The Quest of a Conservative

It seemed to be there, almost for the taking, after World War II — as though we needed only to reach out and pluck from the tree of culture a complete account of conservatism, a coherent and elegant theory of conservative thought.

In a well-known passage in The Liberal Imagination (1950), Lionel Trilling would insist, “It is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Moreover, he said, conservative impulses do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling was probably right in part: that there were no conservative ideas “in general circulation” would be an explicit reason for the founding of National Review in 1955. About the rest, however, he was simply wrong. The problem of conservatism in those days wasn’t too few ideas but too many.

About the Author

Joseph Bottum

Joseph Bottum is the visiting scholar of conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado's Benson Center.

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It seemed to be there, almost for the taking, after World War II — as though we needed only to reach out and pluck from the tree of culture a complete account of conservatism, a coherent and elegant theory of conservative thought.

In a well-known passage in The Liberal Imagination (1950), Lionel Trilling would insist, “It is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Moreover, he said, conservative impulses do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling was probably right in part: that there were no conservative ideas “in general circulation” would be an explicit reason for the founding of National Review in 1955. About the rest, however, he was simply wrong. The problem of conservatism in those days wasn’t too few ideas but too many.