In this classic volume, written at the height of the Cold War, with a new preface of 2006, Peter Viereck, one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen of modern conservatism, examines the differing responses of American and European intellectuals to the twin threats of Nazism and Soviet communism. In so doing, he seeks to formulate a humanistic conservatism with which to counter the danger of totalitarian thought in the areas of politics, ethics, and art.

The glory of the intellectuals was the firm moral stance they took against Nazism at a time when appeasement was the preferred path of many politicians; their shame lay in their failure to recognize the brutality of Stalinism to the extent of becoming apologists for or accomplices of its tyranny. In Viereck's view, this failure is rooted in an abandonment of humane values that he sees as a legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism and certain strands of modernist thought and aesthetics.

Among his targets are literary obscurantism as personified by Ezra Pound, the academicization of literary culture, the rigidity of adversarial avant-gardism, and the failure of many writers and cultural institutions to conserve the very heritage their political freedom and security depend on. Viereck represents their attitude in a series of satirical dialogues with Gaylord Babbitt, son of Sinclair Lewis' embodiment of conservative philistinism. Babbitt Junior is as unreflective as his father, but the objects of his credulity are the received ideas of liberal progressivism and avant-garde mandarinism. Ultimately, Viereck's critique stands as a timely rebuke to the extremism of both left and right.

"Lucidly written, widely informed, and uncompromisingly honest -- a valuable expose." Michael Parenti "Documents the stunning success of a network of wealthy donors and corporations in creating and sustaining a set of think tanks, legal action groups, and media strategies." Gary Orfield, Harvard University What explains the electoral success of Republicans, particularly of the ascendant neoconservatives who now dominate the Party? Based on a thorough and up-to-date examination of the New Right over twenty-five years, The Politics of Fear proposes some provocative answers, including globalization, new technologies, and a far-reaching network of right-wing think tanks and foundations. As the authors show, all have opened the doors to a new politics of fear successfully waged by the neoconservatives. By manipulating insecurity, the New Right has created an extraordinarily successful populist conservative movement. Utilizing extensive documentation, the authors argue convincingly that the fear of immigrants and racial minorities has served as the most effective tactic in the GOP arsenal, while their approach also implicates gays, feminists, and terrorists. The book explains why Americans have willingly supported a party that promises them security, just as it delivers greater economic and political insecurity. The authors argue that, despite their striking political successes, neoconservatives have delivered to voters a set of policies harmful to working Americans in the way of regressive tax measures, military exploits, tort reform, deregulation, and environmental destruction.

"Lucidly written, widely informed, and uncompromisingly honest -- a valuable expose." Michael Parenti "Documents the stunning success of a network of wealthy donors and corporations in creating and sustaining a set of think tanks, legal action groups, and media strategies." Gary Orfield, Harvard University What explains the electoral success of Republicans, particularly of the ascendant neoconservatives who now dominate the Party? Based on a thorough and up-to-date examination of the New Right over twenty-five years, The Politics of Fear proposes some provocative answers, including globalization, new technologies, and a far-reaching network of right-wing think tanks and foundations. As the authors show, all have opened the doors to a new politics of fear successfully waged by the neoconservatives. By manipulating insecurity, the New Right has created an extraordinarily successful populist conservative movement. Utilizing extensive documentation, the authors argue convincingly that the fear of immigrants and racial minorities has served as the most effective tactic in the GOP arsenal, while their approach also implicates gays, feminists, and terrorists. The book explains why Americans have willingly supported a party that promises them security, just as it delivers greater economic and political insecurity. The authors argue that, despite their striking political successes, neoconservatives have delivered to voters a set of policies harmful to working Americans in the way of regressive tax measures, military exploits, tort reform, deregulation, and environmental destruction.

Based on research fieldwork conducted in France and Germany, this study seeks to explain how public actors have taken part in the regulation of the expression of right-wing radicalism. The author compares these two neighbouring countries which have framed the struggle against right-wing radicalism differently. German political and state actors have constructed a public policy responding to political radicalism, whilst in France, the radical right is primarily handled in the political arena. The text evaluates how these two Western European democracies address the paradox of tolerance (i.e. the fact that liberal democracies may restrain rights they value, such as freedom of speech, in order to repress intolerant forces that threaten democracy). This book is core reading for scholars and students interested in the spread of far-right politics in contemporary democracies.

