11 Essential ­Conservative

Thinkers You Won’t

Read in College
(But Should )
 Imagine your classroom experience introduced you to the full
range of important thinkers, not just the progressive ones.

Imagine you had access to great ideas and books not on the
typical syllabus to guide you in your intellectual journey.

Chances are you’ve read something by Karl Marx or Friedrich

Engels (and it’s good you did). Maybe you’ve even read Foucault
or Chomsky. But what about leading thinkers on the right?

Have you ever heard the names Frédéric Bastiat,

Russell Kirk, or William F. Buckley Jr.?

These make it into very few classrooms—and when they do, they’re
often dismissed as rigid ideologues or racist bigots. But Bastiat was
renowned for his defense of human rights, Kirk for his work in the
genealogy of conservative thought, and Buckley for his provocative
interviews with thinkers of every stripe. If you ignore thinkers on the
right, you won’t understand how certain core ideas like individual
liberty and free enterprise shaped America. And you won’t fully
grasp the heated debates that dominate our culture today.

This eBook introduces you to 11 essential conservative thinkers

spanning three centuries and hailing from several countries. They
often disagree with each other. You’ll disagree with some of them too.
But in getting to know them, you’ll get the education you deserve.
 Edmund Burke
(1730–1797)

The father of modern conservatism

This Anglo-Irish statesman offers wise counsel for confronting

facile, superficially appealing programs of radical reform.
In his richly persuasive answer to the extreme rationalism
and utopian politics of the French revolutionaries (see his
Reflections on the Revolution in France), Burke advanced a
key insight: Tradition, institutions, and folkways contain crucial
knowledge about wise modes of peaceful living. These gains
were hard-won over centuries, and reformers sweep them away
at their peril. The Burkean impulse in American conservatism
continues, especially among social conservatives skeptical
of the sexual revolution and nationalists worried about the
transformative effects of massive, low-skill immigration.

Frédéric Bastiat
(1801–1850)

Defender of free markets and free people

This French essayist and parliamentarian was one of the most

effective exponents of classical liberalism. He brought core
economic truths to the fore and offered deeply principled
defenses of the rights of the human person. In his masterwork,
The Law, Bastiat criticized the state worship of absolutists and
reactionaries as well as the pseudo-scientific plans of socialists
and revolutionaries. He exposed common economic and
political fallacies (many of which are still common today) and
urged political thinkers to imagine themselves as citizens,
not would-be philosopher-kings, reengineering their fellow
men as a gardener shapes topiary. His timeless arguments
and clear and lively writing are well worth reading today.
 Alexis de Tocqueville
(1805–1859)

Making democracy safe for liberty

This French aristocrat traveled to the United States in the

early 1830s to explore a republic whose founding revolution
had unfolded so differently from France’s. His work shows
how the centralization of power in the hands of the few had
hollowed out civil society in France before the Revolution
(The Old Regime and the Revolution) and how Americans
had created a new and vibrant, faith-friendly social order
(Democracy in America, which has been called “at once
the best book ever written about democracy and the best
book ever written on America”). But Tocqueville also offered
prescient warnings about how the rise of a centralized
bureaucratic state could weaken that social order. This
“democratic despotism,” he warned, would weaken liberty.

Wilhelm Röpke
(1899–1966)

The moral foundations of the market economy

This German economist articulated the economic and moral

benefits of the market economy. When the Nazis came to power
in 1933, he refused to toe the Nazi line and became the first
German professor fired for his ideas. He fled the Gestapo to
exile, first in Turkey, then in Switzerland. A friend of Friedrich
Hayek and influenced by Ludwig von Mises, Röpke advanced
Austrian, free-market economics. His writings on the market
economy helped shape West Germany’s remarkable post–World
War II recovery, known as the “German economic miracle.”
Röpke termed his own work “economic humanism” because he
was concerned with the nature of man. He is often described
as offering a “third way” that preserved market freedom while
protecting the social capital on which ordered liberty rests.
 Eric Voegelin
(1901–1985)

Resisting the utopian temptation

In The New Science of Politics, this German-born political

philosopher and intellectual historian diagnosed a crucial
wrong turn in modern political thought: a “Gnostic” rejection
of the order of reality in favor of invented utopias and
violently messianic politics, as seen in communist and fascist
movements. Voegelin had firsthand experience with such
movements: he fled the Nazi occupation of Vienna to come
to the United States via Switzerland. His great lifework,
the demanding Order and History, attempts to trace the
connection between political structures and theological
worldviews, beginning with ancient Egypt. A key insight: for
Voegelin, the Hellenistic breakthrough of philosophical reason
should be treated as analogous to the Jewish revelations
recorded in the Old Testament. (Pope Benedict XVI would
echo this idea in his famous Regensburg Lecture.)

