Is It the End or Awakening of Philosophical Fusionism?

By |2022-06-16T11:26:57-05:00June 12th, 2022|Categories: Conservatism, George Nash, Libertarianism|

The once dominant and implicitly ecumenical philosophy of fusionism has been denounced by a chorus of right-wing critics as a "dead consensus." Fusionism, some critics assert, was perhaps a necessary contrivance during the Cold War but is now irrelevant. And so a determined quest for yet another formulation of conservatism has begun. The Fall of [...]

In Honor of Russell Kirk

By |2021-05-10T19:21:32-05:00June 11th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, George Nash, Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, Timeless Essays|

What Russell Kirk did was to demonstrate that intelligent conservatism was not a mere smokescreen for selfishness. It was an attitude toward life with substance and moral force of its own. In the book of Ecclesiasticus, it is written: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Today, I propose to honor [...]

How Firm a Foundation? The Prospects for American Conservatism

By |2017-05-17T21:15:59-05:00March 17th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, George Nash, Richard Weaver|Tags: |

What do conservatives want? Limited government, they answer; free enterprise; strict construction of the Constitution; fiscal responsibility; traditional values and respect for the sanctity of human life. No doubt, but I wonder: how much are these traditional catchphrases and abstractions persuading people anymore? How much are they inspiring the rising generation?… (essay by George Nash) [...]

Ten Books That Shaped America’s Conservative Renaissance

By |2022-01-17T13:57:28-06:00March 12th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Economics, Edmund Burke, Eric Voegelin, Featured, Friedrich Hayek, George Nash, Ludwig von Mises, M. E. Bradford, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, The Conservative Mind, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, Wilhelm Roepke, William F. Buckley Jr.|

If we are to know and rebuild a conservative civil social order in this country, then we need to “rake from the ashes” of recent American history the books that influenced a generation of conservative scholars and public figures, books whose message resonated with much of the American populace and resulted in astonishing political triumphs. [...]

The Conservative Reformation

By |2022-08-13T15:25:45-05:00September 16th, 2016|Categories: Agrarianism, Conservatism, Featured, George Nash, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk|

Two decades ago, George Nash, in his The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,[1] told the story of how American conservatism was forged rather uneasily as a political movement from three intellectual groupings: traditionalists, lib­ertarians, and anti-communists. Today on the conventional “Right,” however, we find many libertarians who argue as vigorously against the opponents of [...]

Conservatism: Past & Future?

By |2014-05-03T16:25:28-05:00May 3rd, 2014|Categories: Books, George Nash, History, Ted McAllister|Tags: |

The historiography of American conser­vatism (often rendered the “conservative movement”) remains immature. For decades, the academic historical establishment largely ignored American conservatives or dealt with them as a sort of fringe group, recurrent expressions of a pathology. Only after the surprising and enduring appeal of Ronald Reagan did most historians begin to take se­rious scholarly [...]

Herbert Hoover’s Crusade Against Collectivism

By |2020-12-01T14:08:33-06:00January 21st, 2014|Categories: Books, George Nash, History, New Deal|Tags: |

Herbert Hoover perceived in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt not a moderate and pragmatic response to economic distress but something more sinister: a revolutionary transformation in America’s political economy and constitutional order. Having espied the unpalatable fu­ture, Hoover could not bring himself to acquiesce. This excerpt is adapted from The Crusade Years, 1933–1955: Herbert [...]

A Conservative Historian’s Memoir

By |2022-01-06T22:32:35-06:00October 5th, 2013|Categories: Books, Forrest McDonald, George Nash, History|Tags: |

Above all, Forrest McDonald survived and thrived because he was not by temperament a party-line ideologue and was unfazed by the imprecations of those who were. Unlike too many of his fellow historians who let their present-day policy agendas control their interpretation of the past, McDonald refused to distort his subjects in this way. Recovering [...]

In Honor of Russell Kirk

By |2019-04-07T10:51:57-05:00January 24th, 2013|Categories: Books, Conservatism, Featured, George Nash, Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind|

In the book of Ecclesiasticus it is written: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Today I propose to honor the memory of a famous man, a man who earned his fame by writing about those who, in an intellectual and spiritual sense, were our fathers. In the great chain of being [...]

Freedom Betrayed, Again and Again

By |2014-01-09T20:02:08-06:00December 18th, 2011|Categories: Books, George Nash, John Willson, Politics|Tags: |

Most of the readers of this site know by now that one of the truly great historians of my generation (people born 1933-46, the “no-name” generation), George H. Nash, has recently published Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2011). Every conservative has held [...]

Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath

By |2014-02-03T11:46:25-06:00November 20th, 2011|Categories: Books, Foreign Affairs, George Nash|Tags: |

Excerpt from: Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, Edited with an Introduction by George H. Nash (Hoover Institution Press, 2011) The Blunders of Statesmen (From the Editor’s Introduction) In November 1951, a public relations executive named John W. Hill met Herbert Hoover at a dinner in New York City. It was [...]

Go to Top