This book offers a distinctive treatment of Hayek's ideas, as a research programme. It presents a detailed account of aspects of Hayek's intellectual development and of problems that arise within his work, and then offers some broad suggestions as to ways in which the programme initiated in his work might be developed further.

First published in 1998, this volume offers some solutions to the inherent difficulties with moving from philosophical generalities to specific policies, by exploring how a bridge might be built between political philosophy and social policy analysis. In light of these findings, Steven R. Smith evaluates the relationship between the Centre-Left and the New Right, focusing on the way in which concepts of individual autonomy and equality are used by political philosophers and social policy makers. Smith explores post-1945 training, education, social security and community care policy within the United Kingdom.

This book examines the nature of the extreme right in contemporary Russia, arguing in particular that, alongside a continuing tradition which emphasizes Russia's orthodox and traditional past, an increasingly important intellectual current is drawing on Western European neo-fascist ideas and adapting them to the Russian situation. This book examines this intellectual current within the context of increasing conservatism across Russia as a whole, showing how the new ideas have an impact right across the political spectrum, and assessing the threat posed by them and their proponents.

This first full-length treatment of Russell Kirk's life and accomplishments blends new biographical insights and critical perspectives about the author of the ground-breaking The Conservative Mind.

Peter Viereck, poet and historian, is one of the principle theoreticians of conservatism in modern American political thought. In this classic work, Viereck undertakes a penetrating and unorthodox analysis of that quintessential conservative, Prince Metternich, and offers evidence that cultural and political conservatism may perhaps be best adapted to sustain a free and reasonable society. According to Viereck's definition, conservatism is not the enemy of economic reform or social progress, nor is it the oppressive instrument of the privileged few. Although conservatism has been attacked from the left and often discredited by exploitation from the right, it remains the historic name for a point of view vital to contemporary society and culture. Divided into three parts, the book opens with a survey of conservatism in its cultural context of classicism and humanism. Rejecting the blind alley of reaction, Viereck calls for a discriminating set of principles that include preservation through reform, self-expression through self-restraint, a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux, and a preference for historical continuity over violent rupture. Viereck locates our idea of Western political unity in Metternich's Concert of Europe whose goal was a cosmopolitan Europe united in peace. This ideal was opposed by both the violent nationalism that resulted in Nazism and the socialist internationalism that became a tool of Soviet Russian expansionism. While not ignoring the extremely negative aspects of Metternich's legacy, Viereck focuses on his attempts to tame the bellicosity of European nationalism and his little-known efforts to reform and modernize the Hapsburg Empire.

