The Mind of Toryism
Cosgrave, Patrick
"The Mind of Toryism" communists, disillusioned with the way they run the show in Russia, have been disproportionately active in the more malleable American conservative movement. Still another...
...Conceivably, one could disagree with the above arguments...
...Most notably on the question of entry into Europe, Heath has defied the wishes of the country, and of the majority of the Party: he has been elitist in the true sense that the Conservative Party has always been elitist and antidemocratic...
...This mixture of heritages, rather than the kind of psychological analysis favoured by William James, seems to me to explain much about the character of the modern Conservative Party...
...He is also a democrat, believing, as is most evident in his stands against Europe and immigration, that the people of the nation as a whole have a right to determine their future as they wish...
...But he was equally opposed to all other forms of plausible coercion...
...And then, in a few short years, it plunged to Watergate...
...He meant by that remark not to scorn the assistance all intellectuals might give to the Party, but to make a distinction between Conservative gentlemen of intellect and left-wing intellectuals...
...James divided Conservatives into tenderminded and tough-minded...
...however, there are clear indications that income in this country is continuing a long historical trend of becoming more evenly distributed...
...First, the fact that large numbers of individuals in intellectual and academic circles wholeheartedly accepted and supported McGovern's ideas in toto...
...but it did mean that that service, considered deliberately as something distinct and definite---as an interest--no longer took the foremost position in Conservative intellectual thinking...
...Constitutionalist will scarcely serve for an electorate where the vast majority have never even read our organic law...
...the fact that we are Enoch Powell from the London Spectator a small and close knit society--all these things explain in part the exceptional tolerance which the British Conservative Party, unlike similar parties in other countries, affords to active political intelligence...
...calls for more responsibility in the control of public expenditure, and the imposition of extra taxation until the desired anti-inflationary effect is achieved...
...is a speechwriter for the White House . . Victor Baras is an assistant professor of political science at Wellesley College, Massachusetts...
...He was opposed to militarism because he knew it for an open door to national socialism...
...Now we see a rising generation happily recalling that under our system, as the Federalist Papers amply prove, political powers were separated precisely because they could be checked and balanced against each other...
...But, before proceeding to those reasons, it is important to grasp something quite fundamental about the intellectual (defined now as somebody who is especially concerned with the contribution which can be made to politics by the independent activity of mental analysis) who is predisposed towards Conservatism, and his equivalent who is drawn to Socialism or any of the other creeds of the Left...
...but an essential part of the form of those judgments is their pretense to a continuing moral and intellectual justification...
...Nixon was personally cognizant of all the illegalities and "dirty tricks" involved is really a secondary matter...
...If income has not been getting more The Alternative November 1973 9...
...According to Kristol, technoloKy has made many things much cheaper in this country, thus bringing an improved standard of living within range of an increasing number of people...
...Where men of such great and varied talents could not undermine the federal balance it was unlikely that the Nixon-Agnew combine would succeed...
...most British Conservatives look at the power of Russia...
...McGovern's tax package immediately came under a lot of fire, in large part because many people found the abovementioned figures unreasonable...
...And there is no salvation from his present purgatory...
...Whatever about the other activities of the mind, a marked feature of politics is this--that intellectual activity is imposed on tendency and experience...
...That miniature flag in the buttonhole is too closely akin to Hitler's omnipresent swastika...
...In the course of George McGovern's abortive quest for the presidency, the Senator advanced a set of proposed tax reforms which, he asserted, would have high priority in a McGovern Administration...
...When he became leader of the Tory Party Edward Heath gave a good run to economic liberalism and the ethic of free enterprise...
...It is the halfeducated conservative who displays a bumper-sticker saying: "America, Imve It or Leave It...
...But there is an enormous practical difference between the way you tackle a doctrine, and the way you tackle a power: British Conservatives are more nationalistic for everybody than are Americans...
...But with the reduction of executive pretensions should come, quite quickly, that restoration of balance on which our federal system depends, along with that individual initiative which authentic liberalism has always served to promote...
...Watergate is no mere summer storm...
...In America, where there is no birthright elite, this assumption of superiority may take curious and often highly arrogant forms...
...It acquired the Whig landowners when the Whig Party was taken over by thrusting Liberal industrialists...
