This interview ran in The University Bookman in 1996 (vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 25-32), when Jeffrey O. Nelson, who was the journal’s editor, expertly turned the lengthy manuscript of my 90-minute interview into a coherent, polished piece. I was a student at Middle Tennessee State University writing my dissertation on prose style in Buckley’s fiction, and my director suggested I inquire about interviewing the author. It was fitting that Buckley was the Bookman’s first interview, as he helped Russell Kirk found this journal in 1960.

Buckley as a novelist is a topic still given little attention by scholars, and reviewers have focused more on the author instead of the work. My hope now is that readers unfamiliar with his Cold War spy fiction and the CIA’s Blackford Oakes will take away an insight or two about Buckley the novelist. Such as? His philosophy of language, his rituals as an author, how he creates a character’s name, and the OSS—which is not about the CIA’s parent organization. 

During our meeting at Buckley’s Manhattan office on East 35th Street, I inquired about plans for another spy novel. “No,” Buckley said.“The Cold War is over.” But nine years later he published Last Call for Blackford Oakes, taking Oakes back into deep cover in Moscow during Reagan’s second term. — WFM, April 2025.

I remember when I discovered that among his many talents, William F. Buckley Jr. was a novelist. Browsing the new books area of the University of Delaware library late one afternoon, I noticed Buckley’s The Story of Henri Tod, his fourth novel. I randomly selected a page and began to read. I was hooked.

On this page, Buckley’s humor and wit were on full display. Blackford Oakes—the hero of Buckley’s novels—is describing himself in a note to a lady he meets on a train headed to Vienna in the hope she will dine with him that evening. “I am the love child of the Prince of Wales and Tallulah Bankhead,” he writes. “I was born in 1925, and was kept hidden away on an Aegean island. There I learned to spear wild hogs, fight bulls, track snow leopards, and walk over burning coals. During the summers, my father sent the faculty of Eton to teach me Greek and Latin. . . .”

Buckley’s leading man is the quintessential “Cold Warrior.” He remarked to an audience at the Bohemian Club after completing his sixth novel, See You Later Alligator, that his intent was to show that the CIA “seeks to advance the honorable alternative in the great struggle for the world.” He makes it unmistakably clear that the Americans are the good guys.

I met with Mr. Buckley in his office at National Review late last year to talk about his nearly twenty years as a novelist.

What is the function of the novelist in society?
WFB: The function of the novelist is to depict reality and excite the imagination.

Will you write another Blackford Oakes novel?
WFB: No. The Cold War’s over.

Did the Blackford Oakes novels require the approval of the CIA since you were an employee?
WFB: No. It’s amusing you ask that because when I lectured at the CIA seven or eight years ago, maybe a bit more than that, the director of the CIA teased me that theoretically I should have had approval.

What is Blackford’s most distinguishing feature of character?
WFB: I didn’t intend for any particular one to stand out except his actual loyalty to the United States and the Western cause.

Blackford reads National Review, and he has Up from Liberalism in one of the early books, even mentions your name in several others . . .

WFB: That’s my little cameo.
. . . so in what ways does Blackford exhibit libertarian or conservative values?

WFB: Libertarian only in the sense that he’s generally anti-statist; he reads National Review. He is conservative in the sense that he thinks that the values of the West are worth a nuclear deterrent, and devotes his life to corollary propositions. So, that’s pretty conservative. But it is interesting, he was very attached to Kennedy, personally attached in a couple of those books, and he was absolutely dumbfounded when he couldn’t rescue him from the assassin. So he had a personal attachment to Kennedy. But I can’t remember that in any of the books I had him simply expatiate in general on any political policies. These aren’t political books in the sense that National Review is a political magazine. He has no pine on socialized Medicare of anything.

Is that because spies are supposed to be apolitical?
WFB: Spies traditionally work for whichever government is in power, so in that sense, they are apolitical. But you’re not required to be apolitical. They can be very fervent socialists or very fervent anti-statists, and it wouldn’t theoretically affect their power to exercise their calling.

How did you prepare to write a Blackford Oakes novel?
WFB: What happens is that two or three weeks before going on my annual retreat to Switzerland, I would decide on what the mise-en-scéne would be. I might decide, for instance, it’s going to be [a] Castro novel, and it’s going to feature the Bay of Pigs or whatever. Then I’d get my people here to line me up with two or three books on the subject and take them with me to Switzerland, and then start in.

What are the advantages to writing in Switzerland?
WFB: The advantages are that people don’t call you up every five minutes, which happens here. And there’s some allocation of time. I do my administrative work in the morning, and my column. Then have lunch and go skiing. Then I start writing around 4:15 or 4:30 and write till about 7:15 or 7:30, and do that every single day until the book is finished.

Do you set a time frame to finish the novel?
WFB: Yeah. It’s taken as few as four and as many as six and a half weeks.

Which months of the year do you go there to write a novel?
WFB: February and March.

What about your immediate environment in which you do your writing? What’s around you? Do you look over a lake, a ski slope?
WFB: For twenty-seven years we rented a chateau that belongs to a friend. It’s an enormous twelfth-century place that started out as a monastery. It had a very large room, which had been a children’s playroom with a ping-pong table at one end. And it looks out into the base of a mountain in Gstaad, Switzerland. That’s where I wrote most of my books. There was a fire at one point, in 1973. So for two years, we had to rent individual chalets. The owners sold part of the chateau, so we now have a chalet, up high, that looks over the same mountain next to which I used to be. 

When you’re writing your fiction, are there any rituals you follow? Do you listen to music, drink coffee?
WFB: My rituals are that I start around 4:30 after I take my bath and my shower. I work pretty regularly. Sometimes I hear the fax machine working and say, ‘Should I get up and see if it’s urgent?’ Always at exactly seven o’clock, our cook brings me a Kier, which is white wine with a little touch of crème de cassis. I take out one of my little cigars, and I have the most glorious feeling of satisfaction. Sometimes, I might just finish a few paragraphs. But three years ago, I gave up booze at Lent, and Lent, of course, always happens halfway through my novels. And so therefore I had to satisfy myself with grapefruit juice and my cigars. Last year I gave up cigars. So I had to satisfy myself, for Lent I mean, just with my Kier. I might make a deal with God to let my own private Lent begin after the novel. It’s really a wonderful combination. A little Dutch cigar and Kier. I recommend it. 

So, regardless of how many words you’ve written or how many pages you stop around seven o’clock?
WFB: 7:00 or 7:15. But I also see how many words I’ve done. It’s got to be 1,500 average.

What do you enjoy most about being a novelist?
WFB: It’s fun to spin a bit of yarn. My books are very meticulously plotted. There’s no sloppiness in the plot. I think I wrote somewhere that when I accepted the commission to write a novel, I bought a book called How to Write a Novel. The only thing I remember about the book is the reader expects only one coincidence, resents more than one. I’ve sort of been guided by that. So there’s always a coincidence in the book, but no more than one coincidence. Anyway, if you bring back a manuscript and people write ‘Gee, that was neat,’ then that gives you a nice feeling.

How do you decide on a character’s name?
WFB: It’s completely improvised, except the Russian names. I’m not good at making up Russian names. So what I got was the index to the Gulag Archipelago, which has fifteen hundred Russian names. I tend to look for names that are slightly euphonious.

How about the title of a novel? How do you decide on that, and when do you normally decide on a title?
WFB: Well, sometimes I know right away. I remember deciding before writing it that I would call a particular book See You Later Alligator, which made a lot of sense to me, especially in the Spanish version of it, Hasta Luego Camián. This story is amusing. I went to a little party that Andy Warhol gave for about twenty people. I didn’t catch the name of the woman on my left, so she turned to me and she said, ‘What are you working on?’ Maybe I’ve written this, I forget. People who ask me that question—I interpret, by the look on their face, whether they want the thirty-second answer, the one-minute answer, or the two-minute answer. This was a two-minute lady, so I gave her the whole works. She said, ‘That’s fascinating. What are you calling it?’ I said, ‘That’s a real problem, because the publisher said if I don’t give it a name by noon tomorrow, they’re going to call it whatever they feel like. She said, ‘Why don’t you call it Stained Glass?’ Weeks later I found out she was Ruth Ford, the actress. So she named that book. Stained Glass. And Stained Glass is a great title for it. It’s a play on words. Stained Glass has two meanings. The word macula is the Latin for sin and stain. It’s nice to have a title with double entendre. And most of mine do. 

Do you have a philosophy of language, and if you do, how does that affect your fiction?
WFB: The only philosophy of language that I have is that I won’t, except in very exceptional circumstances, suppress an unusual word if the word flashes to my mind as exactly appropriate. [James Jackson] Kilpatrick will suppress them. If he feels eighty percent of the people who read this don’t know what that word means, he won’t put it in. I will put it in.

Why, because you think we should go look it up?
WFB: Well, the way I rationalize it is that word exists because there was what the economists would call a ‘felt need’ for it, i.e., no other word around did what this particular word does. Therefore, the eventuation of that word enriched the choices you have. So, why do you want to be a party to diminishing the choices that you have, when you’re dealing with a language which you worship for its beauty? Ronald Knox noted that the translator of the King James Bible subsumed seven different Greek words defining different shades of an ethical perception in the word ‘righteous’ in the King James version. As a result, he said ethical exploration was set back by generations because those words had to be rediscovered. I thought it was a fascinating point. So, if you suppress a particular word, let’s say, ‘velleity’—something you desire, but not ardently—if you suppress that word, you diminish the choices by which people can express and distinguish between something that absolutely want and something they would like in the sense they would like an extra sweater. I don’t want to be a party to that.

In your essay, “In Defense of Unusual Words and Foreign Phrases,” you mentioned that you have about a thousand of these kinds of words and phrases as part of your working vocabulary.
WFB: I hadn’t counted them, but subsequently I did. You know why, because my nephew came up with the idea of publishing a calendar of unusual words. The very bright idea he had was to quote my actual use of it. The question was, ‘How many years could I go?’ The answer is three. After three, there weren’t enough unusual words, so they started reprinting them in different formats. Therefore, you’re talking about a thousand words that I routinely use, or have used, which would be unusual enough to engage the attention of people who want to learn. The average buyer of one of these calendars would probably know two-thirds of them, and a third he wouldn’t know. I once, having read the latest Updike book, underlined the words I didn’t know. And at our next editorial meeting, I went around my company of learned associates. Of the twenty-six words I underlined, twenty-four of them were known to somebody. But probably if they had read it, they would have found twenty-six words of which I knew two-thirds. Everybody has a private stock of words, which for some reason stay to the memory, and it’s a different stock of words. The person who uses more unusual words than any human being, alive or dead, is Patrick O’Brian—the guy who writes sailing books. He has the world’s most extensive vocabulary.

What do you think your strengths as a novelist are?
WFB: A clean plot, fast movement, and an eye for humor. There is a leanness in my novels, which some people say is characteristic of my writing when I write novels, i.e., there’s not a lot of time spent describing exteriorities, which some people do beautifully. 

How do you place yourself in the tradition of espionage literature or spy novels? Where do you see yourself fitting in there? And how do your novels differ from the others?
WFB: They are not like anybody else’s. Having said that, I’m not quite sure how I would actually distinguish them. They’re much better written than eighty, ninety percent. I’m not as good a writer, in my judgment, as Le Carré. I have certain strengths he doesn’t have, among them brevity. And then, of course, there’s the fact that I’m unambiguous when the time comes to show who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and he’s very ambiguous. But beyond that, I don’t know, I don’t read many of those others. I probably haven’t read more than ten in my life.

Ten spy novels?
WFB:  Yeah. I’ve read four or five Bond ones, up until he got surrealistic. Mainly the early Bond, which I enjoyed, but the later Bond got out of this world, sort of Supermanish.

What role does your Catholicism play in your fiction?
WFB: I feel that Catholicism affects human character and that human character affects fiction. In my case—well, in Brothers No More—I put up front a situation in which Caroline asks a priest what she ought to do under certain circumstances. So there’s a little bit of Catholic theology built into that. I think that’s beyond a sort of implicit recognition that some things are right and some things are wrong to do.

Some people might object to the philandering of Blackford. Why do you incorporate that element into your novels?
WFB:  Well, in my judgment, when you write a novel post about 1955, there’s got to be a sexual element. I remember one time having dinner with Nabokov in Switzerland, which was a yearly event. I said, ‘You look very pleased with yourself today, Vadim.’ He said, ‘I am, I have finished my OSS.’ ‘What’s OSS?’ ‘Obligatory Sex Scene.’ The people expect it because sex surrounds us more vividly than would have been the case fifty years ago. You don’t go to a movie as a rule without having some sexual element. Most books have a sexual element. There are sex cases in all the newspapers, so it becomes a conventional daily event in the imaginary life. A book that doesn’t have it is a book about which people, not even knowing what it is, tend to feel something’s missing. I recognized this even starting in, and have those two scenes in Saving the Queen, one involving the brother and the other the Queen herself. 

Do you have a favorite among the ten novels?
WFB: I think probably Saving the Queen is the most fun. Maybe because it’s my first, maybe because the idea of seducing the Queen is kind of fun—actually, he was seduced. She did the seducing. I guess I’m the proudest of that book. Somebody did a screenplay on Saving the Queen and had this rather novel change, which was okay by me. They made her unmarried, so nobody was committing adultery. And I thought it loses a couple of nice scenes with her stuffy husband, but you can do away with that and have a fairy queen, as in Elizabeth I. 

What’s become of the screenplay for Saving the Queen?
WFB: At one point, CBS was interested in the possibility of running a Blackford Oakes movie once a month. All the books, and maybe more plots. They got close enough to get me to Hollywood to talk with them, but then they turned it down. So it stalled. My son said, ‘Well, they didn’t discover Vietnam in the movies for about ten years.’ Then he said to me, ‘You own the Cold War. When the Cold War is rediscovered, Blackford Oakes will be all over the place.’ I hope he’s right.

My experience is that when I mention you as a novelist to my liberal English professors, they automatically dismiss you because of who you are. They know you as the National Review guy.
WFB: That’s right, and they would not read my books.

Right. Is there anything you could say to those kinds of professors who dismiss your novels so readily?
WFB: I could say, ‘Nabokov thinks they’re good.’ Nabokov died just before Stained Glass came out (which won an American Book Award). So he only read Saving the Queen. But he was laudatory about it. And he was a fussy man.

William F. Meehan III is editor of William F. Buckley Jr.: A Bibliography, Conversations with William F. Buckley Jr., and Getting About: Travel Writings of William F. Buckley Jr.

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Thomas Harding published The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing last year. The University Bookman contributor JP O’Malley caught up with Mr. Harding to discuss his writing of the first biography of this important figure.

Thomas Harding’s latest book, The Maverick, begins on September 13, 1919, in Vienna, where Arthur George Weidenfeld was born. He was the only son of Max and Rosa Weidenfeld and grew up in a modest middle class Jewish family. Researching the biography, Harding travelled to the apartment where George Weidenfeld and his family lived. Gumpendorferstrasse 111 was once a bustling Jewish neighborhood within Vienna’s 6th District. “I wanted to find out about George’s life before he came to England, so I met George’s daughter, Laura, who kindly sent me this diary, which his mother had kept when George was a small boy in Vienna,” Harding explains from his home in Hampshire, England.

The award-winning, bestselling author, whose previous books include Hanns and Rudolf (2013) and The House by the Lake (2015), notes how Weidenfeld as a child was taught how to read Hebrew and encouraged to pay attention to his family’s religious heritage. On his mother’s side of the family there were Jewish rabbis going back to the sixteenth century. Weidenfeld learned from his mother about the most famous of these: Isaiah Abraham Horowitz (also known as the “Holy Shelah”). Horowitz had been chief rabbi in Prague before moving to Jerusalem where he led the Ashkenazi community. During his time in Israel, Isaiah Abraham Horowitz wrote a book that became highly influential among European Jews. In it, he stressed the pursuit of joy and positivity, even in the face of adversity and evil.

