First published in 1976, and revised in 1996, George H. Nash’s celebrated history of the postwar conservative intellectual movement has become the unquestioned standard in the field. This new edition, published in commemoration of the volume’s thirtieth anniversary, includes a new preface by Nash and will continue to instruct anyone interested in how today’s conservative movement was born.
First published in 1976, George H. Nash’s celebrated history of the postwar conservative intellectual movement has become the unquestioned standard in the field. This new edition, published in commemoration of the book's thirtieth anniversary, includes a new preface and conclusion by the author and will continue to instruct anyone interested in how today’s conservative movement was born.
Presents forty essays, speeches, and other documents on conservatism or by conservatives, spanning 1930 to the turn of the century, including works by Seward Collins, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Jr., Irving Kristol, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and others.
Right Face tells the compelling story of how the American conservative movement in the two decades following World War II managed to move from obscurity to the center stage of national politics. When Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 defeated the conservative champion Robert Taft and won the Republican presidential nomination, many on the American right felt that they had become homeless within the established party-system. The brand of liberalism which permeated the nation's intellectual life had also become bipartisan political doctrine. The feeling of cultural and political ostracism triggered a quest for an independent conservative network of organizations, with the hope of either "taking back" the Republican Party or creating a viable alternative. The first part of Right Face recounts the often bitter struggle to define the meaning of conservatism in modern America. Part two concerns the search for influential national outlets for conservative opinion, whereas part three focuses on the movement's actual plunge into electoral politics - not least on its well-planned takeover of the Republican Party machinery in 1964 and the resulting presidential nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater. An epilogue attempts to trace main currents in the evolution of American conservatism since the 1960s, as well as to assess the extent to which American conservatives have managed to create the "Counter-Establishment" they set out to create more than half a century ago. In a sense the conservatives actually set out on two different quests: One was for intellectual respectability. The other was for political power. As this study reveals, the two goals were not always compatible. Based on extensive archival sources, Right Face provides an incisive analysis of the conservative movement and the forces that shaped it. With its blending of intellectual and organizational developments, it adds an important chapter to the history of American political culture in the 20th century.
From the middle of the twentieth century, think tanks have played an indelible role in the rise of American conservatism. Positioning themselves against the alleged liberal bias of the media, academia, and the federal bureaucracy, conservative think tanks gained the attention of politicians and the public alike and were instrumental in promulgating conservative ideas. Yet, in spite of the formative influence these institutions have had on the media and public opinion, little has been written about their history. Here, Jason Stahl offers the first sustained investigation of the rise and historical development of the conservative think tank as a source of political and cultural power in the United States. What we now know as conservative think tanks--research and public-relations institutions populated by conservative intellectuals--emerged in the postwar period as places for theorizing and "selling" public policies and ideologies to both lawmakers and the public at large. Stahl traces the progression of think tanks from their outsider status against a backdrop of New Deal and Great Society liberalism to their current prominence as a counterweight to progressive political institutions and thought. By examining the rise of the conservative think tank, Stahl makes invaluable contributions to our historical understanding of conservatism, public-policy formation, and capitalism.
A foundational text of the modern conservative movement, this 1948 philosophical treatise argues the decline of Western civilization and offers a remedy. Originally published in 1948, at the height of post–World War II optimism and confidence in collective security, Ideas Have Consequences uses “words hard as cannonballs” to present an unsparing diagnosis of the ills of the modern age. Widely read and debated at the time of its first publication, the book is now seen as one of the foundational texts of the modern conservative movement. In its pages, Richard M. Weaver argues that the decline of Western civilization resulted from the rising acceptance of relativism over absolute reality. In spite of increased knowledge, this retreat from the realist intellectual tradition has weakened the Western capacity to reason, with catastrophic consequences for social order and individual rights. But Weaver also offers a realistic remedy. These difficulties are the product not of necessity, but of intelligent choice. And, today, as decades ago, the remedy lies in the renewed acceptance of absolute reality and the recognition that ideas—like actions—have consequences. This expanded edition of the classic work contains a foreword by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball that offers insight into the rich intellectual and historical contexts of Weaver and his work and an afterword by Ted J. Smith III that relates the remarkable story of the book’s writing and publication. Praise for Ideas Have Consequences “A profound diagnosis of the sickness of our culture.” —Reinhold Niebuhr “Brilliantly written, daring, and radical. . . . It will shock, and philosophical shock is the beginning of wisdom.” —Paul Tillich “This deeply prophetic book not only launched the renaissance of philosophical conservatism in this country, but in the process gave us an armory of insights into the diseases besetting the national community that is as timely today as when it first appeared. [This] is one of the few authentic classics in the American political tradition.” —Robert Nisbet
Herbert Hoover's "magnum opus"—at last published nearly fifty years after its completion—offers a revisionist reexamination of World War II and its cold war aftermath and a sweeping indictment of the "lost statesmanship" of Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover offers his frank evaluation of Roosevelt's foreign policies before Pearl Harbor and policies during the war, as well as an examination of the war's consequences, including the expansion of the Soviet empire at war's end and the eruption of the cold war against the Communists.
From 1964 to 1980, the United States was buffeted by a variety of international crises, including the nation's defeat in Vietnam, the growing aggression of the Soviet Union, and Washington's inability to free the fifty two American hostages held by Islamic extremists in Iran. Through this period and in the decades that followed, Commentary, Human Events, and National Review magazines were critical in supporting the development of GOP conservative positions on key issues that shaped events at home and abroad. These publications and the politicians they influenced pursued a fundamental realignment of US foreign policy that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan. Paving the Way for Reagan closely examines the ideas and opinions conveyed by the magazines in relationship to their critiques of the dominant liberal foreign policy events of the 1960s and 1970s. Revealed is how the journalists' key insights and assessments of the US strategies on Vietnam, China, the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT), the United Nations, the Panama Canal, Rhodesia, and the Middle East applied pressure to leaders on the Right within the GOP who they believed were not being faithful to conservative principles. Their views were ultimately adopted within the conservative movement, and subsequently, helped lay the foundation for Reagan's "peace through strength" foreign policy. Incorporating primary sources and firsthand accounts from writers and editors, Jurdem provides a comprehensive analysis of how these three publications played a fundamental role influencing elite opinion for a paradigm shift in US foreign policy during this crucial sixteen--year period.
Creating Conservatism charts the vital role of canonical post–World War II (1945–1964) books in generating, guiding, and sustaining conservatism as a political force in the United States. Dedicated conservatives have argued for decades that the conservative movement was a product of print, rather than a march, a protest, or a pivotal moment of persecution. The Road to Serfdom, Ideas Have Consequences, Witness, The Conservative Mind, God and Man at Yale, The Conscience of a Conservative, and other mid-century texts became influential not only among conservative office-holders, office-seekers, and well-heeled donors but also at dinner tables, school board meetings, and neighborhood reading groups. These books are remarkable both because they enumerated conservative political positions and because their memorable language demonstrated how to take those positions—functioning, in essence, as debate handbooks. Taking an expansive approach, the author documents the wide influence of the conservative canon on traditionalist and libertarian conservatives. By exploring the varied uses to which each founding text has been put from the Cold War to the culture wars, Creating Conservatism generates original insights about the struggle over what it means to think and speak conservatively in America.