"Joseph Scotchie wishes to tell the story of what he terms an "underfunded, mostly unknown movement" known as the "paleoconservative" or "Old Right" which, he argues, has "provided the intellectual firepower behind the troubled populism of the 1990's." And Scotchie is not afraid to ask hard questions." --"The Review of Politics"
"An essential and valuable contribution to American intellectual history in the last decade of the last century." -- "The American Conservative"
The dominant forces of American conservatism remain wedded, at all costs, to the Republican Party, but another movement, one with its roots in the pre-World War II era, has stepped forth to fill an intellectual vacuum on the right. This Old Right first rose in opposition to the New Deal, fighting both statism at home and the emergence of an American empire abroad. More recently this movement, sometimes called paleoconservatism, has provided the ideological backbone of modern populism and the opposition to globalization, with decisive effects on presidential politics. In "Revolt from the Heartland," Joseph Scotchie provides an intellectual history of the Old Right, treating its main figures and defining its conflict with the traditional left-right political mainstream.
As Scotchie's account makes clear, the Old Right and its descendents have articulated an arresting and powerful worldview. They include an array of learned and provocative writers, including M.E. Bradford, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Murray Rothbard, and more recently, Clyde Wilson, Thomas Fleming, Samuel Francis, and Chilton Williamson, Jr. Beginning with the movement's anti-Federalist forerunners, Scotchie traces its developments over two centuries of American history. In the realm of politics and economics, he examines the anti-imperialist stance against the Spanish-American War and the League of Nations, the split among conservatives on Cold War foreign policy, and the hostility to the socialist orientation of the New Deal. Identifying a number of social and cultural attitudes that define the Old Right, Scotchie finds the most important to be the importance of the classics, a recognition of regional cultures, the primacy of family over state, the moral case against immigration. In general, too, a Tenth Amendment approach to such recurring issues as education, abortion, and school prayer characterizes the group.
As Scotchie makes clear, the Old Right and its grass-roots supporters have, and continue to be, a powerful force in modern American politics in spite of a lack of institutional support and media recognition. "Revolt from the Heartland" is an important study of a persisting current in American political life.
Joseph Scotchie is the author of "Barbarians in the Saddle: An Intellectual Biography of Richard M. Weaver" and the editor of "The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right" and "The Vision of Richard Weaver," all available from Transaction. He is also the author of a biography on the novelist Thomas Wolfe.
""Joe Scotchie's terrific new book solves a Great American Mystery. Why do our conservative intellectuals attack one another more viciously than they do liberals? Why does the splintered movement-Old Right, Neoconservative, New Right, and Beltway Right-behave like old communists who would rather purge each other than carry out the revolution? Why, if a member has some success, as when Pat Buchanan won in New Hampshire in 1996, do the rest attack him until they have assured his defeat? It's an incredible story and you have to read the book to find the answer""-William J. Quirk, Professor of Law, "University of South Carolina"
""As an immigrant, I have always regarded the American conserative movement as the flower of democracy, the real reason for the Free World's victory in the Cold War. But flowers do not grow to the sky and the historic conservative movement is clearly now dead. In this remarkable and erudite account, Joseph Scothie investigates the new shoots that are coming up, traces their roots, and analyzes their future-and America's.""
-Peter Brimelow, author of "Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster"
""With truly masterful precision, Joe Scotchie illuminates the myriad dissident strains of American Conservatism which knocked at the doors of power at the end of the Cold War before meeting a fateful rebuff. He tells the story of those distinctive Right wing intellectuals who said "no" to an imperial foreign policy, mass immigration, and a globalized economy. While this band lost the key internecine battles of the 1990s to Newt Gingrich the neoconvervatives, and the politics of Clinton-bashing, in Scotchie' eloquent account their struggle for a conservatism rooted a sense of measure and respect for the American past retains all its piquancy for the decade to come.""-Scott McConnell

Nineteenth century Spain deserves wider readership. Bedevilled by lost empires, wars, political instability and frustrated modernisation, the country appeared backward in relation to northern Europe and even in relation to much of its own geographical periphery. This new history, the first survey of its kind in English in more than a hundred years, offers a fresh perspective on this century, showing how and why elements of backwardness and modernity ran in parallel through Spain. Bounded by the military and imperial crises of 1808 and 1898, this study pays special attention to the experience of war on politics and society, and integrates the latest historical debates in its analysis.

The Conservatives have been the most successful party in British politics since the arrival of a mass electorate following the Reform Acts of 1885 and 1918. Although identified with the elite, the Conservatives have consistently been able to mobilize a mass popular support. This has involved more than just a narrow defence of privilege and property, or negative anti-socialism. The essays in this volume explore the relationship between the Conservative Party and the mass of the British people from the 1880s to the Thatcher and Major era. Several focus on the party's sources of support and the ways in which it has sought to broaden these through shifts in policies, presentation and organization.

The papers that comprise this volume reveal how people are intent on preserving not only their wealth but culture too. The individual contributions identify the key arguments used to coax voters, whose natural sympathies might gravitate to the left, to vote for the Conservative Party en masse.

