10 Books Every Conservative Must Read

Plus Four Not to Miss and One Impostor

Benjamin Wiker

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781596986046
• eBook ISBN: 9781596986381
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following up his 10 Books That Screwed Up the World, author Benjamin Wiker brings you 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss and One Impostor. Offering a guide to some of the most important literary works of our time, Wiker turns his discerning eye from the great texts that have done so much damage to Western Civilization to the great texts that could help rebuild it. 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read features a range of works from classics such as Democracy in America and The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, to more "pop" classics like Sense and Sensibility and The Tempest. Through these works, Wiker reveals some of the most important lessons for our time as well as the true meaning of conservatism. Written with an educational purpose and witty tone, this is a must-read for conservatives, Republicans, and booklovers everywhere!

Part I

Just What Exactly Is Conservatism?

THIS BOOK ABOUT BOOKS IS DIVIDED INTO FOUR MAIN PARTS according to four important themes: the first, concerning the nature of conservatism itself; the second, focusing on the American founding; the third, dealing with economics; and the last, pressing home the importance of forming the conservative imagination.

That we should need any discussion of just exactly what conservatism really is might strike us as odd. Surely conservatives already know what it means to be conservative, otherwise they wouldn’t be conservatives.

I think there is a kind of negative clarity among conservatives. That is, conservatives are clear about what conservatism is not (big government, socialism, high taxes, gay marriage), and so when they try to explain what conservatism is they define it negatively, as in freedom from governmental niggling and nannying. But a negative definition is a rather difficult starting point to form a positive account that conservatives can live by and defend.

Part of the problem in getting that definition is caused by the very word “conservative.” The word “conservative” is, by itself, a word without much substance. To say that one is “conservative” doesn’t really say much at all, because the real question is, what is one trying to conserve? And moreover, why is it really worth conserving? “We’ve always done it this way,” is not an argument. “Because change is always bad,” is a dangerous argument.

Nor can we merely reduce conservatism to the defense of what is “traditional,” a point that will become obvious by illustration. The Aztec Empire spanned, roughly, the time period from the early 1300s to the early 1500s—about as long as the United States has been around. The Aztecs were culturally rich, powerful, brutal, and infamous for practicing human sacrifice. The practice of human sacrifice was much older and more widespread in the Mesoamerican region. By incorporating it into their culture as well, the Aztecs were being quite conservative. They could point to the practice as “traditional,” as having been performed dutifully by their fathers’ fathers’ fathers leading back into the mists of time.

And it was not just a matter of tradition, of maintaining a long-standing human custom. Since the Aztecs believed that the gods sustain the universe, and that the gods themselves were placated by human sacrifice, they had profound religious reasons for defending the practice against innovators. Moreover, they didn’t just believe that the gods were bloodthirsty. Human sacrifice atoned for real moral sins. We may not approve of this method of atonement, but we can have little doubt they experienced guilt for actual moral wrongs they felt needed expiation.

The point is fairly simple. Every society that has lasted for at least two or three centuries has long-standing, hallowed traditions, passed on with great solemnity from generation to generation. Whatever these traditions are or were—and whatever their moral caliber—the maintenance of them against innovators would be the task of that society’s “conservatives.”

If conservatism is merely the doctrine that what has been done for a long time must be preserved and defended because it has been done a long time, then conservatism means very little. To say the least, it would make a hash of American conservatism, which did away with the traditional arrangement of kings and nobles ruling the common folk.

Yet, that having been duly noted, conservatives can add some substance to the definition of conservatism by pointing to America’s founding fathers. But here’s the rub. Appealing to the founders no longer has much cultural weight outside conservative circles. The age of simple appeal to the founding fathers is gone. For a variety of reasons, their venerable status has been almost entirely eroded. As a consequence, it is no longer politically compelling either to state or prove that “the founding fathers said this” or “the Constitution states clearly that.” For better or worse, we live in an age when the wisdom of the founders cannot be taken for granted as common coin, but must be set forth again, argued for once more, and made compelling to a new age.

But precisely here conservatives should see the problem of merely reducing conservatism to those principles of the American founders. Surely conservatism is something deeper and older, surely it rests on even more venerable and firm foundations. Or to put it another way, if the American founders were conservative, certainly they weren’t just making things up on the spot, but were themselves conserving a deeper and older wisdom, a perennial wisdom that isn’t peculiar to America but deeply rooted in the nature of human beings.

