Books in Brief: Conservative Minds in America

Conservative Minds in America, by Ronald Lora (Rand-McNally, 260 pp., paper, $2.95). In a barren field—secondary historical works on conservatism in America—one falls greedily upon any new sign of growth, hoping that wisdom may be found blossoming there. Promising to explain much, Lora delivers only a cataloguing. He focuses his study on twentieth-century conservatives, the “Cultural Critics of Mass Society,” ranging from the New Humanists and the Agrarians, to Marquand and Cozzens, Kirk and Viereck, and concluding with, yes, a chapter on “Wm. F. Buckley Jr. and the national review.” Lora is no conservative, but his bias only occasionally distorts an admirably composed summary of the thought of these and other thinkers. But after the initial listing of several theories of the origin and nature of conservatism, with the suggestion that an examination of the “cultural conservatives” might illuminate their relative merits, he abandons his framework. His one-sentence hypothesis: “Conservatism, in its deepest meaning, arose in reaction, both conscious and unconscious, to the delimitation of . . . God in Western culture,” is not bad, but it is not explored beyond page seven. In sum, Lora has done nice footwork in an excellent bibliographical essay.