American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Mark C. Henrie

Anne E. Krulikowski

Gregory Wolfe

John Zmirak

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Laura Barrosse-Antle

Alexandria Chiasson

Alexandra Gilman

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Brian C. Anderson

Eugene Genovese

Daniel J. Mahoney

Wilfred McClay

Forrest McDonald

George H. Nash

AMERICAN

CONSERVATISM

An Encyclopedia

EDITED BY

Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Editors’ Introduction

Alphabetical Listing of Entries

The Entries

About the Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NO encyclopedia of the size and scope of this one is the work of even a dozen people, let alone three. Since taking over this project in 2000, the editors—all at work at their full-time jobs and on numerous other side projects—have been necessarily and ably assisted by numerous interns, editorial assistants, designers, proofreaders, and others, not to mention the 250- plus contributors to the volume, many of whom gladly took on multiple entries in exchange for little or no pay.

We must first thank Gregory Wolfe for getting this volume up and running in the early 1990s and for continuing to assist in its completion after it was formally handed off to ISI. Indeed, this volume is no exception to the rule that everything has its history. Greg conceived of this work and was initially commissioned by Garland Publishers to edit an encyclopedia of the American Right, which was to be an explicit companion to the instructive and professionally compiled Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990, rev. ed. 1992). The scope of the project, however, proved overwhelming for one individual with no institutional support, and so Greg asked Jeff Nelson if he and ISI would be willing to take the project over. Believing ISI was the perfect home for such a work—and encouraged to undertake it by ISI’s president, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., senior vice president H. Spencer Masloff, and its late executive vice president, John F. Lulves Jr.— the editors began working on it in earnest at the turn of the new millennium. Needless to say, every entry already penned had to be revisited and most of them revised. In addition, the new editors undertook to adjust the conception of the project from an encyclopedia of the American Right to a reference work on American conservatism. At least two-thirds of the entries in the present volume were added, some previous ones deleted, and after much hard work the encyclopedia took its present form.

Besides Greg, perhaps no one worked harder on the myriad day-to-day tasks associated with pulling such a large project together than did Anne Krulikowski, who worked on the project at ISI from 2001 to 2003. Our colleagues Mark Henrie and John Zmirak took on difficult writing assignments and provided wise counsel on the shape of the volume, while various others—including interns Laura Barrosse-Antle and Alexandria Chiasson, former ISI Books managing editor Xandy Gilman, June Weaver, and Megan Muncy—also played key roles in bringing this encyclopedia to fruition. Sam Torode, with help from John Vella, provided the book with its elegant layout and photo illustrations, and Jennifer Connolly helped shepherd this volume through the printing process. We also thank the distinguished members of our editorial advisory board for their advice on entries, balance, and other matters.

For their crucial financial support of this volume, we thank Earhart Foundation and the Historical Research Foundation. Finally, we are grateful to all of the contributors for their good work and especially their patience—a virtue sorely tried at times, we know. James Person, Rob Waters, Max Schulz, and the late John Attarian deserve special thanks for diving in time and time again to the sizeable pool of work that lay before us back in 2001. This encyclopedia certainly would never have appeared without their efforts.

This volume is dedicated to John F. Lulves Jr., E. Victor Milione, and Henry Regnery: stewards of the Word, custodians of our heritage, and teachers who have shaped the lives of thousands of students in the knowledge and hope that each generation is a new people.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

SINCE it emerged in the years following World War II, conservatism in America has been declared intellectually and politically victorious— and dead—many times over. As a new, self-conscious intellectual movement, postwar conservatism was launched through the publication of groundbreaking books, including Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944), Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), and Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind (1953); the establishment of new, opinion-shaping periodicals, such as Human Events (1944) and William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review (1955); and the formation of organizations such as the Foundation for Economic Education (1946) and the Young Americans for Freedom (1960). Nevertheless, conservatism in America still has been defined, for many, by its political rather than its intellectual fortunes: Barry Goldwater’s dramatically unsuccessful 1964 presidential bid and Ronald Reagan’s equally dramatic but successful 1980 run for the presidency are usually portrayed as defining moments for American conservatism, with the first ironically paving the way for the second. Since the election of Reagan, the political ups and downs of the conservative movement in America have continued: the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994, for example, has left in its wake an ambiguous legacy, including the impeachment of a Democratic president, growing deficits, a war fought overseas in the name of democracy, and a splintering of the conservative movement.

Conservatism’s mixed political fortunes, along with the often acrimonious debates that have persisted among the critics of postwar American society, including neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, traditionalists, libertarians, and those who simply call themselves conservatives, reveal a continuing crisis of identity among Americans on the political right. One reason for this crisis may be a lack of historical knowledge and perspective. This is too bad, for the most interesting intellectual debates in the last fifty years have arguably taken place not between conservatives and liberals but between adherents of different positions within the conservative camp. George Nash’s Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (revised ed., 1996) provides a masterful narrative history of conservatism, but there has as yet been no comprehensive treatment of the different elements of conservatism in all their conflicting and complementary variety. As Pepperdine University political theorist Ted V. McAlister has poinetd out, The historiography of American conservatism … remains immature. For decades, the academic historical establishment largely ignored American conservatives or dealt with them as a sort of fringe group. Only after the surprising and enduring appeal of Ronald Reagan did most historians begin to take serious scholarly notice of self-proclaimed conservatives. Slowly, the historical literature is growing richer. But for now, the story of conservatism in America, as told by the academics, is fractured and inconclusive. This volume is intended to contribute to the ongoing effort to understand what it has meant— and still means—to be a conservative in America.

THE editors do not see in the history of conservatism the inevitable develop ment of an increasingly powerful and coherent ideology of any kind, nor do they believe in the inevitable triumph of any particular set of policy positions. This eschewal of ideological clarity may leave some readers of this encyclopedia dissatisfied. Indeed, the reader will not get very far in this volume before beginning to notice the tensions and outright contradictions that exist and have ever existed among conservatives—on matters of principle no less than on matters of policy. If it has been marked by anything, conservatism in America has clearly been marked by diversity. How is it, then, that such a range of views came to be associated with a single social-political philosophy?

The full answer to that question is complex. It is true, as has been often stated, that from 1945 to 1991 conservatism, as a political movement, was held together primarily by the glue of anticommunism. But then there also were many staunch liberal anticommunists (e.g., Lionel Trilling) and even some staunch radical anticommunists (e.g., George Orwell). Furthermore, there were even anti- anticommunists among conservatives and their fellow travelers (e.g., John Lukacs). So, while anticommunism provided a center of gravity for the conservative intellectual movement, there must be more to the story.

