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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Meyer_(political_philosopher)
"Frank Straus Meyer was a leader in the founding generation of post-World War II American conservatism. Like Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, and John Dos Passos, he embraced conservatism after having been a member of the Communist Party, and like them, too, Meyer became a fierce and unrelenting foe of communism and the Soviet Union that sponsored its spread worldwide." (p.XI)
"While at Oxford he was a well-known radical student leader and secret member of the Communist Party, taking instruction from his party handlers on his duties as a student activist. This radical phase continued through his studies at the London School of Economics (1932-34) and at the University of Chicago (1934-38). In 1940 Meyer married Elsie Bown, who became his lifelong intellectual and political companion. They made their home on Ohayo Mountain Road in Woodstock, New York. Here, over the years, the Meyers welcomed countless visitors for memorable nights of conversation, food and drink, and song. Their two sons are John C. and Eugene B. Meyer. Always the intellectual, Meyer, who turned to communism through a study of Marxist texts, began an agonizing reappraisal of his beliefs after reading F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. In 1945, after fourteen years of active service at its direction, Meyer made a complete break with the party." (p.XII-XIII)
"Meyer's intellectual road from Marxist collectivism to the defense of individual liberty was paralleled by another, more drawn out, and evidently more wrenching spiritual journey that probably began during his days at Oxford. On the day of his death this proud Jew was baptized into the Catholic Church." (p.XV)
"For many readers Meyer's fusionism (as it was called by his friendly adversary L. Brent Bozell) will remain convincing." (p.XXI)
-William C. Dennis, préface à Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996, 238 pages.
"When two or three years ago Russell Kirk, then a member of the faculty of Michigan State College, published a volume called The Conservative Mind, he hardly expected, it is to be presumed, that within a short time it would make him the major prophet of a flourishing new movement. But the emergence of the New Conservatism, which has for some time filled the columns of the quarterlies and magazines of opinion and is now spilling out into the larger world, can indeed be accurately correlated with the appearance of that book." (p.3)
"This fundamental compatibility with the collectivist trend of the time which comes out so blatantly in Mr. Rossiter has been implicit in the New Conservatism from the beginning, despite much just and tonic criticism of positivist ethics and the blatant centralizing tone of the "liberal" atmosphere by Russell Kirk and his more serious colleagues."
"The term "liberal" has for some time now been captured by the proponents of a powerful state and a controlled economy and has been corrupted into the opposite of its true meaning. To be conservative has, therefore, by usage and consent come to mean to be an opponent of that false "liberalism." From a certain point of view there has been logic to this custom, when by conservative was understood loyalty to the established traditions of the Constitution and to a free American social structure, as over against the Roosevelt revolution." (p.4)
"The fundamental political issue today is that between, on the one hand, collectivism and statism which merge gradually into totalitarianism and, on the other, what used to be called liberalism, what we may perhaps call individualism: the principles of the primacy of the individual, the division of power, the limitation of government, the freedom of the economy. This is not a problem of tone or attitude, not a difference between the conservative and the radical temperament; it is a difference of principle. What is at stake are fundamental concepts of the relationship of individual men to a society and the institutions of a society." (p.5)
"The mantle of the conservative tone can well befit the established order of the welfare society. Mter all, that order is in its twenty-third year since the fateful election of 1932. The New Conservatism is, on an intellectual level, a natural complement to the Eisenhower version of Rooseveltism." (p.6)
"The entire sphere of economic activity must remain free of political control. For only the strict separation of the sources of a man's material existence-property, employment, provision for illness and old age-from political institutions can enable him to maintain his independence of them. And further, if the state, which is the legal repository of force for the preservation of the conditions of peaceful civil life and for defense against external enemies, gains control over any other sphere of human activity, the very possibility of effective division of power is gone." (p.8 )
"However much one may respect Burke's stand as a practical statesman, it is impossible to derive a firm political position from him. As Richard Weaver has said: "Of clear rational principle he had a mortal distrust ... it would be blindness to take him as a mentor." (p.10)
"Their judgment is good. Only the principles of individual freedom-to Dr. Kirk the "conservatism of desolation" -can call a halt to the march of collectivism." (p.13)
-Frank Straus Meyer, "Collectivism Rebaptized", july 1955, in Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996, 238 pages.