First published in 1998, this volume offers some solutions to the inherent difficulties with moving from philosophical generalities to specific policies, by exploring how a bridge might be built between political philosophy and social policy analysis. In light of these findings, Steven R. Smith evaluates the relationship between the Centre-Left and the New Right, focusing on the way in which concepts of individual autonomy and equality are used by political philosophers and social policy makers. Smith explores post-1945 training, education, social security and community care policy within the United Kingdom.

From KKK members to Mussolini lovers, from Nazis to Fascists, and from Australia to Kenya, this collection provides a stunning portrait of women's active involvement in conservative, fascist, racist, and anti-democracy politics around the world. As the first comparative volume of international scope ever on the subject of right-wing women, this book provides a crucial understanding of the often important, but rarely acknowledged role women play in right-wing movements. Far from being mere puppets of their male counterparts, right-wing women are political actors in their own right, with varied interests and demands. These original essays provide a disturbing and complicated portrait of why women join such groups; what beliefs they hold; what they teach their children; and how their actions impact the rest of the world. Essays cover a range of topics, including: women in the KKK; fascist women in Brazil; Afrikaner nationalist women in South Africa; women of the Falange; Islamist women in Turkey; women supporters of Pinochet; women in the Nazi party; and women in Concerned Women in America, America's largest grassroots women's organization.

From KKK members to Mussolini lovers, from Nazi to fascists, and from Australia to Kenya, this collection provides a stunning portrait of women's active involvement in conservative, fascist, racist, and anti-democracy politics around the world. As the first comparative volume of international scope ever on the subject of right-wing women, this book provides a crucial understanding of the often important, but rarely acknowledged role women play in right-wing movements. Far from being mere puppets of their male counterparts, right-wing women are political actors in their own right, with varied interests and demands. These original essays provide a disturbing and complicated portrait of why women join such groups; what beliefs they hold; what they teach their children; and how their actions impact the rest of the world. Essays cover a range of topics, including: women in the KKK; fascist women in Brazil; Afrikaner nationalist women in South Africa; women of the Falange; Islamist women in Turkey; women supporters of Pinochet; women in the Nazi party; and women in Concerned Women in America, America's largest grassroots women's organization.

Is "conservative environmentalism" an oxymoron? Is "more" environmental regulation "good" for business? "The Greening of Conservative America" contends that the adherents to any well-considered conservative political philosophy should, on first principles, support pro-conservation, pro-environment policies. Furthermore, and pragmatically, Bliese demonstrates with repeated examples how environmental protection policies actually benefit business by stimulating greater efficiency and innovation and by spurring the creation of green products and services for new markets around the globe. These ideas are applied in chapters on specific environmental issues, including pollution, global warming, biodiversity, public-land management, and sustainability. The book concludes with criticisms of "free-market environmentalism" and calls conservatives back to their root principles on matters of the environment. Concerned citizens of any political persuasion will find much in this book to inform their views on public debates over environmental issues and policies.