The realities of coalition politics in a vast, diverse country like the United States provide part of the answer. For with the effort to elect Barry Goldwater, American postwar conservatism became a political movement as much as a political philosophy. And practical political movements are founded on compromise. Of course, such compromises are susceptible to explanation. Thus Frank Meyer’s well known fusionism served for decades as a kind of justification for conservatism as a political coalition. Through fusionism, Meyer and those who followed him argued that the great goals of life are freedom and virtue, and that in order for virtue, the special concern of traditionalists, to be authentic, it must be attained in a context of maximal individual freedom, the special concern of libertarians. In turn, argued Meyer, freedom may only claim our moral allegiance insofar as its ultimate purpose is to allow men and women to attain virtue. Thought of in this way, libertarians and traditionalists could be understood to pursue much the same practical ends for human beings.

This fusionist philosophy has in fact played a large role in uniting conservatives at the level of public policy debate and practice. Rapidly embraced by National Review and other movement-shaping organs, fusionism is today the implicit background philosophy of most conservative institutions, politicians, journalists, and activists. And why not? As an inclusive doctrine it has inestimable practical advantages. But at the level of theory fusionism has always remained controversial. Indeed, with the exception of the nuanced treatment it has received at the hands of M. Stanton Evans, it has remained largely unelaborated. Traditionalists, for their part, argue that it is a tradition of ordered liberty that they defend, and not just virtue, which often flourishes under the worst, most brutal and unfree circumstances; saints may be found in concentration camps, even as good people may be led astray by libertines. Then, too, there is the problem that thoroughgoing libertarians have often remained agnostic as to whether the end of freedom is really virtue, as Meyer claimed; for former Reason editor Virginia Postrel, for example, freedom is an end in itself, and if individuals decide to use it to attain virtue, that is their business.

Thus, while Meyer’s fusionism may be largely responsible for providing a practical foundation for the conservative political coalition, it has not succeeded in providing a unifying theoretical basis for the conservative intellectual movement. Does, then, such a basis exist?

Perhaps the suggestive analysis of sociologist Philip Rieff offers one possible approach to this question of what might unite conservatives at the level of theory. In Rieff’s typology of the succession of ideal character types in the history of the West, the political man of the Greeks was replaced by the religious man of the Hebrews and Christians and finally by the short-lived, transitional character of the economic man of the Enlightenment. Economic man was short-lived because a new type, psychological man, displaced him near the beginning of the twentieth century. And, as Rieff argues, this new man was quite different from the preceding three, in that he no longer recognized the existence of a hierarchy of impulses in man’s nature. In other words, psychological man is similar to the mass man whose advent Ortega described and conservatives of all stripes have feared. Accepting no hierarchy imposed from a source outside the sovereign self, mass man is too easily manipulated by the state—with its twin promises of security and freedom—into detaching himself from those mediating institutions which not only present obstacles to the state’s consolidation of power, but also provide the self with its ethical education. The abstractions of ideology fuel the engine of this manipulation by bringing the atomized individual into conformance with the needs of the new therapeutic social and political order.

Although they do not typically think of the matter in this way, it could be argued that different sorts of conservatives have held, and continue to hold, different beliefs as to which of the character types described by Rieff represents a superior human ideal. For many of the followers of Leo Strauss and some neoconservatives, it is political man; for most traditional Jews and Christians, it is religious man; for libertarians and other neoconservatives, economic man represents an authentic characterological advance. Probably most theorists regarded as essentially conservative would regard a hybrid of two or three of these types as the best option of all (leave aside for now whether such a hybrid is really possible). But if Rieff is correct that psychological or mass man became the characteristic American type in the twentieth century, opposition to his elevation as the human ideal—and the concomitant rejection of any notion of an ethical or moral hierarchy in human desire and action—may be the most important thing that has united American conservatives.

Indeed, it might be said that conservatives of all stripes have regarded acquiescence in the advent of mass man to form the core of what they have opposed and often labeled as liberalism. Their common opposition to the enthronement of mass man and all that his ascension entails provides, perhaps, enough shared philosophical ground that the postwar conservative intellectual movement has not been simply a convenient political arrangement.

Whether this shared revolt against the masses is sufficient to maintain conservatism’s viability as a movement remains open to question. New, fundamental questions about man and society must now engage the conservative imagination, including Islamic terrorism, the economic and political rise of China, the advancing frontier of biotechnology, the emergence of transnational bureaucracies and the corresponding deemphasis of nation-states, the ongoing erosion of our constitutional order, challenges to the traditional understanding of marriage and family, increasing ecological concerns, and the deterioration of American community life. In other words, history is living—but so is the conservative tradition. We hope that in the face of these challenges, this encyclopedia will serve as a touchstone for those seeking resources in conservatism’s American past.

American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (hereafter ACE ) seeks not to establish any orthodox definition of conservatism but rather to offer information and insight on the persons, schools, concepts, organizations, events, publications, and other topics of major importance to the nature and development of the conservative intellectual movement in America since World War II. Its 626 entries—ranging, in the main, from 250 to 2,500 words in length—cover social issues from abortion to welfare, thinkers from Lord Acton to Donald Atwell Zoll, politicians from John Adams to John Witherspoon, magazines from the American Mercury to the Weekly Standard, books from The Conscience of a Conservative to Witness, historical events from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War, social-political philosophies from agrarianism to totalitarianism, concepts from academic freedom to tradition, organizations from the America First Committee to the Young Americans for Freedom—and much else. The most comprehensive encyclopedia of American conservatism yet compiled, it is the editors’ hope and belief that the volume will be of value to all students, journalists, academics, and lay readers interested in what has probably been the most important intellectual movement of the last fifty years.

The criterion for an entry’s inclusion in this encyclopedia was deceptively simple: the topic under consideration must have been of substantial importance to the shaping of postwar American conservatism considered primarily in its intellectual (rather than simply its political or social) aspect. This means that there is (a) a prejudice against conservative politicians and pundits who have not clearly had a deep and lasting influence on conservatism, (b) a prejudice against foreign figures, unless they had a major impact on postwar American conservative thought (the only non-American politician included here, besides Edmund Burke, is Margaret Thatcher), and (c) a pronounced bias towards the years since 1945. Publications, persons, and events prior to 1945 were included only if they had a significant bearing on conservatism in America since the end of World War II. Furthermore, in order to limit the scope of the project, the editors decided that, with very few exceptions (most of which pertain to the founders and earlier American figures), only books, persons, events, etc., to have emerged since the Constitution was ratified in 1789 would be included. Thus, there are no entries on such figures as Plato, Aquinas, Locke, or Hume, and none on such events as the Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, or Glorious Revolution of 1688.

As we have already intimated, there is today—and always has been—much debate as to what is and is not authentic conservatism. It is not the intent of this encyclopedia to adjudicate this debate; a rather broad meaning of conservatism is here taken for granted. The intent of this volume is to provide coverage of those matters of importance to each of the major schools of postwar conservative thought and to do so as evenhandedly as possible.