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That is what we are trying to recover in Part One. We’re trying to get to the very deepest roots of what conservatism really is. In doing so, we will find that conservatism is not merely an American thing—we’ll read an ancient Greek philosopher, a late-Victorian English journalist, a twentieth century, German-born political philosopher, and a twentieth century Irish-born Christian apologist. Rather, conservatism is a fundamental way of understanding human nature and its place in the cosmos.

We’ll also find out that liberalism is not some recent phenomenon, but is nearly as old as conservatism—Samuel Johnson famously quipped that the devil was the first Whig (the Whigs being British liberals). I am not out to demonize liberalism, however, but to use it to clarify what conservatism is, for the two exist in essential antagonism. Liberalism, too, at its core is a fundamental way of understanding human nature and its place in the cosmos. It is not just a surface reaction to conservatism, but a deep rebellion against the conservative account of man. The works we’ll be considering in Part One will go a long way in clarifying what conservatism is through an analysis of its opposite, liberalism.

This kind of deep clarification is needed for another reason. Readers who are at all familiar with the fourteen books I’ve chosen for treatment as genuinely conservative will know that more than one of those fourteen authors would shudder—were they alive today—at being called “conservative.” In fact, they would demand to be called “liberal.” Yet, even a quick analysis of their arguments shows them aligning (for the most part) with today’s conservatives.

This confusing situation is illuminated somewhat by our remembering that the American founding fathers were indeed engaging in a revolution against the mother country and her King, and that the term “republican” was, a century before our founding, a term for radicals in English politics bent on decapitating kings and putting political power into popular hands. In Europe, conservatism was associated with those who wanted to keep or restore the old regime where hereditary kings and queens, with the help of an entrenched aristocracy, ruled nations. From the European perspective, Americans looked like radicals; but Americans believed they were reinstituting the most natural and moral form of government, self-government. The habits and principles of self-government—including economic self-government—could therefore rightly be considered conservative insofar as they conserve what is most natural and moral. But by the nineteenth century, the anti-statist position, whether in Europe or America, came to be known as “liberalism” since it sought liberation from top-down governmental control.

Contemporary American conservatism is sometimes seen as having its genesis from this “classical liberalism,” the old anti-statist liberalism that focused on laissez-faire economics, personal liberty, and republican institutions. But, for reasons that will soon become apparent, this isn’t a satisfactory solution, because there exists a “classical conservatism,” far deeper and older, that is the home, the foundation, of true conservatism, the sure fixing point of the conservative mind. Our chosen books will help us find it.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Politics: Aristotle

“... man is by nature a political animal.”

Aristotle: The Father of Political Conservatism

CALLING ARISTOTLE THE FATHER OF POLITICAL CONSERVATISM should give conservatives a feeling of great relief. Conservatism is much older than America. It is not a modern invention. It goes back far earlier and far deeper, and that gives it a far firmer foundation and an even grander pedigree, stretching to ancient Greece. Conservatism is a perennial political philosophy, and its founding text is Aristotle’s Politics.

Aristotle is the father of political conservatism in two important, related senses. First, he understood that the decisive political argument occurs between those who maintain (as he did) that political life and morality are natural and those who assert that political life and morality are entirely man-made (as did the sophists and political innovators of his day). This argument is still with us. As we’ll see, it marks the crucial difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives tend toward political caution, because they believe man is not infinitely malleable; and they believe that morality is objective and puts limits on what human beings can and should do. Liberals tend to believe the reverse: that morality is relative, and that man is malleable and can rightfully be subject to political manipulation to advance some heady notion of the common good or expedite some grand “progressive” project.

Conservatives, like Aristotle, prefer experience to theory—in fact, conservatives cringe at utopian philosophical schemes, which liberals tend to embrace because they vivify or justify their efforts at social engineering. And like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason—that is, reason divorced from experience. Liberals see no problem with reconstituting a nation’s political life on the basis of some attractive but untried rational scheme used as a tempting template to draw up programs of “hope and change.”

But while the conservative disposition, which we can trace to Aristotle, is suspicious of abstract reason, it is not, obviously, hostile to philosophy. Aristotle remains, after all, one of the handful of great philosophers in human history, and history has preserved only a portion of his works, which range widely, from detailed biological treatises (such as the Parts of Animals and the Generation of Animals); an examination of The Soul; works on Respiration and Youth and Old Age; to his seminal works on logic and language (such as the Categories and On Interpretation); more general treatises on nature like the Physics and On the Heavens; books on Rhetoric and Poetics; an exposition of the principles of Ethics; and the most abstract principles of Metaphysics. Conservatives aren’t anti-intellectual. They simply and solidly demand that our reason be firmly tethered to our experience of reality as it is.

