There is no conservative thought in America, only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” wrote Lionel Trilling in 1950, thus providing a generation of historians with a convenient set piece to demonstrate the inadequacies of mid-century liberalism and its blindness to the nascent conservative intellectual movement gathering strength and purpose just as Trilling wrote.Footnote ¹ Two excellent new books about American intellectual history cast this quote in yet another light. Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History carefully documents a centuries-long tradition of conservative thought in America, from the founding era through the end of the twentieth century. In The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, Michael Kimmage asserts that Trilling himself be considered a source of conservative ideas in postwar America. Taken together, the books by Allitt and Kimmage indicate that a new cycle of writing about conservative thought has reached full flower. For far too long, the field of conservative intellectual history has been dominated by the figure of George Nash, author of the classic 1976 The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. These books provide an updated and more critically sophisticated way to examine the terrain Nash strode alone for so long.Footnote ² More significantly, they indicate that intellectual historians are ready to consider conservatism in dialogue with liberalism, bringing new balance to the study of American ideas. Furthermore, both books, Kimmage's in particular, suggest that some of what we are calling conservative and liberal might be flying under the wrong flag.Footnote ³ The key to sorting out the confusion will be drawing a more careful distinction between conservatism as a “movement” and as a body of ideas, and looking at both conservatisms as part of a typically American response to historical change, rather than as an exotic and abberant specimen.

Comprehensive, intelligent, and eminently readable, Patrick Allitt's The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History is a strong contender to replace Nash's text as the definitive survey of the field. Linking colonial and nineteenth-century history to the recent wave of scholarship about modern political conservatism, it is a broad survey that cogently argues for the existence of “a strong, complex, and continuing American conservative tradition.”Footnote ⁴ Yet The Conservatives more closely resembles another progenitor, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953), which attempted to develop the connections between British and American conservative thought.Footnote ⁵ Kirk defined conservatism as thought in the grand tradition of Burke, identifying his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as the foundational text of conservatism. Like Kirk, Allitt ventures through the broad sweep of two centuries, plucking out sundry statesmen, writers, and philosophers to become part of his conservative chorus. His is no enviable task; to be comprehensive, Allitt leaves himself (like Kirk) open to the inevitable criticism that he is not discovering a conservative tradition, but creating one.

Despite these broad similarities, Allitt's treatment differs from Kirk's in several significant ways. First and foremost, Allitt is not an advocate of conservatism, as Kirk was. He writes,

Allitt succeeds in this effort, maintaining a dispassionate tone without sacrificing liveliness or readability.

More significant than his low rhetorical temperature is that Allitt rejects Kirk's narrow definition of conservatism as thought in the Burkean tradition, opting for a broader understanding of conservatism as an attitude of reverence towards the past, a broad and often contradictory set of beliefs, and a reactionary impulse. “Conservatism is, first of all, an attitude to social and political change that looks for support to the ideas, beliefs, and habits of the past and puts more faith in the lessons of history than the abstractions of political philosophy” (2, original emphasis), he writes. Allitt's “attitudinal” definition does not preclude Burkean conservatives, who automatically appear in the text throughout all eras. And his description of the conservative attitude closely matches Kirk's essentialist canons of conservative thought.Footnote ⁶ Allitt then expands his definition by highlighting other vital parts of conservatism: conservatives are “skeptical and anti-utopian” and “antitheoretical,” and “American conservatism, moreover, has often been reactive, responding to perceived political and intellectual challenges” (2–3, original emphasis). Here are the broad contours of conservative thought as a system, but what of the content of that thought, its specific conclusions and positions? Allitt finds specificity in certain recurring ideas and themes, including “a suspicion of democracy and inequality” (3), “fears of social dissolution” (4), and “the defense of privilege by the holders of privilege” (5). He has more trouble pinning conservatism down on specific issues such as “the proper role of government,” for on this and other issues “conservatism has meant different things at different times” (4). Throughout the text, Allitt will be forced to repeat this basic idea as he encounters wide diversity and dissent among his subjects. Ultimately, then, his conservatism is more an interconnected yet not always consistent range of attitudes than a fixed set of essential beliefs.

