In this important and stimulating book Reba Soffer disentangles the strands of a triple helix: twentieth-century conservatism, the writing of its history, and the role of historians as public intellectuals. It is in four parts. The first explains her method and the way in which intellectual history can be used to unpack and elucidate the nature of conservative history. The second is a discussion of the interwar decades in Britain and the writings of F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Keith Feiling, and Arthur Bryant. The third treats postwar Britain and the career of Herbert Butterfield. The fourth examines conservative historical writing in postwar America and describes the historical writings of Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk, Rowland Berthoff, and Daniel Boorstin. These chapters are followed by a comparative epilogue on British and American conservative historians.

Soffer sees the advantage in having a “personal encounter with the interior lives of these historians.” She investigates their “mental geography” to “re-create the context in which conservative thinking occurred” (310). While writing with sympathy about these writers and their conservatism, Soffer, as always, is not uncritical. She is extremely sensitive to the internal contradictions of these historians’ writings. Moreover, hers is a skeptical conclusion concerning whether a “more cohesive or persuasive conservative ideology” than the ones these historians offer is possible in either Britain or the United States (305).

The conservatism preached by Hearnshaw, Feiling, Bryant, Butterfield, Viereck, Berthold, and Boorstin was not one thing; it was several. If they shared a common sensibility it was a profound suspicion about the nature of human beings, human rationality, and what they regarded as the folly of attempting to shape the world according to a human image. This led them to understand the past as “the story of survival against overwhelming odds” and as “a guide to a reasonably sustainable life” (33–34). Other than that, at least in emphasis, they were deeply divided in their attempt to define conservatism. Perhaps that was their great error: while distrusting ideas and theories, these historians attempted to find definitions. But definitions are ideas. Because they regarded themselves as pragmatic, these historians relied on experience and common sense (and experience charted out over time) as guides to present action. But sense is not common (or, people do not share the same sense), and experience is many things, not one, and anyone who has tried to use experience as a guide to life has come to grief.

So, we should not be surprised to find Hearnshaw as a defender of the state and of a hierarchical but “meritocratic elitism based on character, education, will, and hard work” (63). Feiling followed Coleridge and Newman, wrote a sympathetic biography of Neville Chamberlain, and resigned from the Conservative party over Suez. Butterfield’s formative experience was as a Methodist, and one of his most important books was on the origins of modern science. Historical experience led Bryant to brushes with fascisms and anti-Semitism (subjects that Soffer handles with great tact and subtlety). Boorstin named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Viereck treasured those “rooted institutions shared by all successful cultures” (245) and voted for Adlai Stevenson in 1952. These differences emerged precisely because these historians responded to different political problems at different times. Therefore, rather than a program, a philosophy, or a definition, conservatism turns out to be a process through which these writers, far from opposing change, protested against intellectual contingency and a contingent understanding of the way the world wags. Contingency, however, is merely a construct, a concept, and a tool designed to tame and understand experience. Alien to their style of thinking, with its ironies, ambiguities, paradoxes, and neuroticisms, contingency provides no comfort.

Therefore, these writers took comfort in what they regarded as a stable and understandable past. Such comfort as they took, consequently, was riddled with anxiety and fear. Soffer offers a stimulating suggestion about the sources of their conservatism. She writes not about their ideas, of course, because they were conservatives and conservatives are supposed to distrust ideas, but rather the origins and the intensity of their conservative feelings. Some, like Hearnshaw, Butterfield, Viereck, Kirk, and Boorstin were outsiders, and although Butterfield became Master of Peterhouse and Boostin became the Librarian of Congress, they struggled to overcome their social origins. Bryant had tremendous sales of his books, and Feiling became Chichele chair of modern history, but this failed to satisfy them, and they sought to achieve influence through political activism (303). The sources of their feelings of urgency lay within them, in their anxieties about their status.

Comfort is what they took, but comfort might not be regarded as the business of the historian. The historiography these writers practiced was history for a wide audience. Some wrote history that was highly regarded by professional historians: Feiling, for example, wrote The History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714 (1924), British Foreign Policy, 1660–1672 (1930), and The Second Tory Party, 1714–1832 (1938); Herbert Butterfield wrote George III, Lord North, and the People (1949), George III and the Historians (1957), and The Origins of Modern Science (1949). Their writings for wider audiences, however, were not the practice of Quellenkritik. These writings would not satisfy Acton, who claimed that, when a historian moves from books to archives, doubt is exchanged for certainty; historians achieve mastery as they explore new heavens and earths, and as they move forward they take the world with them. That is, these writings for wider audiences were not those of members of the profession of which Michael Bentley writes so tellingly in Modernizing of England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1979 (2005).

Moreover, they were not intellectuals in the cultural sense that Stefan Collini writes about in Absent Minds (2006). Russell and A. J. Ayer, for example, deployed the intellectual authority they had gained in specialized and technical studies to address public questions that have no answers. Rather, these were writers of the sort Collini has written about in Public Moralists (1991) or those who are the subjects of Julia Stapleton’s Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (2001). These historians used their knowledge to address moral questions about which examples could be drawn from the past. It is possible to rummage about in the wreckage of the past and find examples or illustrations to support various contentions. The past can be pirated for many purposes, but this sort of rapine does not explain anything, and it certainly does not explain conservatism.

Active in public life, these historians were judges of their times and society. They may have had what they considered conservative interpretations, but they did not practice historical criticism, even of the modest sort Acton practiced. Historical criticism requires something other, or more than, interpretations. Interpretation assumes that meaning is in the evidence itself and may be simply drawn out. Criticism requires something else: the determination to exploit the ironies and the internal contradictions in evidence and to appreciate that the writ of evidence runs in several directions, not one. Quellenkritik is highly destabilizing, and it is impossible to use it as a moral device. It is all about epistemology, not ontology. However, the purpose of these writers was a moral one. They did not purport in their more popular writings to be critics. It would be unfair to judge them, therefore, against critical standards. Since they were moralists, it is their moral positions that deserve our attention. Morality is a matter of meaning; it is transformational. Criticism is a matter of explanation; it is transactional. The book Soffer has written enables us to assess an interesting group of writers on their own terms and to consider the ways they addressed the problems of their age. And it is a measure of this book that its provocations give us the opportunity to consider again the relations among learning, public life, and political power.