Those interested in recent political history might enjoy Alfred S. Regnery’s new book, Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (Threshold, 2008). Regnery covers both the politics and the intellectual debates that shaped the conservative movement after World War II.
Among his interesting observations is a discussion of the sometimes uneasy alliance between libertarian and traditional conservative thinkers:
[T]here was a continuing tension between those who emphasized freedom over virtue and those who preferred virtue over freedom. [Russell] Kirk and the rest of the traditionalists stood for order and consensus, morality and what they called “right reason,” religion and virtue. [Friedrich] Hayek and the rest of the libertarians and classical liberals believed above all in individual liberty, free markets, private property, and reason. Ironically, the man who healed the breach was the one who had originally pointed out the tension, namely, Frank Meyer, who continued to emphasize the importance of individual liberty but qualified freedom by arguing that it was the chief political end, even though virtue was the ultimate personal end. In the face of totalitarianism and Communism, political liberty was the ideal for Meyer. To try to use the state to achieve virtue would be to yield to the statist temptation. Nevertheless, to fail to distinguish between authoritarianism with its suppression of human freedom and the authority of God and transcendent truth was to be indifferent to the “organic moral order” out of which political liberty grew and even flourished.
