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The Conservative Tradition in America

Allen Guttmann

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Mar 12, 2008 Werner rated it liked it

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Actually, I read this book through, piece-by-piece, in the college library at odd moments during my junior college days in the early 70s, but never checked it out. Since I couldn't at first remember if I'd read it all the way through, and felt I needed a refresher before reviewing it, I decided to reread it. That was an interesting experience; the book contributed a lot to my own intellectual formation as a college student, so I was reviewing my own spiritual/ideological pilgrimage as well as th Actually, I read this book through, piece-by-piece, in the college library at odd moments during my junior college days in the early 70s, but never checked it out. Since I couldn't at first remember if I'd read it all the way through, and felt I needed a refresher before reviewing it, I decided to reread it. That was an interesting experience; the book contributed a lot to my own intellectual formation as a college student, so I was reviewing my own spiritual/ideological pilgrimage as well as the book in the last few days.

In itself, the book is not a great intellectual masterpiece, or anything resembling it (in fact, it has the academic "print or perish" dictum stamped all over it as its probable major reason for existing); it is somewhat disjointed, with several of its thematic chapters being reworked articles that were originally published separately, and Guttmann's conclusions often don't seem to follow from the examples he adduces. It could also be said of him that, as E. E. Evans-Pritchard remarked of A. E. Crawley, he "is not a particularly lucid writer." Despite the title, this is not a narrative history of Conservative thought in America, but a series of sketch surveys of particular writers --and Guttmann often seems to devote as much or more attention to writers he is arguing were NOT Conservative [the capitalization is his] as to those that he concedes were. Nor, as an avowed socialist and skeptic, is the author very sympathetic to his subject (though, in his conclusion, he allows some merit to Conservative ideals). Nevertheless, this work does have strengths that made an important impression on me as a youth.

First, while I don't share his rigid definitions (more on this below) Guttmann makes the important point that not every claimant to the label "conservative" actually is so; in fact, the "libertarian" cult of unbridled laissez-faire economics represented by National Review and Barry Goldwater has virtually nothing in common with Conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke, and the political alliance between the two was not a marriage made in heaven. (Forty years later, this point has been made clearer by the split between the paleo-conservatives represented by The American Conservative and the GOP of Bush and McCain.) As a young man who'd grown up in an ultra-"conservative" church and a small-town Iowa community dominated by the Republican party, and who defined myself automatically in "conservative" terms, this was eye-opening and liberating, helping me to realize that my visceral discomfort with Big Business and cutthroat economics had good conservative credentials, and that knee- jerk labeling is a poor substitute for substantive thought. Second, being a literary rather than a political scholar (he argues that the political weakness of Conservatism in America from the get-go made it more important as a literary than as a political movement), Guttmann has a fresh perspective on the discussion, which was interesting to me as a reader of literature. Finally, the book just presented a wealth of fascinating factual information about American intellectual history, and an introduction to a number of thinkers I'd never heard of, such as Joseph de Maistre, Orestes Brownson, and the Southern Agrarians of the 1930s. All of this is presented in a fairly jargon-free style that makes for a quick read (though the author's occasional untranslated Latin or French words and phrases can be irritating!).

Perhaps the major weakness of the book is Guttmann's rigid insistence on defining Conservatism strictly as a viewpoint whose essential features are support for social and economic inequality and a union of Church and State, and rejection of political democracy and of the idea of natural human rights. (The main reason Conservatism by his definition is so rare in America is that he defines it in terms which practically no American since 1776 would be prepared to accept. :-) ). In a time of socio-economic and political breakdown and flux, those of us who don't fondly imagine the coming of a Utopia invented full-blown from a drawing board that's a pure blank look rather to past thought as a guide for the present and the future. IMO, speaking as someone who sees himself as a paleo -conservative, we can find useful models in a conservatism whose essential features, rather, are support for caring communities bound together by face-to-face relationships, for tradition as a shared social glue that gives continuity to our society, for stable and loving families based on faithful monogamous marriage, for private property as something everybody ought to have, for the rule of law as opposed to the rule of unbridled power, and for voluntary acceptance of religious truth (which, as Guttmann recognizes, has a prophetic as well as a priestly tradition) as the highest moral and philosophical authority --a conservatism which can draw from Locke and Jefferson as well as from Burke. ...more

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