This is not to say that in the entries included here the reader will not encounter specific points of view. Far from it. The editors understand that some articles are more neutral in tone than others. In fact, they relish the strong opinions that often are on display, which they believe has made for a more interesting volume than would have been the case had contributors been forced into the iron cage of a supposed neutrality. To the editors’ minds, at least, it is more important that a variety of points of view are present and accounted for: anarchist, classical-liberal, secular, religious, populist, aristocratic, Straussian, Voegelinian, Reaganite, antiinterventionist, interventionist, modernist, antimodernist, fusionist, agrarian, industrialist, southern, northern, and so on. But they have striven to see that each article is, so far as it goes, accurate and fair in its treatment of its subject, even if the subject is approached from a perspective with which not all conservatives would agree. Only views that seemed to be clearly beyond the pale of mainstream conservative thought have been intentionally excluded. In other words, the editors have resisted allowing the volume, taken as a whole, to present the story of American conservatism as an unwaveringly straight line from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush, or from the founding of National Review to, say, the advent of Rush Limbaugh. The story is more complicated than that … and more interesting.

THE reader will find at the end of almost every entry in this encyclopedia a list of articles and books for further reading. The reader should note that, in the interest of conserving space, these further reading sections do not include references mentioned in the entries themselves. The reader will also find after each entry a list of other entries to consult that touch on the topic at hand.

The bulk of this volume notwithstanding, we are acutely aware that there are dozens of important persons, concepts, and publications not profiled here that might well have been included. In order to keep the size of the project manageable, the editors decided to employ a strong bias toward including only those living men and women whose careers were sufficiently advanced to allow for an adequate assessment of their contributions. Similarly, in the last quarter-century there has been such a proliferation of conservative institutes, centers, publications, and now blogs that it became impossible to include all of them in this volume. Thus, the editors have chosen to focus principally on more venerable institutions and publications, those which seem already to have reached a kind of canonical place in the bibliography of conservatism. We welcome the reactions and suggestions of readers, which will be gratefully considered as we plan a projected, and clearly necessary, second volume.

ALPHABETICAL LISTING OF ENTRIES

abortion

academic freedom

Acton, Lord

Acton Institute

Adams, Brooks

Adams, Henry

Adams, John

affirmative action

Agar, Herbert

agrarianism

Allen, Richard V.

America First Committee

American Conservative

American Conservative Union

American Enterprise Institute

American Liberty League

American Mercury

American Review

American Revolution

American Spectator

anarchism

Anderson, Martin

anticommunism

Anti-Federalists

Arkes, Hadley

arms control

Ashbrook Center

Atkinson, Edward

Atlas Economic Research Foundation

Austrian school of economics

authority

Babbitt, Irving

Ball, William Bentley

Banfield, Edward C.

Baroody, William J.

Bartley, Robert L.

Becker, Gary S.

Bell, Bernard Iddings

Belloc, Hillaire

Bennett, William J.

Benthamism

Berger, Peter L.

Berger, Raoul

Berns, Walter

Berry, Wendell

Bill of Rights

Blackwell, Morton

Bledsoe, Albert Taylor

Bloom, Allan

Bookman

Books & Culture

Boorstin, Daniel J.

Bork, Robert H.

Borsodi, Ralph

Bozell, L.Brent

Bradford, M. E.

Bradley Foundation, Lynde and Harry

Bredvold, Louis I.

Brooks, Cleanth

Brooks, David

Brown v. Board of Education

Brownson, Orestes A.

Bryan, William Jennings

Buchanan, James M.

Buchanan, Patrick J.

Buckley, William F., Jr.

Burckhardt, Jacob

bureaucracy

Burke, Edmund

Burkean conservatism

Burnham, James

Bush, George W.

Bushnell, Horace

Butler, Nicholas Murray

Calhoun, John C.

Campaigne, Jameson, Jr.

Canavan, Francis, S.J.

capital punishment

capitalism

Carey, George W.

Carlson, Allan

Carnegie, Andrew

Casey, William J.

Catholic social teaching

Cato Institute

centralization

Chamberlain, John

Chamberlin, William H.

Chambers, Whittaker

Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)

Chesterton Review

Chicago Tribune

China Lobby

Chodorov, Frank

Christian Reconstruction

Chronicles

church and state

City Journal

civil rights

Civil War

Claremont Institute

Clay, Henry

Cleveland, Grover

Clinton, William J.,

impeachment of

Cold War

Cold War revisionism

Collegiate Network

Collier, David S.

Collier, Peter

Collins, Seward B.

Colson, Charles W.

Commentary

common law

community

Cone, Carl B.

Conquest, Robert

Conscience of a Conservative, The

conservatism

Conservatism in America

Conservative Book Club

Conservative Mind, The

Conservative Party of New York

Constitution, interpretations of

constitutionalism

containment

Coolidge, Calvin

Cooper, James Fenimore

Coughlin, Charles E.

Cram, Ralph Adams

Crane, Philip

creationism

Cribb, T. Kenneth, Jr.

Crisis

Criterion

Crocker, George N.

culture wars

custom

Dartmouth Review

Davenport, John

Davidson, Donald G.

Davidson, Eugene A.

Davis, Jefferson

Dawson, Christopher

Declaration of Independence

Decter, Midge

democracy

Democratic Party

DeMuth, Christopher

Dew, Thomas Roderick

Diamond, Martin

Dickinson, John

Dies, Martin

Dietze, Gottfried

distributism

diversity

Djilas, Milovan

Dobson, James C.

Dos Passos, John

Douglas, Stephen A.

D’Souza, Dinesh

due process

Eagle Forum

Earhart Foundation

East, John P.

Eastman, Max F.

education, higher

education, public

Edwards, Lee

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns)

émigré intellectuals

English, Raymond

Enlightenment

enterprise zones

entitlements environmentalism

envy

Epstein, Joseph

equal protection

Equal Rights Amendment

equality

Ethics and Public Policy Center

Evans, M. Stanton

Falwell, Jerry family

Family Research Council

farm policy

fascism

Faulkner, William federalism

Federalist, The

Federalist Party

Federalist Society

feminism

Feulner, Edwin J., Jr.

Field, Stephen Johnson

First Things

Fish, Hamilton, III

Fitzhugh, George Fleming, Thomas

Flynn, John T.

Foreign Policy Research Institute

Foundation for Economic Education

foundations, conservative

Francis, Samuel

Free Congress Foundation

free trade

Freeman

French Revolution

Friedman, Milton

Frost, Robert

Fukuyama, Francis

Fund for American Studies

fundamentalism

fusionism

Garrett, Garet

Genovese, Eugene D.

