Conservatism from the Vasty Deep

Most historians are familiar with certain well-worn aphorisms on the indispensability of history. Faulkner claimed the past was neither dead nor past; Nietzsche declared that no matter how fast we run, we drag the chain of our past with us; Santayana warned that if we forget the past we condemn ourselves to repeat it. Hence the past is either inescapable, or we escape it only at our peril. Less obvious, and more subject to contentious debate, is what exactly our unavoidable history means: what are its lessons; who are its heroes (or villains); and in practical terms, how should the collective memories of a people, a race, a nation, a society, or any distinctive cohort, be used to inform wise choices going forward? Reba Soffer's History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America provides, in effect, a series of related case studies centered on such questions as these. That is, Soffer examines the writings and careers of eight public intellectuals (four British, four American) who used their historical knowledge to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of twentieth-century liberalism and what they saw as the greater dangers of leftist radicalism.

According to Soffer, these figures shared three characteristics: they were historians, though not all were academics; they were conservatives, though not necessarily of the same variety; and they were influential, though Soffer admits that influence is difficult to measure. The prime difference between the British and American writers was that British historians built upon a conservative tradition reaching back (at least) to the French Revolution, while the Americans, lacking such a deeply rooted tradition, had to construct one afresh after World War II. In addition, the British historians were more effective in connecting their conservative values to contemporary politics because the Conservative Party upheld traditional, conservative principles. By contrast, conservative ideology did not clearly dominate the Republican Party in America until the Reagan era.

Transatlantic dichotomies also pertained to institutions and cultural communities. The four British historians covered—F. J. C. Hearnshaw (1869-1946), Keith Feiling (1884-1977), Arthur Bryant (1899-1985), and Herbert Butterfield (1900-79)—belonged to a small, exclusive club that was centered around Oxford and Cambridge Universities and extended into government ministries and the media. Often there were family connections and personal relationships that reinforced the group identity of this elite network of opinion shapers and policymakers. In the United States no such small, privileged circle existed. The nation was too large, too young, its society too fluid and too geographically dispersed; even its intellectual tradition was less settled, and its intellectuals enjoyed less status. Therefore the historians Daniel Boorstin (1914-2004), Rowland Berthoff (1921-2001), Peter Viereck (1919-2006), and Russell Kirk (1918-94) were united more by their opposition to post-New Deal liberalism and to fears of the nation lurching leftward than by connections of class, religion, family, or affiliations with common institutions.

Soffer is far better in her depiction and analysis of the British landscape than of the American. This is understandable given her historical expertise and her previous research.¹ While she applies to both countries the axiom that conservatism is mostly a reactive force against left-of-center initiatives, her portrait of the intellectual, historiographical, and political landscape within which that force operated in Britain is richer, more nuanced, and more thematically unified than her parallel portrait of the American scene. Conservatism in the U.K. may simply be an easier concept to define than its U.S. counterpart. Nevertheless, Soffer describes it as an empire-oriented ideology "in defence of hierarchical authority, paternalism, deference, the monarchy, Church, family, nation, status, and place." It was directed against socialism, communism, state interventionism, and the "erosion of privilege and power" of the traditional land-owning elite. These sentiments supported a devotion to the Conservative Party as the "historic protector of law, order, and property rights within a nation unified by ancient institutions" (pp. 6-7...