"For the first time in modern America a whole school of thought has consciously challenged the very foundations of collectivist Liberalism ; two intellectually serious journals, Modern Age and National Review, have established themselves integrally in the life of the nation ; and an increasing number of the newer generation of undergraduates, graduate students, and young instructors in the universities openly range themselves against the prevailing Liberal orthodoxy."
"I ask the indulgence of my readers in accepting the word "conservative" as an overall term to include the two streams of thought that in practice unite to oppose the reigning ideology of collectivist Liberalism. I believe that those two streams of thought, although they are sometimes presented as mutually
incompatible, can in reality be united within a single broad conservative political theory." (p.15)
"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 who, drawing upon the same source, stress value 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 preeminence 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." (p.16)
"Both extremes are selfdefeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny." (p.17)
"What the conservative is committed to conserve is not simply whatever happen to be the established conditions of a few years or a few decades, but the consensus of his civilization, of his country, as that consensus over the centuries has reflected truth derived from the very constitution of being. We are today historically in a situation created by thirty years of slow and insidious revolution at home and a half century of violent open revolution abroad. To conserve the true and the good under these circumstances is to restore an understanding (and a social structure reflecting that understanding) which has been all but buried ; it is not to preserve the transient customs and prescriptions of the present.
It is here that the dilemma of conservatism affects our present doctrinal discussion. The need in our circumstances for the most vigorous use of reason to combat the collectivist, scientistic, amoral wave of the present tends to induce in the libertarian an apotheosis of reason and the neglect of tradition and prescription (which he identifies with the prevailing prescriptions of the present). The traditionalist, suspecting in this libertarian tendency the same fever to impose upon men an abstract speculative ideology that has characterized the revolution of our time-as well as the French Revolution and its spiritual forebears-tends to recoil and in his turn to press a one-sided position. Too often he confounds reason and principle with "demon ideology." Rather than justly insisting upon the limits of reason-the finite bounds of the purview of any one man or anyone generation and the responsibility to employ reason in the context of continuing tradition-he seems sometimes to turn his back on reason altogether and to place the claims of custom and prescription in irreconcilable opposition to it." (p.18)
"When a revolutionary force shatters the unity and balance of civilization -then conservatism must be of another sort if it is to fulfill its responsibility. It is not and cannot be limited to that uncritical acceptance, that uncomplicated reverence, which is the essence of natural conservatism." (p.19)
"What is required of us is a conscious conservatism, a clearly principled restatement in new circumstances of philosophical and political truth. This conscious conservatism cannot be a simple piety, although in a deep sense it must have piety towards the constitution of being. Nevertheless in its consciousness it necessarily reflects a reaction to the rude break the revolution has made in the continuity of human wisdom. It is called forth by a sense of the loss which that cutting off has created. It cannot now be identical with the natural conservatism towards which it yearns. The world in which it exists is the revolutionary world. [...] Today's conservatism cannot simply affirm. It must select and adjudge." (p.20)
"Like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, confronting the chaos in the body politic and in the minds of men created by the overweening pride of the Athenian demos, we do not live in the happy age of a natural conservatism. We cannot simply revere ; we cannot uncritically follow tradition."(p.21)
"We need to reject the utilitarian ethics and the secular progressivism that classical liberalism has also passed on to us.
Nineteenth-century conservatism, with all its understanding of the preeminence of virtue and value, for all its piety towards the continuing tradition of mankind, was far too cavalier to the claims of freedom, far too ready to subordinate the individual person to the authority of state or society." (p.22)
"Although the classical liberal forgot -and the contemporary libertarian conservative sometimes tends to forget-that in the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue, he did understand that in the political realm freedom is the primary end. If, with Acton, we "take the establishment of liberty for the realization of moral duties to be the end of civil society," the traditionalist conservative of today, living in an age when liberty is the last thought of our political mentors, has little cause to reject the contributions to the understanding of liberty of the classical liberals, however corrupted their understanding of the ends of liberty." (p.24)
"We can no more make of the great conservative minds of the nineteenth century unerring guides to be blindly followed than we can condemn out of hand their classical liberal opponents. Sound though they were on the essentials of man's being, on his destiny to virtue and his responsibility to seek it, on his duty in the moral order, they failed too often to realize that the political condition of moral fulfillment is freedom from coercion.