George, Henry

Gilder, George

Gildersleeve, Basil L.

Gingrich, Newt

Glazer, Nathan

Gnosticism

God and Man at Yale

God That Failed, The

Godkin, E. L. (Edwin Lawrence)

gold standard

Goldwater, Barry M.

Goodrich, Pierre F.

Gottfried, Paul E.

Grant, George P.

Great Books programs

Grove City College

Gulf War

Haberler, Gottfried

Hallowell, John H.

Hamilton, Alexander

Harper, Floyd Arthur Baldy

Harrigan, Anthony

Hart, Jeffrey

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hayek, Friedrich A. von

Hayes, Carlton J. H.

Hazlitt, Henry

Helms, Jesse

Helprin, Mark

Henry, Patrick

Herberg, Will

Heritage Foundation

Heyne, Paul

Hillsdale College

Himmelfarb, Gertrude

Hiss-Chambers trial

historic preservation

historicism

Hodge, Charles

Hoffman, Ross J. S.

Holmes, George Frederick

homeschooling

Hook, Sidney

Hoover, Herbert

Hoover Institution on War,

Revolution and Peace

Horowitz, David

Howard, John A.

Hudson Institute

Human Events

Human Life Review

Hutchinson, Thomas

Hutt, William H.

Hyde, Henry

Ideas Have Consequences

ideology

I’ll Take My Stand

Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion

immigration

incorporation doctrine

Independent Institute individualism

Institute for Contemporary Studies

Institute for Humane Studies

intellectual

intelligent design theory

Intercollegiate Review

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Iraq War

isolationism

Ives, C. P. (Charles Pomeroy)

Jacobs, Jane

Jaffa, Harry V.

Jaki, Stanley L.

Jeffers, Robinson

Jefferson, Thomas

Jewish conservatives

John Birch Society

John Paul II, Pope

Judd, Walter H.

judicial activism

Kemp, Jack F.

Kendall, Willmoore

Kennan, George

Kenner, Hugh

Kent, James

Keynesian economics

Kilpatrick, James J.

Kimball, Roger

Kirk, Russell

Kirkpatrick, Jeane J.

Knight, Frank H.

Koch, Charles G., Charitable

Foundation

Koestler, Arthur Kors, Alan C.

Kramer, Hilton

Kristol, Irving

Kristol, William

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik von

Kuyper, Abraham

Laffer Curve

Lane, Rose Wilder

Lapin, Daniel

Lasch, Christopher

law and economics

law and order

Lee, Robert E.

LeMay, General Curtis E.

Levine, Isaac Don

Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples)

liberalism

liberalism, classical

liberation theology

Libertarian Party

libertarianism

liberty

Liberty Fund

Lieber, Francis

Liebman, Marvin

Liggio, Leonard P.

Limbaugh, Rush

Lincoln, Abraham

Lindbergh, Charles A.

Lippmann, Walter

literary criticism

localism

Lodge, Henry Cabot

London, Herbert I.

Lowell, James Russell

Lowell, Robert

Luce, Clare Boothe

Lukacs, John

Lyons, Eugene

Lytle, Andrew Nelson

MacArthur, Douglas

Machen, J. Gresham

Macon, Nathaniel

Magnet, Myron

managerial revolution

Manhattan Institute

Manion, Clarence

Mansfield, Harvey C.

Marshall, John

Marxism Mason, George

Matthews, J. B. (Joseph Brown)

Mayflower Compact

McCarthy, Eugene J.

McCarthy, Joseph R.

McCarthyism

McClellan, James

McCormick, Colonel Robert R.

McDonald, Forrest

McInerny, Ralph

media, conservative

mediating structures

Medved, Michael

Meese, Edwin, III

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)

Meyer, Frank S.

Milione, E. Victor

Mises, Ludwig von

Mises, Ludwig von, Institute

Missile Defense, National

Modern Age

modernity and postmodernity

Molnar, Thomas

monetarist economics

Mont Pelerin Society

Montgomery, Marion H.

moral imagination

Moral Majority

More, Paul Elmer

Morley, Felix

Morris, Gouverneur

movement conservatism

Murray, Charles

Murray, John Courtney, S.J.

Nash, George H.

National Association of Scholars

National Conservative Political Action

Committee

National Federation Of

Independent Business

National Review

National Rifle Association

natural law

natural law theory, new

Natural Right and History

neoconservatism

Neuhaus, Richard John

Neusner, Jacob

New Criterion

New Criticism

New Deal

New Humanism

Newman, John Henry

New Right

New Science of Politics, The

New Urbanism

Niebuhr, Reinhold

Niemeyer, Gerhart

nihilism

Nisbet, Robert A.

Nixon, Richard M.

Nock, Albert Jay

Novak, Michael

Novak, Robert Oakeshott, Michael

O’Connor, Flannery

Olasky, Marvin

Old Right

Olin, John M., Foundation

Oliver, Revilo P.

Orton, William Aylott

Orwell, George

Owsley, Frank

paleoconservatism

Parkman, Francis

Parry, Stanley J.

Party of the Right

Paterson, Isabel B.

Pegler, Westbrook

Percy, Walker

personalism

Philadelphia Society

Phillips, Howard

Podhoretz, Norman

political action committees

Political Science Reviewer

populism

pornography

Pound, Ezra

poverty

prejudice

prescription

privatization

progress

progressivism

Property and Environment

Research Center

property rights, private

protectionism

Protestantism, evangelical

Protestantism, mainline

public choice economics

Public Interest

Puritanism

Quayle, James Danforth

Quest for Community, The

quotas

Radio Free Europe

Rand, Ayn

Randolph, John (of Roanoke)

Ransom, John Crowe

Read, Leonard E.

Reagan Democrats

Reagan Doctrine

Reagan, Ronald

Reason

Reason Foundation

Reconstruction

Red Scare

Reed, Ralph

Regnery, Henry

Regnery Publishing regulation

Rehnquist, William H.

relativism

Repplier, Agnes

Republican Party

Rickenbacker, William F.

Rieff, Philip

right-to-work movement

Road to Serfdom, The

robber barons

Robertson, Marion Gordon Pat

Rockefeller Republicans

Rockford Institute

Roman Catholicism

Roosevelt, Theodore

Root, Elihu

Röpke, Wilhelm

Rosenberg case

Rothbard, Murray

Royster, Vermont C.

rule of law

Rushdoony, Rousas John

Rusher, William A.

Russell,

Richard B., Jr.

Rutledge, John

Ryn, Claes G.

Safire, William

Santayana, George

Scaife Foundations

Scalia, Antonin

Schaeffer, Francis A.

Schall, James V.

Schindler, David L.