It’s an attitude that Weidenfeld would embrace for most of his life. He would later lose both of his grandmothers in the Holocaust. He never spoke about the trauma for the rest of his life, even to his own family. Harding points out that Weidenfeld managed to exit his home city, Vienna, at the right moment. Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. Weidenfeld arrived in London the following summer. “George came to England with no contacts, no money and could barely speak English,” Harding explains. “But through hard work, diligence, and skills, he was able to build this extraordinary publishing empire.” 

Weidenfeld was just twenty-years old when he landed a job as a linguist for the BBC’s Overseas Intelligence Department. The work introduced him to figures like English novelist George Orwell, the exiled leader of the Free French General Charles de Gaulle, and a young writer called Nigel Nicolson.

The latter figure came from a bohemian background with old money. His family also had good social connections, particularly in the literary world. Both proved useful when the two young men launched a publishing house in London in 1949. Weidenfeld & Nicolson would go on to publish numerous best-selling authors, including Henry Kissinger, Joan Didion, Henry Miller, Edna O’Brien, Clare Tomalin, and Saul Bellow. The London publisher also published books by senior Nazis. 

Included in Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s 1953-54 catalogue, for example, was Hitler’s Table Talk, a series of monologues given by the Führer. The book was edited by the Oxford academic Hugh Trevor-Roper, who added an introduction, providing context and historical background. In that same catalogue was The Story of Nazi Political Espionage by Wilhelm Hoettl, which provided an insight into the German secret service. Then in 1970 Weidenfeld & Nicolson published Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer. In 1942, Speer had been appointed Armaments Minister in Hitler’s government and became second only to Hitler himself as a power on the home front. For publishing these controversial titles, Weidenfeld was repeatedly attacked by Jewish individuals and organizations. He was also criticized for providing a platform for Nazis and for amplifying their propaganda. 

Harding speaks about the great lengths Weidenfeld sometimes had to go to get these authors published. This was particularly true of Speer who was incarcerated in Spandau prison after the Second World War. Weidenfeld wrote to him, suggesting that he write his memoirs. “Speer was released in 1966 after completing his twenty-year sentence and, soon after, George hosted a dinner party for him in Düsseldorf with a group of influential people, including British and German diplomats and journalists,” Harding explains. 

The English author confesses that he was commissioned to write this biography by the current chairman at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. “I made it clear to the publisher from the beginning that they had no control over anything I wrote on this book,” Harding insists. “And I can honestly say they haven’t asked me to keep anything out.”

Harding doesn’t appear to self-censor though. Nor does he go out of his way to paint Weidenfeld in a favorable manner. “I think George was somebody who was totally self-serving,” says Harding openly and honestly. “He was a very lonely character and he tried to compensate for that by forging this network of friendships and business partnerships. Books and publishing became his way of achieving that.”

Many of the books Weidenfeld & Nicolson published are now considered modern classics. Among those titles are The Double Helix (1968) by James Watson and The Group (1963) by Mary McCarthy, as well as huge bestsellers, such as Keith Richards’s memoir Life (2010), Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), and I Am Malala (2013) by Malala Yousafzai.

“Just look at how many extraordinary books that were published under George’s guidance as co-founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson,” Harding points out. “You can say after one or two, that maybe he was lucky. But when you start getting into roughly 30 or 40 books that changed modern western culture, you have to start thinking, this was a man who had the ability to recognize literary greatness.”

Weidenfeld personally took on huge financial risks to get some of the more controversial titles he took on published. This was especially true of Lolita (1955). Originally published in Paris by Olympia Press, Vladimir Nabokov’s novel recalls Humbert Humbert’s steamy romance with a twelve-year-old. Is it literature? Is it pornography? It is undoubtedly about a middle-aged man who repeatedly rapes a teenager he purports to be smitten by. 

These issues were raised in the lengthy debates that ensued in the months leading up to Lolita’s publication in Britain. They were even featured in Britain’s House of Commons. Over the summer of 1958, Conservative chief whip, Ted Heath, begged Nigel Nicolson, then a Tory MP, not to publish the book. In mid-December 1958, a week before a new Obscenity Bill was being debated in Westminster, Nicolson addressed Parliament about the importance of artistic freedom and the dangers of censorship. “Is an obscene work of art a contradiction in terms?” he asked his fellow MPs rhetorically. In the winter of 1959, amid much scandal and media fanfare, Weidenfeld & Nicolson published Lolita. Within weeks nearly 300,000 copies were sold in Britain and across the commonwealth.

The publishing of Lolita changed the ability for writers to be able to publish what they felt was important to write, the biographer explains. However, “Nigel Nicholson’s family was against the publication of Lolita, so Nigel was caught between his parents and George on this issue,” says Harding. “And he stood up for the publication of the novel in the British Parliament and lost his constituency seat [as a result of it].”

The biographer spends considerable time and ink looking at how Weidenfeld used his publishing empire to wield political influence. In 1949, Weidenfeld worked in the office of Israel’s founding president, Chaim Weizmann. He also published the memoirs of some leading Israeli politicians, including Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, and David Ben-Gurion. “George was an ardent Zionist before the state of Israel was created in 1948,” Harding explains. “And like many Jews of his generation, that only strengthened after the Holocaust.” 

Harding says Weidenfeld had a “long, involved and complicated relationship with Israel.” “At times, some people, particularly his authors, criticized George for prioritizing Israel over other aspects of his life,” the author points out. “His relationship with Israel was not without controversy, certainly in the publishing world.”

The biographer also notes that after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Weidenfeld became increasingly preoccupied with European politics and the issue of German unification. Weidenfeld felt a unified Germany would be beneficial to Germany itself, Europe, and the world.

In a letter to Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of West Germany, dated February 23, 1990, Weidenfeld made clear his reasons for supporting reunification. “A united Germany can and must play a vitally important part, not only politically and economically, but also in the sphere of human rights, and especially in the struggle against racism, chauvinism and anti-Semitism, as it helps the emergent democracies of Central and Eastern Europe to enter the civil society,” he wrote. 

On July 13, 1990, Weidenfeld met Kohl for two hours at his home in Bonn. The following day Weidenfeld summarized his thoughts on paper. “Germany’s auspicious progress on the road to unity is not only a vindication of the Federal Republic’s achievement in building a functioning democracy, vibrant economy and civil society but also renews a link with all that was most promising in the early part of the Weimar Republic and in the past century.” 

Germany finally reunified in October 1990. Eight months later, Weidenfeld received the Knight Commander’s Cross (Badge and Star) of the Order of Merit from the newly united German government.

“George would always say that he was somebody who loved both Germany and Austria,” Harding explains. “But he loved them before the Nazi regime. And he wanted to be part of bringing that back. For George it was about rebuilding a culture that he found really beautiful.” 

“But his relationships with Germany and with Austria were always focused on another agenda: strengthening the alliance between Austria, Germany and the state of Israel,” Harding explains. “And in this regard, he was very successful.”  

Elsewhere, the biographer examines Weidenfeld’s dramatic love life. He married four times and had numerous affairs. Weidenfeld first walked down the aisle with Jane Sieff in 1952, who gave birth to a baby girl, Laura, the following year. The couple divorced in 1956. Soon afterwards the publisher became obsessed with English memoirist Barbara Skelton. She was then still married to the famous novelist Cyril Connolly, who was on the books of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Skelton left Connolly. But her marriage to Weidenfeld in August 1956 was disastrously short lived. Weidenfeld’s third marriage to American heiress Sandra Payson Meyer ended amicably after a decade. Then in 1992, aged 72, Weidenfeld tied the knot with Annabelle Whitestone. They remained married until Weidenfeld’s death in 2016. He was buried in the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, Israel.

Most obituaries described Lord Weidenfeld of Chelsea as a pillar of the British Establishment. In 1995, American interviewer, Charlie Rose, called the Austrian born British publisher a “people collector.” A polite way of describing a self-serving chameleon? Perhaps.

Many friends and foes quoted in Harding’s book take that view. They use unflattering terms like “loathsome,” “appalling,” and “monstrous” to describe an egomaniac driven by vanity and money. The biographer also cites interviews from countless women who worked for the publisher. Some remember a charmer and a seducer. Others found him “creepy and inappropriate,” says Harding. Moral imperfections aside, the publisher’s cultural legacy is secure. 

The numerous books that George Weidenfeld helped publish “transformed western culture and have stood the test of time,” says the biographer. “George was both a publishing genius, but also flawed as an individual,” he says. “This was one of my main motivations for exploring his life with this biography,” Harding concludes. “That paradox between George’s external presentation and his internal reality.”   

JP O’Malley is an Irish writer living in London.

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The Bookman is pleased to speak with Amity Shlaes about her new book Great Society: A New History. Amity Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, and is the author of six books, including four New York Times bestsellers. Her history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man (2007), has been translated into numerous languages. Readers know Miss Shlaes’s columns from the Financial Times (2000–2005) and Bloomberg (2006–2013), or the Wall Street Journal, where she served on the editorial board. Miss Shlaes chairs the jury for the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek book prize.

Amity, thanks for speaking with us. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of the book.

Nostalgia for 1960s policies has grown lately, probably because people don’t remember the results of that policy. This book covers the errors of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations—with an emphasis on cabinet members, or the government’s partners and foes, such as trade unions, or, often businesses. People ask what I made of the Presidents. The book isn’t about the Presidents, it’s about the men who worked with and served them. In that sense it is a kind of a domestic version of David Halberstam’s Best and the Brightest. And the domestic policymakers failed for the same reason the defense policymakers failed: arrogance. They overlooked reality because they were in love with their own blueprints. The strategies in the War on Poverty had the same flaws as Robert McNamara’s bombing strategy: they were written from 10,000 feet, without regard to the individuals below.

Your previous book, The Forgotten Man, focused on the Great Depression and the reaction to it. Your new book opens in 1964. How was the nation changed in the decades in between in how they reacted to different crises?

The 1930s New Deal yielded such disappointing results that Americans became somewhat wary of large domestic social programs, or government management of the labor market. Soon after World War II, Congress overrode Harry Truman’s veto of its Taft-Hartley Act, it wanted to constrain organized labor so badly. Taft-Hartley basically neutered the New Deal’s mighty Wagner Act. But the success of World War II pushed Americans back toward the collective. Together we had conquered in Europe and Japan; after that, as Norman Podhoretz once wrote, meeting domestic goals, including abolishing poverty, seemed easy tasks, like a “mopping up action.”

The subtitle indicates that this is a “new history.” Why was a new history needed?

The Sixties were more than Woodstock, or civil rights, or even napalm. I wanted to tell the story of life at home among ordinary people, black or white.

But the most important reason new histories, whether by me or someone else, are needed is economics. Most older histories take a Keynesian approach, which means they see nothing wrong with using fiscal or monetary policy for stimulus. That is, they replicate the errors of their subjects, the characters of the 1960s. One of the tragicomic scenes in the book is when Nixon and his men, including Fed chairman Arthur Burns, come together, like Olympian gods, at Camp David and write policy as if they were writing the laws of economics themselves. The most self-aware of the attendees, Herbert Stein, even wrote a parody of the Camp David economic directives, casting them as the Ten Commandments.

And the results of such Keynesian policies, the stimuli and micromanagement by government in the 1960s and early 1970s, were terrible: the inflation and unemployment of the 1970s. Needed was a book that looked at the 1960s from a classical economic perspective. Only classical economics can explain the 1970s.

Another problem: the older histories of the 1960s treat business as a kind of reliable domestic animal, a pack horse or milk cow, there to provide tax revenues for idealistic government projects. My own impression was that business actually saved the day. We wanted a Great Society. It turned out that business could get us closer to great than government programs. Three companies get especial attention in Great Society: General Electric, Fairchild (which became Intel), and Toyota.

It’s important to mention a book that differs from the other traditional histories, and influenced me: Allen Matusow’s The Unraveling of America. Matusow sees through Great Society bravado. He argues—and I think he’s right—that Nixon merely continued the Great Society. Nixon and Johnson were actually quite similar.

Also: The Stanford scholar John Cogan wrote a wonderful book about entitlements that came to my attention as I was working on Great Society. The High Cost of Good Intentions offers up numbers that confirmed my own analysis. Any Great Society student should look at Cogan’s work.

You acknowledge the dreams of activists like Michael Harrington for “full socialism” in the United States failed, and instead a compromise of sorts between big business and government arose. What was wrong with this arrangement?

Partial socialism or social democracy, the usual compromise, does far more damage than we expect. And government folly builds upon folly. Such folly, in the Philip Larkin poem, “deepens like a coastal shelf.” If this book validates the theories of any economist, it is those of Friedrich von Hayek, who explained that incremental expansions of government, especially when they are justified by crises (wars, or say, pandemics), push us down the Road to Serfdom.

Can you tell us a little bit about how corporations reacted to the Great Society initiatives. In one sense the large corporations stood to benefit from cozy relationships to big government.

Big business is not always entrepreneurial, especially when it lives off contracts from government. In fact, business and government together, especially when organized labor unions join them, can block or hurt enterprise. President Eisenhower was correct to warn about the “military-industrial complex.”

You describe the book as a “cautionary” tale for those who look to socialist reforms for economic problems. How so?

It’s remarkable the extent to which many of today’s proposals replay 1960s proposals or programs. From universal income to increases in the minimum wage, expansions of the federal role in health care, welfare expansions, or changes in the legal definitions of our rights, all echo or repeat 1960s plans. Those 1960s projects by and large did not work out.

What about civil rights?

Basically, the book finds that the first civil rights laws, especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964, were necessary. The switch to affirmative action, which Johnson led in a speech at Howard University, was more questionable.

Would you say the Great Society initiatives were a cultural as well as an economic/political force?

Of course. Culture and economics are related. Was it cultural, or economic, when World Bank head Robert McNamara had the hubris to go to the campus of Notre Dame to argue for population control? Both. The new reformers, whether in government or among social scientists, shared an incredible arrogance. Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute has argued that 1960s liberalism was also libertarian liberalism—the same individualism that led to rock music led Intel executives to break away from the old work of the electronics industry, servicing defense. There’s a case for that, too.

There have been some gestures toward a return to socialism in recent years among some Western elites. To what do you attribute that?

Amnesia. The memory of the New Deal’s failings faded in the 1950s, and the idealistic faith in social programs grew again. By the 1960s the country seemed ready for a New Deal repeat, just as now Americans seem ready to try socialism. “Nothing is new,” as the adage that opens the book goes, “it is just forgotten.”

What if any role do governments—even state or local—play in regulating industry misconduct?

Government encouraged business and unions to believe that economic growth rates should be set by a few men around a boardroom table. When business “disobeyed”—as, say, Roger Blough of U.S. Steel did when he set steel prices higher than JFK liked—the Kennedy Administration punished the disobedient companies like six year olds. Chapter One of the book tells the story of the Kennedy Administration’s prosecution of GE for price fixing. GE was guilty, but the prosecution was also political. The human collateral damage of the GE scandal included Ronald Reagan. Reagan, then a p.r. man for GE, lost his job.

One character in the book is Walter Reuther. Tell us a little about why he is important to the story.

Walter Reuther, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Arthur Burns, is one of the flawed heroes of my book. Reuther, the leader of the United Auto Workers, fought for civil rights side by side with Martin Luther King. He even helped to raise the bail for Martin Luther King when MLK was in the Birmingham jail. Reuther also actually funded the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, who later became radical and then anarchist and violent—the Weathermen. (Tom Hayden is a character in this book; one chapter covers his trip to Hanoi, which preceded those of his wife, Jane Fonda.) The bitter truth, which he lived to see, was that young people he had backed helped give the election to his greatest opponent, Richard Nixon.