Signally they failed to recognize the decisive danger in a union of political and economic power, a danger becoming daily greater before their eyes as science and technology created apace immense aggregates of economic energy. [...] Looking to the state to promote virtue, they forgot that the power of the state rests in the hands of men as subject to the effects of original sin as those they govern. They could not, or would not, see a truth the classical liberals understood: if to the power naturally inherent in the state, to defend its citizens from violence, domestic and foreign, and to administer justice, there is added a positive power over economic and social energy, the temptation to tyranny becomes irresistible, and the political conditions of freedom wither." (p.25)
"In ultimate terms, upon the basic issue of human destiny, truths have been given us that we cannot improve upon, that we can only convey and make real in the context of our time." (p.25)
"Power of a magnitude never before dreamed of by men has been brought into being. While separation of power has always been essential to a good society, if those who possess it are to be preserved from corruption and those who do not are to be safeguarded from coercion, this has become a fateful necessity under the conditions of modern technology. To the analysis of this decisive problem and to the development of political and economic solutions of it, classical liberalism contributed mightily. If we reject that heritage, we should be casting away some of the most powerful among our weapons against socialism, Communism, and collectivist Liberalism. The traditionalist who would have us do so because of the philosophical errors of classical liberalism, like the libertarian who rejects tradition because it has sometimes been associated with authoritarianism, seriously weakens the development of conservative doctrine." (p.26)
"The economists of the liberal British tradition, from Adam Smith through and beyond the vilified Manchesterians, like the Austrian economists from Menger and Bohm-Bawerk to Mises and Hayek, analyzed the conditions of industrial society and established the principles upon which the colossal power that it produces can be developed for the use of man without nurturing a monstrous Leviathan. Without their mighty intellectual endeavor, we should be disarmed before the collectivist economics of Marx, Keynes, and Galbraith." (pp.26-27)
-Frank Straus Meyer, "Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism", 1964, in Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996, 238 pages.
"That which is called liberalism today has deserted its heritage of defense of the freedom of the person to become the peculiarly American form of what in Europe is called democratic socialism. This transformation was the result of a fatal flaw in the philosophical underpinnings of nineteenth-century liberalism. It stood for individual freedom, but its utilitarian philosophical attitude denied the validity of moral ends firmly based on the constitution of being. Thereby, with this denial of an ultimate sanction for the inviolability of the person, liberalism destroyed the very foundations of its defense of the person as primary in political and social matters." (p.33)
"The conservatives of the last century were sound in their fundamental philosophical position, upholding the objective existence of values based upon the unchanging constitution of being as the criterion for moral thought and action. They staunchly held the line against the assault of utilitarianism, positivism, and scientism; but on another level they failed philosophically, deeply misreading the nature of man. They would not or they could not see the correlative to their fundamental philosophical position: acceptance of the moral authority derived from transcendent criteria of truth and good must be voluntary if it is to have meaning; if it is coerced by human force, it is meaningless." (p.34)
"We are told that what is not in the tradition of Burke-or of the medieval synthesis-or of Plato-cannot call itself conservatism: anyone who insists upon freedom in the political and economic sphere together with "legitimate" conservative beliefs is really half liberal, half conservative, a sad case of intellectual schizophrenia." (p.36)
"Without something in the nature of an ideal image of what a good society should be, without an end which political action can strive to approximate, there is no basis for judging the rights and wrongs of the practical alternatives that constantly present themselves." (p.37)
"The only equality that can be legitimately derived from the premises of the freedom of the person is the equal right of all men to be free from coercion exercised against their life, liberty, and property. This is the touchstone of a free society. For the rest, the capabilities of men, specific and inherited, should determine their position, their influence, and the respect in which they are held." (p.38)
"I do not assume that reason is the sole possession of a single living generation, or of any man in any generation. I do assume that it is the active quality whereby men (starting with a due respect for the fundamental moral knowledge of ends and values incorporated in tradition) have the power to distinguish what ought to be from what is, the ideal from the dictates of power. Upon these assumptions, I shall attempt to reestablish, in contemporary contexts, principles drawn from the nature of man." (p.40)
"The apprehension of man as of such a nature that innate freedom is of the essence of his being, is the central axiom upon which this critique of political thought is founded." (p.48)
"They are, indeed, ideal principles and must be adapted in the light of the material situ~tion and the demands of conflicting interests. They will need to be made concrete in different ways under different circumstances." (p.48)
"The art of politics at its best is guided by fundamental principle, but operates by judgment, by prudence. Both are necessary; without the guiding principles of political theory, based in turn upon fundamental philosophical considerations, the practical art of politics is without direction and soon becomes an exercise in expediency for expediency's sake." (p.49)
-Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, 1962, in Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996, 238 pages.