Schlafly, Phyllis

Schlamm, William

Schumpeter, Joseph A.

science and scientism

Scopes trial

Scottish Enlightenment

Senior, John

separation of powers

Sewanee Review

Sheen, Fulton J.

Simon, William E.

Smith, Adam

Sobran, Joseph

social Darwinism

socialism

sociobiology

Sokolsky, George

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr

Southern Agrarians

Southern conservatism

Southern Partisan

Southern Review

Sowell, Thomas

speech, freedom of

Spence Publishing Company

Spencer, Herbert

Spiritual Mobilization.

Stanlis, Peter J.

states’ rights

Stephens, Alexander Hamilton

Stigler, George J.

Storing, Herbert J.

Strauss, Leo

Straussianism

Students For America

Sumner, William Graham

supply-side economics

Supreme Court

Taft, Robert A.

Taft, William Howard

Taft-Hartley Act

Tansill, Charles

Tate, Allen

Taylor, John (of Caroline)

technology

Teller, Edward

Terror, War on

Thatcher, Margaret

therapeutic state

Thernstrom, Abigail

think tanks, conservative

Thomas, Cal

Thomas, Clarence

Thornwell, James Henley

Thurmond, Strom

Tocqueville, Alexis de

Toledano, Ralph de

Tonsor, Stephen J.

Tories, American (Loyalists)

totalitarianism

Touchstone: A Journal of Mere

Christianity

tradition

traditionalism

Triumph

Tucker, St. George

Tullock, Gordon

Tyrrell, R. Emmett, Jr.

unionism

United Nations

University Bookman

Utley, Freda

van den Haag, Ernest

Van Til, Cornelius

Viereck, Peter

Vietnam War

Viguerie, Richard

Villard, Henry

Villard, Oswald Garrison

Vivas, Eliseo

Voegelin, Eric

Wade, John Donald

Wall Street Journal

Wallace, George C.

Washington, George

Washington Legal Foundation

Washington Times

Wattenberg, Ben J.

Weaver, Richard M., Jr.

Webster, Daniel

Wedemeyer, General Albert C.

Weekly Standard

Weigel, George

welfare policy

welfare state

West (the)

West, American

West, E. G. (Edwin George)

Weyrich, Paul M.

Wilbur Foundation

Wilhelmsen, Frederick D.

Will, George F.

Williams, Walter E.

Williamson, René de Visme

Wills, Garry

Wilson, Francis Graham

Wilson, James Q.

Wister, Owen

Witherspoon, John

Witness

Wittfogel, Karl A.

Wolfe, Tom

Woodson, Robert

Young America’s Foundation

Young Americans for Freedom

Zoll, Donald Atwell

A

abortion

Abortion may be defined as the deliberately procured (or induced) termination of a pregnancy … at any stage after conception, the immediate purpose of which is the destruction of the human fetus. For conservatives it involves profound moral and legal questions. The flash point for the abortion debate in the United States occurred on January 22, 1973, when, in a couplet of cases titled Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court discovered a right to abortion in the United States Constitution.

Eight years earlier, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found unconstitutional as applied to married persons Connecticut’s law banning the use of contraceptives. The Court held that the Constitution protected a right of privacy and that the marital use of contraception lay within this zone of privacy. In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, this right was, for all intents and purposes, extended to the use of contraceptives by unmarried persons. These cases set the stage for Roe.

In Roe, the Court held that the Texas criminal abortion statute violated the Constitution. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the seven-person majority, rooted the right to abortion in the privacy right found in Griswold. The Court failed to give any account of where within the Constitution this right to privacy resides. But whether this privacy right was located in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty or in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, the Court was quite certain that it was a right broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The Court also dismissed the argument that the fetus had rights as a person under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Court set out the requirements of this new right to abortion with legislative specificity. A state could from the end of the first trimester regulate the abortion procedure, but only to protect maternal health. Before the second trimester, the state could mandate only that an abortion be performed by a licensed physician. At the point of viability a state could go so far as to proscribe abortion … except when necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother. Though this seemed to give a state much latitude to prohibit abortion, it was in practice feckless. For in Doe, the Court had defined health in the most expansive way possible to include all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age—relevant to [her] well-being. Practically, then, a state could prohibit no abortion.

For conservatives, Roe raised interrelated questions about the proper role of judges and the proper manner of interpreting the Constitution. At the heart of the American republic are the principles of self-government and the intrinsic dignity of each individual. A free people have the right to rule themselves so long as their laws do not infringe on the basic and civil human rights specifically enunciated in the Bill of Rights.

The judge’s role within this framework is restrained by the limited scope of the constitutional charter. A law must stand unless some provision of the Constitution is violated by the law. Where a judge departs from his limited role and imposes his will upon the law—rather than abiding by the actual text of the Constitution—he does a real injustice to those subject to his judicial decrees, even where the end effected is morally laudable.

In finding a right to abortion in the Constitution—a right clearly not present under any reasonable reading of the Constitution—the Court removed an issue that almost certainly was intended to be left to the people’s discretion. Conservatives have argued for more than three decades that gleaning a right to abortion from the alleged right to privacy was nothing more than an act of constitutional amendment by seven unelected men. For the Court to create such a right and then enforce it universally against the people subverted the meaning of the Constitution. Furthermore, even assuming that a right to abortion exists, there is nothing private about abortion. It involves a doctor, a father, and, arguably, the life of another human being, the unborn child. Even on its own legal terms, Roe failed.

For most conservatives the wrongness of Roe is compounded by its moral consequences. They challenge the central and fundamental principle animating Roe by contending that the fetus does not merely represent potential human life but rather is actual human life. We know this, they argue, not because of a dictate of faith but because of textbook biology.

Furthermore, conservatives argue that one may never intentionally kill innocent persons because of each person’s intrinsic dignity, regardless of mitigating circumstances. Thus, because the being present at conception is human, the moral principle governing abortion is clear, if difficult to accept: one can never justify abortion—by definition the intentional destruction of an innocent human being. The human life present from conception is entitled to the equal protection of law.

For some conservatives, albeit a small minority, Roe’s wrongness is multiplied by the fact that they believes the Fourteenth Amendment proscribes laws allowing abortion. Professor Robert P. George, while not endorsing this reading, has stated that a genuinely principled argument … can be made that the American people have, by ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, committed themselves to a proposition which is inconsistent with the regime of abortion-on-demand. Thus, for some conservatives Roe is wrong because it explicitly contradicts the mandate of the Constitution to give persons the equal protection of the law.

Unfortunately Roe did not signal the worst from the Court on abortion. Nearly twenty years later, in the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court heard argument concerning abortion regulations instituted by the state of Pennsylvania. Changes in the composition of the Court and decisions seemingly curtailing Roe had led to uncertainty concerning the status of Roe. The stage was set for its reconsideration.