But Reuther’s greatest error was that, wittingly or unwittingly, he conspired with the automakers to make Detroit uncompetitive and thereby to open the door for foreign automakers. No one who has seen the recent film Ford v Ferrari, about Henry Ford’s obsession with race cars, can come away without the impression that Henry Ford II was a goof. That is also my impression. One chapter of this book is called “Reuther and the Intruder”—the intruder being Toyota. Reuther’s life was a tragedy, since he hurt the people he loved, auto workers. Reuther also died tragically, crashing in one of the dangerous early LearJets.  

We are pleased to publish this interview with Ken I. Kersch, about his recent book, Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Ken I. Kersch is Professor of Political Science at Boston College, where he teaches courses in American constitutional law and development and American political thought. He is the author of four books, and many articles, chapters, and reviews. He received his B.A. from Williams College, his J.D. from Northwestern, and his Ph.D. from Cornell. His next book, American Political Thought: An Invitation, will be published next year by Polity.

Professor Kersch, thanks for joining us. Can you give us a brief summary of the argument of the book?

In recent years, there has been a lot of excellent work published on both the postwar conservative movement, on legal mobilization by conservatives, and on the development of “originalism” as a method of constitutional interpretation by judges. The work on the movement generally, including on its political thought, has said very little about conservative views on the Constitution, aside from of accounts of the constitutional resistance to civil rights. Work on the Federalist Society and on the origins of originalism tended to focus on the post-1980s/Reagan administration time period. But arguments about the Constitution had been central to the movement itself, long before it came to power in the 1980s. Those arguments extended well before southerners resisting civil rights. In Conservatives and the Constitution, I sought to capture this wider world of postwar conservative constitutional argument.

Conservatives and the Constitution focuses on “the constitution outside the courts,” or the constitution within the political and social movement thought, rather than as it is parsed by judges in judicial opinions. I draw extensively from magazines and books, and only rarely from legal scholars and judicial decisions. Over time, once a political coalition gains power, its understandings make their way into judicial approaches and rulings, as refracted though the requirements and culture of legal institutions. We cannot really understand the Constitution in the courts unless we understand how judicial frameworks are rooted in broader and deeper political understandings arrived at before-hand outside the courts.

After a context-setting preface and some background on financial support structures and outlets, I provide an overview of some of the major big-picture constitutional theory arguments that helped define the postwar American Right. I then present the material through the prism of “stories about” various issues central to the movement, like markets or communism, as they related to arguments about the Constitution, and then stories told by core identity groups that ultimately coalesced into the Christian Right. The “stories about” framing does not mean that I don’t take up serious intellectual arguments, and treat them as such. I do so—extensively. But I wanted to show how those arguments were presented and situated within larger, overarching accounts of the country’s history—by narratives about where we were, where we are now, what went wrong and why, and how we redeem and restore the Constitution—and thus the nation. By focusing on both arguments and narratives, I hope to convey the ways that ideas (arguments) and emotions (stories) work together in to motivate and help integrate social and political movements. Conservatives and the Constitution, which focuses mostly on the 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) to 1980 (Reagan) period, maps this trajectory.

You note—importantly, I think—the importance of narrative in the conservative self-understanding, writing that conservatives have churned out an endless series of books, articles, and other media that created a politics “saturated with historically-rooted, movement-making, ethically constitutive stories.” What is the constitutional story conservatives were telling as part of this historically-conscious sense of itself?

You ask what constitutional story conservatives were telling in this period. Actually, one of my points is that conservatives with different identities and coming from different perspectives were telling multiple stories that bore a family resemblance. These stories both overlapped and diverged. And it is the dynamic relationship of this family of stories unfolding over time that I hoped to capture in this book. Different elements of the movement—laissez faire individualists, fervent anticommunists of different ilks, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, and traditionalist, conservative Roman Catholics—brought not simply distinct ideas, arguments, and emphasizes to the table, but different understandings of where we—either the U.S. as a country, or, for that matter, Western civilization—have been, are now, are likely to go, and should strive to achieve. Each of these elements of the postwar movement had relatively settled commitments. But each was also in dialogue with the others, working toward common ground.

This process is not unique to conservatives or conservatism: it is a dynamic that plays out within any broad-ranging and somewhat pluralistic political movement. This is especially true when there is a two-party system that forces groups not simply into purely transactional coalitions (as might be the case in multi-party parliamentary systems like that of Italy or Israel), but into durable political coalitions that might last for twenty or thirty years, sustained by shared interests, yes, but also by a sense of common identity, and shared purpose and meaning.

Most conservatives—though the neoconservatives might have been an exception—adhered to (small “r”) republican understandings about the ways that long-lived governments eventually succumb to corruption, brought about in significant part by the decline in virtue of its citizens, and about the imperative of rallying to promote and instill virtue, and restore the republic to its sustaining first principles. This genus of political thought was prominently identified by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy (1531).

Republicanism has long been a prominent strain of Anglo-American political thought. Different elements of the postwar conservative movement held different views about the culprit for this corruption, loss of virtue, and decline. Some emphasized communist propaganda and subversion. Others blamed a loss of (Protestant) Christian faith, as evidenced by a turn away from biblical literalism, which they insisted had provided the foundation for the Founder-bequeathed American political system. Still others blamed the decline on the country’s abandonment of the medieval unities that instantiated in the teachings of the (traditionalist, pre-Vatican II) Roman Catholic Church. For traditionalist and, in some cases, ultramontane Catholics, the problem was less a declension from the Founding than the Enlightenment presuppositions of the Founding itself. As a quintessentially modern policy, these Catholics insisted, the U.S. had been hopelessly corrupted from its inception by liberal individualism and Reformation theology. And there were plenty of other targets as well: secularism, a rampant egalitarianism that had become its own quasi-religion, a turn away from a commitment to Lockean, individualist understandings of natural rights, and so forth. These stories were compatible enough to suggest possible alliances. And part of the glue that might hold them together in coalition was a developing conviction that, while they might not always see things eye-to-eye, they nevertheless were facing a much more dangerous common enemy—liberals and progressives.

And that is what happened. This extended process of forging an alliance based not simply on common interests but also—and perhaps even primarily—on a shared identity required the most significant thinkers within these different movement camps elements to either revise their stories (one way that a group can change without a sense that they have abandoned their principles), or to bracket or downplay some element of their understandings in the interest of forging common ground. As I show, for example, there was a lot of rethinking of free-market capitalism by Christian conservatives. Thinkers like Edward Opitz and Michael Novak played a major role in shifting the understandings and attitudes of conservative Protestants and Catholics away from the view that government had an important role to play in aggressively regulating economic markets. This helped lay the groundwork for an alliance between an incipient Christian Right and free-market libertarians. That common ground, I show, was forged by the formulation of a language and story about their common commitment to “natural rights.”

I say “a language and a story” not to deny the existence of “natural rights.” I say “a language and a story” to emphasize that, at least early on, the movement allowed each of its constituent elements to follow its own understanding of natural rights. So, for instance, traditionalist Catholics were left free to imagine that Locke’s “natural rights” and St. Thomas Aquinas’s understandings of natural law were either the same thing, or close enough. Fundamentalist Christians were left free to talk about how the natural rights philosophy of the Founding was underwritten by a biblical literalism which, they insisted, had been the foundation of the English common law. This worked because the search for common ground was framed as a fight against a common enemy: those who had ostensibly abandoned the Founders’ commitment to “natural rights”—modern liberals and progressives.

I do not argue in Conservatives and the Constitution that this was all about “stories,” and that the arguments did not involve arguments about principle, or truth. The book is mostly about arguments. It is an intellectual history. It describes and weighs ideas. But I wanted to take things one step beyond that by also describing how these arguments and ideas were integrated into larger stories that were being told about the country’s and Western civilization’s historical trajectory, about where we began, what had happened since, and where we as a society and a civilization were moving. Besides simply describing the way that arguments and ideas actually live outside the seminar room in actual politics of real countries with vibrant political cultures, presenting the arguments and ideas as tied to overarching narratives and stories better captures the ways that politics, arguments, ideas, and emotions work in tandem. It is the stories that provide the motivation and passion that inspires political involvement and commitment for most people. I wanted to better capture the fulness and complexity of actual political life.

Some people are apparently disturbed by the fact that the narratives I describe in this book are not easily classifiable as either “true” or “false,” and that I withhold judgment on that in most cases. This implication is that I am descending into “postmodernism” or even nihilism, of the same sort that is, apparently, now destroying Western civilization. But I believe in true and false. I believe in historical facts. I don’t believe everything is a story. But people arrange facts into narratives and stories. This itself is an historical fact. And it is a historical fact about the United States, as it is about every other country. Since it is a universal human phenomenon, it is not surprising that some scholars of “American Political Development” have focused on its dynamics and political implications. But since it is a pervasive phenomenon, the study of how stories and narratives inform and structure that life have also been explored by historians (intellectual, and otherwise), ethnographers, sociologists, and diverse scholars of nationalism and social movements across the humanities and human sciences.

The fact is that different historical actors tell different stories about what has happened, why it happened, and its future implications. Here is an example. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the U.S. Supreme Court for the very first time was asked to interpret the provisions of new Fourteenth Amendment (1868) providing that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Slaughterhouse involved the question of whether Louisiana’s conferral of a butchers’ monopoly violated this part of the Fourteenth Amendment by depriving the now out-of-work butchers of “the right to pursue a lawful and necessary calling.” To Justice Samuel Miller, speaking for the Court’s slim majority, that answer was obviously “no.” To arrive at that conclusion, Miller did not simply read the language of the constitutional text. He also asked what had led to the addition of those provisions to the Constitution. “The most cursory glance at [the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments],” Miller explained, “discloses a unity of purpose, when taken in connection with the history of the times, which cannot fail to have an important bearing on any question of doubt concerning their true meaning …” That purpose was to address the “institution of African slavery, as it existed in about half the States of the Union.” Miller went on to say,

“We repeat, then, in light of this recapitulation of events, almost too recent to be called history, but which are familiar to us all … [that] on the most casual examination of the language of these amendments, no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in them, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him …”

In concluding, Miller opined that “We doubt very much whether any action of a State not directed by way of discrimination against the negroes as a class, or on account of their race, will ever be held to come within the purview of this provision.” This case involving a butchers’ monopoly, Miller’s reasoning went, did not involve anything like that. Joined by a majority of the Court’s justices, he dismissed the case. In a vigorous dissent, however, Justice Stephen Field insisted that if the right to pursue to pursue a lawful and necessary calling were not held to fall within the prohibitions set by the Fourteenth Amendment, “it was a vain and idle enactment, which accomplished nothing, and most unnecessarily excited Congress and the people on its passage.” In Field’s view, the Civil War had done nothing less than newly place the protection of fundamental rights—all fundamental rights, no matter who was appealing to them—“under the guardianship of the National authority.”

Field’s and Miller’s clashing views, which sharply divided the Court a mere eight years after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, issues from divergent understandings—narratives, stories—about what the Civil War was and meant, and what the addition of the Reconstruction Amendments had been (originally!) designed to achieve. This, it is worth underlining, was a Court stuffed to the gills with Lincoln and Grant appointees, including both Field (Lincoln) and Miller (Lincoln). Miller’s reading of the meaning of the War was more limited, and had fewer revolutionary implications for the powers of the national government, including a Supreme Court that would aggressively wield its powers of judicial review. Field’s reading of the meaning of the War was that it had instituted a broad-ranging and expansive revolution in American rights protection.

Which of these stories is “true”? The choice between the Miller story and the Field story—in conjunction with the Miller argument and the Field argument—had momentous implications: it would underwrite future interpretations of the constitutional text concerning fundamental questions of the powers of government in the United States. In point of fact, over time, Justice Field’s interpretation won out, laying the foundations for an immensely powerful modern Supreme Court.

These two justices could not agree on what had happened in the Civil War less than a decade after it ended. And this was an historical episode they both had personally lived through and witnessed, during a time when that war was the central issue of American life. Justices Miller and Field could not agree on the “original intent,” “original public meaning,” or purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s central provision—which happens to be one of the most important provisions of the entire Constitution. This is not because that provision was obscure: every justice on that Court had been saturated in these debates and new departures. They were forced by circumstances to situate arguments about what the text means within a narrative about the trajectory and meaning of historical events, which would then inform their judgment concerning its future implications.

My point is simply that this happens all the time in arriving at constitutional understandings. Postwar conservative understandings of the Constitution are about arguments, and theories of government, yes. But those arguments and understandings are embedded within broader narratives about history: about where we were, where we are, and where we are going. This is true of liberals and progressives as well. Both outlooks have broader constitutional visions. They advance constitutional arguments that are situated within those visions, which are structured around stories about the meaning of the Founding, of the Civil War, of the New Deal, of Brown v. Board of Education (1964), Engel v. Vitale (1962), Roe v. Wade (1973), of progressive-era eugenics, mid-century appeals to “states’ rights,” the creation of a professional civil service and the modern administrative state, and so forth.

The New York Times recently published an examination of American history textbooks supplied under the same name and title by the same authors to two states with very different political profiles, Texas and California. Texas’s version of textbooks had been edited to conform more closely to the conservative stories told by the people in that more conservative state. California’s version of the textbooks had been edited to conform more closely to the progressive or liberal stories told by the people in the more progressive state. Both books, incidentally, were historically accurate. Both were grounded in demonstrable historical facts. What was different was the story or narrative that was used to frame and present those facts. My book simply argues that participants in the postwar conservative movement did the same thing when it came to arraying their arguments about the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. I argue, moreover, that, to the extent that conservatives won elections and assumed the reins of power, the stories the stories they told about the Constitution played a significant part in constituting the contemporary American nation.

A key theme of your book seems to be how conservative constitutional thought developed from outside the academy, and for that reason has been largely ignored. Can you expand on that for us?

Yes. Actually, I would say “from outside the legal academy.” Especially in the aftermath of the New Deal, liberals dominated legal academia, especially the fields of public law, like constitutional and administrative law. This is not to say that there were no conservative law professors. There must have been. But they were outliers, and did work in other fields that were, for all practical purposes, a-political.

There were a lot of conservative legal scholars before this, of course. Conservatives Christopher Tiedemann and Thomas Cooley wrote some of the leading late-nineteenth century public law treatises. I don’t think anyone sat down and said “let’s purge conservatives from legal academia.” The way these things work is that there is are new veins and trends in scholarship that are considered cutting edge. In the early twentieth century, the cutting edge involved the application of the new philosophies like pragmatism, and the reformist strains of the new social sciences to law. Scholars who were doing that sort of work—proponents of the “sociological jurisprudence,” or “Legal Realism”—were initially viewed as outsider insurgents. But in time they redefined the core of public (and also private) law scholarship. As the New Deal took shape, a “Legal Process” school developed as well that was more institutional in focus, and had a powerful influence on constitutional and administrative law. In this context, conservative job applicants would have been seen as hopelessly out of date, working within frameworks from thirty years ago. That could have happened in any field. But legal academia is also distinctive in the way that it is tied to what public institutions and officials (including judges and justices) are actually doing. After the Supreme Court began affirming New Deal constitutional understandings in 1937, the law itself changed, and it looked to have changed for good. To be teaching constitutional understandings from 1910 after 1937 would have been read as both useless and incompetent. Law students need to know the current law. This, in effect, meant the legal academy would be dominated by liberals for a long time to come.