Harry V. Jaffa
(1918–2015)

Philosopher of the American regime

This American political philosopher was the most distinguished

U.S. student of Leo Strauss. He translated that thinker’s
mostly critical and analytical work into concrete assessments
of U.S. history and principled prescriptions that strongly
influenced major strains in American conservative politics.
Jaffa’s most important book was on Lincoln, Crisis of the
House Divided. In it he countered previous conservative
thinkers, asserting that Lincoln represented a revival of
Classical political philosophy. Jaffa considered the assertion
of individual rights in the Declaration of Independence as
the culmination of Western political thought, in continuity
with medieval and ancient models. The more philosophical
neoconservatives trace their intellectual lineage to Jaffa.
 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
(1909–1999)

Radical critic of leftism

Dazzlingly erudite, this Austrian-born aristocrat was a

scholar, teacher, lecturer, and writer. In his National Review
column, his books, and his lectures all over the United
States, he showcased a classical liberal distrust of intrusive
government along with a European traditionalist’s love for
the distinctive, historic, and hierarchical. In his influential
book Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse,
he traces the political right and left further back than their
traditional origin in the French Revolution. For him, each
is grounded in a profound human instinct: the right, in the
impulse toward independence, diversity, and competition;
the left, in the herd instinct seeking conformity, equality, and
safety. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Nazism
was a right-wing movement, Kuehnelt-Leddihn showed
that it stood together with communism on the left.

Frank Meyer
(1909–1972)

The fusionist

In most nations, religious defenders of traditional morality

and advocates of free markets and small government end up
in opposing political parties. Tensions between these groups
are rising in GOP circles today. But the fact that they ever
formed a coalition in the first place can partly be traced to the
work of Frank Meyer, an ex-communist convert to classical
liberalism who became one of the most influential editors of
National Review. President Ronald Reagan credited Meyer
with fashioning “a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and
libertarian thought.” That synthesis, often called fusionism,
became the foundation for modern American conservatism.
In his landmark book In Defense of Freedom, Meyer argued
that the modern secular state was the enemy of religious
liberty, personal virtue, and economic dynamism. Bible
readers and Ayn Rand fans alike should see the dignity of
the human person as the starting point of decent politics.
 Russell Kirk
(1918–1994)

Conservatism’s genealogist

Russell Kirk served the newly birthed post–World War II

conservative movement as its genealogist. At a time when
self-satisfied liberals dismissed conservatism as a set of
irrational impulses, Kirk proved them wrong. In his landmark
work The Conservative Mind, Kirk traced a coherent tradition
of conservative thought in the Anglo-American world,
beginning with Edmund Burke and continuing through the
cultural criticism of T. S. Eliot. Kirk’s The Roots of American
Order went further back, tracing the key principles of the
ordered liberty Americans cherish to the ancient world,
biblical revelation, medieval syntheses of faith and reason,
and Reformation polemics. In The Politics of Prudence, Kirk
rebuked neoconservatives for falsely imagining that American
liberty could be imposed on foreign countries that lacked the
deep roots of order he had unearthed in the rest of his work.

William F. Buckley Jr.
(1925–2008)

The man who built a movement

Buckley was the organizational genius who knitted together

the disparate strands of antileftist thought and activism into
a thriving conservative movement after World War II. His first
book, God and Man at Yale, announced him as a rising star
with its critique of the (by today’s standards quite mild) leftist
and atheist bias of Ivy League educators. He went on to found
National Review, serve as the first president of the group that
became the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, write a widely
syndicated column, and conduct erudite television interviews
on Firing Line, a program that ran for decades. Intelligent,
quick-witted, and charming, Buckley helped introduce serious
conservative ideas to a mainstream audience while working
tirelessly behind the scenes to build a conservative movement.
 Patrick J. Buchanan
(1938–)

Conservative populist

In his three campaigns for the presidency (the last as the

Reform Party candidate), Buchanan laid the groundwork for
Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacy. For three decades,
Buchanan has been the most cogent voice for responsible
populism in the conservative movement. A senior adviser
to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Buchanan
embodied the Cold War anticommunism and social
conservatism that formed a key part of the Republican
coalition, as millions of working-class Americans moved away
from their traditional Democratic Party affiliation. Buchanan
protested how little social conservatives seemed to be getting
in terms of substantive policy for their unwavering support.
A longtime columnist and television personality, Buchanan
focused much of his later writing (such as The Death of the
West) on the transformative cultural and political effects
that mass, low-skill immigration is exerting on America.
That issue became central to Donald Trump’s campaign, as
did the skepticism Buchanan brought to neoconservative
efforts to export American values via military intervention.