It is important to keep in mind here that Allitt is sifting through a number of competing claims to what conservatism is, and his definition ultimately samples from, but is not wedded to, many of the most prominent definitions of conservatism that both scholars and conservatives have already advanced. Not only does Allitt's attitudinal definition partake of Kirk's, but it also draws from Samuel Huntington's definition of conservatism as a “situational ideology” with no fixed content, but rather a context-driven “system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter.”Footnote ⁷ Allitt modifies this concept to what I will call a “contextual” definition of conservatism, eschewing Huntington's cold emphasis on structure alone but recognizing that context plays a key role in energizing fundamental ideologies. He also utilizes the more capacious political definition of conservatism advanced by George Nash and the fusionist leaders of the modern movement like William F. Buckley Jr and Frank Meyer. Nash's innovation was to sidestep theory and consistency and accept modern conservatism's self-definition. “Movement” to Nash was critical: his title invoked a “conservative intellectual movement,” and he further elaborated, “I have designated various people as conservatives either because they called themselves conservatives or because others (who did call themselves conservatives) regarded them as part of their conservative intellectual movement.”Footnote ⁸ So like Buckley and Meyer, Nash allowed antitraditional libertarians into the conservative pantheon, as long as they kept quiet about the more radical implications of their ideas and pulled in harness on behalf of the Republican Party and against the specter of modern liberalism. Similarly, the latter portions of Allitt's account treat conservatism as a political movement as much as an ideology. Ultimately, his definition balances deftly between those of Kirk, Huntington, and Nash, taking conservatism in turn as an attitude, a reaction to specific historical events, and a durable political phenomenon.

But there is an idée fixe to Allitt's discussion that is more than contextual, and one that that is often not mentioned in the modern conservative self-definition: elitism. Allitt does not deliberately foreground elitism or place it at the center of his account. Still, the theme of elitism recurred so strongly throughout the text, and was in so many places the dominant link between one set of conservatives and another, that the book might easily have been titled The Elitists: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History. Though elitism is often linked to tradition, it transcends tradition and is a sensibility shared by libertarians and iconoclasts from William Graham Sumner to Ayn Rand. At times it takes the guise of scientific racism, at others culturally based racism, and again as an affinity for plain old aristocracy. From the evidence Allitt marshals, it seems clear that elitism would be a primary component of any essentialist definition of conservatism.

The trouble with elitism as a unifying theme is not its efficacy, for it is a rather substantial glue that binds together many elements of the American conservative tradition as Allitt presents it, but that Allitt does not fully plumb and explore this theme throughout his text. This is particularly lamentable in the modern era, when the conservative movement learns to engage populist rhetoric and arguably becomes more populist in its orientation and concerns, even while retaining vestiges of its traditional elitism. This was a critical move that transformed conservatism from the sensibility of a few disgruntled elites to a mass political philosophy, and from a personal or cultural creed to a political movement. The distinction between conservatism as an intellectual orientation and conservatism as a political movement is significant, and one I will return to later in this essay.

Allitt begins with a chapter on the Federalists, calling the Federalist Papers “the first conservative classic” and the Federalist politicians of the 1790s and 1800s conservatives because of their belief in “social hierarchy, class deference, and restraint” (7). According to Allitt, founders like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton squared their revolutionary activities with their political conservatism by understanding the Revolution as a fundamentally restorative event, which returned the colonies to first principles lost in the maw of British power. Through his discussion of the Federalists, Allitt describes what might be understood as a conservative theory of human nature, a viewpoint which emphasized the dangers of human passion, the frailty of reason, and the need for stable institutions to create ordered liberty. It was also a viewpoint which emphasized natural inequalities between men, a tendency that comes most clear in the thought of John Adams but is also seen in the establishment of a strong judiciary, which Allitt hails as the “most lasting and conservative achievement” of these early conservatives (23).