While hardly at a high point after 1937, conservatism still existed. And so too did conservative thought about the Constitution. The question for me was where do you find that? You are not going to find it in the law schools. But it was not hard to find elsewhere: you can look pretty much anywhere else: books, magazines, radio and television broadcasts. It is just that legal scholars who study the constitutional law tend to be rather parochial. They don’t look in these places. They think serious constitutional thought comes from legal scholars working in the elite legal academy. But, especially as concerned conservatives, that simply was not the case at this time.

It is worth noting that when the legal academy first recognized a rising conservatism within their rather parochial world, it came from a group of increasingly disillusioned legal scholars who, almost to a man, were the students and law clerks of Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter is a very interesting bridge figure because his unbending—and increasingly anachronistic—adherence to progressivism led him to consistently and unyieldingly stump for the duty of judges in most cases to defer to democratically elected legislative majorities. Scholars like Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School, Alexander Bickel of Yale Law School—both Frankfurter clerks—and even Frankfurter himself, a Louis Brandeis protégé and confidant of Franklin Roosevelt still sitting on the Supreme Court into the 1960s, ended up being classed as “conservatives” because they were counseling deference to legislatures and judicial restraint into the new age of the Warren Court “Rights Revolution.”

The position of liberals on the role of the courts had shifted, and was now out of sync with Frankfurter’s old-school progressivism. The Court was issuing landmark “activist” decisions in cases like Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Mapp v. Ohio (1961), Baker v. Carr (1962), Engel v. Vitale (1962), Miranda v. Arizona (1966). Liberals were now championing strong courts that aggressively wield their judicial review powers. If you stayed with the old progressive “duty of deference” line, even though you had not changed at all politically, you were suddenly classed as conservative … or at least as interesting and attractive to conservatives. This shift set the stage for the introduction of conservatism within legal academia for the first time since the 1930s—though, again, it was through the back-door path of old-line progressives who had simply stayed put since the 1930s, but had not adjusted their theories to conform with the new liberal line on judicial power. Out of this came people like Robert Bork, who himself admired and learned from Alexander Bickel, whom he came to emulate as a proponent of judicial restraint.

But, again, there were still conservatives, and conservatives who were writing and speaking about the Constitution without any particular emphasis on the debates about judicial restraint versus judicial activism taking place in the law schools. These movement conservative thinkers focused on substance, not process. They focused on the whole system, without an undue emphasis on the role of the judge. And these people were everywhere. Their work is often quite sophisticated. Some of these people were academics. People like Friedrich Hayek were pretty much excluded from the academic field of economics for the same reason that conservative constitutional scholars were kept out of the law schools—not necessarily because they were conservative per se, but because their work was understood to be hopelessly out of date. Some of the most prominent academic conservative political and constitutional thinkers were in English departments (Richard Weaver; M. E. “Mel” Bradford). Many were independent scholars and journalists (Brent Bozell, Jr.; James Jackson Kilpatrick). Some were ministers and theologians (Fulton J. Sheen; John Courtney Murray; Francis Schaeffer). Many were political philosophers in political science departments. The most prominent of these were students of the German-Jewish émigré legal philosopher Leo Strauss, either at (first) the New School for Social Research, the University of Chicago, or Claremont McKenna College. People like Harry V. Jaffa, Walter Berns, Herbert Storing, and many others wrote extensively about the Constitution within a framework shaped by the Straussian paradigm. That paradigm focused on the relationship between the political thought of the ancient/classical world and contemporary liberal modernity.

This broader intellectual world outside the law schools had only a tenuous connection to constitutional thought then taking place within the law schools. That connection was still tenuous when the first group of “conservatives” like Kurland or Bickel began to emerge within the law schools across the 1960s. These old-progressives-in-a-new-contest grew into the first generation of law school-based conservative originalists. But as time went on, the connections between the two worlds grew thicker. And that is where we are today. The conditions for interactions between these two worlds are especially ripe given that today’s conservative legalists are less preoccupied with the “problem” of voiding laws passed by democratically elected legislatures, and more focused—as conservative constitutionalists outside the law schools have long been—on substantive commitments concerning the nature and appropriate constitutional structure of the U.S. government.

What were the main streams of that conservative constitutional vision as it emerged in the postwar period?

In its broadest sense, movement political thought would be familiar to your readers. It generally falls into the classifications running the gamut from traditionalism to libertarianism to neoconservatism, as chronicled by people like Frank Meyer and George Nash. By looking at the movement through the prism of its constitutional arguments, however, I spotlight arguments and synergies that have been obscured by most studies of the movement. It is interesting to me that no one thought to do this before, especially since the people making these constitutional arguments and the places they were making them were far from obscure.

Once you look at movement through the lens of constitutional argument rather than simply dividing up people into the categories of traditionalist, libertarian, and neoconservative, you bring to the surface a whole new set of arguments internal to the movement. These arguments are not just between ideological camps, but within them. Traditionalists, for instance, were quite divided. Preeminent amongst those writing about the Constitution were Straussian political philosphers like Harry V. Jaffa and Martin Diamond, and also people like Walter Berns and Herbert Storing. There were localist, states’ rights traditionalists, many of whom were neo-confederates, or at least battling new constitutional reform efforts associated with the civil rights movement. This included people like Richard Weaver and James Jackson Kilpatrick. Then there was the traditionalist constitutional thought that is highly theological that issued from evangelical and fundamentalist Christians like Edmund Opitz, Francis Schaeffer, or John Whitehead. And there were traditionalists and quasi-modernizing conservative Roman Catholics who talked a lot more than is commonly noted about the Constitution—people like Clarence “Pat” Manion, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Fulton J. Sheen, John Courtney Murray, and William Bentley Ball.

These are relatively big-name figures. But a lot of the people I canvas in the book are almost completely unknown. There are lawyers who wrote an article or letter to the editor to The American Bar Association Journal, for instance, or some lesser known conservatives who were one-time or occasional contributors to Modern Age or Human Events. There are also people like David Lawrence of U.S. News and World Report, a former student of Woodrow Wilson’s at Princeton, who wrote a lot about the Constitution, yet has not received anything near the attention he warrants as a significant figure in the postwar conservative intellectual firmament.

On the free-market libertarian side, my book touches upon independent thinkers like Felix Morley, Murray Rothbard, or Ayn Rand, Austrians like Hayek and von Mises, and the Chicago School economists, extending outwards to the public choice economics of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and the law and economics movement with people like Richard Posner. As noted above, the law-school based legal process scholars like Philip Kurland, Raoul Berger, and Alexander Bickel were especially significant in introducing a new sort of conservative constitutionalism to the elite legal academy. These legal process scholars were the progenitors of modern, legalist originalism.

My main interest is not so much in redoing the excellent work that has already been done on many of these people. Again, I am looking at them through a distinctive lens. My interest is in thinking about how their writing and ideas either informed or touched upon debates within the movement over how to think about constitutional restoration and redemption. That brings them in relation to the overarching theme of the book, which is that, over time, those debates over constitutional restoration and redemption helped unite a movement that often started from diverse premises into a relatively cohesive political community.

You describe the development of conservative constitutional and political thought as “in significant respects, a movement of ideas-drenched autodidacts” who took it upon themselves to write about and put into political action what they saw as the American tradition. Do you see this as different from the development of liberalism at that time?

Yes, I do. I think that, after an extended period of mobilization of Progressive and liberal ideas from the Progressive Era through the New Deal, liberalism had arrived at an understanding of themselves as non-ideological, and even as not having particular views about the powers of government, other than that it should be rational, public-spirited, and problem-focused. Liberal self-understandings were that they were simply doing what made common sense to anyone not deformed by ignorance and selfishness. Liberals excelled at policymaking. And they tended to debate the practicalities of public policy. Certainly, a lot of thought and ratiocination went into this. But it was assumed that the fundamental ideas and principles had long since been settled.

Conservatives, on the other hand, questioned the basic premises. This was maddening to those like Lionel Trilling and Richard Hofstadter, who accused conservatives as having no ideas at all, of merely emitting “irritable mental gestures.” I think the issue was not that conservatives didn’t have ideas, but that liberals understood those ideas to have been thoroughly discredited. In a sense, as liberals saw it, there was not much difference between holding discredited ideas, and having no ideas at all.

It has become a cliché to say it, but, yes, conservative ideas were essentially shut out of the mainstream media, and out of core institutions like academia. I hasten to add that it certainly is not true that conservatives at the time had no public voice. Then, as now, their exclusions sat side-by-side with some very loud voices on radio, television, and mass periodicals, whether in Reader’s Digest, or Fulton J. Sheen’s Life is Worth Living, or, for that matter, in the pronouncements of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy or White Citizens’ Councils, and in public service and advertising campaigns by business groups pitching faith, free markets, and anticommunism. But to the thought leaders, these were the deplorables.

To get the underlying serious ideas, conservatives had to turn to alternative sources, whether magazines like National Review, Human Events, or Plain Talk, or to books published by Regnery, Arlington House, or Devin-Adair. This was apprehended as alternative, even “secret,” knowledge that the elites didn’t want you to know, in the same spirit, in many regards, as Breitbart, Fox News, and (still) Regnery Books are today. These outlets often rejected the prevailing paradigms. Those who immersed themselves in them got the feeling, at least, of being autodidacts, in the realm of political thought, at least. By that, I don’t mean that these people were necessarily uneducated, formally or otherwise. But, as conservatives, they needed to educate themselves in politics, because they were not going to get that education from academia or from the mainstream media.

You note that conservative constitutional thought is embedded within the larger conservative political thought, and therefore is not the same as “originalism”; indeed, some of the schools of thought you discuss, which take a more expansive view of constitutional history, would seem to be at odds with originalism. How did the two come to be seen as allies?

I think we would do better to distinguish originalism as an “ism” (to borrow from the constitutional theorist James Fleming) from broader republican understandings about the corruption and decline of political orders I described earlier. The former was very much a creation of the conservative legal academics like Raoul Berger, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia, their students, and associates like Edwin Meese. Situated as they were within the legal academy, these thinkers found a foothold within the intellectual traditions and debates that had been established there. Since the progressive era and even before, the constitutional thought and theory in legal academia was structured around the ostensible problem of the “political” and “activist” judge. The task for law school-based constitutional theorists was to posit the best theory of interpretation on offer to the life-tenured federal judge, to justify the exercise of his or her judicial review powers.

This “countermajoritarian” act (Bickel) was understood to be aberrant—that is, requiring special justification—on the grounds of democratic theory. The theory emphasized the presumptive legitimacy of legislation rooted in public will. This general presumption of constitutionality was longstanding: one can find it stated at least as far back as Justice James Iredell’s concurring opinion in Calder v. Bull (1798). But the claims of democracy were reinforced by late nineteenth and early twentieth century progressive political thought by people like John Dewey. In the legal world, strong statements of the presumption of constitutionality were articulated by the likes of James Bradley Thayer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Brandeis, and by the full panoply of New Deal liberals. Legal academic originalism appropriated the arguments of this earlier tradition of judicial restraint and deference to legislatures, but newly wielded it in resistance to the Warren Court “Rights Revolution” (1953–1969). They denounced the Warren Court’s increasingly assertive, rights-declaring, “countermajoritarian” liberal judges. The charge was hypocrisy. Conservative originalists accused liberal judges of betraying the earlier progressive commitment to restrained, deferential judges, and to the presumptive legitimacy of legislative majorities.

It is true that law school-based originalists advanced arguments about the original meaning of the Constitution that went beyond arguments about judges exercising of their judicial review powers. But during its ascendency, originalism’s main calling card and appeal, both within the law schools and outside them, was that it was a theory that would restrain activist judges and free up democratically elected legislatures. This is clear in the most prominent arguments advanced at the time by Edwin Meese, William Rehnquist, and others.

Conservative constitutional thought more broadly, however, had never been especially sanguine about the claims of an unleashed democracy and the presumptive powers of democratic majorities. In this regard, there was something of a disconnect between the arguments being advanced by the law school-based conservative originalists, and the conservative constitutional theory forged outside the law schools. Conservative constitutional thinkers outside the law schools did not foreground the dilemma of the judge, and the ostensible problem of his or her exercise of the powers of judicial review. Since they did not begin with the presumptive claims of democracy, they did not necessarily conceive of it as involving any sort of countermajoritarian “difficulty.” They were interested in the first instance, and most directly, in the powers and limits of government. If the law was constitutional, it should be upheld. If it was unconstitutional, it should be voided. Their understanding of judicial activism and restraint, to the extent they focused on it at all, was defined substantively rather than procedurally.

I would not posit a hermetic separation between conservative constitutional thought in the law schools, especially beginning in the 1980s, and conservative constitutional thought in the movement more generally. But the former was, in some ways, and more at some times than others, quasi-autonomous. The calling card of originalism in the law schools was that it would restrain judges in the exercise of their judicial review powers in a countermajoritarian fashion. The calling card of the movement constitutional thought is that it would restore a long-lost constitutional order that had been corrupted by modern developments.

My book suggests that we would do better to consider the trajectory of conservative constitutional thought as it developed across the postwar years by isolating law school-based originalism from broader arguments within the movement more generally for constitutional restoration and redemption. Only by first doing so, can we then move forward to better understand the relationship between the one and the other.

To address the other issue raised by your question, my book also notes that there were plenty of sophisticated movement constitutional thinkers who were not originalists in the law school sense. They rejected that sort of originalism. The entire purpose of law school-based originalism was to tie Ulysses firmly to the mast, to restrain him from seduction (or, as Robert Bork would have it, “temptation”) by politics. Not a few conservatives, including Russell Kirk, Brent Bozell, Martin Diamond, and Willmoore Kendall, evinced, in places, a Burkean sensibility emphasizing an imperative of incremental, organic development over time. For the law professors, this vitiated the logic, and dangerously loosened the knots, of originalism. It allowed for judicial discretion. But prudence, discretion, and incremental adjustment are not problems for Burkeans: they are of the essence of Burkean traditionalism. And, to the extent that the Founders themselves were possessed of Burkean sensibilities, they were perhaps not a problem for the Founders either.

There were others—and here the libertarians especially serve—who really focused on original principles, like liberty or (for Harry V. Jaffa) equality. This involved founding principles, and thus it was an originalism of a sort. But it certainly does not counsel judicial humility and deference to legislatures. It offers no more restraint than liberal or left versions arising out of avowed commitments to those same principles.

Indeed, you suggest that a return to a more substantive constitutional vision—which implemented political and cultural goals through even “restrained” judicial decision-making—would not be inconsistent with the traditions you have identified. In fact, you suggest the “overlapping consensus” between originalists and libertarians with the broader populist conservative movement might be breaking up; do you see that as a future focus of conservative argument?

I’m not sure I see the overlapping consensus between originalists and libertarians as breaking up. There has been some serious grousing, to be sure, especially from members of the Christian Right—and, especially, the traditionalist Catholic Right—that libertarianism has cannibalized the contemporary conservative movement. Some of these Catholic traditionalists have charged the Federalist Society and Federalist Society-vetted members of the federal judiciary with skewing towards libertarianism and away from moral traditionalism.

But, for the most part, and following the phenomenon described by political scientists like Alan Abramowitz and Lilliana Mason, the religious traditionalists and the libertarians still identify much more with each other than they do with their progressive enemies. At this point, moreover, both are perfectly comfortable with enlisting an activist judiciary in their cause. By “activist,” I simply mean that neither has any compunctions about judges wielding their judicial review aggressively to void laws they adjudge to be unconstitutional. Judicial activism to them is when the Court voids a law that it shouldn’t have, and judicial restraint is when it upholds a law that it should have. It has nothing to do with the number of laws voided or upheld. The test of activism or restraint is substantive, not procedural.

You have a chapter on “Catholic stories,” which retraces how some Catholics came to embrace American democracy, while others continued to be suspicious. That debate remains very much with us. How did some American Catholic conservatives become comfortable with the American liberal regime?