Unfortunately, in Casey the controlling, joint opinion of Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter concluded that "the essential holding of Roe v. Wade should be retained and once again reaffirmed." The majority came to this conclusion, it claimed, because of the demands of constitutional liberty and stare decisis—the legal principle that earlier decisions should be followed or adhere[d] to by a court in later decisions so as to give stability and continuity to the law.

The Court stated that the Constitution promises that the government cannot enter a realm of personal liberty. The constitutional liberty implicated in the abortion question is the liberty related to those personal decisions concerning marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing and education. Such personal decisions are constitutionally protected because [a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State. This passage, referred to subsequently as the Mystery Passage, has been the source of much derision. Abortion was to be permitted because the destiny of the woman must be shaped to large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society. Because of the vague and seemingly allencompassing right to define one’s universe, a state is not entitled to proscribe abortion in all instances.

Stare decisis required upholding Roe in large part because the Court believed that Roe had formed the fabric of numerous social interactions; women and men had ordered their lives assuming the right to abortion guaranteed by Roe. Second, the Court believed that to overrule Roe would exact a heavy toll on the Court’s legitimacy. This argument amounts to the principle that even where the Court is wrong in a previous decision it should be extremely reluctant to overturn that decision lest in doing so it confirm in the minds of the people its own error.

The Court also set out a new legal standard—the undue burden standard—to govern abortion regulations before viability. After viability the Court adopted Roe’s formulation that the state could proscribe abortion except when necessary for the life or health of the mother.

Conservatives’ criticisms of Casey are numerous. First, they argue, the Court once again overstepped its authority and ruled on an issue about which the Constitution is, at best, silent. Worse, presented with an opportunity to correct the errors of the past, the Court instead repeated them. The utter intellectual bankruptcy of the Court’s opinion was demonstrated by the fact that the Court could no better explain where the right to abortion was lodged in the Constitution than had Justice Blackmun in Roe.

Second, the conception of liberty that animates the joint opinion in the Mystery Passage is both legally and philosophically nonsensical. As a legal matter, the Court could not have meant what it said. Every time it rules the Supreme Court upholds laws that limit a person’s ability to define the concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Furthermore, conservatives understand that at the heart of liberty is the freedom to pursue the good and human flourishing. The Mystery Passage’s vision of human freedom posits a radical personal autonomy that trumps any considerations of truth and the good life.

Third, the Court’s affirmation of Roe arose in large part because of the hubris that animated the Court’s view of itself. The Court saw itself as an indispensable—perhaps the indispensable—body helping the American people actualize their vision of themselves as a people of the rule of law. And it believed that self-understanding would be shaken to the core if it overruled Roe. The Court seemed oblivious to the fact that if Roe was wrongly decided then its legitimacy was already in question.

Fourth, conservatives notes that Casey, like Roe before it, turns on the assumption that the fetus is, at most, potential human life. But this assumption is factually wrong. Finally, Casey, like Roe, never once discusses the right it is guaranteeing, never describes what is involved in abortion, what occurs, what the necessary means to achieve the goal of ending a pregnancy are. Casey and Roe simply elide any such description.

In the years after Casey, the Court has not become the focal point for much abortion litigation. With the addition of two Democratic appointees the Court’s philosophic makeup changed little. The undue burden test does allow states to place more meaningful restrictions on the abortion license. Yet, in the only Supreme Court abortion case of import in subsequent years, Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), the seemingly limitless right to liberty in Casey led the Supreme Court to strike down Nebraska’s ban of the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion.

Thus, the abortion controversy remains. With the controversy come continuing questions regarding the Supreme Court’s legitimacy and the realization on the part of many conservatives that no democratic republic that allows her most vulnerable citizens to be exposed to the whims of the strong can be called healthy. Roe, reaffirmed by Casey, was the legally illegitimate act that ushered in this age of abortion. For most conservatives, abortion, like slavery, is an aberration—an example of where the Republic has turned against her deepest principles.

—CHARLES DENISON

Further Reading

Arkes, Hadley. Natural Law and the Right to Choose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Bork, Robert H. The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law. New York: Free Press, 1990.

Ely, John Hart. "The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade." Yale Law Journal 82 (1973): 920–49.

George, Robert P. The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2001.

Muncy, Mitchell S., ed. The End of Democracy: The Celebrated First Things Debate with Arguments Pro and Con and The Anatomy of a Controversy. Dallas: Spence Publishing, 1997.

Paulsen, Michael Stokes. The Worst Constitutional Decision of All Time, University of Notre Dame Law Review 78 (2003): 995–1043.

Schlueter, Nathan, and Robert H. Bork. Constitutional Persons: An Exchange. First Things 129 (2003): 28–36.

See also: Supreme Court; Constitution, interpretations of; culture wars; family; Human Life Review; Hyde, Henry; incorporation doctrine; judicial activism

academic freedom

The engagement of twentieth-century American conservatism with academic freedom is an ironic one. In 1951, William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, one of the seminal books of the American Right, attacked the reigning conception of academic freedom for allowing agnostic and collectivist professors to undermine the religious and individualist foundations of Yale. The beginning of the twenty-first century finds conservative professors and students appealing to academic freedom as a defense against contemporary ideologies that they believe threaten an entire generation with intellectual conformity.

Academic freedom has both institutional and individual components. The institutional component, in a famous summary by Justice Felix Frankfurter, comprises the four essential freedoms of a university—to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study (Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 1957). The individual component comprises the freedom of the teacher and (to a lesser extent) the student. The 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors, perhaps the most important single statement on the subject, states that [t]eachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, and to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subjects, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subjects. During the 1950s, the institutional and individual components were usually in harmony, as institutions frequently appealed to academic freedom in defense of leftist professors such as those attacked by Buckley. (Many of those same institutions, however, refused to defend the academic freedom of Communist Party members, on the grounds that they were obliged to use their positions to indoctrinate rather than teach.) To date, no case concerning a direct clash of the institutional and individual components has reached the Supreme Court. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, however, has ruled on such a case, in favor of the University of Alabama, which restrained a tenured professor from making occasional classroom comments or holding voluntary after-class sessions on the Christian implications of health physiology (Bishop v. Aronov, 1991). While the professor appealed for protection of his individual academic freedom, the university appealed for the government to refrain from interfering in its institutional academic freedom.

