Conservative Revival

October 12, 1959

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, had tremendous influence on practical policy; but that influence did not reach its peak until 50 or 60 years later. Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, published in 1867, has also, alas, had tremendous influence—yet even that influence did not reach major importance until a half century after publication.

These examples illustrate the truth of Lord Keynes’s observation, in his General Theory, that “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the whole world is ruled by little else. . . . Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval. . . .”

Today conservatives and true liberals are entitled to take some comfort from this reflection. For though in practical politics, especially in America, the assumptions of statism, socialism, paternalism, and inflationism were never more prevalent, there are increasing signs in the academic and intellectual world of a turn in thought. If we confine our attention merely to what has happened so far in 1959, I do not think one could name a year in the last 30 in which so many consciously conservative books of high quality have appeared.

THE 1959 RECORD

Some of these have already been mentioned in this column. They include The Roots of Capitalism by John Chamberlain; Power Unlimited—The Corruption of Union Leadership by Sylvester Petro; The Public Stake in Union Power, a collection of sixteen lectures by leading economists, edited by Philip D. Bradley, and Protracted Conflict, an analysis of Communist strategy, by Robert Strausz-Hupe and associates.

But there are many other important books that I have not had the opportunity to review or discuss. In the purely economic field there is Managed Money at the Crossroads, an analysis of the European experience by Melchior Palyi, one of the most devastating attacks on monetary planning and built-in inflation that has appeared in a generation. More largely in the political field there are The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov; James Burnham’s Congress and the American Tradition, and Allen Drury’s powerful Washington novel, Advise and Consent. In the international field of the cold war there is Willi Schlamm’s Germany and the East-West Crisis, a best seller in Germany itself.

Then there are books in the more general fields of the arts, culture, morals, and education. Outstanding among these are The Freudian Ethic, an Analysis of the Subversion of American Character by Richard LaPiere, professor of sociology at Stanford, and The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun, provost of Columbia University.

SEMANTIC PROBLEM

Though most of the books mentioned above are by university professors, they all repudiate one or another aspect of the statist-socialist-Jacobin-newdealist-unbuttoned-“liberal” ideology that has dominated American economic, political, cultural, and academic life since the days of the New Deal. But one problem is that there is no entirely satisfactory name either for the philosophy which is being rejected or for the new philosophy which in contrast, is now being expressed.

This is illustrated by two of the books that must stand high on the list. One is The Evolution of a Conservative by William Henry Chamberlin; the other is Up From Liberalism by William F. Buckley, Jr. Both authors call themselves conservatives. Chamberlin writes: “Conservatives should stand strongly for a government of limited and divided powers, kept in equilibrium by a system of checks and balances.” Yet this was a central tenet of the liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Buckley brilliantly excoriates a philosophy he calls Liberalism, yet nearly all the doctrines he decries are the opposite of those of traditional liberalism. Notwithstanding the present confusing state of the vocabulary with which we are compelled to deal, a turn of thought away from paternalism, statism, and socialism, and toward conservatism and self-discipline is increasingly perceptible.