...This was in part the reflection of his desire to enter Europe, and his awareness of the fact that, in the Community, it would be desirable to develop British industry by fostering cross-border mergers: this need, in turn, dictated a stress on management, bureaucratic control, and government supervision...
...and only for a very brief time indeed did the leadership of the Conservative Party afford much tolerance for Tory intellectuals on the Right --or old-fashioned liberal---side of this argument...
...Besides closing what he called "unfair" tax loopholes for the rich, McGovern wanted to tax annual income over $50,000 at a rate of at least 75 percent, and sought a 100 percent confiscatory tax on any inheritance over $500,000...
...the fact that the Tory Party traces its history back to a seventeenth century intellectual and philosopher, Bolingbroke...
...folTner communists, disillusioned with the way they run the show in Russia, have been disproportionately active in the more malleable American conservative movement...
...in political science at the University of California at Los Angeles . . . Victor Gold, a former press secretary to Vice-President Agnew, is now a syndicated c o l u m n i s t . . . Haven Bradford Gow, a student residing in Fall River, Massachusetts, has written for a variety of periodicals . . . Chris Hughes, a student, has finished studying at the Sorbonne and is now travelling in Europe . . . Thomas Molnar is the author of several books, including The Decline of the Intellectual, The 7kvo Faces of American Foreign Policy, and Utopia, t h e Perennial H e r e s y . . . Felix Morley, formerly editor of the Washington Post and president of Haverford College, now lives on Gibson Island, Maryland, where he is writing his memoirs . . . Peter Rusthoven is studying at Harvard Law School . . . Jack Simmons resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania . . . Rev...
...Ziegler has it...
...It strikes me as having considerable substantive interest as well, for two reasons...
...On its course through the history of the country it has acquired many accretions --the failed, the disappointed, the discontented, the dissatisfied--of other parties...
...Hence my initial distinction between different kinds of minds...
...Apparently, that goal itself is no longer at all controversial in liberal circles...
...Libertarian is a clumsy word...
...The reason is that middle-class people now have to compete with workingclass and lower-middle-class people for those 'good things in life' they had always aspired to...
...There is further cause for optimism in the fact that so many nominal conservatives pointedly divorced themselves from Mr...
...Briggs, in a recent article for the Public Interest, points out that the only type of housing whose cost is rising relative to income is in upper-middle-class areas--because more Americans are becoming bunched in the middle income ranges where they can begin to bid on such housing, hence driving up the price...
...Since he is also a democrat, he defies the paternalistic heritage of Salisbury, though he is intellectually a very similar kind of politician...
...Labour came to power in the twenties very much, as Mr...
...The Conservative, on the other hand, because he recognizes the impulse which drew him to his faith as an impulse, is the better prepared to recognize what is, and what, therefore, he must come to terms with...
...Simonds, sometime feature editor of National Review, lives in Falls Village, Connecticut, teaches at Indian Mountain School, and works the shell game at fairs and carnivals throughout New England . . . C. Bascom Slemp is the chief Washington correspondent of The Alternative . . . Robert F. Turner works at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace . . . Timothy Wheeler, an associate of The Alternative, is editor of the Financial Book Digest...
...Only with the failure of the Wilson government, and the subsequent, at least temporary failure of the Heath government, did the possibility of a serious debate about the eco-ContributorsAram Bakshian, Jr...
...So, well over a century later and partly because of Taft's opposition, did FDR, a superficial Democrat with many conservative traits...
...Compared to his effort, the Bow Group, such youth ginger groups as Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism, are insignificant...
...the fact that one of the requirements of a parliamentary system of government such as we enjoy, in which the proponents of either party are required to excel in the cut and thrust of debate across a small chamber--a cut and thrust in which the younger Pitt defeated the great Fox...
...These reforms, argued McGovern, would not only yield a "fairer" tax system, but would also promote a "more equitable" distribution of income in America...
...I will add only one other word about the experiences of the two countries...
...or to state the matter somewhat differently, the belief that the current distribution of income in America is somehow "bad" and "inequitable" is ceasing to be a radical idea and is becoming instead part of mainstream liberal doctrine...
...Second, the fact that those who did criticize the candidate attacked his specific figures, and not the more general idea that income needed to be redistributed...
...but they believed that free enterprise economics offered the best guarantee of British success inside the Community...
