The European Roots o f Amemcan Consemttim

A DISTINCTIVE characteristic of the American conservative movement which emerged after the Second World War is its demonstrable connection to certain European thinkers. This eager assimilation of European thought among modem conservatives distinguishes them from most earlier representatives of the American Right. Neither the angry reactions of some businessmen and politicians to the New Deal in the 1930s nor the Southern Agrarian protest against cultural and industrial modernization suggest specific contact with any European current of thought. Perhaps a limited parallel may be drawn between contemporary conservatism and the New Humanism developed before the First World War by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer

More. A band of bookish academics centered mainly around Harvard and Princeton, the New Humanists drew upon European, mostly French, literary and social critics to construct their brief against sentimental art, humanitarian politics, and romantic ethics. Their involvement with politics, however, was both spasmodic and ineffective. Unliie modem conservatives they failed to transform their educational-cultural critique into a program for political action. What is unique about the modem conservative movement are the continuing ties between theory and practice and, even more intriguingly, between European critics of modernity and the present battle of American conservatives against relativism and secularism in education and further social leveling. Some key participants in the formulation of this conservative response were and are of Central European origin. Like such mentors of the New Left as Eric F r o m , Herbert Marcuse, and Theodore Adomo, these emigres, too, had fled from Hitlers Third Reich. It may in fact be possible to view them as a kind of counterintelligentsia, attempting to mobilize their adopted society against what their fellow-refugees were then teaching: the desirability of a secular, collectivist order appealing to mans appetitive nature and assuming his infinite plasticity. These counterintellectualswere of course not all cut from the same cloth; and as one considers such names as Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Mises, Thomas Molnar and Gerhard Niemeyer, Modern Age writers all, it becomes obvious that they range across a wide spectrum of beliefs, from Thomism through neoclassicism to various forms of libertarianism. Nonetheless, certain experiences and attitudes seem to provide a unifylng link among them. They had each seen at first hand the operation of Nazi tyranny, but unlike the leftist emigres, were outraged by totalitarianism, not simply by Nazism. Unlike the Left, they associated the wickedness which they had experienced to a retreat from civilization, not merely to a failure to enact their kind of revolution. Finally, almost all of them defined this retreat in terms of a crisis of values characteristic of modem times. Although their interpretations
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of this crisis may have differed, they all identified the present with a process of dehumanization of which Nazi and Communist oppression were the most extreme examples. Each one saw his task in relation to the crisis perceived and hoped to instruct the rising generation on what moral legacy was needed to redeem the modem West. Leaming and teaching, for all of them, entailed an act of recovery. For the explicitly Christian members of the counterintelligentsia, their purpose was defined as helping men to turn around. The Christians, Niemeyer and Molnar, and the more classically-minded Voegelin chose Platos term jel-iagogi?(a turning about) to characterize the result of a spiritual awakening, which they sought to encourage in the present drifting age. The more politically-minded Strauss called for a retum to the study of the ideals of justice and virtue as expounded in the texts of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon. All of the European-rooted writers viewed the crisis of modernity as cumulative in nature. Strauss and Voegelin stressed particular watersheds in the development of the modem moral and political dilemma. According to Voegelin, modem thinkers lost the attunement to the divine ground of being found in both the classical Greek philosophers and the prophets of ancient Israel. Denying the transcendent, they became futated on the here and now and like the gnostic heretics in the early church, they despised the world as they found it, believing rather in the imminent arrival of Gods Kingdom (or, from a modem standpoint, the ideal social order) on earth. This latterday gnosticism had unleashed a series of cataclysms. The Russian Revolution and the Nazi catastrophe carried forward what the radical wing of the Reformation and the French Revolution had already expressed in a more restrained fashion. All of them reflected the continuing obsession with totally transforming society by violence and through the participants inner light or by a science o f revolution. European-rooted scholars such as Niemeyer and Molnar have incorporated Voegelins picture of a cumulative Westem crisis, although Molnar, a conservative Catholic, has also
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stressed the effects of the dissolution of Christian Aristotelianism and the modem adversarial relationship between faith and reason. Straw, seizing upon a picturesque phrase, has called attention to the waves of modemity. He has likened the breakdown of the classical political tradition to a piecemeal weakening of something under growing attack before being entirely abandoned. Tracing the origins of this process to Machiavellis reckless divorce of political theory from moral values, he identifies Locke and, more particularly, Rousseau with a further wave of the modem spirit, which found its final expression in Nietzsche. Both Locke and Rousseau tried to locate in man a political nature, but lacking the ancient belief in his unchanging moral being, could only justify civil society as a provider of material rights or emotional satisfaction (Rousseau). Finally Nietzsche, who exalted Greek fatalism but despised Platonic morality, proclaimed the transvaluation of all values. Free spirits were called upon to look beyond good and evil and to renew a by then decadent West by supplying it with new ethical doctrines. As a bold but desperate modernist, Strausss Nietzsche is presented as the ultimate victim of the disease he seeks to cure. A classically-trainednihilist, he tries to save others from his own condition by teaching moral relativity. It should be noted that even so impassioned an advocate of individual liberty as Hayek provides his own specific view of Westem cultural disintegration. The Westem consciousness of liberty is seen as reaching its high point in the nineteenth century with the coming to political age of the American and European bourgeoisie. Both the pressures of mass democracy and the eroding middle-classsense of spiritual worth are viewed as contributing to the new serfdom already being imposed by a socialist bureaucracy. Unlike the more traditionalist refugee scholars, Hayek has defended modernity while being an avid critic of classical conservatism. But he has also depicted the plight of the modem West more movingly than others with whom a traditionalist may feel philosophically more compatible. He has described the period of Western middle-classdominance as a brief interlude of liberty between an old

