Liberalism and the Conservative Imagination
Liberals could appreciate conservatism as an intriguing yet utterly harmless mood because in the early 1950s, conservatism had yet to harden into a clearly defined ideology..
Essay in Liberalism for a New Century
eds. Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson (University of California Press, 2007)
In this essay, I look at mid-century debates about the meaning of the word “conservative.” More than mere semantics, the argument concerned what it meant to be conservative, and who would determine the parameters of conservative identity. In the end, conservatism became closely identified with market capitalism rather than with intellectual traditions that emphasized the organic, interconnected nature of society.