The American Dissent: A Decade of Modern Conservatism by Jeffrey Hart
Spitz, David
Bad books are easily ignored. They may waste an unwary reader's time, but this is a minor irritant. Really bad books, however, are noxious: they insult the intelligence of readers; they also...
...Here Hart presents, fairly, the diverse positions of a number of conservative sects, shows that they are at loggerheads with one another, and offers some mildly critical observations of his own...
...I do not know...
...Hart seems unaware that Rousseau immediately added: "How did this change come about...
...He mentions few others, and then only because in an occasional article they have been critical of so-called liberal positions...
...The only liberal he seems to have read is Lionel Trilling...
...That question I think I can answer...
...Whatever the accuracy of this charge—and it can surely not be made against all liberals—Hart, with rare exceptions, unblushingly commits this error himself...
...It is not entirely without reason that Rousseau, who would have us believe that men can be "forced to be free," is called by many the godfather of both modern totalitarianism and modern democracy...
...Must Professor Hart really be taught that liberal critics of the Court, not to speak of justices like Holmes and Brandeis, have made precisely this point throughout many decades of this century—not least in the 1930's—and that they were denounced for having done so by a host of conservative writers...
...A few examples will make this clear...
...Since that journal and its writers say many different and often contradictory things, not least on conservatism and liberalism and their applications to contemporary problems, the result is a genial incoherence of doctrine...
...As it is, one can only dismiss it as a simple-minded work for simple-minded people...
...Geniality, however, is not Professor Hart's central characteristic...
...He quotes the celebrated sentence with which Rousseau began the first chapter of his Social Contract: "Man is born free...
...Such a really bad book is The American Dissent...
...He also admits that the National Review was wrong when it argued in 1960 that serious disputes between China and Russia could not arise...
...He then rails against Rousseau, calling him a defender of hypothetical, abstract freedom...
...Hart believes that this was essentially correct, though he concedes it may have been somewhat overstated...
...and everywhere he is in chains...
...Hart's first admission of this kind involves Frank Meyer, National Review editor, who contended that Khrushchev's de-Stalinization was really a triumph of Stalinism...
...3. One must read through 150 pages before discovering that conservatives can make mistakes...
...1. Hart condemns liberals for deriving their conceptions of conservatism from secondary liberal sources...
...4. Finally, the most astounding of these observations: Hart informs us that liberal writers are beginning only now to catch up with the conservative discovery that the Supreme Court is a sort of standing constitutional convention whose decisions result no less from political and social considerations than from judicial reasoning...
...Actually, it is little more than an uncritical summary of the National Review and various other writings by authors associated with it...
...it is rather a vast political innocence, rooted in a disdain for logic and an indifference to unpleasant facts...
...Predictably, it is also arrogance, blunted only by a comic tediousness...
...But there is no reference to and no sustained examination of the doctrines formulated by such major liberal writers as Morris R. Cohen, R. M. MacIver, and (since Hart is not loath to appeal to English conservatives) Bertrand Russell...
...2. As Hart demonstrated in an earlier book (on the eighteenth-century English politician and writer Viscount Bolingbroke), he is neither a qualified historian nor a political theorist...
...and he does not...
...However, these and a few later concessions of conservative errors do not impair Hart's confidence in the judgment of Mr...
...The American Dissent has one somewhat redeeming section—a chapter on the varieties of conservative thought...
...It was not to be expected, therefore, that he would understand the complex and paradoxical thinking of Rousseau...
...What can make it legitimate...
...Had the book been limited to this one chapter, it would have been a near-respectable if elementary effort...
...Ostensibly, this is a scholarly examination of American conservatism in the past decade...
...Buckley and his aides...
...they also injure the cause they avowedly seek to promote...
Vol. 14 • May 1967 • No. 3
