Italian Conservatives

According to a recent denunciatory article in an Italian radical paper, the United States has known three conservative writers: George Fitzhugh, Clinton Rossiter, and Ayn Rand. These are undemocratic exotics, and ought to be abolished in their native land.

Such an extreme of ignorance possesses the excuse that American representatives in Italy have done almost nothing to give Italians any real knowledge of American politics. In several of the bigger USIA libraries, American conservatives or old-fashioned liberal writers are conspicuous by their almost total absence. Only one conservatively-inclined recent American book has been published in Italian translation: Dr. R. A. Nisbet’s The Quest for Community. Since 1954 or 1955, one Italian writer tells me. the USIA libraries generally have not stocked any new conservative book by an American author—despite the appearance in America of a good many such—unless badgered and importuned by regular patrons of these libraries.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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According to a recent denunciatory article in an Italian radical paper, the United States has known three conservative writers: George Fitzhugh, Clinton Rossiter, and Ayn Rand. These are undemocratic exotics, and ought to be abolished in their native land.

Such an extreme of ignorance possesses the excuse that American representatives in Italy have done almost nothing to give Italians any real knowledge of American politics. In several of the bigger USIA libraries, American conservatives or old-fashioned liberal writers are conspicuous by their almost total absence. Only one conservatively-inclined recent American book has been published in Italian translation: Dr. R. A. Nisbet’s The Quest for Community. Since 1954 or 1955, one Italian writer tells me. the USIA libraries generally have not stocked any new conservative book by an American author—despite the appearance in America of a good many such—unless badgered and importuned by regular patrons of these libraries.