CONSERVATISM is a rather dreary thing if it can’t distinguish between what’s worth conserving and what’s not. For all the conservative genius expended over the past 50 years in behalf of tradition and liberty, the crucial consideration remains how to separate good from bad strands of tradition, and moral from immoral uses of liberty. For that task, neither tradition nor liberty, by itself, is adequate. One needs the knowledge of right and wrong that political philosophy seeks, and that statesmanship and religion in various ways incorporate.
What’s made American conservatism, in the best sense, possible is its great good fortune in being able to draw on a philosophical revival of the arguments for natural right and against relativism and nihilism. These arguments, advanced and deepened by several important thinkers but above all by Leo Strauss, provided conservatives with a place to stand, from which to move the modern world.
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