"Frank Straus Meyer was a leader in the founding generation of post-World War II American conservatism. Like Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, and John Dos Passos, he embraced conservatism after having been a member of the Communist Party, and like them, too, Meyer became a fierce and unrelenting foe of communism and the Soviet Union that sponsored its spread worldwide." (p.XI)
"While at Oxford he was a well-known radical student leader and secret member of the Communist Party, taking instruction from his party handlers on his duties as a student activist. This radical phase continued through his studies at the London School of Economics (1932-34) and at the University of Chicago (1934-38). In 1940 Meyer married Elsie Bown, who became his lifelong intellectual and political companion. They made their home on Ohayo Mountain Road in Woodstock, New York. Here, over the years, the Meyers welcomed countless visitors for memorable nights of conversation, food and drink, and song. Their two sons are John C. and Eugene B. Meyer. Always the intellectual, Meyer, who turned to communism through a study of Marxist texts, began an agonizing reappraisal of his beliefs after reading F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. In 1945, after fourteen years of active service at its direction, Meyer made a complete break with the party." (p.XII-XIII)
"Meyer's intellectual road from Marxist collectivism to the defense of individual liberty was paralleled by another, more drawn out, and evidently more wrenching spiritual journey that probably began during his days at Oxford. On the day of his death this proud Jew was baptized into the Catholic Church." (p.XV)
"For many readers Meyer's fusionism (as it was called by his friendly adversary L. Brent Bozell) will remain convincing." (p.XXI)
-William C. Dennis, préface à Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996, 238 pages.
"When two or three years ago Russell Kirk, then a member of the faculty of Michigan State College, published a volume called The Conservative Mind, he hardly expected, it is to be presumed, that within a short time it would make him the major prophet of a flourishing new movement. But the emergence of the New Conservatism, which has for some time filled the columns of the quarterlies and magazines of opinion and is now spilling out into the larger world, can indeed be accurately correlated with the appearance of that book." (p.3)
"This fundamental compatibility with the collectivist trend of the time which comes out so blatantly in Mr. Rossiter has been implicit in the New Conservatism from the beginning, despite much just and tonic criticism of positivist ethics and the blatant centralizing tone of the "liberal" atmosphere by Russell Kirk and his more serious colleagues."
"The term "liberal" has for some time now been captured by the proponents of a powerful state and a controlled economy and has been corrupted into the opposite of its true meaning. To be conservative has, therefore, by usage and consent come to mean to be an opponent of that false "liberalism." From a certain point of view there has been logic to this custom, when by conservative was understood loyalty to the established traditions of the Constitution and to a free American social structure, as over against the Roosevelt revolution." (p.4)
"The fundamental political issue today is that between, on the one hand, collectivism and statism which merge gradually into totalitarianism and, on the other, what used to be called liberalism, what we may perhaps call individualism: the principles of the primacy of the individual, the division of power, the limitation of government, the freedom of the economy. This is not a problem of tone or attitude, not a difference between the conservative and the radical temperament; it is a difference of principle. What is at stake are fundamental concepts of the relationship of individual men to a society and the institutions of a society." (p.5)
"The mantle of the conservative tone can well befit the established order of the welfare society. Mter all, that order is in its twenty-third year since the fateful election of 1932. The New Conservatism is, on an intellectual level, a natural complement to the Eisenhower version of Rooseveltism." (p.6)
"The entire sphere of economic activity must remain free of political control. For only the strict separation of the sources of a man's material existence-property, employment, provision for illness and old age-from political institutions can enable him to maintain his independence of them. And further, if the state, which is the legal repository of force for the preservation of the conditions of peaceful civil life and for defense against external enemies, gains control over any other sphere of human activity, the very possibility of effective division of power is gone." (p.8 )
"However much one may respect Burke's stand as a practical statesman, it is impossible to derive a firm political position from him. As Richard Weaver has said: "Of clear rational principle he had a mortal distrust ... it would be blindness to take him as a mentor." (p.10)
"Their judgment is good. Only the principles of individual freedom-to Dr. Kirk the "conservatism of desolation" -can call a halt to the march of collectivism." (p.13)
-Frank Straus Meyer, "Collectivism Rebaptized", july 1955, in Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996, 238 pages.