That is a very interesting process. In some sense, I’m sure, it is the story of the Americanization of any immigrant group that might initially fall outside the American white, northern European Protestant Christian mainstream, whether racial, ethnic, or religious: they both assimilate and make their own contributions to the ongoing development of the mainstream culture, which is perpetually in flux. The history is long and complicated. But suffice it to say that there are those who argue that American Catholics from John Carroll onwards, including the Catholics who played a part in the settlement of Maryland, were always acclimating and adjusting to the political culture of the new world, with its heightened commitment to democracy and popular sovereignty, its suspicion of hierarchy, and its commitment to limited government and individual rights. Whatever the official church doctrines and dogmas, American Catholics became Americans like anyone else.

What was different—and this is something that many of the Founders, casting a wary eye on Quebec, recognized—was that the official doctrines, and, indeed, the entire structure, of the traditionalist Catholic Church were much more anomalous in the U.S. than they had been in Europe. U.S. political thought was fed not just by secular Enlightenment thought, but also by Protestantism. And whatever was going on with ordinary Catholics, there were always those who saw the Church as having an answer to the problems caused by liberal modernity. This Catholic traditionalism too, if mostly on the fringes, has a long history in the U.S., from Orestes Brownson to Brent Bozell, and on to Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule today. And there have always been magazines and other gathering places for these people and this thought, like Triumph, and Crisis and numerous websites and blogs today.

What I focus on in Conservatives and the Constitution is a particular moment and context: the relatively sophisticated mid-century Thomist revival, at a moment when Catholics where unusually visible as Catholics in popular culture, like television and film. There was a lot going on, not least the Vatican II conclave in which the Church, as one of the prime movers in that, the American Jesuit priest John Courtney Murray described it, signed “articles of peace” with many of the core elements of liberal modernity, including democracy, individual rights, and the separation (“distinction”) between Church and State. If the U.S. was the exemplary liberal modern nation, then it is obvious that this was closely related to the process of Catholic Americanization, which was soon put at the red-hot center of American politics by John F. Kennedy’s bid for the White House.

I treat Murray’s major statement on how good Catholics could be good Americans, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960), at the center of these developments. That book, I argue, one of the era’s major contributions to political theory, even though, so far as I know, almost no one at the time—especially law professors—put it in that category. It is an argument that essentially places the Declaration of Independence’s commitment to natural rights at the heart of the American constitutional and political tradition, and interprets that commitment by the lights of a Thomistic understanding of natural law. If you know anything about trends in contemporary conservative political and constitutional thought, you know that this Murrayist framework is becoming highly influential on the Catholic and broader American Right.

Murray was a liberal Catholic. His task, in many respects, was inclusion and assimilation of Catholics, who were formerly perceived as outsiders to the American political and constitutional tradition. Many of today’s Murrayists are conservatives. Their task, by contrast, is to position themselves at the true defenders of the Founders’ vision of natural rights, and cast out progressives and liberals—ostensibly secularists—as outsiders to the American political and constitutional tradition, if not outright enemies and traitors. This positions conservative Catholics as the true defenders of the American liberal constitutional regime. Again, there are conservative Catholics who continue to reject liberalism. But that, at least, is where the battle lines are increasing drawn on the contemporary Catholic Right.

In your introduction, you note that this is one book of a three-book project on conservative thought. Can you give us a preview of the arguments of the remaining books?

I am not so grandiose as to have embarked on the project of writing a multivolume work! I have been working on this for quite some time. What happened is that I wrote one book that turned out to be too long. I was forced to cut two-thirds of what I had written. That is the material that will constitute the next two books.

Conservatives and the Constitution is the part of what I had written that sets out the big picture. It focuses on general, overarching arguments within the postwar conservative movement about how we should understand the Constitution. I first present some of the most significant of these freestanding arguments. Following that, in a succession of chapters, I present some of these broader arguments as they were framed by the stories of constitutional abandonment and would-be restoration and redemption concerning, first, two flashpoint questions of the time (economic liberty and confronting the communist threat) and then, second, by key identity groups that ultimately coalesced to form the Christian Right. Left on the cutting room floor was all the material that more specifically addressed particular constitutional issues, like the separation of powers, federalism, civil rights, or a diverse array of civil liberties.

Those of us who teach constitutional law to undergraduates typically divide the subject into a two-semester sequence, the first emphasizing structures and powers, and the second focused on civil rights and civil liberties. That seemed a useful way of dividing up that material, and that is how I divide up the material that I will present in the next two books.

The broader argument and theme of those books will be consistent with my theme of stories about constitutional restoration and redemption set out in the Conservatives and the Constitution. But, as freestanding books, they will move the argument forward, advancing new arguments that arise more directly out of their subjects. The book on conservative arguments about the structures and powers of government will chart the movement’s foregrounding of attacks on runaway judicial power, and chart the relationship between that very prominent set of arguments and the postwar conservative movement’s more global constitutional critique of the modern American administrative and social welfare state.

The book on conservative arguments involving civil rights and civil liberties will focus somewhat less than is typical on southern conservative resistance to civil rights—which was certainly real, and of considerable importance—than what to me is currently the more significant question of how the movement moved to leave behind that former resistance following their string of massive losses occasioned by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, and the transformative Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and reimagine themselves as the polity’s foremost champion of constitutional liberty and equality, rightly understood—and even of anti-racism. Rather than recounting the now well-known history of White Citizens Councils, this seems to me the more interesting, intriguing, and currently more important question. The book will take that past and ask how, beginning in the mid-1960s, it began to be reworked into a politically viable vision for the movement’s present and future.  

We are happy to feature this conversation with Bria Sandford, who is editorial director of Sentinel and an executive editor at Portfolio, imprints of Penguin Random House.

UB: Bria, we are so happy to have you with us. Maybe we should start off with a description of your imprints and the kinds of books they (and you) are looking for.

Thanks for having me! I appreciate the University Bookman’s thoughtful books coverage, and it’s an honor to get to talk to you about the work we’re doing at Portfolio and Sentinel.

One of my colleagues likes to say that Portfolio, which was initially founded as a “business” imprint, now publishes “nonfiction for ambitious people.” We’re always looking for “big idea books,” reported narratives, and smart personal development, as well as more prescriptive books.

Sentinel, the other imprint founded by our publisher, has traditionally published conservative books and continues to do so, though some of them have a twist now, as capitalism-skeptical books by friends on the left have started finding a home there.

These days I’m looking for books on two tracks: (1) big platform-driven books that address conservative “moods,” books for middle America, not about middle America, and (2) books creatively addressing the pain points centrists may have missed.

UB: We are now coming to the end of Donald Trump’s [first?] term as President. How have you seen conservative publishing change in those years?

It’s been a change to see conservative publishing not go through a dip under a Republican president. I haven’t been through that many presidential cycles as an editor, but the conventional wisdom says that books always do best when in opposition to the administration. Whether it’s because Trump is breaking up and reforming political coalitions (or is a symptom of that reforming) or because the liberal reaction to Trump has made conservatives feel increasingly embattled, or for some other reason, conservative publishing is doing just fine.

Thematically, I’m seeing fewer Ronald Reagan books, fewer supply-side economics books, and fewer foreign policy books. The free-speech books I thought were petering out, but those are having a comeback, though perhaps not from voices I’d call conservative. There’s also a rise in a kind of political book masquerading as self-help. I expect the elite-bashing (which is a bit odd for conservatives, when you think about it) is peaking.

UB: Where do you see promising trends in conservative publishing? For example, given the political climate, are conservative books being reviewed “more” in mainstream press?

I can’t say I’ve noticed books that at one time would have failed to get reviews being covered now, but I haven’t thought much about it. What is good news is that the breaking and reforming of ideological coalitions has provided a whisper’s breadth of more room for engaging with ideas on their merits. It’s less clear what’s a “conservative” or “liberal” position, so we’re able to slide some books that are neither Republican nor Democrat into spaces that wouldn’t have had them before. I’m encouraged by is growing interest everywhere in examining the limits of choice, though I’m also now a little bored with the liberalism-vs-illiberalism discourse.

UB: As an editor, take us through how you help an author shape her idea for a book as it develops.

This varies dramatically author to author, but the process usually starts with making sure the book has a definite and appealing and controversial promise to the reader. After that, we’ll hash out a rough outline, and I’ll encourage the author to begin writing rather than perfecting the outline, since almost invariably the writing process reveals something that needs to be reordered. Once we have a draft, we’ll spend a lot of time discussing whether the book’s structure and tone deliver on the promise, and I spend a lot of time thinking about whether something is missing.

UB: Conservative books seem divided between those questioning where we are (Dreher’s Benedict Option, Ted McAllister and Bruce Frohnen’s book on America’s conservative soul, or Richard Reinsch’s study of Orestes Brownson and American constitutionalism) and more “popular” books that set out political points on the question of the hour. Do you see a common audience there?

I see a commonality if not a common audience: both kinds of books tend either to turn inward, examining or extolling conservatism, or go on the attack, pointing out problems with the libs. What I’d love to see more of is political books that are not about “conservatism” or “liberals” but books that bring a particular point of view to specific visceral issues like birth, death, and sex. Fewer books about the working class and middle America and more books for ordinary people.

UB: George Will’s recent book on The Conservative Sensibility got a lot of criticism on social media for what some were arguing was a rather soulless portrayal of conservatism, and you noted on Twitter that yet his book was selling—was your point that conservatives miss their mark in reaching a popular audience and could take a lesson from Will?

One never likes to have to give an extended account of what one meant in a tweet! I don’t remember exactly what I was getting at, but I suspect I wanted to remind myself and my “Twitter friends” that conversations on that website are less influential than one might think. You can think your side is drowning out the other’s arguments, when in reality you’re just shouting to twenty or thirty people. That’s not to say that those small conversations aren’t valuable and can’t change the world, but it’s important to be realistic about where a movement is and to recognize that time and money and institutional backing do count for something.

UB: Books like Chris Arnade’s Dignity seemed really to strike a nerve—not conservative in any clear political sense, but a book that seemed to resonate more with conservative sentiment. Any hints at what might be coming up in 2020 that you are excited about?

In 2020 and beyond: I’m excited for Rod Dreher’s new book, which draws on the lives of counter-Soviet resisters for lessons on how to live with integrity in a world of lies. Patrick Deneen’s follow-up to Why Liberalism Failed will be wonderful, and I can’t wait for readers to get their hands on Helen Andrews’s Boomers and Grace Olmstead’s book on what we owe the past.

UB: Aside from work, what are you reading now?

I recently finished The Grammarians by Cathleen Schline, a truly delightful novel on the page, even if I had quibbles with the plotting. I’m making my way through Edith Stein’s Essays on Woman, Pretor-Pinney’s The Cloudspotter’s Guide, and Sarah E. Hill’s This Is Your Brain on Birth Control, and I just started Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights.  

Thanks for speaking with us. Tell us how the book came about.

Ted: As part of The American Project, we had produced a public statement designed to reclaim American conservative principles in a time of great confusion. We called it “A Way Forward” and determined that we needed a supporting historical document that would demonstrate that these principles, however eclipsed recently, are deeply embedded in the American story. However, what wasn’t clear until I began writing it was that the recent collapse of the conservative establishment and the reemergence of long-dormant or quiet forces and ideas was forcing a new assessment of the past. The narrative that had long been part of the conservative establishment was far too Cold War centered and had completely ignored longer and deeper trends in American history. What was needed was a new history that revealed that the way forward in a time of intellectual chaos required reclaiming our deepest traditions.

As I confronted the opportunity of reclaiming a richer and more American conservative tradition I reached out to Bruce about turning it into a book. The idea was to wed an accessible but newly recovered historical account with a restatement of conservative principles that are rooted in nature and have emerged in American forms through the long experience of the American people. Bruce’s expertise in the U.S. Constitution, common law, and Natural Law made him the perfect choice to develop a book that blends historical and normative, and connects the American experience with human needs and human nature. What we argued was that the particular and the universal belong together and that divorcing a set of principles from the human experiences that helped reveal those principles is a fundamental error, leading to destructive ideology.

There have been a number of books recently trying to explain where conservatism goes from here, but perhaps a better question is how did it get here? The Trump presidency, for example, while attracting a lot of conservative popular support, seemed disconnected with the conservative intellectual ecosystem. What happened?

Bruce: That’s an important question. To understand where conservatism goes from here, we first must understand what went wrong with it. The seeds of the problem were sown at the beginning of the conservative “movement” formed during the 1950s, with the adoption of “fusionism”—a coalition of groups including traditional conservatives, libertarians, and disenchanted former leftists committed to opposing Communism. With the rise of cultural leftism during the 1960s, many in this coalition determined to soft-pedal so-called “social issues” for the sake of unity in the face of the Communist threat. Unfortunately, over time this devaluation of essential issues of culture and morality became deeply ingrained in the conservative movement. More generally, victory at the polls seemed to conservative leaders to require simple slogans rather than an affirmation of essential American norms. At the same time, identification with the Republican Party fostered growth of a kind of “Conservatism Inc.” that was rather hostile to the small-town institutions, beliefs, and practices at the heart of the American way of life.

Eventually “getting along” and winning elections for the Republican Party became more important to conservative elites than defending Americans’ ability to rule themselves in their own families, churches, and local associations. This, and the rise of globalist economics, bringing economic dislocation and waves of often illegal immigrants produced apathy (helping elect Barack Obama). Then, when Donald Trump came along and gave voice to people’s frustrations, we have a political realignment of massive proportions. It’s still unclear where this will lead, but one thing is for sure: conservatives have to address people’s basic alienation—our feeling that we have been forced from our homes in the sense of our most natural and fundamental connections—or we no longer have any purpose, no reason to exist.

In a nation defined by progress and reinvention, what do you mean when you say as one of your key claims that “conservatism is the most powerfully American tradition because conservatives seek to preserve American principles and norms”?

Ted: At its heart, the conservative American tradition is about liberty and, particularly, about political liberty. By emphasizing political liberty, we stress the right of groups of people to take care of themselves, to establish the rules and laws and norms that they use to govern themselves collectively, whether in families, churches, cities, or the YMCA. In the American context, this right of self-rule was exercised countless times as people moved west or groups organized to solve some new problem. In each case, some new community organized itself—invented itself—through social contracts. In other words, the art of self-rule necessarily meant creativity, reinvention, new beginnings.

While Americans love the word progress and they seem determined to tinker, invent, improve, change things, I believe the best way to understand this tendency is through the idea of opportunity. America has always been about opportunity, most famously with opportunities to start over or to leave behind restrictions or statuses or customs that hold one in a certain social, political, or economic place. This lure of opportunity (or, if you like, progress in the sense of having the chance to make one’s life better) has always served as a check on the lure of equality. Equality—the ideal of all leftist ideologies—ultimately eliminates opportunity in favor of some distributed justice. And so, while Americans have always loved equality, their deeper love of opportunity has caused them to love equality moderately, and to love it this way is to love both liberty of the individual and political liberty (liberty of the community).

The deepest American tradition is, therefore, the jealous regard for protections of our liberties, and it is because we defend our tradition of liberties that we empower individuals and groups to pursue opportunities that give to American life a vibrancy and a certain kind of progress without slipping into the deadening ideal of equality.

Some critics of liberalism argue that the Founding was tainted originally either because it bore within itself the seeds of a secular progressivism or because it has no antidote for such an ideology. How would you respond to that?

Bruce: It’s understandable that in a time when slogans have replaced serious argument, and in which even people who consider themselves conservative spend so much time talking about America as an ideological construct conceived as a servant to equality, that some people would come to see our own tradition and nation as somehow rooted in a rationalistic secularism. But it just ain’t so.