...Stanley Baldwin, one of the most electorally successful of British Conservative Prime Ministers, once observed that "the difference between a man of intellect and an intellectual is the same as the difference between a gentleman and a gent...
...One wonders, of course, why this should be the case--and this in turn raises a whole series of other questions...
...But in power he developed economic management in the direction of controls and administration...
...Republican"--even as pusilanimous leadership cut him down...
...and the so-called Economic Group of bright Tory members of Parliament has yet to develop its influence...
...The Conservative mind is historical (though to a degree ameliorative) and defensive...
...McCmvern himself was alternately bemused and befuddled by all the furor: at one point he expressed perfect amazement that many of the assembly line workers he talked to thought his tax package "unfair," at least for people making more than $50,000 a year...
...For forty years now a few old-timers like myself have apprehensively watched the rapid enlargement of presidential power and the subordination of legislative, judicial, and local autonomy by self-serving claims of national security and executive privilege...
...It is a tragedy in the antique Grecian mold...
...Here was a man of virtue, in the strict Roman sense of that fine word, disproving the sorry legend that to be a politician is to be tarnished...
...The trouble with our conservative thinking is not that it is dishonest or insincere, but simply that it is inapplicable, as a reasoned political philosophy, for the United States...
...Indeed, such Tories as are on this side draw much more sustenance from Americans like Friedman than from anyone at home...
...Even if it is risking a little, I will suggest that, whereas American Conservatives, like all Americans, think of America as an idea, British Conservatives think of Britain as an interest, an interest formulated as a nation...
...nomic organization of the country become possible...
...The contribution of the Monday Club is negligible...
...It might almost be said that the Tories welcomed the intellectuals, not because they might contribute to the Party, but because the Party might contribute to them...
...Salisbury always fought for the "political predominance of the educated classes" and they, in the great majority, have supported entry into Europe, even where they admit or even desire the likely disappearance of the nation as Europe unites further...
...nor is he interested in discovering and coming to terms with the obstacles which real life may put in the path of his ambition...
...Whether Mr...
...Historically, the Conservative Party of Edward Heath is far from out of tune with what has been stood for in the past...
...His party realized this and therefore proudly called him "Mr...
...But that is to look at Conservatism as a doctrine...
...and probably of the country...
...Pawick Cosgrave The Mind of Toryism American friends continually ask me why it is that the political climate of British Conservatism seems much more amenable to the intellectual and intellectual activity than does the climate of American Republicanism...
...Kristol discusses the same phenomenon in more general terms in an article for the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Frustrations of Affluence...
...The presence in our British political history of such figures as Salisbury...
...Still another characteristic of conservatism is its belief in an elite and a consequent mistrust of democratic procedure...
...A parliamentary group, the One Nation Group, was later formed, containing three of the most brilliant of the Research Department's graduates, Iain Macleod, later Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald Maudling, likewise, and The Alternative November 1973 7 Enoch Powell, who needs no introduction, and who was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet by Edward Heath in 1968 for a particularly hard-line speech on immigration: it was designed to advance Tory thinking on social welfare matters, and adapt the Labour inheritance of the Welfare State to Tory uses...
...In any event, McGovern soon started backtracking on his ideas while Republicans rejoiced at yet another blunder, McGovernites cursed yet another example of the "backwardness" of the American people, and historians added yet another cubit to McGovern's stature as the most naive man to run for the presidency since William Jennings Bryan...
...As Professor Seymour Martin Lipset has demonstrated, by almost any socioeconomic indicator one would select, American society is as best we can determine more equal than it was one hundred years ago...
...nevertheless, it would still strike me as an extraordinarily difficult proposition to assert that income in America has become less equal in the last century...
...But the true-blue conservative still considers massive expenditures on "defense" as being somehow less socialistic than parallel governmental outlays in the field of domestic welfare...
...Maurice Cowling in The Impact of Labour has shown, against the will of Tories, but with the goodwill of their leader, Stanley Baldwin, who thought education in power would lead Socialists away from revolution: he was proved right when a number of the most prominent Labour ministers joined him in a coalition government to save the nation in 1929...
...All of these enterprises were smiled upon benignly by the Party leaders...
...The leftwing mind is ameliorative and particularly disposed to attack...
...Intellectualism was very important in terms of power largely because of the smallness and homogeneity of our island, which made the media vital in most propagations of ideas...
