Unsung Conservatives

We could devote a whole issue to unsung conservatives–but we have limited ourselves to 15. These conservatives are “sung,” to varying degrees, but they deserve wider recognition. As do a host of others. Our John J. Miller examines and hails the 15, below.

Scott Milross Buchanan (1895-1968): As dean of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., Buchanan became a founding father of the Great Books syllabus. He divided the curriculum into seven parts-grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy-and insisted that students read directly from the works of classical authors. It didn’t bother him that so many were dead white males. “The clearest historic pattern of the liberal arts for the modern mind,” he once wrote, “is, curiously enough, to be found in the thirteenth century.” Although his personal politics were not recognizably conservative (he was a pacifist who criticized the Cold War), his academic influence was strongly traditionalist.

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We could devote a whole issue to unsung conservatives–but we have limited ourselves to 15. These conservatives are “sung,” to varying degrees, but they deserve wider recognition. As do a host of others. Our John J. Miller examines and hails the 15, below.

Scott Milross Buchanan (1895-1968): As dean of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., Buchanan became a founding father of the Great Books syllabus. He divided the curriculum into seven parts-grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy-and insisted that students read directly from the works of classical authors. It didn’t bother him that so many were dead white males. “The clearest historic pattern of the liberal arts for the modern mind,” he once wrote, “is, curiously enough, to be found in the thirteenth century.” Although his personal politics were not recognizably conservative (he was a pacifist who criticized the Cold War), his academic influence was strongly traditionalist.