A serious examination of the American Revolution and the Constitution has to look at the context in which they came about. That context is a tradition forged by 150 years of self-government by a deeply religious people. That people was “liberal” in the limited sense that they were wedded to opportunity and to the limitation of governmental power. It was “conservative” in a much deeper, more fundamental sense because the colonists in America were steeped in traditions of faith, family, and a freedom that was intrinsically communal in character. Even before they came here, colonists forged social compacts consciously patterned after church covenants, pledging themselves to walk together in the ways of their Lord. These were no secularist progressives, nor were they likely to consent to be ruled by such.

As to the Constitution itself, scholars in particular are far too enamored of modern, rationalist readings of frames of government—seeing them as somehow the fundamental institution of a society. That may be true of constitutions rooted in the French revolutionary tradition. But ours isn’t. It’s a document intended to provide limited, enumerated powers necessary to maintain peace and economic freedom among semi-sovereign states while protecting the new nation against foreign aggression. It was intended to mediate—keep the peace—among more natural, fundamental associations (religious ones prominent among them), not to reorder society according to any blueprint, secularist or otherwise. Ours is not an ideological people. It’s essential to our recovery of our way of life that we reject readings of our tradition that would reduce them to ideologies of any kind.

We must understand that Progressivism, while an American phenomenon, wasn’t an inevitable product of some deeply flawed founding; it was the product of our deeply flawed, sinful nature as humans, played out in the specific circumstances of the United States. The mistaken assumptions about human nature, abstract reason, and the power of administrative structures to make us “better” people exist in different forms, for example in European Social Democracy and Liberation Theology.

You place a lot of emphasis in the book on the importance of local associations and groups in the face of both elite opinion and forces such as globalization that seek to disrupt the ones we form at local levels. Our reviewer noted that you did not also note how local associations could be stifling or themselves contribute to the tendencies you deplore. How do local associations fit into your conservative vision?

Bruce: Local associations are at the core of conservatism and of the American way of life. It certainly is true that local associations can stifle individual creativity and expression, and that some have in fact pushed our culture toward the very Progressive universalism that has undermined our way of life. Some of this is just the way life is, though some shows the impact of Progressivism on our culture.

Community is, of course, demanding, and not individualistic. Historically, Americans expressed their individualism more by heading to the frontier than by seeking to destroy local associations. Even then, they usually took their communities with them, or found new ones on arrival. There is a fundamental understanding, cultivated by leftist history, that Americans were individualists from the start, but in fact the “individual” was actually a householder. Republican government was rooted in the role of heads-of-household in political life. But that isn’t the same thing as individualism; the kinds of privacy so many Americans demand today is quite foreign to our traditions and was largely created by some very bad Supreme Court decisions over the last few decades.

In addition, it’s important to keep in mind that from the beginning many Americans suffered from a kind of mania for community perfection. After all, the Puritans were Puritans—they wanted great purity in their church and, from those fundamental institutions, their lives—and they were willing to come across the sea to make that vision real in extremely thick, sometimes utopian communities. These outpourings of enthusiasm always have been a (sometimes destructive) part of the fabric of our culture. It was how associations worked, with years of calm interrupted by times of passion and revival of one sort or another. It wasn’t until the massive, national movements, especially of the late nineteenth century, that things changed for the worse. We address this somewhat obliquely in the book in noting the different views of Progressives, but the point really is that temperance reformers in particular nationalized as well as politicized their demands, and this fed into the ideology of Progressivism that has been the central bane of American tradition ever since.

Where did you place the historical moment when conservatism was eclipsed as a way to understand our national story among elite institutions?

Ted: What we are calling conservatism is the collection of America’s deepest traditions, customs, and norms—the ones that persist for generations. But these are not understood as “conservative” until they are threatened or challenged in some way. It is perhaps appropriate that one of the first crises of historical understanding came when slavery finally posed a threat to the nation’s identity that, as Lincoln noted in his “House Divided” speech, required that the nation clarify and then defend an understanding of its core principles. This clarification required an understanding of our history that both identified our most cherished principles and that charted a new course that would force us to be true to those principles. While the word “conservative” is anachronistic in this context, I think that this process of historical remembrance and innovation to meet an emerging crisis and its aftermath is an example of a conservative way of understanding, of preserving, and of innovating appropriate to our highest principles.

We have not always been good at this sort of historical story-telling, and at times our most popular and dominant historical narratives concentrated too heavily on celebration of heroes, principles, ideals, and accomplishments that we associate most with American identity. Failure to engage with the challenges or limits or problems with that history didn’t buttress American conservatism as much as make the American people vulnerable to simplistic concepts of history that appeared to show hypocrisy and gross violations of natural rights as the core of American identity.

The Progressive movement in the early twentieth century came with a new view of American history, including the famous attack by Charles Beard on the Constitution’s framers as motivated by economic self-interest. Progressive historians stressed a history of exploitation that they hoped would serve their political purposes. But if I’m going to date the time when the overwhelming majority of elite institutions rejected a conservative view of American history in favor of a story of injustice and exploitation, then I think we have to look at the 1960s and 1970s as the turning point. American liberals, who dominated intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1960s, operated with a somewhat more complex (than leftists) understanding of American ideals in the context of American failures, and they remained largely devoted to a set of American principles that they believed were still being realized over time. But certainly by the 1970s, judging by the kind of history told to American students from grade school through college, a leftist consensus had emerged among those institutions most involved in shaping both historical memory and American self-understanding.

By the 1970s liberals were on the defensive against those who demanded that history be useful for the purpose of social transformation, and conservatives had failed in the one area where they ought to have flourished—supplying a supple historical account rooted in an understanding of human nature, that follows carefully the empirical record and that exposes the danger of all abstract systems of justice as enemies of human good. Indeed, by the seventies and eighties, most of what we call conservative history had become a tool of a political movement, of think tanks, or of an effort to find what they call a “nonhistoricist” version of America. Almost all of these “conservative” versions of American history were triumphalist in some form and ended in some slogan that defined America. Lost in such accounts is the irony, contingency, the moral complexity of our real history and, as a result, a failure to develop a deeper understanding of American traditions, customs, and norms that understands moral failures in all their contextual complexity. Among the things lost by this is the ability to use history to adjust and improve without losing the deeper principles and ideals that are our inheritance. We are left with this option: defend some abstract ideal of America or destroy a fundamentally unjust America in favor of an ideal system of social justice. Both of these are anti-conservative and hostile to the American tradition, properly understood.

What role has the law played in undermining the conservative vision you outline?

Bruce: It’s important to begin by understanding the central role a specific form of law has played in our tradition. The common law Americans brought over from Britain is the law of custom. It’s written down in judicial decisions and opinions, but these decisions follow the customs of the people. That understanding underlay, not just our written Constitution, but also the unwritten constitution—the character and traditions of the people. So while ours is not primarily a book about the courts, the courts have played an important role in replacing custom with their own arbitrary rules and with decrees emanating from the federal government. Courts have taken over the powers of Americans as a self-governing people. They did this through a series of terrible decisions, beginning with Dredd Scott, which made slave ownership into a kind of unlimited federal, constitutional right, accelerating through the “laissez faire” courts of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and culminating in the lawless decisions of the post-World War II Supreme Court, determined to make over our nation and people according to judges’ abstract visions of social justice.

The courts have done two things, basically, to undermine our way of life. First, they have ignored, undermined, and “overruled” basic provisions of our Constitution limiting the federal government’s ability to rule the people directly from the center. Separation of Powers? Federalism? Enumeration of Powers? Inherent limits to the Commerce Power? All gone, and with them most of the reasons local communities traditionally had to exist and serve as the means by which the people rule themselves. Second, courts took over legislative power, all-too-often reducing a self-governing people to the role of supplicants before an imperial judiciary that makes law to serve its own goals. Neither can continue if we are to continue as a free people.

Where do you see the resources for a renewal of a conservative vision?

Ted: Over the last five decades or more, we have been experiencing the slow concentration of power into the hands of an oligarchic elite who now control almost all key cultural and social institutions. This was made possible by previous developments that undermined state and local control and that put more and more power and policy control in the hands of national elites. But the result is an assault on the deepest American traditions of individual and political liberty (self-rule). Recent events have exposed to a large swath of Americans who, previously, had been largely uninterested in politics, that their lives are controlled to an unacceptable degree by institutions over which they have no direct control or influence. This awakening to the fact of the oligarchy is the first and most important “resource” for a conservative renascence. Conservatives are made in response to abuse and the shape of their reaction depends on the context, but always moves toward a restatement of principles suited to a new environment. That is what we are seeing today.

The keys for this to develop into an effective conservative vision capable of motivating people to defend their inherited principles include demanding and getting more control over their private and communal lives and a vivid and powerful articulation of American traditions that invites people to love of an America that is beyond or perhaps beneath identity politics and simplistic ideals of justice. Americans must work “without permission” (to quote Charles Murray) to solve their problems, to build their neighborhoods and associations, to create the space for a self-ruling people to exercise their freedom. This will require fighting in the courts and in battling the administrative state and forming ever-new associations to help in these fights. But in the long run, the most important resource is an internalized belief that we govern ourselves and we will no longer tolerate the soft tyranny we have now exposed.

Bruce: We include in our book a number of policy discussions and concrete proposals for improvement. Most of them are aimed at undermining the oligarchy that currently controls our cultural high ground, especially in education (from preschool through graduate school), religion, and social policy. Also required is a return to understanding that our nation is, in fact, a nation—with borders, and with a common interest in the economic well-being of its people and the flourishing of all the communities that constitute it. So, we must take back control over our lives from technological elites through anti-monopoly policies, and from globalists of all kinds by defending our borders and the interests of American workers. Once the oligopoly’s grip on power is loosened—and I think it can be—the natural tendency of all people to form communities and to “come home” to their natural associations, will, God willing, reassert itself.  

Interviewed by JP O’Malley

Antonia Fraser is the author of many acclaimed and bestselling novels and historical works, including Mary Queen of Scots; Cromwell, Our Chief of Men; and The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605. She has won the Wolfson History Prize and the Medlicott Medal for Service to history. Fraser has been President of the English PEN and chair of the Society of Authors. She was married to playwright and author Harold Pinter, who died in 2008. Fraser’s latest book is The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780–1829, which depicts the political issues arising from religious intolerance during that epoch.

The story of this book begins in violence, in the summer of 1780 in London, which was the scene of the worst riots the city had ever experienced. What was the significance of the riots?

They were known as the Gordon Riots, and were famously commemorated later by Charles Dickens in Barnaby Rudge, when he talked about a “moral plague” running through the city. The death toll was somewhere around one thousand people. The riots were led by the militantly anti-Catholic Lord George, who was the son of a duke and also a Member of the British Parliament. The riots revealed the depth of anti-Catholicism, or anti-Popery, as would have been said at the time. They displayed how Catholic emancipation wasn’t going to be an easy thing to win.

What did Catholics need emancipation from? Could you explain the restrictions, in law, for Catholics during this period in both England and Ireland?

It all comes from the Penal Laws, which came about after the Protestant Reformation in England in the sixteenth century. And then there were further troubles after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when William III took the throne from the Catholic James II. At this time Catholics could hold no positions of power. They couldn’t be MPs, sit in the House of Lords, be magistrates, sit on juries, or hold commissions in the army. Catholic ceremonies were illegal. You couldn’t have a Catholic marriage. If you were a Catholic and you wanted to be married, you had to have a pretend Protestant marriage. Worst of all were the inheritance laws that were against Catholics. For example, if you were a member of a large family and about to inherit an estate, a Protestant could come along and take the entire estate by law. Catholics could not attend universities or take degrees either. There were also issues around religious dress in public too: religious dress of nuns, monks, and priests, for instance, could not be lawfully worn in the streets. And any signs of Catholicism in public, such as the sound of bells at Catholic chapels, were strictly forbidden.

The enemies of England in Europe during this time were all Catholic too, right?

Of course England had fought Catholic enemies, not just because they were Catholics, but because they were enemies. Namely sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France and Spain. An important turning point here was the French Revolution, when a lot of Catholic refugees came to England from France. This was because nuns and priests had been made illegal in France and some of them were executed. Catholics who came from France during this time were no longer seen as enemies, but as refugees.

Catholics in England clearly benefited from the effects of the French Revolution. But the effects in Ireland were very different.

Yes. The revolt of the United Irishmen in 1798 in Ireland, led by the Protestant Wolfe Tone, was particularly important here. Tone had looked to French forces for help and had already written a pamphlet in 1790, entitled An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland. This stirred up suspicion from England [thereafter], who believed Ireland might provide a backdoor to England’s enemies.

Was Percy Bysshe Shelley’s visit to Ireland in 1812 part of a greater cultural trend supporting Catholic emancipation?

Shelley was only nineteen then and had recently been expelled from Oxford University. His visit was part of an overall cultural trend from writers in England at the time, which was generally towards liberalism and decency. Shelley had the avowed intention of supporting the Irish people and wanted to draw attention to what he saw as their sufferings at the hands of tyrannical England. In particular he advocated two reforms: Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Act of Union. He had already written a poem for the Irish in 1809. And on his visit to Ireland in 1812 he published a pamphlet, An Address to the Irish People, of which 1500 copies were printed. He also wrote a poem in tribute to the Irish republican, Robert Emmett, who was executed in 1803 for his rebellion. It’s also worth noting that the poet William Wordsworth went completely the other way: he was against Catholic emancipation.

How did the captivity of Pope Pius VII at the hands of Napoleon from 1809 to 1814 influence Anglo-Papal relations during this period?

It meant that Napoleon, not the pope, became England’s enemy thereafter. The Pope stopped being the bogeyman and became instead the captive of England’s enemy. Also, the visit of Cardinal Ercole Consalvi to England in 1814 was hugely important. He was probably the first Cardinal to come officially to England since the sixteenth century. Consalvi was very helpful in delivering the legacy of the dead Stuart King to the living Hanoverian King.

The two heroes of your book are Daniel O’Connell and the British Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. What role did both play in bringing about Catholic emancipation?

O’Connell said that violence was not the way forward. And in the end he paved the way for Catholic emancipation when it became law in April 1829. No blood was shed in the process. As O’Connell himself aptly put it: “It is one of the greatest triumphs recorded in history—a bloodless revolution.” The Duke of Wellington, who was a Protestant and a Tory, saw sense too, understanding that [granting emancipation] was better for peace and for the welfare of England and Ireland. Both these men—separately of course—saw that the way forward for England and Ireland was not warfare, blood, and rioting, but negotiation. So while the story of Catholic emancipation begins in blood, it doesn’t end in blood.

In a speech Daniel O’Connell gave in 1824, he referenced the South American revolutionary, Simón Bolívar. How did Bolívar capture O’Connell’s imagination?

Bolívar captured the heart of all of Europe and was a very important figure of inspiration. He had secured liberty for South America from the Spanish military force in February 1819, becoming President of Gran Colombia, which included much of modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela. He had also defeated the Spanish cavalry in Peru at the Battle of Junín in 1824.

The Venezuelan leader was hailed as El Libertador, from which O’Connell would derive his own honorific, the Liberator. Bolívar was then what Daniel O’Connell has become. And the recent surge of independence in South America had caught O’Connell’s imagination because of the obvious parallels with Ireland. In O’Connell’s speech in 1824, he said that he “hoped Ireland should be restored to her rights, and if she were driven mad by persecution, that a new Bolívar may be found, and that the spirit of the South Americans may animate Ireland.”

Was the major turning point for emancipation through the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 that Daniel O’Connell had run for Parliament and won a seat as an MP nine months earlier in the County Clare by-election?