...It was scarcely noticed that, throughout the fifties and the sixties the national crisis, mainly in economics---or most obviously in economics---became worse and worse with each stage of play...
...He is also the repository of the liberal economic heritage of the nineteenth century--stressing free enterprise and the intimate interconnection between freedom and economic freedom--in the Tory Party...
...Like Madison, Taft opposed all arbitrary power, which is endorsed, often with striking similarities, by both Conservatives and Socialists...
...It has outlived all other parties, save Labour, and a possibly reviving Liberal rump...
...He is also a die hard nationalist...
...I fancy this proem may be of some interest to Americans as suggesting that way in which a British Tory approaches these problems...
...The Labour Party had lost its near monopoly of intellect and ideas...
...Conservatives, frightened by the terrible experience of their defeat in 1945, sought power at almost all respectable cost...
...I know that saying this is to tread on dangerous ground, because it allows the American Conservative to retort with the accusation that his British equivalent is a time-server and a compromiser: I can only say that, in a moment, I will make that charge myself with more force than an American ever could, about some of my friends and contemporaries...
...The Institute of Economic Affairs is the most important propagandist of micro-economic and Friedmanite ideas...
...But over and above...
...but the detriti which the party attracted to itself brought with them many pearls from other intellectual traditions...
...It seems to me that American Conservatives are excessively mechanistic...
...The first question is difficult to answer with any statistical certainty...
...Can one specify what would constitute a "just" or "equitable" distribution of income...
...Broadly speaking, the economic policy division between the Labour and Tory Parties in the sixties consisted of the one leaning towards socialized industry and the other against...
...Its final effect on persons and politics cannot yet be foretold...
...Later still the Bow Group was created: this was an organization designed, though as a research outfit rather than a pressure group, to bring Toryism into touch with the best of modern and generally liberal thinking without sacrificing the best traditions of the Party...
...Has income distribution in America become less equal...
...too reminiscent of Dr...
...it is pessimistic by nature...
...Nixon's untenably defensive posture, finding it "inoperative" as the charming euphemism of Mr...
...He fully realized that while a mania for security promotes dictatorship it consequently damages the cause of liberty...
...The left-wing intellectual compared to the Conservative is like the bright and enthusiastic undergraduate compared to the mature scholar...
...Only gradually, in the sixties, did economic matters begin to ascend to paramountcy...
...To all this mdlange of fundamentally emotional characteristics Bob Taft was both instinctively and intellectually opposed...
...A serious trauma is to be expected as the unused brakes are belatedly applied to executive arrogance...
...Throughout the fifties and early sixties the most emotional and passionate debates in British Conservatism were about the loss of empire, the foreign policy role of the country, and Europe...
...This episode, however, is more than just a commentary on the lack of strategic brilliance exhibited by the 1972 Democratic nominee for president...
...There is, however, great and perhaps unrealized significance in the fact that Bob Taft's political courage and transcendant honesty for a time made him generally known as "Mr...
...It did not necessarily follow, of course, that the Party could not continue to serve the nation--who ever knows what a nation's true interests are...
...The great difference to this fragmented debate has been made by Powell...
...What frustrates the affluent, then, is the difficulty, in this increasingly egalitarian society, of purchasing those "distinctions" that the upper 15 percent of the income strata used to be able to command automatically--e.g., a live-in maid, or a summer home on the Cape...
...Kristol, in an article in Commentary called "About Equality," has eloquently addressed this point as well: "Inequality of income is no greater today than it was twenty years ago, and is certainly less than it was fifty years ago . . . . Though there has been a mushrooming of polemics against the inequalities of the American condition, most of this socioeconomic literature is shot thi'ough with disingenuousness, sophistry, and unscrupulous statistical maneuvering...
...In Butler's revivification of the Conservative Research Department (a body of bright young men and women serving the whole party, but especially the leadership, with ideas, and founded by Neville Chamberlain) there was, then, a distinctive tactical element: intellectualism was supported by the Party both because it was thought to be important in terms of power, and because the particular postwar brand on view drew Toryism towards the center, made it socially conscious, made it tender, as Baldwin had made it...
...And thus we come back to Robert A. Taft, a man of the center who could not be drawn into pitfalls on either right or left...
