Conservatism has been tagged as not a body of thought but a series of “irritable mental gestures.” No matter which is the more accurate description, as a holiday exercise I decided to put together what I would deem a full, rigorous course on Conservative Thought.
Not everything is perfect. But I’m satisfied about how these works give a sense of the whole Anglo-American tradition, where conservatism was born as a defense of institutions and has transmogrified (while remaining itself) into a critique of the institutions. It is supposed to teach students how to think like conservatives, and to give them an intuitive sense of why conservative thought evolved the way it did.
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