This theme of elitism likewise helps hang together Allitt's chapter on southern conservatism, which he identifies as “distinct” from Federalist conservatism but at first seems merely different. Where the Federalists emphasized strong institutions and state-building, the southern conservatives Allitt follows, like John Taylor and John Randolph, tended instead to fear centralized government and advance strident arguments about states’ rights. It is Randolph's declaration “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality” that places him in a lineage similar to Federalist conservatism. John C. Calhoun is a much harder fit to the tradition Allitt has established, at least if his political thinking on nullification is taken as representative. The saving grace, again, proves a form of organized elitism: slavery. It is Calhoun and other southerners’ defense of slavery, “a thoroughly conservative thing to do,” that most strongly makes the case for them as conservatives (36).

In the antebellum North, without a similarly developed system of racial caste to defend, this attitude became much harder to sustain, as Allitt shows in his discussion of antebellum conservatives. He identifies the Whigs as both moderate conservatives and emblematic modern capitalists, interested in “nearly all the characteristics of modern capitalist development: division of labor, specialization, banking and credit, and government policies dedicated to economic growth” (49). Allitt here introduces a new theme, capitalism, that will prove critical to his larger effort to write a synthetic history of conservatism. Emphasis on “internal improvements” also helped the Whigs sidestep the old pattern of elitism and “avoid giving the impression that they opposed universal suffrage” (50). Instead of focusing on aristocracy, Whigs shifted their emphasis to property, arguing it was as “fundamental and natural as the family” (59). As he follows conservatism in the antebellum era, Allitt shifts his focus from politics to culture, identifying a group of littérateurs like George Ticknor and Edward Everett who looked to Britain as the source of a culture America should emulate. Though Allitt does not fully flesh out this cultural piece, he is right to observe that Anglophilia formed an enduring part of the American conservative sensibility.

In the first chapters of the book, Allitt does an able job with a difficult task, following various threads of conservatism in different guise as they surface in the political and social culture of the early republic and antebellum America. Framing conservatism as an attitude rather than an explicit set of political beliefs allows him to impose some unity on his discussion while still encompassing a wide range of subjects and topics. But this is a course fraught with difficulty, as becomes clear when he reaches the Civil War, framed as a “clash of conservatisms.” Allitt's opening argument is strong, and insightful: both sides perceived the other as defending fundamentally conservative institutions (in the north, union; in the South, slavery). And once war came, both Northern and Southern conservatives were able to embrace it for they understood war to be a fundamental part of the human condition. But then new entrants to the conservative pantheon are suggested: Abraham Lincoln, who proclaimed his belief in the proposition “all men are created equal” and infuriated conservatives through his wartime enlargement of executive power, is included for his conservative ability to hold the nation together through war. And northern democrats like Clement Vallandigham, who thought war shortsighted, take their place along northern heirs of Federalism who celebrate armed conflict as an event that, in the words of Francis Parkman, would stir “our clogged and humid atmosphere,” helping the nation emerge “clarified and pure in a renewed and strengthened life” (72).

Allitt's discussion of the Civil War, and the numerous personalities who appear within it—Nathaniel Hawthorne and Orestes Brownson are here too—raises the question whether a definition that can encompass so many different and even contradictory points of view has analytic function or use. How can secessionists be conservative, yet secession be “the antithesis of conservatism” (86)? Allitt is on firmer ground when he covers “lost cause” conservatism, a set of ideas that fits well with his initial rubric. And in closing the chapter, perhaps aware of how unwieldy his cast of characters has become, he reminds readers of his opening assertion that conservatism is “reactional and attitudinal.” But if conservatism is reaction and attitudinal, can it be treated as an autonomous body of ideas?