...As perhaps our best-known British Conservative politician, Enoch Powell, has said, "Only in politics does personal experience make up so large a part of the material used to form judgments...
...Salisbury was tough, Baldwin tender...
...Yet, one hundred years ago most Americans were boasting of the historically unprecedented equality that was to be found in their nation, whereas today many seem convinced that inequality is at best a problem and at worst an intolerable scandal...
...Johnson's biting reminder that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel...
...Some of those who opposed him were themselves pro-EEC...
...Now, we can well argue that the left-wing thinker is fundamentally 6 The Alternative November 1973 emotional in his judgments...
...The foreign policy debate never attracted very much of the attention of the best minds on the Right: it spawned another pressure group, the Monday Club, which rapidly developed an emphasis on anti-Communism, support for the white nations of Africa, and the prevention of colored immigration...
...Xenophobic belief in "The American Century" is now happily at a discount...
...The battle between his ideas and those of Heath will determine the future of British Conservatism...
...However, it does not follow that the active political intelligences encouraged by the Conservative Party were--or are --always themselves Conservative...
...The former recognizes only his own insight...
...The essential meaning of that catastrophe is not obscured by the ocean of publicity aroused...
...He is an economic liberal, a Friedmanite...
...In this country the latter have cleverly captured the label of Liberal, so there is no longer any distinctive name to clarify the philosophy of political balance which Taft espoused...
...But with confidence one may predict that the next Republican candidate for the presidency will be much more in the character of Bob Taft than is the present incumbent...
...An able and dynamic Republican President, virtually certain of easy reelection, nevertheless permitted the most unsavory tactics by his entourage in order to secure a Ja vote of National Socialist proportions...
...Even those commentators essentially sympathetic to the candidate's aims felt that he had misjudged the feelings of most Americans in this area...
...In Kristol's words, "A hundred years ago, it took a relatively small amount of money to make a person much better off...
...There are, I think, many reasons, most of them arising from British history: not all of them, however much Americans may envy the success of the Conservative Bow Group compared to the (relative) failure of the Ripen Society, are conducive to Conservatism considered as a coherent philosophy having a distinct relevance to modern political problems...
...In their efforts to establish privilege for the presidency, to make it a monarchistic office, both Alexander Hamilton and John Adams failed...
...Two of the more interesting of these indications are presented by B. Bruce-Briggs and Irving Kristol...
...to feel the desire to reestablish intellectual respectability...
...David Brudnoy is a visiting professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, a commentator with WNAC-TV (CBS) and WGBH-TV (PBS) in Boston, a free-lance writer and lecturer, and an associate of The A l t e r n a t i v e . . . George Carey is a professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and editor of the Political Science Reviewer . . . Lindley H. Clark is an associate editor of the Wall Street J o u r n a l . . . Douglas W. Cooper is a graduate student at Harvard University and editor of C o u n t e r p o i n t . . . Patrick Cosgrave, whose writings appear frequently on both sides of the Atlantic, is the political commentator for the London Spectator . . . J. Tim Fennell is working for his Ph.D...
...Whatever his ultimate success will be no one can tell: but he does represent the return of the tough Conservative, in that his economic policies will require the abandonment of much of the tender, paternalistic policies adopted by both parties since the war...
...And they forgot that probably their most successful leader, Salisbury, had said, in the Quarterly Review of July, 1860, that Tories ought not to think simply of office for such a concern was "a degrading error which has squandered the fair fame of parties and made a byword of the honour of public men...
...Almost he gave to that party not only the skillful leadership but also the spiritual magnitude that it had in Lincoln's day...
...It acquired some of those very industrialists when, softened by time into regard for rather more than personal gain they, with their leader Joseph Chamberlain, passed into the Tory ranks over the Irish question, thus adding to the Tories a distinctive element of economic liberalism (pioneered, admittedly, in Tory circles by Peel, when he attempted to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws) the most distinguished representative of which today is Enoch Powell...
...But in dealing, let us say, with Soviet Russia, most American Conservatives I have read study the doctrinal challenge...
...Republican...
...I say active political intelligence because there are many countries--Guatemala, for example, China, and Argentina, where Conservative administrations have respected and valued great artistic intelligence, which is something left-wing regimes never do, but do not invite the contribution of the speculative and analytical mind to political debate...
