Right Then
SCHNEIDER, GREGORY L.
Right Then Burnham, Meyer, and the varieties of conservative experience. BY GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER Back in 1994, in a much-discussed essay in the American Historical Review, Columbia University's...
...But as a theory, fusion was considerably less successful, and however much Frank Meyer's work still defines the situation of conservatives today, it offers no blueprint for the future...
...So too, In Defense of Freedom, Meyer's 1962 book, prefers the classical liberal position of individual freedom to the conservatism of Russell Kirk...
...But Burnham and Meyer explain only how we got to our present position, not where we go from here...
...Meyer, troubled by his growing doubt of communism's efficacy, left the party at the end of World War II...
...His recognition of the totalitarian nature of communism, combined with his skepticism about liberalism's ability to deal with the threat, fed his growing pessimism and belief that the West had failed...
...But, as Smant argues in Principles and Heresies, Meyer also recognized the positions shared by libertarians and social conservatives—as shown by the conservatism beginning to sweep across college campuses in the early 1960s...
...Burnham left Communist sectarian politics to write his influential The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World in 1941...
...In 1955, both men became affiliated with William F. Buckley's National Review, with Burn-ham acting as Buckley's intellectual mentor and Meyer, within a year of the new magazine's appearance, taking over as the books editor...
...Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Meyer wrestled with the diverse and contradictory strands of conservative thought, and his real contribution to conservatism was his success at uniting for practical ends the feuding factions of the Right...
...Do James Burnham and Frank Meyer still have anything to tell us...
...Nonetheless, Meyer's brand of fusion contributed to the problems of ideological coherence from which conservatism continues to suffer...
...But few have taken up the ideas and personalities that shaped the movement...
...Burnham's three books on commu-nism—The Struggle for the World (1947), The Coming Defeat of Communism (1953), and Containment or Liberation...
...BY GREGORY L. SCHNEIDER Back in 1994, in a much-discussed essay in the American Historical Review, Columbia University's Alan Brinkley insisted that historians' preference for liberal and progressive interpretations had caused them to neglect the phenomenon of American conservatism...
...Gary Dorrien and Richard Brookhiser, among others, claim Burn-ham as a neoconservative, and they have—as Kelly notes in his biography—some cause to do so, particularly in his anti-communism...
...But the paleoconservatives also claim Burnham as a patron saint, for his managerialism offers a diagnosis of a society that pits the grass-roots against the elite, and his later writings on Western suicide resonate with pale-oconservative themes...
...He attacked Kirk's The Conservative Mind in the July 1955 Freeman as "another guise for the col-lectivist spirit of the age...
...Meyer died of cancer in 1971, and Burnham suffered a stroke in 1978 that ended his public career nine years before his death in 1987...
...In practice, fusion allowed Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and innumerable other politicians to embrace free-market capitalism, traditional morality, and anti-communism simultaneously...
...But beyond the historical interest, the question about what we should learn from these books remains unanswered...
...Meyer's "fusion" of traditionalism and libertarianism allowed conservatives to put aside disputes and get on with the necessary work of constructing a political movement...
...Their clarity of thought and their responses to the problems of their age remind us why it is useful to study history and escape the grip of the immediately relevant...
...Meyer was more sympathetic to the latter view...
...Meyer always acted as a mentor to young people, often talking with them late into the night, and was much loved as a speaker on campuses and among the leaders of Young Americans for Freedom...
...Both are fine biographies of crucial figures in American conservatism after World War II...
...Are either of their central figures important anymore for understanding contemporary American conservatism...
...Traditionalists, such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, emphasized social order and prescriptive tradition as necessary ingredients of a virtuous society, while individualists and classical liberals, such as FA...
...As for James Burnham, what is his relevance for contemporary conservatives...
...Both combine biographical and intellectual history to make important contributions to our historical understanding...
...These biographies of James Burn-ham and Frank Meyer by Kelly and Smant present in great detail the lives, literary influences, and work of two conservative giants...
...Hayek and Milton Friedman, defended the individual person and freedom as ends in themselves...
...In James Burnham and the Struggle for the World, Kelly argues convincingly that what unified all of Burnham's work was an Augustinian skepticism and a fear of the "Caesarism" endemic in the growth of the managerial state and the rise of executive power...
...In the years since, several important books have studied the political success of conservatism...
...He contributed to the libertarian Freeman in the early 1950s and became book-review editor of the conservative American Mercury...
...cated Communist and Burnham, a professor of philosophy at New York University, the more sophisticated intellectual...
...Both Burnham and Meyer began as Marxists, with Meyer the more dediGregory L. Schneider is assistant professor of history at Emporia State University and author of Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right...
...Both became disenchanted with communism in the 1940s...
...1953)—articulated a globalist conservative anti-communism, but his most famous book is probably the 1964 Suicide of the West, his last original work...
...Meyer spent his time out of the public eye, voraciously devouring works on classical liberal thought, philosophy, and history...
...Burnham quickly became an architect of the Committee for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded organization of anti-Communist intellectuals, and wrote about the "struggle for the world" that constituted the Cold War...
...Daniel Kelly's James Burnham and the Struggle for the World and Kevin J. Smant's Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement begin to fill the gap...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 2
