Watch On The Right: Conservative Intellectuals In The Reagan Era (History of American Thought and Culture) - Hardcover

Hoeveler, J. David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299128105 ISBN 13: 9780299128104

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

Synopsis

The ascendancy of conservatism in the last twenty years is an unprecedented episode in American intellectual  and political history.  In Watch on the Right, J. David Hoeveler Jr. gives us enlightening, often immensely entertaining, portraits of the key thinkers behind this “revolution.”  As Hoeveler writes, “conservative thinkers hang their hats on many different racks,” and this book dramatizes for us the breadth of the conservative coalition as exemplified by the eight writers surveyed:  William F. Buckley Jr. George Will, Robert Nisbet, Irving Kristol, Hilton Kramer, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., and Michael Novak.
    These eight “gurus” of the right represent a very wide spectrum of conservative thought, but Hoeveler also considers the present-day conservative renaissance against the literary background that has given the movement its identity since Edmund Burke.  Amid the multiple voices unifying themes do emerge. American conservatives share a hostility toward  the liberal “new class”—the professional media and academic elites and the entrenched government bureaucracies that still believe in the perfectibility of society by enforced social engineering.  Moreover, conservatives of all persuasions are united in struggling to sustain traditional values against the onslaught of revolutionary capitalism and technology, and all are profoundly hostile to imperialistic communism on the Soviet model.
    Despite the existence of a generic conservatism, however, Hoeveler’s portraits provide us with a fascinating tour of the shifts and turns in modern social thought from the decline of liberalism in the late 1960s to the current era—a path that leads through such diverse areas as the Cold War, bourgeois culture, art and aesthetics, civil rights and the welfare state, New Age culture, and the gender revolution.
    To a whole generation that has never known anything but conservative leadership, Watch on the Right will explain, in clear accessible prose, how the movement flourished in the 1970s and 1980s.  For readers who saw it happen (but never thought it would) and for liberals (who are feverishly trying to recover “their ” mandate), this book as no other pulls the ideological threads of the story together.
    Watch on the Right is illustrated with delightful pen-and-ink caricatures.

About this title

About the Author:

J. David Hoeveler Jr. is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He is the author of The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 1900 1940 and of James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: From Glasgow to Princeton.
"

From Publishers Weekly:

Hoeveler's probing study spotlights prominent conservative thinkers who, though differing in ideas and style, share a concern for unnecessary-implied by their concern. aa a sustaining core of values. Profiled are such figures as Irving Kristol, the "Godfather of conservatism"; William F. Buckley, Jr., "America's all-purpose conservative thinker"; Jeane Kirkpatrick, "neoconservative pioneer," and George Will, whom Hoeveler decrees an American Whig. There is a chapter on R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., who represents the libertarian tradition in American conservatism, and another on Michael Novak and his ideological journey "from the ramparts of the Left to neo-conservative prominence." Hoeveler ( The New Humanism ) comments energetically on many other conservative intellectuals including Norman Podhoretz, Robert Nisbet, Hilton Kramer and Alan Bloom. The book confirms the pluralistic nature of American conservatism in the 1970s and '80s, and serves to illuminate conservative thought in the wider context of America's intellectual tradition.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0299128105
• ISBN 13: 9780299128104
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 348