At Taki’s Magazine, Austin Bramwell asks some questions that the Philadelphia Society will never answer, the best one being the piece’s title, “Is the Conservative Movement Worth Conserving?” Although Austin’s own views are not hard to discern, his questions ought to be approached with an open mind. Take this one:
• The Failure of the Canon: To what extent would anyone read the authors of the movement conservative canon (Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer et al.) if a conservative movement did not exist to promote their works so relentlessly?
This one can be answered definitively: many of these works would not be read at all if the conservative movement were not promoting them. We can say that with some degree of certainty because, in fact, the conservative movement does not promote them, and they aren’t read. Kirk is a partial exception, since ISI (and to a lesser extent some of the other youth-oriented movement organs) keeps him in circulation. But how about Meyer? The Liberty Fund still publishes In Defense of Freedom and Other Essays, but his other works — The Conservative Mainstream, The Moulding of Communists, and the anthology What Is Conservatism? — are all long out of print. Admittedly, the market for books on Communist organizational techniques is pretty thin these days, and The Conservative Mainstream is a compilation of “Principles and Heresies” columns from National Review. Essay collections by living authors usually don’t sell; the economics of selling a collection of Meyer essays would be daunting indeed.
You can find Wilmoore Kendall books fairly easily on-line, but none has been reissued in the last decade. There’s still a cache of Regnery’s 1985 edition of The Conservative Affirmation in ISI’s warehouses, I believe. Kirk has the Kirk Center, but I’m not aware of anyone pushing to get students to read Kendall or Meyer. (Apart from the Liberty Fund, to some extent.) Most or all of James Burnham’s books are out of print — it set me back a few bucks to buy good used copies of The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. And I’ve been surprised to discover just how much of Bill Buckley’s oeuvre is unavailable. His best and most important books (not always identical), such as Up From Liberalism, The Unmaking of a Mayor, and Cruising Speed, are a little hard to get.
Outside of the National Review world, some of the other big names of 20th century conservatism fare better. Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott have dedicated academic followings of various sizes, and whole shelves of Strauss and Voegelin are in print. The Voegelin and Oakeshott scholarly communities seem to survive without orbiting the conservative movement too closely. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences is in print from the University of Chicago, and the Liberty Fund still publishes The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver and In Defense of Tradition: The Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver. The movement probably is responsible for much of Weaver’s enduring status — certainly movement types like to say “ideas have consequences,” even if they’ve never read the book — but he’s worth reading despite that.
The movement doesn’t particularly recommend that anyone read Robert Nisbet, and much of Nisbet is out of print, but his reputation may well improve despite the movement’s neglect. A friend of mine working for a libertarian think-tank tells me he recently heard a lecture by an interesting left-leaning professor who cited Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress in his talk — and who cited it as if the author were some little-known genius. Nisbet’s stock should rise over time, in part because he isn’t too closely identified with the movement.
The great libertarian economists would still be read absent a conservative movement, of course: certainly Hayek and Schumpeter would be. Mises might not be as popular as either of them, but if there weren’t an Austrian economics movement to keep his memory alive, I suspect he nonetheless would have made a comeback sooner or later. The Chicago and Public Choice schools would also thrive with or without a conservative movement.
The more I think about it, the less I see a connection between the conservative canon and the conservative movement — though I shouldn’t be surprised. There are worthy parts of the canon (Nisbet, arguably Burnham) that languish despite the movement’s existence. There are others, like Meyer and Kendall, or go unread largely because of the fragmentary and topical nature of what they wrote — which can be said about Buckley, too. Kirk and Weaver do benefit from the movement’s exertions, though I suspect Ideas Have Consequences, like Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, would find a readership even without the movement (after all, Ideas became a success years before there was a movement). And even Kirk endures more because of a dedicated corps of Kirkians than because National Review or the Heritage Foundation cherishes his memory. Although his following is mostly outside of the academy, Kirk probably belongs in the same category as Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott. He would have less of a following without the movement, it’s safe to say, and figures like Meyer and Kendall would be all but forgotten — just as they’re all but forgotten even with the movement.
Perhaps in answering this question, we have answered several of Austin’s others as well. Including this one: “Setting the Party Line: Who gets to decide what positions constitute ‘conservatism’”? Not people who write books, evidently.