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The Conservative Dilemma
| Article
# : |
11501 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
3,480 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
CONSERVATISM
Dream and Reality
Robert Nisbet
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
118 pp., $18.95
FORTY YEARS AGAINST THE TIDE
Congress and the Welfare State
Carl T. Curtis and Regis Courtemanche
Lake Bluff, III.: Regnery Gateway
443 pp., $18.95
Conservatives have never been a particularly optimistic lot. While liberals could argue that this was the best of all possible worlds, the conservatives feared that they might be correct. For American conservatives, the unfettered capitalism, individualism, mass democracy, and egalitarianism of the United States were perceived as especially inhospitable to the conservative vision, and American conservatives, at least prior to 1980, have suspected they were probably irrelevant. Thus Albert Jay Nock entitled his autobiography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Robert Crunden described twentieth-century conservative critics of American culture as The Suerfluous Men, and Clinton Rossiter termed American conservativism The Thankless Persuation. While the election of Reagan boosted conservative morale, it did not completely quiet doubts within the American Right, including the authors of these two books, that the condition of the body politic is, if not terminal, then at least critical.
The sociologist Robert Nisbet has
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