Most American discussions of this subject begin with the brief 1940 Statement and its much longer predecessor, the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles. There is much in the 1915 Declaration for conservatives to admire, particularly the way in which it relates the concept of academic freedom to the public trust that educational institutions carry, as well as to the role of an academic institution in promoting inquiry, advancing knowledge, and providing instruction, among other goals. Unlike the 1940 document and more recent discussions, the 1915 Declaration frames academic freedom in fundamentally communitarian and teleological terms. Many conservatives would nevertheless dissent from the 1915 Declaration—and from most recent discussions of the subject—in its presupposition that free inquiry is hindered by an institutional commitment to religion. The purpose of religious schools, says the Declaration, is not to advance knowledge by the unrestricted research and unfettered discussion of impartial investigators, but rather to subsidize the promotion of opinions held by the persons … who provide the funds for their maintenance. This secular and ahistorical understanding of academic freedom was challenged by Russell Kirk in Academic Freedom (1955): [I]n the Middle Ages … the academy possessed freedom unknown to other bodies and persons because the philosopher, the scholar, and the student were looked upon as men consecrated to the service of Truth.… [Their] freedom was sanctioned by an authority more than human. In more recent years, Pope John Paul II, in Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990), pointed out that the Catholic tradition, in which the Western concept of the university first developed, regards the search for truth as a matter of faith working together harmoniously with reason. Nevertheless, in 1970 the AAUP issued Interpretive Comments on its 1940 Statement that warned church-related institutions against departing from the AAUP’s own understanding of academic freedom.

One presupposition of the AAUP documents and their defenders is that there is a valid distinction between teaching and proselytizing, between learning and propaganda. Every social scientist who is worthy of the name, wrote Robert MacIver in response to God and Man at Yale, seeks to learn and to enlighten, not to propagandize. That distinction is now a questionable one for practitioners of certain academic methodologies, such as some types of feminism, who see their scholarship as an extension of their political activism. The academic freedom of their ideological opponents, and especially their students, is therefore a matter of concern.

Academic freedom develops in response to historical events, and the events of most concern to conservatives have been the increasing demands that the extracurricular activities, course offerings, syllabi, lectures, even professors’ choices of words reflect the demands of feminism and multiculturalism, regardless of the judgment of the professors themselves. Disruptions of classrooms, suppression of conservative student newspapers, and threats against conservative organizations (such as the National Association of Scholars) have reminded some of the deterioration of academic freedom experienced in Weimar Germany. The sexual and racial harassment codes adopted during the last ten or twenty years, moreover, usually proscribe certain forms of speech if they create (in the mind of the offended party) a hostile or intimidating environment. The AAUP has reported that sexual harassment charges are now the most frequent cause of stripping professors of tenure and forcing them to resign without formal review procedures or due process. In the winter 1990–91 issue of Academic Questions, Professor Stephen Thernstrom of Harvard recounted his (and others’) experience of being charged with racial insensitivity for such offenses as using the term American Indian rather than Native American. As Thernstrom pointed out, these attacks on academic freedom differ markedly from those of the McCarthy era because the attackers now have substantial backing within the academy itself. Public aversion to this sort of attempted political conformity, however, may temporarily postpone a showdown over the coherence of the purely secular conception of academic freedom.

Ultimately, most conservatives see the shape of academic freedom as determined by the role of knowledge in fulfilling the social nature of man. Conservatives are therefore likely to continue to press for a pluralism of approaches to the pursuit of knowledge and for the valid distinction between teaching and propagandizing. A contemporary periodical of special interest to the Right concerning issues of academic freedom is Academic Questions, published by the National Association of Scholars.

—DANIEL E. RITCHIE

Further Reading

Baade, Hans W., ed. Academic Freedom. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana, 1964.

Hofstadter, Richard and Walter P. Metzger. The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955.

Pincoffs, Edmund, ed. The Concept of Academic Freedom. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas, 1972.

Van Alstyne, William W., ed. Freedom and Tenure in the Academy: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the 1940 Statement of Principles. Law and Contemporary Problems 53, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 1–418.

See also: education, higher; God and Man at Yale; Kors, Alan C.; National Association of Scholars

Acton, Lord (1834–1902)

Lord Acton

In the 1920s and 1930s, Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton’s reputation had become obscured. But the succeeding age of totalitarianism and socialism brought a new appreciation for Acton and his never-failing love of liberty by the few who still read and studied him. A wider and more appreciative audience for the message of Acton came after the publication of Friedrich A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944), in which Acton shares with Tocqueville the roles of prophetic critic of socialism and tyranny and apostle of liberty. The rediscovery and growing appreciation of Acton was further stimulated by the subsequent publication of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics (1952) and a number of articles by other scholars in journals of political science and history.

Lord Acton was born on January 10, 1834, in Naples, the descendant of a long line of Shropshire baronets and the Dalbergs, one of the most honored families in the imperial aristocracy of the Holy Roman Empire. He was more continental than English, as aristocratic and traditional in politics as he was Roman Catholic in religion. His Whiggery was the Whiggery of Edmund Burke. Because he was Catholic he was unable to study at either Oxford or Cambridge and was educated on the Continent: in Paris at the school run by Feliz Dupauloup, later Bishop of Orleans, and in Munich where he spent six years in the home of Ignaz von Döllinger while he studied at the University. Döllinger was German Catholicism’s leading historian and historical theologian.

The essential pivot in Acton’s life was religious and moral. He believed that only the conscience acting in liberty could perform a moral action. He believed that Christ was risen on the world and that the consequences of the Incarnation were liberty and the amelioration of the human condition. He believed that God so loved liberty that he permitted even sin. He believed, moreover, that free inquiry would result in the establishment of God’s truth. When the young Acton returned to England from Germany in 1857 he cooperated with John Henry Newman in the publication of liberal Catholic journals that he hoped would demonstrate the dedication to free inquiry within the Catholic Church and the compatibility of political liberty and the indispensable need for liberty of conscience in the moral Catholic life. These journals met with Ultramontane opposition and condemnation by the Church.

Acton believed that political liberty had grown up in the no-man’s-land of conflicts between church and state. Modern liberty in England and America, Acton asserted, resulted from the claims of persecuted religious sectarians to liberty of conscience and their insistence upon an obedience to a higher law.

Acton’s philosophy of history and love of liberty involved him in a bitter conflict with Ultramontane theology. He resisted to the fullest the definition of papal infallibility by the first Vatican Council, though after the definition he remained a pious, loyal, and conforming Catholic. Acton projected but never finished a great History of Liberty. The rudimentary outlines may be traced in his essays, lectures, and in his massive manuscript notes. The best and fullest presentation of his work is presented in J. Rufus Fears’s edited compilation, Selected Writings of Lord Acton (1985–88). The exchange of letters between Acton and his mentor, Ignaz von Döllinger, is essential to a full understanding of his motives. The definitive biography, Roland Hill’s Lord Acton (2000), is also indispensable.

