CONSERVATISM: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present.

Edited by Jerry Z. Muller. Princeton University Press. 442 pp. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper

After two decades of intellectual ascendancy and political victory, American conservatism is beginning to look frazzled. Friend and foe alike could benefit from reflection on its origins and guiding purposes. Recalling its debt to and divergence from European forms of conservatism, this rich anthology, edited by Muller, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America, throws "historical and cross-cultural light" on conservative thinkers from Edmund Burke (1729–97) and Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) through such contemporaries and near-contemporaries as Michael Oakeshott (1901–90), Irving Kristol, and Edward Banfield.

This is "an anthology with an argument." While admitting that conservatives have at different times and places defended different, indeed contradictory, things, Muller maintains that there is a recurring habit of mind— "shared assumptions, predispositions, arguments, metaphors, and substantive commitments"—common to conservatives (almost) everywhere. Yet he distinguishes between "conservatism" and "orthodoxy." The former assumes that long-lived institutions have endured for good reason, and that veneration, custom, and habit are essential to human well-being. The latter maintains that institutions should ultimately be justified by abstract truth or a transcendent or unchanging moral order, whether revealed or rational. This distinction makes clear why Muller believes that conservatism is not a critique of the Enlightenment (such as orthodoxy often mounts) but rather a part of it, and why he concludes that David Hume (1711-76) was more or less the first conservative.

Muller’s definition of conservatism leaves little room for Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, not to mention Aristotle, Aquinas, and the American Founders, all of whom held, in various ways, that society’s law and customs have, or ought to have, some important dependence on natural justice. But for that very reason, Muller’s book is a bracing commentary on the present-day condition of American conservatism, and a welcome invitation to rethink what conservatives ought to be conserving.

—Charles R. Kesler