Allitt here has stumbled upon the fundamental problem that bedevils analysts of conservatism, and probably anyone who attempts to write a broad synthesis of political thinking. The issue seems particularly pointed when it comes to conservatism, however, because it can be defined, à la Huntington, solely along contextual or reactionary lines. And if conservatism really is “antitheoretical,” as Allitt writes, then what are we as intellectual historians bothering with? Should we eschew any effort to take conservative ideas on their own terms, instead always hooking them into the broader context in which they emerged and the ideas against which they fought? Allitt and other historians have marshaled too much evidence about recurrent and persistent conservative ideas to suggest that we can just dismiss it as a content-free psychological orientation to the world that opposes change. Thus far, however, America historians have been more interested in conservatism as a contingent historical force than as a stable swathe of thought. Allitt's book is not intended as a theoretical exposition; it is meant to uncover a tradition, and the more places that tradition is uncovered, the more consequential and significant it becomes to historians. But these questions are here and they need to be addressed. It is a virtue of Allitt's work that it stirs these fundamental issues and provides ample material with which some of our dilemmas can be worked through and discussed: is a definition best narrow and sharp, or wide and dull? Is what we lose in analytic precision made up for by what we gain in historical accuracy? When it comes to conservatism, these questions press with greater urgency in the post-Civil War period, when the boundaries of thought begin to shift sharply.

As capitalism prospered in the Gilded Age and called forth opposition in the form of socialism and communism, conservatives of all stripes joined together to denounce the dangers of such economic radicalism. In this era, Allitt discovers a new kind of conservative, one who embraced capitalism despite its disruptive potential: “What they wanted to conserve was an economic and political system dedicated to material progress and social transformation, in which the holders of private property enjoyed a high degree of protection from state intervention” (99). The best example of this sensibility was William Graham Sumner, though Allitt also cites Andrew Carnegie as an exemplar. Though they were rigorously against inherited privilege, these “libertarian conservatives” were comfortable with hierarchy, which Sumner scientistically recast as the natural outcome of the struggle for survival. They coexist rather uneasily in Allitt's account with the Adams brothers, representatives of traditionalism, and the unlikely figure of Teddy Roosevelt, here claimed as an avatar of a “third conservative type” (98). Allitt has now laid out three rough categories of conservative: traditionalists, libertarians, and aristocratic reformers in the mold of TR.

Bringing them all together under the rubric of conservatism is a new commonality to supplement the familiar one of elitism: all shared a deep dislike of the radical socialist and communist movements that were then rapidly gaining prominence. Allitt's exploration of this theme does much to advance his overall thesis of conservative continuity, for his subjects engage in rhetoric that could just as easily have come from the pen of a mid-twentieth-century Cold Warrior. Indeed, even before the Civil War he finds a southern conservative declaring, of abolitionism,

This attack upon socialism and its associated syndromes would gain salience for conservatives and their audiences as Europe erupted in revolutionary movements, but Allitt shows it has deep roots in the American past.

Moving into the twentieth century, Allitt's discussion alternates between attitudinal and contextual conservatives. Some of his selections here are surprising, such as Theodore Roosevelt, others welcome, such as politicians like Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, often overlooked in the development of conservative thought.Footnote ⁹ Allitt might have further probed how their identity as politicians helped subtly shift the grounds of conservative discourse, for like the Whigs a century before, popularly elected Republican politicians had to be circumspect on the faults of the people. They could not, unlike their contemporary Albert Jay Nock, simply hate “nearly everybody” (149). Suffrage gets scant attention, as does the growing importance of philosophical absolutism to conservative identity as anti-foundational ideas gained prominence. This aspect of conservatism bridges the attitudinal and essentialist senses of the term, for absolutism occupies a specific theoretical position, but one that only needs defending after its opponents have gained in prestige and power.Footnote ¹⁰ To be fair, a survey is a survey. Allitt cannot document every manifestation of conservatism, nor fully defend each of his choices. His tracing of a conservative thread across eras usually bifurcated is an important contribution unto itself; if some of his choices provoke disagreement, all the better.