Acton was increasingly fearful as the nineteenth century wore on. He believed that the French Revolution threatened to destroy liberty. Democracy and nationalism were the great threats to freedom and civilization. He equated socialism with slavery. When he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University by the Queen, it was generally agreed that he was the most erudite and astute student of history in England. As a consequence, he became the first editor of The Cambridge Modern History (1902–10).

Acton’s high appeal to conscience, dedication to liberty, defense of Catholicism, and transforming influence on the study of history in England make him one of the most important figures in European thought in the nineteenth century and one of the most influential in the twentieth century.

—STEPHEN J. TONSOR

Further Reading

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg. Lectures on the French Revolution. Edited by John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2000.

———. Essays on Church and State. New York: Crowell, 1968.

———. Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History: Selected Papers. Edited by William H. McNeill. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Butterfield, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. London: Bell, 1931.

See also: Acton Institute; classical liberalism; liberty; Road to Serfdom, The

Acton Institute

Founded in April 1990 by Rev. Robert Sirico and Kris Alan Mauren, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is a nonprofit educational institution located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Taking both its name and the basis of its mission from the writings and teachings of the great Cambridge historian and moralist Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, the institute holds seminars, conducts research, and publishes books, papers, and periodicals that explore the religious underpinnings of a free market and free society. To that end, the institute seeks to stimulate dialogue between religious, business, and scholarly communities and to familiarize those communities (particularly students and seminarians) with the ethical and Christian foundations of political liberty and free-market economics. The Acton Institute also tries to serve as a clearinghouse of ideas for entrepreneurs interested in the ethical dimensions of their commercial activities.

Within the larger context of the conservative intellectual movement, the Acton Institute is usually thought of as classically liberal or libertarian in orientation. Of the two labels, the institute prefers to identify itself with the first, especially in its advancement of economic personalism. The institute defines economic personalism as an approach to the social order inspired by the centuries-old tradition of Christian reflection on the ethical character of social, political, and economic life. In this regard, economic personalism seeks to complement the classical liberal tradition with a distinctly Christian anthropology that draws upon the resources of faith and right reason. It recognizes the natural law tradition as one way of communicating these insights within pluralist societies, which are often characterized by significant differences in foundational belief. Among the institute’s more prominent programs is the Center for Economic Personalism, which publishes the semiannual academic journal Markets and Morality, edited by the center’s director, Samuel Gregg, a moral philosopher who took his doctorate from the University of Oxford under the prominent natural law scholar John Finnis.

—CORY ANDREWS

See also: Acton, Lord; liberalism, classical; libertarianism

Adams, Brooks (1848–1927)

Brooks Adams was the son of Charles Francis Adams and Abigail Brown Brooks. His father was ambassador to the Court of St. James during the American Civil War and did as much as anyone to save the Union by persuading Britain not to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. His grandfather, John Quincy Adams, was an ambassador, president, and member of the House of Representatives, and his great-grandfather, John Adams, was a founding father, ambassador, and second president of the United States. Brooks Adams was christened Peter Chadron Brooks Adams in honor of his maternal grandfather, Peter Chadron Brooks, Boston’s first multimillionaire.

In background and temperament Brooks Adams was a conservative. Like his ancestors he mistrusted political change and anticipated the early demise of the republic. Like them he feared the power of the moneyed interest and speculative enterprise, or what he and his brother Henry called the power of the Gold Bugs. These intellectual tendencies were never articulated into an integrated conservative philosophy. Brooks Adams became a man of the Right rather than a conservative. He was much influenced by European ideas of fin de siècle pessimism and decadence. And he was an intellectual eccentric. In fact, it is not short of the mark to describe many of his ideas as half-baked. His thought was not, however, proto-fascist, as his biographer Arthur F. Beringause suggests.

Brooks Adams lived in the intellectual shadow of his brother Henry, who was ten years his senior. Even though he never achieved the acclaim and distinction of his brother, Brooks, as Charles A. Beard was the first to demonstrate in his introduction to The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), exerted a profound influence on Henry’s historical theories. It was Brooks who edited and provided a long introduction to Henry’s collected essays on the theory of history, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919). Through Henry, the spread and influence of Brooks’s thought was greatly facilitated. Though Brooks wrote and published throughout his lifetime, his Law of Civilization and Decay, first published in 1895, was his most important contribution to the development of conservative thought.

Darwin and the methodology of natural science were decisive influences on Brooks’s historical thought. Throughout his life he was preoccupied with the problem of the nature and meaning of historical experience. His pessimism was rooted in his inability, try as he might, to accept religious belief. He believed that the course of history was governed by causal law, that history was determined, and that free will and human choice had little or no impact on the turn of events. Darwinism provided the basis for his antidemocratic views. He was the first American to attempt a developmental explanation of the whole of human history. He saw the pattern of history as cyclical and oscillating between barbarism and civilization, or moving from a condition of physical dispersion to one of concentration. The resulting law of force and energy as a phase of cosmic dynamics has universal application. The early stages of concentration (civilization) produce mental types embodied in religious, military, and artistic men. However, fear yields to greed and the economic organization tends to supersede the emotional and the martial. When economic man becomes dominant, the course of decline is already well under way. The decline of Rome provides the great example. The capitalist and the suction of the usurer bring about the destruction of civilization. In many respects, The Law of Civilization and Decay should be seen as a belated partisan tract in the campaign against gold.

—STEPHEN J. TONSOR

Further Reading

Adams, Brooks. The New Empire. New York: Macmillan, 1902.

–––. The Theory of Social Revolutions. New York: Macmillan, 1913.

Beringause, Arthur F. Brooks Adams: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

See also: Adams, Henry; Adams, John

Adams, Henry (1838–1918)

Henry Adams

If continuity in tradition and fidelity to type are among the marks of conservatism, the first four generations of the Adams family must constitute the most distinguished succession of conservative achievement and aristocratic talent in American history. Henry Adams’s great-grandfather was President John Adams; his grandfather was President John Quincy Adams; his father Charles Francis Adams was appointed by President Lincoln as ambassador to the Court of St. James during the American Civil War. Young Henry served as secretary to Charles Francis, who was in large measure responsible for keeping Great Britain out of the Civil War as a Confederate States ally. The Adams family lived simply and served greatly for three generations. Compared to Jefferson’s Monticello, Washington’s Mt. Vernon, or Madison’s Georgian Mansion, the Adams family’s Old House at Quincy, Massachusetts, was a rambling, drafty farmhouse with small rooms and few conveniences. Until the third generation and the marriage of Charles Francis Adams to a woman of wealth, Abigail Brooks (1808–89), the modest means of the Adams family were barely sufficient to cover their needs and the demands incurred by public service. They were a family who did not simply collect books but read and studied them. They knew Greek and Latin well and, unusual in America, were well versed in