...But the most important foci of what American Conservatives would think of as Conservative economic policy in a true sense--competitive, monetarist, and concerned to reduce the power of the state--are not within the Tory Party (save insofar as they are represented by the staff at Swinton Conservative College, which enjoys a considerable measure of autonomy from the leadership: it was a gift from the late Earl of Swinton...
...But perhaps the greatest of all British Conservative intellectuals, the third Marquis of Salisbury, Prime Minister for longer than Gladstone, probably the finest mind of the nineteenth century, once said that, although he was a most devout Christian, he had the interests of the nation in his charge and therefore, by the Christian law of duty itself he was obliged to place that interest "in front of all others he might have to consider...
...Conservatives also, of course, tend to be Christians, and defenders of established institutions...
...Today, it takes substantial amounts of money to make a person (above the working-class level) only a little better off...
...The Conservative Party in Britain has been in power for the greater part of British history since the Restoration, in one identifiable form or another...
...In the process of digesting Lloyd George after the First World War the Tories added to the populist tradition first mooted in their circles by Lord Randolph Churchill something of the magic of the Welsh Wizard...
...He was, therefore, no conservative but rather an outstanding exponent of that classical liberalism which James Madison, above all others, embedded in our sadly neglected Constitution...
...The left-winger is not interested in discovering why his policies go wrong...
...Were Russia governed by angels, as Sir Herbert Butterfield once said, she would be a threat, because she is powerful...
...Now, when Labour scored its massive victory over the Tories in 1945, the instant Conservative reaction was to feel they had lost the center of politics...
...privilege nothing...
...They began to conceive of their history in terms of success at power...
...For the causes of a man being attracted to one stream of politics or another are not frivolous causes, even if they are instinctive...
...The likely permutations of that battle need to be worked out elsewhere--the chances of politics and the likelihood of success for either side require separate consideration--but the point to grasp now is that Powell, virtually alone, has created such debate about Conservatism, such distinctively intellectual Conservative debate...
...Consumed by hubris a smooth and competent politician has irretrievably ruined his claim to veneration...
...it is optimistic by nature...
...Gradually, with the loss of the empire, with the cultivation of intellectualism, with the attempt to win the center, Toryism lost distinction of character...
...Apparently, the Senator felt such views represented a gross misreading of one's class interest...
...And finally, what posture should public policy take toward this increasing criticism of current income distribution...
...For a brief moment, in the wake of Powell's taking up the last subject, the club enjoyed prominence, but it has been in decline for some time, rapidly losing influence at the heights, and suffering terrible division at the grass roots...
...To follow the sense in which they might not be requires a brief historical survey...
...Robert Blake, the biographer of the great Tory leader of the nineteenth century, Disraeli, the Provost of the Queen's College Oxford, and enobled by Edward Heath, said of the 1945-51 period, when Churchill gave Lord Butler the task of reestablishing Conservative intellectual ascendancy, and charge of the people Butler hired, that they were people "of whom many things have been said, but not that they are stupid...
...Now, this is not a frivolous distinction-indeed, it is an essential one...
...Thus, not merely did the Tory Party, through i~s survival at the helm of the nation for so many centuries, acquire many of the characteristics of the nation itself, notably a respect for education and intelligence (the influence of British academic education, and particularly the classical curriculum, on imperial politics in the nineteenth century, though it has drawn many fine scholars, is still underexplored...
...and I believe that nationalism is the most important characteristic of British Conservatism...
...He cannot escape the ultimate responsibility, nor the fact that those guilty were the type of henchmen he wanted...
...Justice was everything to him...
...Ineluctably, he was led back to the government intervention popular in the fifties and sixties, but at a much higher pitch...
...all this he is a nationalist...
...As I write this piece,moreover, Powell has just made a 8 The Alternative November 1973 major speech on economic policy in which he attacks the system of economic controls which Heath has established...
...To this black cloud, however, there is a silver lining...
...the latter such reality as his capacity allows him to perceive...
...It was highly disagreeable for Aesop's bullfrog when he found that he could not inflate himself to the size of an ox...
...Old Whig, preferred by F. A. Hayek in his discerning essay on "Why I Am Not A Conservative," requires historical knowledge possessed by few Americans...
...There is more about them of the esprit de gdometrie than of the esprit de finesse, which we like to think characterizes ourselves...
Vol. 7 • November 1973 • No. 2