With the arrival in the 1950s of a bona fide conservative movement, self-aware, self-assured, and bent on both social and political change, Allitt's job becomes considerably easier. No longer is it necessary to construct a lineage; movement conservatism comes with its own canon of thinkers, who are acknowledged as influential on those who call themselves conservative even when they resist the tag (Austrian economist F. A. Hayek being a good example of this). Allitt gives credit to William F. Buckley's National Review and Frank Meyer's associated theory of fusionism, which articulated the philosophical common ground between libertarianism and traditionalist conservatism. Unlike Nash, Allitt is not a cheerleader for fusionism, for he includes cantankerous libertarians like Murray Rothbard, a bitter critic of the new conservative synthesis. Rothbard undoubtedly belongs in any discussion of economic conservatism, but unlike movement conservatives he was harshly critical of fusionism and remained open to the Democratic Party and the political left. Nor does Allitt romanticize conservatives as bold individualists forging an untrod path, for the entirety of his book makes clear that conservatism has existed as a viable position in America since its founding. Having shown the many guises the conservative impulse can take, its substantive content and its deep engagement with present events, it comes as little surprise that the crises of World War II and the emergence of a credible communist rival should have stirred anew the conservative perspective.

With more predictable terrain to cover, Allitt's account loses its interpretative boldness and becomes a narrative of the conservative movement's schisms, feuds, victories and defeats. Yet it was at this very juncture that conservative intellectuals began to cultivate a broad audience that they wooed with new and old wines, most notably a robust conservatism of the people that has taken deep root today. This populism shifted the grounds of libertarianism, too. Where earlier libertarians like Sumner tough-mindedly embraced the inequalities of market capitalism, libertarian economists like Milton Friedman seemed genuinely to believe that market capitalism would uplift the poor (witness his proposals for school vouchers, guaranteed annual income, and tirades against occupational licensing and the minimum wage in Capitalism and Freedom).

The shift to populism is a clear indicator of the distinction between intellectual conservatism and movement conservatism, for elitism is not a viable program for political power in democratic America. The muffling of elitism allowed other aspects of conservative thought to come to the fore, including themes of the “forgotten man” first enunciated by libertarians like Sumner. Following Buckley's lead, conservatives learned to play the game of politics, even if it meant trading in some of their pessimistic dismay at mass democracy for a sunnier celebration of civic nationalism. A basic comfort with hierarchy and difference remained to set conservatives off from egalitarian liberals. But is it true that intellectual conservatism and political conservatism collapsed into one at mid-century? Does the rise of one necessarily bespeak the eclipse of the other? Or is there a history of conservatism distinct from a history of the conservative movement?

Some answers to these questions are suggested by Michael Kimmage's The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, a savory read that offers a number of new perspectives on anti-communism, conservatism, and twentieth-century intellectual history. Where Allitt surveys more than two centuries and dozens of thinkers, Kimmage trains his lenses on two men and approximately four decades, the 1920s through the 1960s. The book begins with a set of chapters that move easily from Chambers to Trilling, tracing the “rough parallelism in experience” that connected them.Footnote ¹¹ Kimmage follows Trilling and Chambers from their radical roots through a mid-century “conservative turn,” arguing that both men's youthful radicalism was borne out an engagement with literary and cultural modernity and its concomitant despair. Likewise, they both passed through their own individual “Kronstadts,” or anti-communist awakenings. From there, they went on to pioneer distinct and oppositional forms of liberal and conservative anti-communism. On the right, anti-communism helped to knit together libertarians and conservatives; on the left it promoted moderation as a core value, along with a renewed appreciation for liberal democracy. “The anti-Stalinist Trilling presided over the moderation of the intellectual left (7),” summarizes Kimmage, while Chambers offered “an openly conservative persona, a feel for political strategy, and a frank sympathy for religion” (11) to generations of conservatives. In the latter part of the book, Kimmage's account breaks into separate chapters that closely examine Trilling's The Middle of the Journey (1947) and the events of the Hiss case, which Trilling's novel so eerily prefigured. He brings the two back together for concluding chapters that examine how both men helped create anti-communism as a personal and political position in postwar America. Though Kimmage describes the divergent trajectories of Chambers and Trilling that carried them into differing political camps, he notes one significant place where these trajectories crossed: neoconservatism (10). Not much of this is new, or news, but there is much to be gained from juxtaposing the literary, ideological, and spiritual journeys of these two men.

