Conservative Thinkers

Conservative Thinkers PDF Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Continuum
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description

Conservative Thinkers

Conservative Thinkers PDF Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: Continuum
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description


Watch on the Right

Watch on the Right PDF Author: J. David Hoeveler
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299128104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The ascendancy of conservatism in the last twenty years is an unprecedented episode in American intellectual and political history. In Watch on the Right, J. David Hoeveler Jr. gives us enlightening, often immensely entertaining, portraits of the key thinkers behind this "revolution." As Hoeveler writes, "conservative thinkers hang their hats on many different racks," and this book dramatizes for us the breadth of the conservative coalition as exemplified by the eight writers surveyed: William F. Buckley Jr. George Will, Robert Nisbet, Irving Kristol, Hilton Kramer, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., and Michael Novak. These eight "gurus" of the right represent a very wide spectrum of conservative thought, but Hoeveler also considers the present-day conservative renaissance against the literary background that has given the movement its identity since Edmund Burke. Amid the multiple voices unifying themes do emerge. American conservatives share a hostility toward the liberal "new class"--the professional media and academic elites and the entrenched government bureaucracies that still believe in the perfectibility of society by enforced social engineering. Moreover, conservatives of all persuasions are united in struggling to sustain traditional values against the onslaught of revolutionary capitalism and technology, and all are profoundly hostile to imperialistic communism on the Soviet model. Despite the existence of a generic conservatism, however, Hoeveler's portraits provide us with a fascinating tour of the shifts and turns in modern social thought from the decline of liberalism in the late 1960s to the current era--a path that leads through such diverse areas as the Cold War, bourgeois culture, art and aesthetics, civil rights and the welfare state, New Age culture, and the gender revolution. To a whole generation that has never known anything but conservative leadership, Watch on the Right will explain, in clear accessible prose, how the movement flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. For readers who saw it happen (but never thought it would) and for liberals (who are feverishly trying to recover "their " mandate), this book as no other pulls the ideological threads of the story together. Watch on the Right is illustrated with delightful pen-and-ink caricatures.

Conservative Thinkers

Conservative Thinkers PDF Author: Peter Viereck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351526421
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Across America today, conservatism is being hotly debated both across the political spectrum and within the conservative movement itself. Much of the public debate is without definition or historical context. This history of conservatism by renowned historian, social critic, and poet Peter Viereck aims to meet the need for a concise, balanced picture of conservative thought in all its different shadings and cultural contexts.The analytical portion of the book provides a succinct but thorough critical overview of conservatism's most representative figures. Viereck begins with chapters defining conservatism itself, its special technical terms, and its changing historical circumstances. The rest deals with its actual thinkers and statesmen. After each main conservative thesis, the anti-conservative rebuttal is summarized, and the reader is allowed to reach his own conclusions. Though the first stress is on conservative political philosophy (from John Adams to Churchill), key sections also stress non-political conservatism: in religion (Cardinal Newman) and in the primarily cultural protest against material progress (Coleridge, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Henry Adams).Every major point is concretely illustrated by an appended cross-reference to a primary source in the second half, a well-chosen anthology of key conservative documents. Criteria for inclusion are three, representativeness, depth of perception, importance of influence. The result is not uniformity but a gamut: from extreme intolerant reaction to an evolutionary moderate spirit. The former passes imperceptibly into authoritarianism; the latter, into liberalism.

10 Books Every Conservative Must Read

10 Books Every Conservative Must Read PDF Author: Benjamin Wiker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1596986387
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Following up his 10 Books That Screwed Up the World, author Benjamin Wiker brings you 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss and One Impostor. Offering a guide to some of the most important literary works of our time, Wiker turns his discerning eye from the great texts that have done so much damage to Western Civilization to the great texts that could help rebuild it. 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read features a range of works from classics such as Democracy in America and The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, to more "pop" classics like Sense and Sensibility and The Tempest. Through these works, Wiker reveals some of the most important lessons for our time as well as the true meaning of conservatism. Written with an educational purpose and witty tone, this is a must-read for conservatives, Republicans, and booklovers everywhere!

Bertrand De Jouvenel

Bertrand De Jouvenel PDF Author: Daniel J. Mahoney
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684516692
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
In his effort to detach the indispensable notion of the common good from its historical identification with the more closed, homogeneous, and static societies of the premodern past, the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-87) pointed the way towards a viable conservative liberalism. So argues Daniel J. Mahoney in this compelling introduction to the life and work of Jouvenel, one of twentieth-century France's most profound philosophers and political essayists. Although he vigorously defended the historical achievement of liberal society against its totalitarian critics, Jouvenel also challenged the modern conceit that man is an autonomous being beholden neither to the moral law nor to the humanizing inheritance of the past. Mahoney's study focuses on Jouvenel's three masterworks On Power (1945), Sovereignty (1955), and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963) and on his broader effort to defend civility and social friendship against rationalist individualism and its logical fruit, collectivist politics. Mahoney explores Jouvenel's affinities with and debts to Aristotle, Burke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, and he contrasts Jouvenel's signal theoretical achievements with the twists and turns manifested in his (sometimes questionable) practical political engagements from the 1930s until his death. Mahoney's characteristically engaging appraisal of this important political philosopher, the fifth entry in the Library of Modern Thinkers series, is the first book on Jouvenel to appear in the English language.

Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America

Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America PDF Author: Michael L. Ondaatje
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206878
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In the last three decades, a brand of black conservatism espoused by a controversial group of African American intellectuals has become a fixture in the nation's political landscape, its proponents having shaped policy debates over some of the most pressing matters that confront contemporary American society. Their ideas, though, have been neglected by scholars of the African American experience—and much of the responsibility for explaining black conservatism's historical and contemporary significance has fallen to highly partisan journalists. Typically, those pundits have addressed black conservatives as an undifferentiated mass, proclaiming them good or bad, right or wrong, color-blind visionaries or Uncle Toms. In Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America, Michael L. Ondaatje delves deeply into the historical archive to chronicle the origins of black conservatism in the United States from the early 1980s to the present. Focusing on three significant policy issues—affirmative action, welfare, and education—Ondaatje critically engages with the ideas of nine of the most influential black conservatives. He further documents how their ideas were received, both by white conservatives eager to capitalize on black support for their ideas and by activists on the left who too often sought to impugn the motives of black conservatives instead of challenging the merits of their claims. While Ondaatje's investigation uncovers the themes and issues that link these voices together, he debunks the myth of a monolithic black conservatism. Figures such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, and cultural theorist John McWhorter emerge as individuals with their own distinct understandings of and relationships to the conservative political tradition.

Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal

Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism Since the New Deal PDF Author: Johnathan O'Neill
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421444623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
"In this work of intellectual history, the author identifies four transformations in federal goverrnment that followed the New Deal: the rise of the administrative state, the erosion of federalism, the ascendance of the modern presidency, and the development of modern judicial review. He then considers how schools of conservative thought (traditionalists, neoconservatives, libertarians, Straussians) responded to each transformation"--

Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk PDF Author: Bradley J. Birzer
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813166195
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
Emerging from two decades of the Great Depression and the New Deal and facing the rise of radical ideologies abroad, the American Right seemed beaten, broken, and adrift in the early 1950s. Although conservative luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin all published important works at this time, none of their writings would match the influence of Russell Kirk's 1953 masterpiece The Conservative Mind. This seminal book became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in Americans' attitudes toward traditionalism. In Russell Kirk, Bradley J. Birzer investigates the life and work of the man known as the founder of postwar conservatism in America. Drawing on papers and diaries that have only recently become available to the public, Birzer presents a thorough exploration of Kirk's intellectual roots and development. The first to examine the theorist's prolific writings on literature and culture, this magisterial study illuminates Kirk's lasting influence on figures such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., and Senator Barry Goldwater—who persuaded a reluctant Kirk to participate in his campaign for the presidency in 1964. While several books examine the evolution of postwar conservatism and libertarianism, surprisingly few works explore Kirk's life and thought in detail. This engaging biography not only offers a fresh and thorough assessment of one of America's most influential thinkers but also reasserts his humane vision in an increasingly inhumane time.

Conservative Intellectuals and Richard Nixon

Conservative Intellectuals and Richard Nixon PDF Author: S. Mergel
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230619944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Conservative Intellectuals and Richard Nixon explores the relationship between postwar conservatives and the president from 1968 to 1974. Seemingly casting those years out of their history, conservatives have never fully explored how Richard Nixon affected their movement. They fail to realize the extent his presidency helped refocus their fight against liberalism and communism. Mergel uses the Nixon years as a window into the Right s effort to turn ideology into successful politics. It combines an assessment of Nixon s presidency through the eyes of conservative intellectuals with an attempt to understand what the Right gained from its experience with Nixon.

Big Tent

Big Tent PDF Author: Mallory Factor
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062290673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Drawing from his comprehensive, star-studded course at the Citadel, Mallory Factor, the New York Times bestselling author of Shadowbosses, brings together a fascinating and diverse range of essays from leading figures and activists which explore and illuminate the conservative intellectual tradition in American politics. Ambitious in its breadth and depth, The Big Tent is a panoramic portrait of the intellectual history of the conservative movement. Some of the leading lights of the right offer an unparalleled introduction to conservative figures and ideas, from the Revolution to William F. Buckley; Barry Goldwater to the Reagan Revolution; Libertarianism to the War on Terror. Insightful and stimulating, The Big Tent is an outstanding survey of the movement over three centuries.