American Conservatism Rehabilitated
HINDUS, MILTON
American Conservatism Rehabilitated Reviewed by Milton Hindus Professor of English, Brandeis University The Evolution of a Conservative. By William Henry Chamberlin. Henry Regnery. 295 pp....
...Chamberlin's approach to the question of what conservatism means to him is autobiographical: "I would probably never have appreciated the values of conservatism if I had not decided, as a young and obscure freelance writer, to go to Moscow in 1922...
...Contact with the brutal actualities of revolution, and particularly its terror, brings the enthusiast down to earth again...
...Some of the best things in this book reflect these gifts...
...Italics mine...
...This may satisfy an uncritical reader, but if one turns to a treatise generally recommended as a classic defense of conservative principles, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, one finds the author saying that "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservatism...
...Chamberlin's position has come to rest a little right of center...
...At that time my Russian-born wife shared my views and enthusiasms, what we have both come to recognize as my delusions...
...Chamberlin adds the considerable weight of his sincerity to the efforts of those who, like Peter Viereck and Russell Kirk, have been trying to restore the word "conservative" as good intellectual coin of the realm instead of allowing it to continue as the debased counter it has unfortunately long been taken for...
...The result is that "the Englishman whom [Burke] conceives to be typical, who 'fears God, looks up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility' is still extant, but is considerably less typical...
...In all these respects, he reminds us that there is a profound resemblance between Soviet Communism and fascism...
...Then begins a search which is always a quest for balance, perhaps the hardest of all things to find...
...The road to disillusion followed by Chamberlin has been taken by innumerable people in our own time and by many others ever since the French Revolution...
...This difficulty is pointed out in several passages by an author whom I missed from Chamberlin's discussion, Irving Babbitt...
...Such polemics make good reading, but upon reflection are hardly reassuring as to the future, for obviously Khrushchev believes his own dogmas as fervently as Hitler did, though he expresses them perhaps a little less shrilly...
...Instead of being a conservative movement, "fascism, whether in its German or Italian form, has all the distinctive features of a revolutionary movement: the plebian leadership: the appeal to the mob...
...Near the beginning of that period, medical science was still in the stage where it resorted to bloodletting as a remedy (Lord Byron might well have survived his 37th year if not for this treatment...
...Babbitt indicates, is that the materialist infection has run so much deeper in the modern world since the time of Burke...
...The point of view of a John Keats concerning medical progress might be distinctly different...
...I really do not know what it is that Chamberlin has in mind...
...He is interested in spiritual values much more than in materialistic ones, as is indicated by the conclusion of his book: "A radical at 20 and a conservative at 60...
...the disregard, in many cases, for the rights of property...
...The difficulty, of course, is to make the thought of these men relevant to the present moment in history when so much has changed, including the meaning of words...
...it requires a robust faith to believe that it can continue indefinitely without leading sooner or later to some kind of disaster...
...First, there is Joseph de Maistre's type of "authoritarian conservatism," which Chamberlin rejects as having "little relevance in a modern world...
...He writes that "during the hundred years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of World War I, the curve of progress in all fields was unmistakably pointed upward...
...At that time, although I was not a member of the Communist party, I was a convinced sympathizer with the Soviet regime, a devout fellow-traveler...
...Such a time is a time of new beginnings, of burgeoning hopes...
...the contempt for legality...
...He notes that "my personal evolution from sympathy with Marxism and Communism, through a phase in which I would have described myself as a liberal, to my present conviction that I am...
...A good recent dictionary, for example, tells us that conservative is an adjective to be used in the sense of "tending to preserve established traditions or institutions and to resist any changes in these...
...philosophically, a conservative was promoted by a growing familiarity with the works of Burke, with The Federalist, and with the writings and ideas of such intellectual conservatives as John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville...
...Universal love, social justice—anything seems possible to the young enthusiast...
...In denigrating the contemporary world, the author goes rather too far in the direction of idealizing the past, particularly the 19th century...
...People throughout the Western world were unmistakably better fed, better clothed, better educated, and more humanely treated if they got into prison and stood a better chance of recovery if they became sick...
...Like Samuel Johnson who, when asked by Bos-well what poetry is, said that he could more easily tell him what it is not, Chamberlin goes about the task of definition by a series of exclusions—that is, by saying what conservatism is not...
...But in my case there is a unifying element: concern for human liberty...
...The reason for this shift of meaning...
...The second type of "pseudo-conservatism" he identifies as belonging to the "crackpot fringe . . . deeply infected with religious and racial bigotry...
...The refusal to face the facts of modern life, he tells us, is not characteristic of the conservative but of the reactionary or nostalgic visionary...
...The land of one's heart's desire seems to be in the immediate offing...
...Finally, there is fascism, and the disingenuous tendency to identify conservatism and fascism constitutes the most damaging slander of all...
...I can explain his view to myself only as that of a man who says in this book: "My good health has been part of my good fortune...
...John C. Calhoun and the Swiss humanist scholar and publicist, Jakob Burckhardt...
...I went to Moscow with no prospect of material advancement, but rather in the spirit of the Moslem making his pilgrimage to Mecca...
...Conservatism, properly understood and defined, seems to possess values especially needed in this age of what Jose Ortega y Gasset has called the revolt of the masses, when the equality of men threatens the quality of man...
...but, as Babbitt says in his Democracy and Leadership, "the conservative nowadays is interested in conserving property for its own sake and not, like Burke, in conserving it because it is an almost indispensable support of personal liberty, a genuinely spiritual thing...
...Though Chamberlin defends private property against various collec-tivistic schemes, he is certainly not one of those who is interested in "conserving property for its own sake...
...Many a young man has felt that a time of catastrophic social upheaval was a kind of "dawn" in which it was "bliss to be alive...
...His analysis of a statement by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in which he discovers six demonstrable factual falsehoods packed into two short sentences, is as crushing a bit of writing as I have ever seen...
...NEW LEADER readers do not have to be reminded that Chamberlin is an excellent and continually readable political columnist and that he is especially expert in matters having to do with Russia...
...the insistence on creating an entirely new order of things...
...The large-scale use of miracle-drugs, inoculations and preventive medicine today make this statement of Chamberlin's puzzling...
...The dangers of the present situation, which Chamberlin conclusively documents, can hardly be overestimated...
...4.50...
...Twelve years later we left Moscow, with completely transformed views of what Soviet Communism meant in practice, with unforgettable memories of cruelties visited on many Russians whom we knew and uncounted millions whom we did not know...
...A good part of Chamberlin's book is devoted to differentiating his position from that of various pretenders who call themselves conservatives...
...His thesis is that ours is a "time when freedom is threatened much more from the Left than from the Right...
...This kind of evolution is familiar enough to be almost banal...
...It is all very well to do homage to Burke...
...In my early 60s, I have yet to experience an operation or a serious illness...
...It is because of increasing disillusionment in the feasibility of Utopian short-cuts to freedom and prosperity, as a result of personal experience and study of history, that I have reached the conviction that conservatism is the surest shield of liberty and the best defense of individualism in the specific conditions of the 20th century...
...To PARAPHRASE WHAT Mark Twain said about the weather, everybody is talking about conservativism but nobody is doing much about defining it...
...This would seem to be far indeed from resisting or opposing any change, as the dictionary has it...
Vol. 42 • June 1959 • No. 26