One thing to be gained is a better understanding of how intertwined the development of conservatism and liberalism has been throughout the twentieth century. As Allitt demonstrates, no sooner had socialism emerged than the American conservative tradition began to constitute itself in opposition, in the process opening itself to acquisitive and iconoclastic capitalists it may well have otherwise shunned. Kimmage extends this story by showing how conservative and liberal anti-communism grew from common roots, reminding us that anti-communism was powered as much by the left as by the right. “The early anti-communism of Trilling and Chambers had several interlocking components,” he writes, among them hostility to the USSR, a critique of the left, and an earnest search for alternatives (110). This early coincidence helps explain the bitter schism between varieties of anti-communism in the wake of McCarthy, for it was above all a falling out between siblings sharing a common encounter with Soviet communism, “The cardinal experience of American intellectuals in the 1930s” (4). This interdependence is something many of my students in seminars on conservative intellectual history have come to understand after their first tour through the literature. At semester's end, they often reflect that liberalism is the missing piece, and wish that we could look at both elements in tandem. My conservative friends urge otherwise, fearing conservatism will lose its toehold in the academy if set against the more popular liberal tradition. Into this dilemma comes Kimmage's book, which ought to earn a place on any syllabus concerned with either strand of thought.

The second advantage to Kimmage's dual focus is that his book unsettles the very categories of left and right that shape so many of our most basic historical perceptions. Ironically it is Trilling, that great representative of mid-century liberalism, who emerges as the more conservative of the two men, in multifold senses of the term. Like Allitt, Kimmage offers a number of ways to understand and define conservatism. As his narrative moves into the mid-1940s, Kimmage describes “the death of radicalism or, put differently, the birth of conservatism” (159). This is at first look a situational conservatism, born of the recoil from totalitarianism, and Kimmage identifies Trilling as its foremost exponent.Footnote ¹² But Trilling's conservatism is not merely situational, as his fondness for Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot indicates. There was something essential in Trilling's “moral imagination” that was conservative, asserts Kimmage. Several stories written prior to The Middle of the Journey extended “a cautious sympathy to conservatism, derived from reflections on mortality, support for moral absolutes, and the tacit acceptance of hierarchy” (180). Nor did this tendency go unnoticed by his peers. Kimmage satirizes the suspicions that swirled about Trilling among the intelligentsia:

However silly such suspicions may seem, Kimmage knows these cultural affinities had meaning. He implies that Trilling's conservatism was a matter of both heart and mind, highlighting his fondness for the Victorian era, his bourgeois manners and temperament, and his belief in the virtues of stability and order. At base lay a profound belief in the Western tradition, which Trilling approached “as an object of almost spiritual veneration” (246). In this rendering, Trilling's detour into radicalism is a detour indeed, an anomaly caused by the historical crisis and his susceptibility to the currents of the times. His return to a sort of conservatism, then, is perhaps the natural trajectory of his thought.