Yes. The keynote of his campaign, which was to be of vital importance in the future, was struck by O’Connell when he announced that “ours is a moral not a physical force.” The people of Clare were told to abstain from violence, which was common for elections at the time, and alcohol was banned too. O’Connell was obviously a Catholic, and as such, was held to be ineligible for the British Parliament. He suggested that the eyes of Europe would be on events in Clare. The winner of the Co. Clare by-election was announced on 5 July 1828, and the winner, by 2,057 to 982, was Daniel O’Connell, a Roman Catholic.

O’Connell was clearly elected, but as a Roman Catholic he wasn’t allowed to sit in the British Parliament. What happened then?

The controversy surrounded the fact that O’Connell would have to take an oath of allegiance [the Oath of Supremacy] to be admitted to the House of Commons. He said as a Catholic he could not take the oath. Parliament insisted that O’Connell had to take the oath. So the seat for Co. Clare was declared vacant. And he had to go back and face another election. But of course he won that election in July 1829. And finally he came to Parliament in a wonderful moment when he took his seat on 4 February 1830.

O’Connell would subsequently acquire the name “King Dan” or “the Liberator.” What were his greatest assets as a political leader, orator, and campaigner?

Well it was clear from early on that O’Connell displayed extraordinary charisma. He also proved to be an orator of unmatchable fervor. O’Connell’s appearance, much like his contemporary, the Duke of Wellington, became inextricable from the legend. He was a showman and could often be seen strolling through Dublin with his umbrella shouldered as if it were his pike. From the start he was steadfast in his opposition to violence: this divided him from the United Irishmen of 1798. And his strongest desire was for the repeal the Act of the Union, to which he was a dedicated adversary.

Following emancipation certain roles were still denied to Catholics, not least the role of the monarch. You mention, for example, that the Act of Settlement 1701 (which stated that Catholics or those married to Catholics could not succeed to the throne) was not repealed. When did that change?

A member of the royal family [today] can marry a Catholic. They used to have step out of the Royal succession for doing so. For example, when Prince Michael of Kent married Princess Marie Christine in 1978 he left the succession because she is a Catholic. But in 2013 the law was changed.

What would happen if a member of the British Royal family wanted to convert to Catholicism today?

If someone who was in line to the current British throne converted to Catholicism, it would be difficult to see how they could become King or Queen because the King or Queen is also head of the Church of England. But if you disestablished the Church of England—which is something that might happen—and then consequently the King or Queen was not head of it, then there would no objection, I suspect. The next step in the UK is to have a Catholic Prime Minister. I always thought it was sad that [former UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair, announced his conversion to Catholicism after leaving office. Because if he had said “I’m a Catholic, what are you going to do about it,” he might have broken new ground.  

JP O’Malley is an Irish writer living in London.

JP O’Malley

John Gray is an English political philosopher whose major books include Straw Dogs, Black Mass, and The Silence of Animals. Gray’s latest book is called Seven Types of Atheism.

Where did the title of your new book arise from?

It parallels an idea in William Empson’s 1930 book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, which says that there are seven types of ambiguity in poetry. Empson argued that language is essentially ambiguous. And that the ambiguity of language is what makes poetry possible. Atheism has many different forms. The purpose of my book is not to convince the reader of a belief of disbelief, but to provoke thoughts in the reader’s mind.

Your book argues that history, rather than science, has always posed more of a challenge to Christianity. Why so?

Well the more astute critics of Christianity in the nineteenth century realized that the real threat to Christianity wasn’t science. Because science and religion are different human activities.

It’s still common, for instance, among the primitive new atheists to treat the Genesis myth as an early version of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. However, leading Jewish scholars stated more than two thousand years ago that the Genesis story was not to be read literally, or as some kind of explanatory theory; but as a myth: that is, a way of finding a fundamental truth through a narrative. So in that sense, religion and science are completely different.

Your book looks at various scholars who have analyzed the historical truth of Christianity. What findings did you discover.

In the nineteenth century there were a number of scholars who looked into claims whether the Christian version of the story of Jesus was historically correct. Even then there were criticisms of it. Christianity is an unusual religion in that a large part of it plays on historical events.

So if Jesus is not seen as as representing the perceived versions of Christianity—that he died and was resurrected—then Christianity is compromised. Of the various different versions of the life of Jesus, none of them can be shown to be wholly the right one. But the one that I think is the most plausible was developed over many years in the writings of a great scholar of the origins of Christianity: Geza Vermes. He argued that Jesus was a charismatic Jewish prophet, and not the founder of Christianity. And that [Christianity] was actually founded by St Paul and later St Augustine. So that important bit of history challenges the Christian story.

How important was St Paul in terms of shaping the history of the West?

He is one of the key figures. You could almost say that Paul was one of the foundational figures of the West because he successfully turned what was originally a Jewish religious movement into one that has universal claims. The historical figure of Jesus was a Jewish prophet and remained a Jewish prophet. He wasn’t the founder of a universal religion. But Paul turned him into that. Paul also linked Christianity together with Greek thinking and philosophy, though in a way that has never really been satisfactory. But he was also a rather malignant figure. Because the religion that he invented—Christianity—has many negative features. For example, the obsession with [sexual piety and the body]. None of that was in Jesus’s teaching.

What is the main difference between Christianity and other religious faiths?

Particular traditions within Western Christianity put so much emphasis and importance on belief, which are really not central in most religions. There is no creed in Hinduism, Taoism, or in ancient Judaism. Indeed, for most of human history, beliefs were not central to religions. But practices were more important. So in this sense, Christianity is rather unique.

You believe that earlier forms of liberalism were more tolerant than present day liberalism. Why so?

The early forms of liberalism that emerged from people like John Locke [in seventeenth-century Britain] were explicitly Christian and monotheistic. This to my mind was more reasonable than present-day liberalism. I am not a monotheist or a Christian. However, I’ve read countless accounts of secular liberals saying that their values are universal. But none of them stand up. Today’s evangelical liberalism wants to convert the whole of humankind to these values. It’s another one of those secular surrogates for religion.

You also say that liberalism did not arise during the European Enlightenment, as many believe.

Yes. The origins of liberalism actually come from the roots of Judaism and Christianity. But I don’t expect to persuade atheists about this because they are irrational on this point.

You are hugely critical of modern liberalism. What is your main problem with the ideology?

That it’s immune to empirical evidence. It’s a form of dogmatic faith. If you are a monotheist it makes sense—I myself am not saying it’s true or right—to say that there is only one way of life for all of human kind: and so you should try and convert the rest of humanity to that faith. But if you are not a monotheist, and you claim to be an atheist, it makes no sense to claim that there is only one way of life. There may be some good and bad ways of living. And there may be some forms of barbarism, where human societies cannot flourish for very long. But there is no reason for thinking that there is only one way of life: the ones that liberal societies practice. It’s also worth pointing out that secular liberalism is the most dominant ideology in the West today, as far as the West has any ideology left.

Do you see any benefits of liberalism?

The old liberal way of life was a highly civilized way of humans co-existing. It produced things like a government that is independent of any single faith. The interesting thing now is that hyper liberals, or what you might call alt-liberals, are destroying what remains of this life. They are closing down free speech in the name of a hyperbolic version of liberal values. This hyperbolic ideology is destroying a valuable way of life.

What kind of influence did the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche have in shaping the atheist movement in nineteenth-century Europe?

Nietzsche retained many forms of Christianity in his thinking. Still, he is the most important atheist. And atheism has really degenerated since his time. Because what he was trying to do—but of course failed—was to develop a form of atheism that really steps outside of Christian beliefs and monotheistic ways of thinking. I think atheism has declined in intellectual quality since the nineteenth century. Today’s atheism is a pale shadow of that other form of atheism.

Are we living in intellectually barren times?

In the world of philosophy—particularly concerning ideas relating to religion—I would say, yes.

But more broadly, no. Because there are many things going on in the media, arts, literature, film, and so on, which I think are extremely interesting.

And we have seen a hybrid of so-called low culture with high culture. Culture, overall, is quite lively and interesting. But in philosophy there is either stagnation, or actual decline. And I blame the liberal center for this. Liberals are absolutely adamant that progress is going on at present. And at the same time they are full of blind panic about many features of the contemporary world. They are horrified by the various forms of rising fundamentalism and nationalism. So the liberal mindset oscillates between adamant certainty and blind panic. That is not interesting.

Many of your critics describe you as a misanthropist and a nihilist, who sees no hope for the human condition. What is your response to that?

Well, these days a nihilist is anyone who simply ruffles or questions the ideas of the time. A nihilist is just someone who makes silly people uncomfortable. Actually most of my critics are themselves nihilists in the original sense. Nihilism was developed in Russia in the late nineteenth century: they believed that traditional religions should be abolished and derive new values from science. 

JP O’Malley is an Irish writer living in London.

A conversation with Adam Bellow.

A full transcript is below, and the unedited audio of this interview may be played or downloaded here (MP3, 27 MB, 27 minutes).

Interviewed by MARK JUDGE

Mark Judge: I am speaking with Adam Bellow, who is a well-known editor. He’s done a lot of conservative best-sellers by people like Sarah Palin, Jonah Goldberg, and Dinesh D’Souza. He is currently an editor at St. Martin’s and he has his own imprint there called All Points. He’s also the creator of the website Liberty Island. I’d like to start with Liberty Island. It is a couple years old but you’ve just relaunched it and you have a new look to the website. So tell me what Liberty Island is, its concept, and about the relaunch.

From website to publisher

Adam Bellow: First of all, I’ll say that I was a nonfiction editor on the right—in the conservative intellectual world for thirty years. I’d never published a novel in my whole career but several years ago I noticed that a lot of my nonfiction authors were asking me whether I would be interested in publishing a novel for them. I kept hearing this. I read some of these books and considered publishing a couple of them in the commercial, mainstream publishing houses where I was working, but the feeling was that they were too sectarian, that the audience for these books written by conservatives would not be a broad mass market, and so it was not considered to be a good idea—just did not fit into our business model as publishers. So together with my friend and business partner David Bernstein we launched Liberty Island magazine.

The magazine was at first a digital magazine for short works by right-leaning authors—conservatives, libertarians, anyone concerned with the fate and future of freedom. We published a lot of great stuff. It was really great fun. We got a lot of wonderful material. But soon after launching we began to receive queries about novels. And so we starting soliciting submissions of novel length. And again, although there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t up to our standards as editors, there was a tremendous amount of good quality material in a wide range of fiction genres, ranging from the literary to what we call genre fiction, which includes science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, historical, romance, and other categories.

And so we started publishing novels, but we had some difficulties with distribution. We were operating on a shoestring and it’s hard to put books into physical distribution. So we went through a couple of distributors and then finally we decided to take on distribution ourselves and handle it directly, which is a much more satisfactory arrangement. You have better control over schedules and timing and so forth. We redesigned our website and relaunched it and we are about to roll out a large number of new titles in a variety of genres. We are extremely proud of the books that we’ve selected and have every expectation that they will find their natural readership.

Punk rock and ‘conservative’ fiction

Judge: I often hear from conservatives that, well, the left owns the popular culture, they own Hollywood, they own academia, they own publishing, and I say, well, there’s this place called Liberty Island where they’re actually trying to establish a toehold there. It’s almost like punk rock in the early days where a bunch of guys are in their basement and they create Rough Trade or Creation Records. The point being that for a lot of conservatives who are complaining about this situation, it takes competition to bring out the best talent, and I think Liberty Island is doing that. Isn’t that your model that the competition is producing better books and there’s a market there for these on the right—people just have to know about that? Am I on the right track there?

There is a new counterculture rising in opposition to the increasingly rigid and politically correct control of mainstream popular culture.

Bellow: Well, the punk-rock analogy is actually a good one. A couple of summers ago I published an article inNational Review announcing essentially our discovery that the creative energy had shifted on the right, into the production of popular culture. It was not limited to popular fiction but also includes video and music and stand-up comedy and a whole range of pop-culture varieties that are reflected in the mainstream culture. But as we conservatives know, conservative viewpoints are not welcome in mainstream culture and so the conclusion of my article, my argument, is that there is a new counterculture rising in opposition to the increasingly rigid and politically correct control of mainstream popular culture.

We at Liberty Island wished to support and promote and give voice to that that counterculture. We called upon our fellow conservatives to support those creative individuals who are laboring in, for the most part, total obscurity with very little encouragement or support. We as editors and publishers are very moved by the persistence and tenacity and commitment of these creative individuals and we think it’s perfectly appropriate to call upon conservatives to support them.

Now the response to my article was interesting because, on the left, there were howls of derision and laughter. What, conservatives write novels? Using what, a rock, a lump of coal? You can imagine what kind of hilarity ensued, because to the left the idea that a conservative could have a creative impulse is laughable on its face.

What I found interesting on the right, however, was a certain reluctance to endorse the idea of what we were calling conservative fiction. What does that mean? Does that mean that we’re going to be publishing novels where Donald Trump is the hero, or about particular conservative policies, or partisan books? And should not culture also be free of any political message or intention and be somehow aesthetically pure or superior?

Great literary works are often entangled, usually political in some way

There is a certain kind of cultural snobbism that we see on the right sometimes, a kind of Parnassian snobbery, which is to say, “that’s nice, get back to us when you discover the conservative Faulkner or Melville.” And our response to that is, what’s wrong with Tom Wolfe or Tom Clancy? We’re not taking about high literature—which we agree should stand on its own aesthetic merits. Although I would also point out that great literary works are often entangled, usually political in some way, going back to the Aeneid, for example, which was commissioned by Augustus to glorify the founding of Rome. Or even farther back, the works of Sophocles, which were open political commentary on the reign of Pericles.

Judge: Or Robert Heinlein?

Bellow: Or Heinlein, yes. Coming more to the future, in the twentieth century there’s no question that particularly genres like science fiction have been political. Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451—the utopia/dystopia—many wonderful books have been published that have a political message and that still managed to be popular and entertaining. And that is what we are looking at.

Now when you come to the question of how aesthetic and cultural movements get launched, they often start—as you know having cited the example of punk rock (or grunge rock or blues or any number of other musical genres)—these movements start in small arenas, like the Cavern Club in Liverpool, let’s say, and they attract an initial band of enthusiasts who are the first fans and supporters of the new musical thing. And they provide support to these artists as they hone their craft and develop their sound and style. And then if they’re really good, they break out of that original supportive environment and go national and even global.

That is also true of writers. A good example is Tom Clancy, who wrote novels that were not explicitly political or conservative but were clearly written with a kind of conservative, pro-American patriotic outlook. Clancy’s novels could not initially be published in the mainstream publishing houses. He was first published by the Naval Institute Press—judging by its name you can imagine the kinds of things they publish. Clancy became a big success for them and after he was established as an author with a large audience then he was able to move to a mainstream publishing company. And that’s the model for Liberty Island.

We think of Liberty Island as the bottom rung of a feeder system that doesn’t exist

We think of Liberty Island as the bottom rung of a feeder system that doesn’t exist, that needs to be created in order to allow first-time authors and self-published authors whose views are unfashionable and could not be published by left-leaning or liberal mainstream houses to be published and to find an audience and build some kind of base of support so that they can then go on to be more successful according as their talents warrant. That is our ethos as publishers.

A sampling of new titles

Judge: Have you thought about asking Kanye West to be on your board of directors?

Bellow: It’s a great idea. Do you have his e-mail? Does he read? That is the other question.

Judge: He raps, so he’s good with language, I know that. So, if someone says, I want to go to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and order two or three Liberty Island books and give this a shot, what are some titles you can think of that would be a good place to start off?

Bellow: We are rolling out a lot of content this year. Every month we are publishing a new novel or a new series. We have started releasing whole series together in batches.