"Joseph Scotchie wishes to tell the story of what he terms an "underfunded, mostly unknown movement" known as the "paleoconservative" or "Old Right" which, he argues, has "provided the intellectual firepower behind the troubled populism of the 1990's." And Scotchie is not afraid to ask hard questions." --"The Review of Politics"
"An essential and valuable contribution to American intellectual history in the last decade of the last century." -- "The American Conservative"
The dominant forces of American conservatism remain wedded, at all costs, to the Republican Party, but another movement, one with its roots in the pre-World War II era, has stepped forth to fill an intellectual vacuum on the right. This Old Right first rose in opposition to the New Deal, fighting both statism at home and the emergence of an American empire abroad. More recently this movement, sometimes called paleoconservatism, has provided the ideological backbone of modern populism and the opposition to globalization, with decisive effects on presidential politics. In "Revolt from the Heartland," Joseph Scotchie provides an intellectual history of the Old Right, treating its main figures and defining its conflict with the traditional left-right political mainstream.
As Scotchie's account makes clear, the Old Right and its descendents have articulated an arresting and powerful worldview. They include an array of learned and provocative writers, including M.E. Bradford, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Murray Rothbard, and more recently, Clyde Wilson, Thomas Fleming, Samuel Francis, and Chilton Williamson, Jr. Beginning with the movement's anti-Federalist forerunners, Scotchie traces its developments over two centuries of American history. In the realm of politics and economics, he examines the anti-imperialist stance against the Spanish-American War and the League of Nations, the split among conservatives on Cold War foreign policy, and the hostility to the socialist orientation of the New Deal. Identifying a number of social and cultural attitudes that define the Old Right, Scotchie finds the most important to be the importance of the classics, a recognition of regional cultures, the primacy of family over state, the moral case against immigration. In general, too, a Tenth Amendment approach to such recurring issues as education, abortion, and school prayer characterizes the group.
As Scotchie makes clear, the Old Right and its grass-roots supporters have, and continue to be, a powerful force in modern American politics in spite of a lack of institutional support and media recognition. "Revolt from the Heartland" is an important study of a persisting current in American political life.
Joseph Scotchie is the author of "Barbarians in the Saddle: An Intellectual Biography of Richard M. Weaver" and the editor of "The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right" and "The Vision of Richard Weaver," all available from Transaction. He is also the author of a biography on the novelist Thomas Wolfe.
""Joe Scotchie's terrific new book solves a Great American Mystery. Why do our conservative intellectuals attack one another more viciously than they do liberals? Why does the splintered movement-Old Right, Neoconservative, New Right, and Beltway Right-behave like old communists who would rather purge each other than carry out the revolution? Why, if a member has some success, as when Pat Buchanan won in New Hampshire in 1996, do the rest attack him until they have assured his defeat? It's an incredible story and you have to read the book to find the answer""-William J. Quirk, Professor of Law, "University of South Carolina"
""As an immigrant, I have always regarded the American conserative movement as the flower of democracy, the real reason for the Free World's victory in the Cold War. But flowers do not grow to the sky and the historic conservative movement is clearly now dead. In this remarkable and erudite account, Joseph Scothie investigates the new shoots that are coming up, traces their roots, and analyzes their future-and America's.""
-Peter Brimelow, author of "Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster"
""With truly masterful precision, Joe Scotchie illuminates the myriad dissident strains of American Conservatism which knocked at the doors of power at the end of the Cold War before meeting a fateful rebuff. He tells the story of those distinctive Right wing intellectuals who said "no" to an imperial foreign policy, mass immigration, and a globalized economy. While this band lost the key internecine battles of the 1990s to Newt Gingrich the neoconvervatives, and the politics of Clinton-bashing, in Scotchie' eloquent account their struggle for a conservatism rooted a sense of measure and respect for the American past retains all its piquancy for the decade to come.""-Scott McConnell

This book is a critique of Cambridge School Historical Contextualism as the currently dominant mode of history of political thought, drawing upon Michael Oakeshott's analysis of the logic of historical enquiry. While acknowledging that the early Cambridge School work represented a considerable advance towards genuinely historical histories of political thought, this work identifies two major historiographical problems that have become increasingly acute. The first is general: an insufficiently rigorous understanding of the key concept of "pastness" necessarily presupposed in historical enquiry of all kinds. The second is specific to histories of political thought: a failure to do justice to the varieties of past political thinking, especially differences between ideology and philosophy. In addressing these problems, the author offers a comprehensive account of the history of political thought that establishes the parameters not just of histories of ideological thinking but also of the much disputed character of histories of political philosophy. Since rethinking history of political thought in Oakeshottian terms requires resisting current pressures to turn history into the servant of currently felt needs, the book offers a sustained defence of the cultural value of modernist historical enquiry against its opponents. An important work for political theorists, historians of political thought and those researching intellectual history, the philosophy of history and proposed new directions in contemporary historical studies.

This work examines the attitudes of the Conservative Party towards Jews in Britain, Palestine and elsewhere from 1900-1948. It aims to show how the Conservative Party in the first half of the 20th century regarded both itself and British society on the one hand, and Britain's role on the other.