But Trilling vehemently disliked the conservative label, becoming agitated and upset when characterized as such. And he was careful to separate himself from any organized political conservatism. When Willie Schlamm sent him the prospectus for a new conservative magazine, an early effort toward what would become National Review, Trilling politely declined to participate in the venture. He was similarly cool to overtures from Peter Viereck. Nor would he review Chambers's writing, for he did not want “his name associated with conservatives such as Chambers. The sympathy [others] assumed between Trilling and Chambers was a sympathy that Trilling wished to keep within certain borders” (245). It was conservatism as a political “movement” that disturbed Trilling. He had no use for William F. Buckley Jr with his embrace of McCarthy's crude populism and his militant postures. Yet as Kimmage shows, when set against his milieu, Trilling is indeed conservative, “in a way that neither Buckley nor Chambers wished to be in the 1950s” (266). Comfortable with the acquisitive folkways of the educated middle class to whom he spoke, Trilling harbored no fantasies of radical change or upheaval. In the book's closing scene, he is comfortably ensconced in the Kennedy White House, relishing his place within the establishment.

On the other hand, Chambers retains the tinge of radicalism in his insistence that Western civilization went off track during the Enlightenment. This comes clear not so much in Witness (1952), his most famous work, but in his later writings. Witness had many agendas, among them sounding the tocsin of alarm for a declining West and vindicating Chambers's account of his relationship with Alger Hiss. It won an immediate place in the conservative canon and made Chambers a conservative hero, but Kimmage finds him to be “a radical among conservatives” (228), situationally speaking at least. This was not because of his intrinsic values, but because of his growing belief that the “United States would have to undergo a revolution in its political and cultural life in order to reverse the progress of the Bolshevik revolution” (228). Part of this orientation may lie in Chambers's character: once a revolutionary, always a revolutionary. Chambers wrestled with the turn from radicalism to conservatism, hedging constantly about his relation to National Review before severing his ties to the magazine entirely. Some of his hesitancy came from his endemic pessimism and the fear that he had chosen the losing side when he abandoned communism. Much of it came from his lingering distaste for capitalism, which was becoming ever more important to Buckley's crowd. Whatever the reason, in the years before his death in 1961 Chambers was more comfortable in the posture of a tragic counterrevolutionary than in that of a conservative.

It was not for want of trying. When he first emerged into the open air as a writer for Time, Chambers busied himself with the American past, seeking to find materials for his own developing identity. At times, Kimmage suggests this was a plausible quest: “American history is wonderfully rich in conservative resources, and it was to these that Chambers dedicated his series on Western culture” (155). At other points, Kimmage appears ambivalent about the existence or durability of an American conservative tradition, finding that Chambers did not have a “conservative tradition either in American thought or politics to support his passionate anti-communism” (108). It is too bad that Chambers did not have Allitt's text as a resource; perhaps it would have slowed his deepening conviction that America was doomed. Or perhaps nothing would counterbalance the trauma of the Hiss case, which seems to have shaken Chambers's faith in the regeneration of America even as it confirmed his emerging belief in the wisdom of the people. Whatever the precise impact, his writing afterwards was tinged by the sense that only radical change could save the West. The book he was working on at his death, Third Rome, later published as Cold Friday, was “so radically a rejection of the status quo that nothing much could be built upon it” (266).

According to Kimmage, two other elements of Chambers's thought constrained this residual radicalism: his deep Christian belief, and his abiding interest in practical politics and strategy, which tethered him to the Republican Party and movement conservatism. These were also the two factors that separated him most decisively from Trilling. As Kimmage notes, Trilling had “no single attitude toward religion: he respected it, he was alienated from it, he was attracted to it, and he was afraid of it” (184). Still, religion lay at the heart of Trilling's political identity in several ways. On a fundamental level, some of Trilling's discomfort with the conservative label may have stemmed from the strong cultural ties between his New York Jewish milieu and political leftism. Kimmage writes that Trilling downplayed his Judaism because it might have complicated his embrace of liberal universalism, a decision also influenced by his strongly assimiliationist drive and the absence of any compelling religious experience. One wonders what Trilling would have done with a religious tradition that made him an American insider, not an outsider. This is one critical difference between Trilling and his neoconservative students, latter-generation heirs to a firmly established “Judeo-Christian tradition,” and thereby comfortable making their Judaism a centerpiece of their political conservatism. In any event, Chambers lacked such conflicts and wholeheartedly embraced Christianity, making his spiritual regeneration the centerpiece of Witness and the basis of his conservative persona.