So for conservatives, like Aristotle, the practice of philosophy, the seeking of wisdom, involves the study of things as they are, not as we might like them to be, and that includes the study of human beings and political life. That is why Aristotle asserted that young men aren’t good “hearers” of lectures on politics—they don’t have enough actual experience of human nature and political life, and since they’re passionate, they’re prone to passionate and destructive schemes for overhauling society.¹ A short overview of Aristotle’s life reveals that, for him, experience and philosophy went together.

Aristotle, the Man of Wisdom and Experience

Aristotle was born in Stagira in Greece in 384 BC. His father, Nicomachus, was the court physician and advisor to the Macedonian king Amyntas III. Amyntas was the father of Philip II, and Philip II was the father of Alexander III, better known as Alexander the Great. All these kings were active in the perpetual wars boiling up the Greek peninsula, and all, especially Alexander, pushed the conquering reach of Macedon beyond its borders. Alexander was born in 356 BC, and when he turned thirteen, Aristotle, almost thirty years his senior, became his tutor (and, as a reward for his efforts, got Alexander’s father Philip to rebuild Stagira, one of the many towns the king had beaten to dust).

As Alexander was an heir to conquest, Aristotle was an heir to philosophy, and he had brought those riches with him, on a rather roundabout route, to the royal court of Macedon. He was the third of three great philosophers, certainly the three greatest that ever lived: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle himself. At seventeen, Aristotle had traveled from Macedonia to Athens, from a nascent empire to one of the numerous independent city-states of the Greek peninsula—the city where Socrates, about thirty years earlier, had been sentenced to death for allegedly corrupting the young with his ideas. Aristotle enrolled in the Academy, a school started by Socrates’ best pupil, Plato, and studied and taught with Plato for some twenty years, leaving Athens only after Plato’s death in 347 BC.

Aristotle then emigrated to Asia Minor, where he married Pythias, the adopted daughter of Hermias, a former slave who had become the despotic ruler of the city of Atarneus. Aristotle’s influence is credited with moderating and tempering Hermias’ tyranny, for Hermias, too, had studied philosophy with Plato and even with Aristotle himself, and would accept much of what Aristotle had to say as the better part of wisdom. Aristotle even arranged an alliance between Hermias and Philip of Macedon. That turned to ashes, however, when Hermias was kidnapped by a Persian ally, clapped in chains, and tortured to reveal Philip’s plans for the invasion of Asia Minor. He refused to betray his friends and died in 341 BC.

Before Hermias met his death, Aristotle had traveled to Lesbos, an island in the northeastern Aegean, where he had gone to study biology. His method there was typical of the man. He did not sit on a rock by the sea and dream up grand theories of the universe and the origin and destiny of life, but got down in the water and looked for himself at what living things actually did, cut them up to see what they were really made of, and looked to experienced fisherman rather than philosophers to learn about the details of sea life.

It was in 342 that Philip called Aristotle to Macedon to become a tutor to young Alexander and other important Macedonian nobles, and it seems that Aristotle’s influence carried all the way into Philip’s own policies, especially encouraging leniency toward Athens. After Philip was assassinated in 336, his son Alexander was proclaimed king by the Macedonian army. He was only twenty. Aristotle left for Athens, and remained there for nearly the rest of his life.

Over the next decade, while Alexander was conquering Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Persia, and stretching towards India, Aristotle was in Athens philosophizing, starting his own school, the Lyceum. Most of the works we have from him come from this period. When Alexander the Great died in 323 from poison, malaria, typhoid fever, pancreatitis, overeating the medicinal plant Hellebore, heavy drinking, or complications from a previous wound (you can take your pick), the immediate result was predictable. With the removal of the heavy hand of Macedonian rule, Athens rebelled, and Aristotle, the royal intimate of Macedonian kings, came under charges of impiety at Athens—the very same kind of charge that brought the Athenians to serve hemlock to Socrates three quarters of a century earlier. Aristotle fled to the Chalcis, a Macedonian stronghold on the island of Euboea, his mother’s native soil, where he died in 322.

Aristotle’s Politics, written while he was in Athens teaching at the Lyceum, is an expansive treatise, and it rests firmly upon his formidable intellect and his deep and long experience of political life. Unfortunately, we cannot possibly cover the entire argument of the Politics in a single summar...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I - Just What Exactly Is Conservatism?
• Part II - Democracy and the Founding of the American Regime
• Part III - The Place of Economics for Conservatives
• Part IV - The Conservative Story, and Conservative Stories
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright Page