In the single-novel category we have a book by Frank J. Fleming, who is a writer, a humorist with a following, with PJ Media. We had published a previous book by Frank, and this is is new one. It’s called Sidequest: In Realms Ungoogled. It’s described as an urban fantasy and it’s about a computer coder who is taking an unusual route to work one day and finds himself in an enchanted forest where fairies approach and give him a sword and tell him to learn to use this sword or perish. But he’s too busy, he has to get to work. So he goes to work instead, but then he begins to notice some strange things: the fact that his boss is a demon with horns and fangs, or that an unnamed thing below feasts on human victims in an arena filled with people absorbed in their cell phones. And then he goes on a date with a blonde girl named Shannon and she is wearing a full suit of armor and carrying an axe. She explains that she is a Sister of Torment and she cuts off heads for the Darkness. And no one thinks there is anything funny about this. Nothing out of the ordinary. He’s beginning to see more and more the world as it is. And he goes on an adventure and has to make important choices. It’s a classic light-versus-dark fantasy. Frank is a wonderful writer, very funny, and it’s a terrific story. That book is doing quite well for us.

And we have a five-book series called Bad Road Rising by Mike Baron. Baron is a very successful author of graphic novels, and in recent years he’s turned to writing fiction. He has a series of books about a private eye, Josh Pratt, who had been a member of a bike gang, a meth dealer, went to prison, had a religious experience, and came out as a better man. In all of his adventures, each of these novels, he has a different problem that he has to solve for somebody, and it usually involves his getting embroiled in some kind of mess with some bad bikers, and also with some liberals, because he lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and naturally is constantly dealing with a sort of liberal folly. What I like about these books, apart from the fact that they’re just really excellent Chandleresque novels—well written, that tell good stories—is that the conservatism is just implicit. Nobody ever gives a lecture in one of these stories. It’s not like reading Ayn Rand. These are just excellent stories with a very sympathetic character, and they’re really page-turning books. These are highly recommended.

In addition there is a trilogy by Quin Hillyer, who is well known to readers of National Review. The series is called The Accidental Prophet, the adventures of someone named Madison Jones, or Mad Jones, who suffers a tragedy in his life, has a kind of religious, Martin Luther–type experience, stays up all night writing a bunch of religious theses and nails them to the church doors. It’s as though Luther lived in the age of Twitter, and Jones becomes quickly the center of a cult. It’s a hilarious but theologically serious book, in three parts. It’s a really fun read.

Another four-part series is by Roy Griffis, one of our favorite authors and a genuine discovery. Roy is a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in San Francisco, and a kind of conservative with a touch of the prepper in him. A really great guy—everyone likes him personally. He has written a series of books set in an alternate American present in which the U.S. fell in 2008, through a combined assault of jihadi invaders from the south and Chinese invaders from the east. So 2008 is the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, and Bush goes into hiding where he directs the resistance and becomes known as Lonesome George. So these are the Lonesome George Chronicles, and in every volume you meet various groups of resistance fighters around the country. There are various subplots that go through the series; there’s one set in the wreckage of Washington, DC. and another in the American Southwest, another in southern California.

One of the things that I particularly enjoy about this book is that the author has incorporated some real-life characters in it, with alternate futures. One of the leading figures in the book is the actor Alec Baldwin, who as everybody knows is a massive liberal, but in this book, Baldwin is one of those liberals who has his eyes opened after LA is nuked by the Chinese and his wife and daughter are killed and he becomes a leader of the resistance. Another real-life figure who is included in this series is the late Molly Ivins, who is a well-known liberal columnist from Texas who in real life died of cancer in the nineties, but in the novel lives on and witnesses the invasion and fall of America and has her eyes opened to the nature of the jihadist threat and becomes the voice of the resistance on the underground radio.

It’s touches like these that make the book enjoyable—particularly enjoyable for a conservative. And I would say not objectionable to a liberal, which is the whole idea. We don’t want to publish conservative books that are offensive to liberals. There’s no need for that. We want to entertain them and get them to maybe think a little bit differently from the way they have been used to doing. And storytelling is the best way.

Books publishers love

Judge: It is. One of my favorite writers in the world is Meg Wolitzer, who wrote The Interestings, and she has a new book out called The Female Persuasion. A lot of people have been saying that The Female Persuasion is about feminism and liberals are going to like this book, but her book The Interestings was about human beings, about how interesting people are as they get older, and their friendships and their relationships and their struggles. I’m going to read The Female Persuasion because I think she’s going to have some interesting characters in there. It’s the same reason I’m going to read Liberty Island books, because there will be interesting characters in there. Is that right?

Bellow: Yes. These are accomplished works of fiction, and we set a pretty high standard. We get a lot of stuff—we read dozens of novels every year, and the majority we have to turn down—as readers we don’t think they are of good enough quality. But the wonderful thing about what we do is that we are in a position to make discoveries, which is what publishers always want to do.

That’s what publishing thrives on: the enthusiasm of editors and their conviction, their commitment to certain writers and books.

Publishers want to publish books that they love. I am sitting right now in my New York publishing office, and I get offered books every day. Four or five times a day someone sends me a proposal or a manuscript or calls me up and pitches a book. It would be easy to fill up your list with books that are perfectly fine, perfectly viable, books that would certainly have an audience. But that’s not how we operate as editors—unless we’re publishing crossword puzzle books or sudoku books, which is not what we went to college to do. But let’s say you’re publishing popular fiction or children’s literature or, as I do, political nonfiction. To the degree that we are able, the way we operate is that you choose to publish books that you love, that you resonate with, that you think other people will love as well. That’s what publishing thrives on: the enthusiasm of editors and their conviction, their commitment to certain writers and books.

In our work at Liberty Island we uphold the same standard. We’ve been very gratified to discover that there is a tremendous amount of good stuff being published—written and mostly self-published—by people who simply deserve a larger audience, and that is our role. I’ve only touched on a few of the titles that we’re publishing. I think we have something like thirty books coming out this year all told, so it’s a cornucopia, an embarrassment of riches. We couldn’t be prouder of our writers and our staff and all the work that has gone to try and demonstrate the truth of our proposition that conservatives can write compelling works of fiction that deserve a broad audience.

Judge: That’s a great place to wind up. I want to thank you for talking with me. The website is Liberty Island. Lots of great stuff there, so check it out.  

The Bookman would like to welcome Philipp Rosemann, who, after teaching at the University of Dallas for over twenty years, was just appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth. He spoke with us about the Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations series, a library of medieval texts being published through a collaboration between the University of Dallas and Peeters of Louvain, of which he is the general editor.

Bookman: Philipp, thanks so much for being with us. Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of the project?

In the late 1990s, a group of medievalists at the University of Dallas generated the idea of a kind of medieval continuation of the famous Loeb Classical Library—a series that would publish English translations of medieval Latin texts on facing pages. The series would have a comprehensive scope, being open to all genres and subjects, so that over time a representative collection of medieval Latin texts would emerge. Equally important was the notion of publishing the Latin original and the translation on facing pages. In this manner, Latin texts would be rendered accessible to a wider audience, but without pretending that a translation can replace the original. As the Italians say, traduttore, traditore: a translator is inevitably a traitor, betraying nuances of meaning in the source that a translation just cannot capture. The hope, then, was that the reader of the translation would always keep an eye on the original, perhaps even being challenged to deepen his knowledge of Latin.

This project appeared particularly suitable for the University of Dallas, which has always had a serious commitment to the recovery and renewal of the Western Christian tradition. In the formation of this tradition, the Middle Ages played a crucial role. But how can one recover and renew what one doesn’t know, or knows only imperfectly? Hence the series was meant to broaden our understanding ofthe Latin culture of the medieval period.

It is my understanding that there remains a large volume of medieval literature in Latin still not translated into any European vernacular. If that is the case, what is the reason for that?

There is an enormous quantitative difference between the classical literary heritage and the medieval one. The Loeb Classical Library has largely reached its goal of making available the entire literature of classical Greece and Rome. Such a goal would be impractical for the Middle Ages, because so many more texts have been preserved. European libraries are full of manuscripts that contain the unpublished writings of thousands of medieval authors. This means that there is still a lot of work to do in recovering the medieval literary tradition. Yet, not everything that is preserved is also worth publishing; for example, do we need to know the contents of the lectures of every medieval university teacher, even those who were unoriginal and mediocre? Hardly. And even if such material is sometimes worth editing for a more comprehensive understanding of the intellectual landscape of the Middle Ages, it is still another question if it needs to be translated.

What effect if any do you think the lack of access to these texts has had on the popular imagination about medieval culture and literature?

The popular imagination regarding the Middle Ages has very little to do with the historical reality. When Renaissance scholars invented the term “Middle Ages,” they meant to suggest that the period between, roughly, 500 and 1500 represented an unfortunate interruption in the tradition of classical learning. The very term “Middle Ages” therefore has pejorative connotations. We can see this in popular usage, where the adjective “medieval” often designates old-fashioned and backward practices. Scholars of the Middle Ages have spent the last 150 years attempting to correct this prejudice—with limited success, it seems to me. Most people continue to think of the medieval period as a dark age.

The reality is that there was as much light and shadow in the Middle Ages as there is in every other age. To be sure, Thomas Aquinas composed his Summa theologiae at a time of brutal wars and torture chambers. But what about the Enlightenment, which produced the Terror of the French Revolution? What about our own time of unprecedented technological progress, which nevertheless assaults human dignity in so many ways, from the insidious talk about “human resources” to the epidemic of abortion? Human nature is fallen.

How are volumes selected for your series?

The most important criterion is the inherent interest of the text being translated, together with the quality of the translation and the translator’s ability to explain why the material is worth reading. Thus, each volume opens with a scholarly introduction that situates the work in its historical context and sheds light on the ways in which it helped shape, or at least contributed to, the Western intellectual tradition. As editor of the series, I ultimately decide what gets published. In the case of texts that lie outside my areas of expertise, such as medieval history or poetry, I seek the advice of colleagues who serve as external reviewers.

A practical consideration always involves the availability of the Latin texts. If a text is still unprinted, slumbering in some library or libraries in manuscript form, the author must prepare an edition. But if a text has been printed, a judgment must be made on the quality of the edition—simply put, has the text been transcribed reliably from its manuscript sources? Finally, a recent edition may be protected by copyright, so that the series must pay its original publisher a fee to gain permission to reprint it.

The series aims to publish a mixture of “major” and “minor” texts, because tradition requires both great minds and humble servants who help transmit the ideas of the major figures. Thus, we have published works by St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas, but also a fifteenth-century abridgment of mystical theology by an obscure Franciscan from Bavaria. One of our volumes contains a manual of a secret system of shorthand writing that seems to border on magic—the anonymous author never quite tells us whether he is just trying to teach his readers the “notary” art or something more “notorious.”

For translators, what special problems does medieval Latin pose—for example, in some of the theological or philosophical texts you have selected?

As I already mentioned, every translation is questionable, even if it does not contain crass mistakes. It is impossible to convey the full meaning of many Latin terms in contemporary English. This is particularly so because we have lost the “ear,” so to speak, enabling us to hear the etymological depth of words. For most contemporary speakers of English, words are labels that are extrinsically attached to the realities they designate. In fact, this loss of depth has much to do with the fact that even educated people no longer know Latin, which is behind so many English words. Thus, for example, who still hears the biological metaphor that is implicit in the notion of “concept”? What does conceiving an idea have to do with conceiving a child? Why is the same word used for both realities? Unlike us, medieval authors heard depths of meaning in every word they used. The idea that a term could be totally arbitrary seemed strange to them.

To give an example from Thomas Aquinas, in the well-known list of transcendentals that occurs in his Disputed Questions on Truth, the Angelic Doctor lists one transcendental as aliquid. This is usually translated as “something.” According to this rendering, Aquinas wants to say: everything that is, is a being; moreover, it is true, good, beautiful, and “something.” No one wonders why Aquinas would make such a trivial point: obviously, whatever is, is something! How couldit not? But this is not what he means. In fact, he explains, dicitur aliquid quasi aliud quid. In Latin, the etymology of “something” is “another what”—so, everything that is, is only insofar as it is distinct from another. Suddenly, we discover a dynamic, dialectical dimension in Aquinas’s thought. In the regular translation of aliquid as “something,” this is lost entirely. The passage becomes nonsense.

The ultimate reason why, for the medievals, words are pregnant with meaning is their belief in the God who is Logos, Word. If God himself is the Word who speaks reality into existence, then words are powerful keys to the very structure of the real. We have to listen carefully to the message they hold. It is very difficult—maybe impossible—to convey this theological conception of language in a contemporary English translation.

These books are beautifully produced; how did the effort to make the volumes of the series beautiful objects play into the goals of the series?

That the books are so beautiful is entirely due to our publisher, Peeters of Louvain, Belgium. In an academic world that is dominated by global publishing conglomerates, Peeters stands out as a family business with roots from the middle of the nineteenth century. The publishing conglomerate works to generate profits for its shareholders, until it is gobbled up by an even larger enterprise; the family-owned publishing house, by contrast, wants to make sure the business is still there for the next generation. This attitude gives rise to a long-term business strategy that is most conducive to academic quality. Emmanuel Peeters, the father of the current owners, once told me: “We want to publish books that will still sell in fifty years.” Indeed, Peeters has a backlist that contains titles from the early twentieth century. With this approach, it is important to the Peeters family that the books they publish stand the test of time, in terms both of their content and of their presentation.

Can you tell us about one or two of the texts you find especially important to have brought to an English-speaking audience?

Let me mention two. The series just published St. Bonaventure’s treatment of the Eucharist in his massive commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Translated by a colleague from Baylor, Junius Johnson, the volume makes a wonderful contribution to a better understanding of the thought of the Seraphic Doctor, the eight hundredth anniversary of whose birth we celebrated in 2017. Bonaventure’s theology offers intellectual resources of great contemporary value, as the future Pope Benedict XVI demonstrated in his dissertation devoted to Bonaventure’s theology of history. Bonaventure thinks much more historically than most other scholastics, including Thomas Aquinas. In an age in which truth is challenged by a heightened awareness of historical development, it is important to understand how truth and time belong together in the Christian faith.

Another favorite volume of mine was authored by my late mentor, Professor James McEvoy. In the Bavarian State Library, McEvoy discovered an abridgment that one Brother Andrew, a Franciscan, prepared in the fifteenth century of some works by the thirteenth-century English theologian Robert Grosseteste. These works, in turn, were commentaries on the mystical theology by the mysterious but crucial Pseudo-Dionysius, a fifth-century author writing under the name of the disciple of St. Paul from the Acts of the Apostles. The abridgment is in many ways unremarkable; it is not one of the great works of Western literature. But that is the point: tradition is kept alive not only through the original creations of the greatest minds, but also requires the modest work of transmission and transformation that occurs inthe writings of lesser figures. In this case, an otherwise unknown Franciscan from the late Middle Ages used Robert Grosseteste to understand the mystical theology of the Pseudo-Dionysius; the notes that he made to abridge this material were in turn used by other readers. Brother Andrew’s modest abridgment thus helped connect readers with the Pseudo-Dionysius across an entire millennium. That is tradition.

How will your recent appointment in Ireland affect the Dallas series?

The University of Dallas has appointed a young colleague from the History Department, Kelly Gibson, to act as co-editor. This appointment will ensure the continued association of the series with Dallas, while also adding a fresh editorial perspective. At the same time, the National University of Ireland has promised me support for a second editorial office in Maynooth. The series will therefore acquire a presence in Europe, which will strengthen its connections with English-speaking colleagues on that side of the Atlantic.  

In this conversation, Philipp Rosemann, general editor of the Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations series, discusses his work to make accessible the work of medieval texts in Latin, and why tradition needs both the major figures and those who help transmit their ideas for new generations.