This work examines the attitudes of the Conservative Party towards Jews in Britain, Palestine and elsewhere from 1900-1948. It aims to show how the Conservative Party in the first half of the 20th century regarded both itself and British society on the one hand, and Britain's role on the other. It discusses Conservative responses to Jewish immigration into Britain from both Eastern Europe in the first decades of the century and from Central Europe in the 1930s. Conservative attitudes to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine are examined from its nascent stage up until the establishment of the State of Israel. The author argues, in conclusion, that the generally held view that the Conservative party is, and always was, anti-Semitic is too simplistic an analysis of a complex group of people during a period which saw changes in the Party, in British society and in the Jewish community.

This Longman Companion provides a wide-ranging compendium of essential facts and figures on the Conservative Party - from its origins in the 1830s to the dawn of the 21st Century. Central to the book are the detailed chronologies on the Conservative Party's years in government and opposition. In addition, it contains fascinating information on the Party's relationships with women, ethnic minoirities, the trade unions, Europe, Ireland, ideology, social reform and empire.

The essential concerns of conservatism are the same as those that motivated Nisbet's first and most influential book, "The Quest for Community." In fact, "Conservatism" unites virtually all of Nisbet's work. In it, Nisbet deals with the political causes of the manifold forms of alienation that underwrite the human quest for community. The sovereign political state is more than a legal relationship of a superstructure of power, it is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man's economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of power.

Nisbet holds that although political philosophers are often conceived in terms of their views of the individual and the state, a more useful approach adds the factor of social groups or communities mediating between the individual and the state. Such groups comprise "society" the protection of which is the "sole object" of the conservative tradition, according to Nisbet. This conservative ideology arose in the West as a reaction to the French Revolution and its perceived impact upon traditional society. Edmund Burke was the first spokesman of the new ideology. In this book, Nisbet argues that modern conservatism throughout the West can be seen as a widening of Burke's indictment not only of the French Revolution, but of the larger revolution we have come to call modernity.

From Edmund Burke and his contemporaries such as Bonald, de Maistre, Haller, and Savigny, down to T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, Michael Oakeshott, Irving Babbit, Paul Elmer More, and Russell Kirk, the essential themes of political conservatism remained the same. They are centered upon history, tradition, property, authority, liberty and religion, and attack equally the political collectivism and radical individualism that have the same irrational outcomes. Nisbet makes the point that, at present, conservatism is also in a crisis, one created in large measure by mixing in the political arena economic liberalism and welfare state socialism - a lethal mix for conservative politics.

Two vivid sets of images epitomize the dramatic course of the American right in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The main image is of a triumphant President Ronald Reagan, reasonably viewed as the most effec-tive president of recent decades. A second set of images comes from the bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, a man linked to shadowy parts of the contemporary ultraright. The roots of Reaganism are conservative, intellectual, and political movements of the 1950s and 1960s, including currents that in those years were considered marginal and ex-tremist. The roots of the ultraright of the 1990s have intersecting though by no means identical sources.

Serious evaluation of the American right should begin with The Radical Right. It describes the main positions and composition of distinctive forces on the right in the first half of the 1950s and the next decade. It recognizes the right's vehement opposition to domestic and international Communism, its sharp rejec-tion of the New Deal, and its difficulty in distinguishing between the two. Bell's controversial point of departure is to regard the basic position of what he terms the radical right as excessive in its estimation of the Communist threat and unrealistic in its rejection of New Deal reforms. From this starting point, Bell and his authors evaluate the ways the right went beyond programs and the self-descriptions of its leaders and organizers.

The Radical Right explains McCarthyism and its successors in terms of conflicts over social status and the shape of American culture. Daniel Bell focuses on the social dislo-cation of significant groups in the post-New Deal decades. Many members of these groups perceived themselves as dispossessed and victimized by recent changes, even if it was not possible to regard them as having undergone any great suffering.

David Plotke's major new introduction discusses the book's argument, McCarthyism and American politics, the changing shape of the American right from 1965-2000, mili-tias, and new issues in American politics. This edition also includes an afterword by Daniel Bell responding to Plotke's interpretation and revisiting his own perspectives.