Unforgettable

To political philosophers and students of the intellectual tradition of the conservative movement, Frank Meyer is a household name. A lot of the rest of us have never heard of him. But many people credit him with something unforgettable: the first philosophical defense of modern conservatism. He's one of those guys that blows your mind to read. And read again. What Frank Meyer did is articulate a philosophy of "fusionism." I know it sounds like something out of the Jettson's, but in fact, "fusionism" is the movement and intellectual tradition of "fusing" Adam Smith's free-market libertarianism with Edmund Burke's socially concerned traditionalism.

This is something most of us take for granted as modern conservatism. But fiscal and social conservatives didn't always get along, and we can thank Frank Meyer for lighting a fire in people like William F. Buckley Jr. that has no doubt profoundly impacted the way we think....(more)


Here is an exerpt from Meyer's seminal piece "Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism" featured in Modern Age in 1960. You can read the whole thing here. It is truly unforgettable.

[T]here have developed doctrines apparently sharply opposed to each other, and sometimes presented as mutually incompatible, but which I believe can in reality be united within a single broader conservative political theory, since they have their roots in a common tradition and are arrayed against a common enemy. Their opposition, which takes many forms, is essentially a division between those who abstract from the corpus of Western belief its stress upon freedom and upon the innate importance of the individual person (what we may call the libertarian position) and those whodrawing upon the same source-stress valve and virtue and order (what we may call the traditionalist position).

But the source from which both draw, the continuing consciousness of Western civilization, has been specifically distinguished by its ability to hold these apparently opposed ends in balance and tension; and in fact the two positions which confront each other today in American conservative discourse both implicitly accept, to a large degree, the ends of the other. Without the implicit acceptance of an absolute ground of value, the pre=eminence of the person as criterion of political and social thought and action has no philosophical foundation; and freedom would be only a meaningless excitation and could never become the serious goal of a serious politics. On the other hand, the belief in virtue as the end of men's being implicitly recognizes the necessity of freedom to choose that end; otherwise, virtue could be no more than a conditioned tropism. And the raising of order to the rank of an end overshadowing and subordinating the individual person would make of order not what the traditionalist conservative means by it, but the rule of totalitarian authority, inhuman and subhuman.

On neither side is there a purposeful, philosophically founded rejection of the ends the other side proclaims. Rather, each side emphasizes so strongly the aspect of the great tradition of the West which it sees as decisive, that distortion sets in. The place of its goals in the total tradition of the West is lost sight of, and the complementary interdependence of freedom and virtue, of the individual person and political order, is forgotten.