Watch on the Right

...Considered as a set of general ideas and principles, conservatism flashes with brilliance, but as a distinctive genus of thought, it seems occasional, unpremeditated, ad hoc...

...24.95 D. G. Myers Lionel 'frilling's remark in The Lib- eral Imagination (1950) that there were no conservative ideas in circulation has become an article of faith on the left, even if the passing decades have made Trilling himself look almost conservative...

...3) liberalism (in its classical sense), putting freedom before liberation, and therefore responsibility before grievance...

...Although recent anti-utopianism is inspired by disdain for the vague mysticism of sixties counterculture and the bold plans of the New Left, this feature of conservatism is as old as anti-Jacobinism...

...But more recent misgivings about intellectuals have assumed the form of philippics against a "new class" of professionals in law, government, the press, and the university—an "elite corps of impudent snobs," in Spiro T. Agnew's less sparing phrase...

...Hoeveler even calls this movement a "renaissance," and in D. G. Myers teaches English at Texas A&M, recently selected as the site of the Bush presidential library...

...What,then, makes someone a conservative...

...H oeveler is superb at drawing con- nections and parallels, at tacking recent writers onto the map of historical conservatism...

...J David Hoeveler's latest book j • makes any such self-congratulatory dismissal of conservative thought impossible to sustain...

...In criticizing an essay on Will by the late Henry Fairlie, Hoeveler complains that Fairlie "threw together a potpourri of scattered reflections by Will but disdained to see any thematic core in them...

...It is this confidence in the common man, for instance, that distinguishes a writer like Tyrrell from his master, H. L. Mencken...

...He isn't especially interested in biographies of his eight thinkers, and his book is a little thin on such basic information as which books were written in what order...

...Hoeveler believes that each writer's body of work amounts to a philosophy—at least to a characteristic way of squinting at the world...

...In his view, its rebirth was attended by four main principles...

...Watch on the Right he examines it in detail, while placing it in the larger context of conservative thinking since Burke...

...If he seems to place Irving Babbitt at the center of American conservatism, it's no surprise, for Hoeveler is best known for his definitive and tightly written account of Babbitt's New Humanism, published in 1977...

...Hoeveler tries to explain American conservatism in the idiom of general ideas...

...This is as it should be, since the 49-year-old Hoeveler teaches intellectual history at the Milwaukee campus of the University of Wisconsin...

...2) democratism, a trust in the habit and memory, the fundamental wisdom, of the people at large...

...This may explain much about the intellectual history of recent conservatism, from the left's intolerance of it to Buckley's failure to deliver his long-promised book on the movement...

...As a whole, though, the book is curiously unfocused (to use Hoeveler's own phrase), partly because the writers it covers do not really constitute a cohesive movement...

...The sniggering on the left at the mental capacities of Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle cannot distract attention from the fact that behind the success of conservative politicians there stands a movement of conservative ideas that has gained wider approval from the American people than any recent movement on the left...

...In the eighties, Hoeveler points out, conservative ideas "achieved an ascendancy marked by conservative triumphs in the presidential elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988...

...It may also suggest that what conservatism requires at present is not intellectual history, no matter how informative and interesting, but a searching philosophy of itself, an account of what (if anything) it means to think conservatively...

...Watch on the Right is no such disdainful potpourri...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 39...

...These principles exhibit both the continuity and the newness of contemporary conservatism...

...Hoeveler's thesis is that so-called neoconservatives, who believe themselves merely to be flinching at the radicalization of liberalism and who are looked upon with suspicion by the Old Right, have more in common than either side may realize with the "principles and prejudices that have marked conservative thought over two centuries...

...Just recently, an esteemed professor of English at Duke University said that, while both the left and the right have offered critiques of American education, the difference between them "is one of sophistication and complexity...

...C onservatives may be almost anything else in addition to conservatives...

...The right presents its case in a vulgar "flag-waving mode," while the left urges its reforms "in the context of a full-fledged epistemological argument, complete with a theory of the self, an analysis of the emergence and ontology of institutions," and buzz buzz buzz...

...Equally alliterative conservative thinkers—Irving Babbitt, Jacques Barzun, Julien Benda, Peter L. Berger, M. E. Bradford, William F. Buckles Jr., Jakob Burckhardt, Edmund Burke—are ignored, if not unknown...

...Today, among those university professors who are in a hurry to abandon the human heritage, the only opposition acknowledged is that of "the Killer Bs": Allan Bloom and William J. Bennett, Jr...

...Each chapter of Watch on the Right makes for interesting reading, particularly the one on Novak, perhaps because his intellectual progress has been the most tortuous...

...As intellectual history, though, Watch on the Right is about as good as can be...

...Conservatives from Burke to Robert Nisbet have identified [the French Revolution] as a revolution by intellectuals," Hoeveler says, "one in which abstract theory envisioned a new order for human society...

...These were: (1) anti-utopianism, an animosity toward any abstract scheme for the perfection of society...

...They may be historians or economists or literary critics or political theorists, though at least six of the eight intellectuals in Hoeveler's book can be described as some variety of journalist—as E Scott Fitzgerald puts it, "that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' " Since none of his subjects wrote philosophy per se, Hoeveler's method is not capable of showing how each one's thinking was given shape by the particular mode in which he did write, because modern conservatism, unlike Marxism for instance, is not in itself a mode of thought...

...This anti-elitism is nicely balanced by a confidence in the sentiments and opinions of the common folk on such matters as crime, obscenity, racial justice, the rewarding of merit, and the threat of Communism...

...and (4) the bourgeois ethic, "the source of the self-discipline that makes intelligence and its application possible...

...He selects for close study eight contemporary figures: four neoconservatives (Irving Kristol, Hilton Kramer, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak) and four intellectuals affiliated with an older, more "European," strain of conservatism (William F. Buckley, Jr., George Will, Robert Nisbet, and R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...He skillfully braids Kristol's supply-side economics, Kramer's modernist aesthetics, and even Novak's passion for sports into a coherent humanism...

...Hoeveler observes that recent conservative writers have "failed to define a conservative philosophy of knowledge...