In “Thoughts on French Affairs” (1791), Edmund Burke declined to resume his attack on the French Revolution: “If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way … and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current … will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men.” Matthew Arnold would pronounce this “return of Burke upon himself” one of the “finest things” in literature:

Burke's “Providence” revealed itself in history, organic and complex, not in those abstract “metaphysic rights” merely decreed by a “new conquering empire of light and reason” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790). Now that the Revolution had entered history, continued opposition to it would be “perverse and obstinate.” Arnold's secular spiritual authority, in turn, spoke through “Culture”—the “disinterested” application of a critical intelligence informed by the “best that has been known and thought in the world.”

The conservative turn in Lionel Trilling is detectable as early as his Matthew Arnold (1939), the product of a decade in which he migrated from fellow traveler to liberal anti-Communist. Trilling endorsed Arnold's idea of culture and, more important, found in his work an un-Hegelian, un-Marxist, unsynthesized dialectic that settled into a condition of equilibrium in which one recognizes the discontinuitiy between idea and act, theory and its execution. Such divisions, in self and society, have been marked by Michael Kimmage and others as a defining attribute of Trilling's imagination. No tendency in his writings is more amply documented than a predilection for authors who “contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves” (“Reality in America,” The Liberal Imagination; cf. Kimmage, 132). Such artists and their works satisfy ideals that would be recognized by the audience (his “We”) to whom Trilling's discourse was scrupulously attuned: Keats's negative capability, the virtue of remaining “in uncertainties,” of being “content with half-knowledge” (“The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters,” The Opposing Self; cf. Kimmage, 264); or what Scott Fitzgerald called “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (“F. Scott Fitzgerald,” The Liberal Imagination). The protagonists of Trilling's fiction, notably The Middle of the Journey, “Of This Time, Of That Place,” and “The Other Margaret,” occupy a space between opposing moral forces. They are heroes manqué. In a brilliantly distorted, personalized account of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (in The Liberal Imagination), Trilling located his heroic ideal in the figure of Hyacinth Robinson, child of aristocratic and plebeian parents, divided between a commitment to revolutionary violence and a deep attachment to the (nearly) eponymous Great House of European civilization. Trilling calls the ideal “moral realism.” James's novel adumbrates its fate: “[S]ometimes society offers an opposition of motives in which the antagonists are in such balance of authority and appeal that a man who so wholly perceives them as to embody them in his very being cannot choose between them and is therefore destroyed. This is known as tragedy.” In the end, Hyacinth turns the assassin's weapon on himself. “He is a hero of civilization,” writes Trilling, “because he dares do more than civilization does: embodying two ideals at once, he takes upon himself, in full consciousness, the guilt of each. He acknowledges both his parents. By his death, he instructs us in the nature of civilized life and by his consciousness he transcends it.”

The blood sacrifice and collective guilt in this remarkable passage might well have appealed to the imagination of Whittaker Chambers, but no intellectual virtue would have been less acceptable to him than the one that emerges from Trilling's remarks on Keats and Arnold, Fitzgerald and James. A select audience and a modulated voice exempted Trilling from the public clamor over Chambers's charge of Soviet espionage against former New Deal prodigy Alger Hiss, the daytime drama of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, and Hiss's unsuccessful libel suit followed by his conviction for perjury. These events became the occasion for a bestselling spiritual autobiography, Witness (1952), in which Chambers presented history—the West's and his own—as a religious melodrama that he called “tragedy” and his personal retreat from a faithless world as a defiant “Christian pastoral” (Kimmage, 222). Chambers's use of “tragedy,” of course, involves the customary transference of an aesthetic category to actual life. That he would have rejected the other analogies between his history and fiction distinguishes him sharply from Burke, his great counterrevolutionary forerunner whose defense of the ancien régime consisted in an effort to preserve the “pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal,” the “super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination” (Reflections). In contrast to Burke's pragmatic use of history, Chambers, early and late, as Communist and convert, would settle for nothing short of certitude. From Chambers's published writings, letters, and statement to the FBI, Kimmage documents impartially the convert's dogmatic (and grandiose) pronouncements. The testimony speaks for itself: “Faith [not Economics] is the central problem of this age” (222); “The vital defect in the Communist philosophy [is] the absence of God,” and (echoing Goethe's Mephistopheles) “[M]an without God, no matter how intelligent … or how dedicated, is inevitably a beast” (90–91). Communism became for him virtually synonymous with evil, and the Hiss case, more than a synecdoche for the Cold War: “I am the witness on whom, to a great extent, it still all swings” (232).

Kimmage states that the “key difference between Trilling's liberalism and Chambers's conservatism was religion” (141). He might have said “secularism.” In E. M. Forster: A Study (1943, 1964), Trilling placed himself and his subject within a critical tradition that arose in the eighteenth century and “witnessed such a notable breaking up of religious orthodoxies and such a transference of religious feelings to secular life that it is surely the true seed-time of the intellectual as we know him” (cited in Kimmage, 168). In this context the anomaly, of course, was Chambers, who blamed the rational skepticism of the Enlightenment for all subsequent political crimes and heresies. The Enlightenment legacy enabled Trilling to develop the idea of a “secular-spiritual” authority (“Mansfield Park,” The Opposing Self) and to agree with Chambers, on different grounds, that the success of Stalinism would require “the death of the spirit” (147). An enlightened or Burkeian pragmatism led him to affirm the vision of tragedy as “a gift that art could give to politics” (164; emphasis added) and to derive his sense of tragedy largely from the later writings of Freud, which he interpreted as one interprets a work of fiction. Finally, a rigorous dialogue with his opposing self allowed Trilling, in his conservative turn, to act as dissenter “from the orthodoxies of dissent” (“Reality in America”; Kimmage, 132). “Chambers,” says Kimmage, “wrote about the soul without God; Trilling wrote about the psyche out of balance” (246).

There are several studies of Trilling and the other New York Intellectuals who traveled from the far Left to liberal or conservative anti-Communism. The Hiss case seems to have been solved (without convincing the Hissophiles) by Alan Weinstein's Perjury (1978). Sam Tanenhaus has produced a definitive biography of Chambers (1997). None of these projects required a more intricate design than The Conservative Turn, which consists in the careful weaving and unweaving of a connection between two figures so ill-matched in personal style and critical judgment.

As for their place in recent history, Trilling's novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947) includes a false prophecy by Gifford Maxim, who plays Whittaker Chambers. His adversaries, Arthur and Nancy Croom, are hard-line, upscale Communists who bear an uncanny likeness to the Hisses. Between Maxim and the Crooms stands the author-figure, John Laskell, who has found a middle way. Maxim regards Laskell as irrelevant for the time being. The fate of civilization, he declares, depends on the outcome of his struggle with the Crooms: “We will hate each other and we will make a new world. And when we have made it and it has done its work, then maybe we will resurrect John Laskell.”

In real life the Croom party's account was settled by the end of the Cold War. The model for Gifford Maxim, until his death in 1961, found a champion in William F. Buckley Jr., and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan. The original for John Laskell has been acknowledged as an influence by born-again neoconservatives Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and made the subject of a handsome memorial tribute by historian Gertrude Himmelfarb in The Weekly Standard. Their paths converged again in sharp reaction to the “adversary culture” of the 1960s (9, 312). But in an era of postmodernist cultural criticism, the prospect of a resurrected Liberal Imagination seems dim.