authoritarianism and what may well prove to be an even worse tyranny. In trying to assess the overall impact of scholars with European roots on American conservatism, it might be useful to avoid stating the obvious. The obvious in this case would be that American conservatives have gravitated toward European scholars who write sympathetically about their own concerns. Yet, one must be on guard against exaggerating the intellectual dependence thereby implied. I for one doubt that American conservatives would have been powerless before the assaults of the intellectual Left but for the presence of certain European mentors. Some of the most vigorous and creative minds on the post-war Right have in fact belonged to native-bornAmericans. The Europeans did, however, provide the movement with a broader sense of perspective. Because of the contact with European thinkers, American conservatives have linked their own struggles, historically and conceptually, to a larger civilizational framework. Moreover, those intellectual controversies which resounded through inter-warEuropean universities-e.g., between historicists and anti-historicists, neo-realists and neonominalists, lovers and despisers of modernity- have at last become matters of concern for American conservative intellectuals. Most significantly, the Central Europeans have redefined conservatism in a way that may continue to benefit us several centuries hence. They discarded the romantic myth of a golden past which may serve as an object of nostalgia for any given present. They examined the problematic and rootless character of their age and sought to deal with modernity by recovering lost truths and understandings. In a real sense, they were prepared to say with Nietzsche: Let the dead bury the dead! What they hoped to revive was not Greek clothing nor eighteenthcentury American speech, but sound principles wherever they found them. Thus Hayek closes The Road to Serfdom by noting: Though we neither can wish nor possess the power to go back to the reality of the nineteenth century, we have the opportunity to realize its ideals-and they were not mean. We have little right to feel in this respect

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superior to our grandfathers and we should never forget that it is we, the twentieth century, and not they, who have made the mess of things. An erudite Straussian, Stanley Rosen, has defended a conservatism of principle in a book dealing with the nihilist component in both Marxism and modem existentialism. He attributes to his study of Plato the knowledge that it is wrong to understand the return to the origins in a historical sense. Rosens rejection of modernity proceeds from an intellectual critique of the value-denying and ultimately anti-philosophical nature of distinctively contemporary thought. In his case (and in Strausss and Voegelins as well) this critique confirmed his conviction: that the Platonic-Aristotelian concept of the relation between reason and the good is superior to the modem, or predominantly modem, conception. This sober quest for the recovery of past truths is a characteristic of all those Central Europeans who have contributed to American conservatism. Shunning the search for utopia in the past as well as the future,

these thinkers occupied themselves with the defense of traditional values such as justice and freedom. And they did so not because these ideals were quaint or old, but because of what seemed their intrinsic merit. Thus the refugee scholars taught us to see, as Aristotle had, that renewing a polity may be no less an achievement than founding one.Z
-PAUL GO~TFR~ED
Thisargument against utopianizing the past should by no means be equated with any glorification of the present. There is a shallow form of prpsendsn now beiig prodaimed by some liberal revisionists who consider post-Great Society America the highest point in human social evolution. The m a t compelling evidence cited for this view, however, derives from the size of the G.N.P. and the effects of technological advances. Like vulgar Marxists, these analysts generally disregard ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic questions or treat them within the context of an expanding technology and welfare state. It is obviously not my intention to defend this or any other symptom of presentkt complacency-or, even less, to ascribe it to the worthy subjects of this tribute. *Perhaps even more pertinent is the other part of this maxim from The Politiw, Book Four: . . .just as the act of relearning (metamanthan&) may be no less worthwhile than learning something from scratch (manthanein a am&).

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