THE RIGHT BOOKS

Just out is The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders (Regnery Books, 950 North Shore Drive, Lake Bluff, Ill. 60044, and 1130 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; $18.95), the late Senator John P. East’s only, posthumously published, book, the page proofs of which the senator had just finished correcting at the time of his death, on June 29, 1986. Typically, my reaction to the prospect of reviewing a book of this nature written (or “written”) by a practicing politician resembles the initial one of Flannery O’Connor to the proposal, made her by the Sister Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta, that she write a memoir of an afflicted but spiritually gifted child, then deceased: “Not me, I said to myself.” But John East, before he was elected to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina in 1980, had been for 16 years a professor of political science at East Carolina University, and contributed scholarly articles to such periodicals as Modern Age. Furthermore, as senator, he had surrounded himself with top-flight aides and researchers, drawn from the best and the brightest among young conservative-intellectual circles. So, in the end, I picked it up, and took a cautious bite.

The American Conservative Movement is not a terribly ambitious book, but it is a very good one, written in a style that is clear and sophisticated throughout. It has its origins in a suggestion made by George W. Carey, editor of The Political Science Reviewer, that the author write a piece on the political thought of Willmoore Kendall. East did so, and went on to write similar essays on Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Ludwig von Mises, which appeared in Modern Age, and constitute the present work. “My purpose in this book,” East writes in a prefatory note, “is to show that the seven thinkers analyzed are the seminal theorists of the American conservative movement in the post-Woild War Ii era, which produced a conscious and principled conservatism in American thought.” Moreover: “There is one unifying theme underlying all seven of these writers: . . . the need to focus the attention of contemporary thought upon an ennobled conception of man and life. Modernism has degraded man” (from the Conclusion).

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Just out is The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders (Regnery Books, 950 North Shore Drive, Lake Bluff, Ill. 60044, and 1130 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; $18.95), the late Senator John P. East’s only, posthumously published, book, the page proofs of which the senator had just finished correcting at the time of his death, on June 29, 1986. Typically, my reaction to the prospect of reviewing a book of this nature written (or “written”) by a practicing politician resembles the initial one of Flannery O’Connor to the proposal, made her by the Sister Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta, that she write a memoir of an afflicted but spiritually gifted child, then deceased: “Not me, I said to myself.” But John East, before he was elected to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina in 1980, had been for 16 years a professor of political science at East Carolina University, and contributed scholarly articles to such periodicals as Modern Age. Furthermore, as senator, he had surrounded himself with top-flight aides and researchers, drawn from the best and the brightest among young conservative-intellectual circles. So, in the end, I picked it up, and took a cautious bite.

The American Conservative Movement is not a terribly ambitious book, but it is a very good one, written in a style that is clear and sophisticated throughout. It has its origins in a suggestion made by George W. Carey, editor of The Political Science Reviewer, that the author write a piece on the political thought of Willmoore Kendall. East did so, and went on to write similar essays on Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Ludwig von Mises, which appeared in Modern Age, and constitute the present work. “My purpose in this book,” East writes in a prefatory note, “is to show that the seven thinkers analyzed are the seminal theorists of the American conservative movement in the post-Woild War Ii era, which produced a conscious and principled conservatism in American thought.” Moreover: “There is one unifying theme underlying all seven of these writers: . . . the need to focus the attention of contemporary thought upon an ennobled conception of man and life. Modernism has degraded man” (from the Conclusion).