct. 7, 2005: (Peter (Robert Edwin) Viereck; b. Aug. 5, 1916, New York, N.Y.; Harvard University, Ph. D., 1942; William R. Kenan Chair of History, Mount Holyoke College, 1979-)

Biog. resource center (Contemp. authors), May 17, 2006: (Peter (Robert Edwin) Viereck; b. Aug. 5, 1916, New York, N.Y.; Harvard University, Ph. D., 1942; William R. Kenan Chair of History, Mount Holyoke College, 1979-)

New York times WWW site, May 19, 2006: (Peter Viereck; Peter Robert Edwin Viereck; b. Aug. 5, 1916, Manhattan; d. Saturday [May 13, 2006], South Hadley, Mass., aged 89; noted historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and founder of the mid-20th-century American conservative movement who later denounced what he saw as its late-20th-century excesses)

LC database, May 19, 2006 |b (hdg.: Viereck, Peter Robert Edwin, 1916- ; usage: Peter Viereck [predominant form], Peter Robert Edwin Viereck)

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A conservative road not taken in mid-20th-century America. Viereck was one of the earliest postwar "new conservative" intellectuals; by the middle of the 1950s, however, he had been officially drummed out of the conservative movement by the National Review. In this eclectic book, Viereck rails against the xenophobic populism of the McCarthyite Right, the dreariness of American mass-consumption culture, and the boundless optimism of liberals alike.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still deserve to be read ! Viereck expresses the core elements of conservative thinking in especially lucid prose, making a clear distinction between philosophy and mere party politics.

The defense of private property, for example, looms large in the conservative platform not out of some plutocratic materialist need to accumulate profits, but rather for the moral sentiments it engenders. "It educates its possessor in the moral qualities of sturdy independence, sense of responsibility, and the training of judgement and character brought whenever free choice is exercised in any field, including the economic field. It is these moral qualities, not the gluttonous material ones that have historically associated the rise of personal liberty with the rise of personal property."

Viereck shows how the big-business materialists and socialist materialists are two sides of the same coin, both in agreement on a mechanistic view of life, utilitarianism, faith in sterile efficiency and unprecedented progress, and a commitment to the "unpleasant duty of dutiful pleasure-seeking".