What, then, to do with Chambers, this radical conservative, and Trilling, this conservative liberal? In some senses, Kimmage's discussion is a return to the Burkean conservatism of Russell Kirk. But Kimmage's sense of conservatism lacks the political litmus test of Kirk, who as Arthur Schlesinger Jr pointed out, had a rather instrumentalist view of his creed. As Schlesinger observed in a biting 1955 attack on Kirk, citing his opposition to free public-school lunches, “for all his talk about mutual responsibility and the organic character of society, Professor Kirk, when he gets down to cases, tends to become a roaring Manchester liberal.”Footnote ¹³ One thing Kimmage does extraordinarily well is break free of the confines of “movement” conservatism even as he situates conservatism at the very center of American intellectual life in the twentieth century. Kimmage understands Chambers as a preeminent conservative intellectual; despite his vestigial radicalism, the impact of Chambers on other conservatives and the deeply traditional thrust of his work makes this appellation just. But he also sees Trilling as one who can rightly be said to have made a “conservative turn,” no matter how he clings to the liberal label. According to Kimmage, it is moderation above all that helps resolve the complexities of Trilling's place in American thought. We might think of Trilling's mind as a mixture of radicalism and conservatism that blended together into liberalism, a balancing act hinted at by the title of his 1955 collection of essays, The Opposing Self. In both men, categories bump up against personality, and abstraction against particularity.

The bigger question at work here is how we as historians handle the political categories of our time, particularly when they obtrude as sharply as they do in modern America. Should we transcend them, as does Kimmage, or give into them, as did Nash, or rest somewhere in between, like Allitt? Can we recognize the categories of “liberal” and “conservative” as historically bound and constructed, and create our own boundaries and constructions to replace them?Footnote ¹⁴ Kimmage writes that Trilling “opened the door to conservative ideas without ever walking through to the other side” (12)—dare we pull him across the threshold? And what, most importantly, allows us to see the history most clearly?

In 1976, Nash's willingness to take conservatism at face value helped draw into focus a movement that had gone unheeded. Decades later, a cavalcade of literature on conservatism behind us, both Kimmage's work and Allitt's suggest it may be time to push back against the present. Stepping away from the politics of today can allow us to see the deeper connections that lie beneath the partisan divide, such as in the case of Chambers and Trilling. Allitt's treatment opens up the possibility of deeper comparative work across generations. Can we find Kronstadt, too, in the nineteenth-century reaction against socialism and communism? One can imagine a volume that juxtaposed not right and left, but pre- and post-Civil War, or followed the silent conservative literary traditional across the generations.

Though neither author pursues this avenue, the global connections between all strains of conservatism deserve exploration. The headnote to Kimmage's book, a poem by the Russian Anna Akhmatova, reminds us of the international dimensions of the “God that failed.” It also stirs anew the question of context—if a fundamental aspect of conservatism is context, should our reference point be America, or the broader Atlantic West? The slippage between left and right highlights a fundamental difference between American and European conservatism that both complicates and compels attention to the Atlantic crossings that shaped both creeds. Moreover, there is clearly a need for more explicit attention to elitism and absolutism as constitutive of conservative philosophy wherever and whatever its manifestation.Footnote ¹⁵

What both texts make clear is that there is a conservative tradition in America, and that it has always mingled, uneasily and easily, with classical and modern liberalism. Constrained by our contemporary political categories, writing in the shadow of a historiography that insists upon America as a liberal polity, and distracted by their fondness for social democracy, historians have not always noticed this tradition. After Allitt they will know it is there, and after Kimmage they will wonder where else it might be.