"For the first time in modern America a whole school of thought has consciously challenged the very foundations of collectivist Liberalism ; two intellectually serious journals, Modern Age and National Review, have established themselves integrally in the life of the nation ; and an increasing number of the newer generation of undergraduates, graduate students, and young instructors in the universities openly range themselves against the prevailing Liberal orthodoxy."
"I ask the indulgence of my readers in accepting the word "conservative" as an overall term to include the two streams of thought that in practice unite to oppose the reigning ideology of collectivist Liberalism. I believe that those two streams of thought, although they are sometimes presented as mutually
incompatible, can in reality be united within a single broad conservative political theory." (p.15)
"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 who, drawing upon the same source, stress value 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 preeminence 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." (p.16)
"Both extremes are selfdefeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny." (p.17)
"What the conservative is committed to conserve is not simply whatever happen to be the established conditions of a few years or a few decades, but the consensus of his civilization, of his country, as that consensus over the centuries has reflected truth derived from the very constitution of being. We are today historically in a situation created by thirty years of slow and insidious revolution at home and a half century of violent open revolution abroad. To conserve the true and the good under these circumstances is to restore an understanding (and a social structure reflecting that understanding) which has been all but buried ; it is not to preserve the transient customs and prescriptions of the present.
It is here that the dilemma of conservatism affects our present doctrinal discussion. The need in our circumstances for the most vigorous use of reason to combat the collectivist, scientistic, amoral wave of the present tends to induce in the libertarian an apotheosis of reason and the neglect of tradition and prescription (which he identifies with the prevailing prescriptions of the present). The traditionalist, suspecting in this libertarian tendency the same fever to impose upon men an abstract speculative ideology that has characterized the revolution of our time-as well as the French Revolution and its spiritual forebears-tends to recoil and in his turn to press a one-sided position. Too often he confounds reason and principle with "demon ideology." Rather than justly insisting upon the limits of reason-the finite bounds of the purview of any one man or anyone generation and the responsibility to employ reason in the context of continuing tradition-he seems sometimes to turn his back on reason altogether and to place the claims of custom and prescription in irreconcilable opposition to it." (p.18)
"When a revolutionary force shatters the unity and balance of civilization -then conservatism must be of another sort if it is to fulfill its responsibility. It is not and cannot be limited to that uncritical acceptance, that uncomplicated reverence, which is the essence of natural conservatism." (p.19)
"What is required of us is a conscious conservatism, a clearly principled restatement in new circumstances of philosophical and political truth. This conscious conservatism cannot be a simple piety, although in a deep sense it must have piety towards the constitution of being. Nevertheless in its consciousness it necessarily reflects a reaction to the rude break the revolution has made in the continuity of human wisdom. It is called forth by a sense of the loss which that cutting off has created. It cannot now be identical with the natural conservatism towards which it yearns. The world in which it exists is the revolutionary world. [...] Today's conservatism cannot simply affirm. It must select and adjudge." (p.20)
"Like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, confronting the chaos in the body politic and in the minds of men created by the overweening pride of the Athenian demos, we do not live in the happy age of a natural conservatism. We cannot simply revere ; we cannot uncritically follow tradition."(p.21)
"We need to reject the utilitarian ethics and the secular progressivism that classical liberalism has also passed on to us.
Nineteenth-century conservatism, with all its understanding of the preeminence of virtue and value, for all its piety towards the continuing tradition of mankind, was far too cavalier to the claims of freedom, far too ready to subordinate the individual person to the authority of state or society." (p.22)
"Although the classical liberal forgot -and the contemporary libertarian conservative sometimes tends to forget-that in the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue, he did understand that in the political realm freedom is the primary end. If, with Acton, we "take the establishment of liberty for the realization of moral duties to be the end of civil society," the traditionalist conservative of today, living in an age when liberty is the last thought of our political mentors, has little cause to reject the contributions to the understanding of liberty of the classical liberals, however corrupted their understanding of the ends of liberty." (p.24)
"We can no more make of the great conservative minds of the nineteenth century unerring guides to be blindly followed than we can condemn out of hand their classical liberal opponents. Sound though they were on the essentials of man's being, on his destiny to virtue and his responsibility to seek it, on his duty in the moral order, they failed too often to realize that the political condition of moral fulfillment is freedom from coercion.
Signally they failed to recognize the decisive danger in a union of political and economic power, a danger becoming daily greater before their eyes as science and technology created apace immense aggregates of economic energy. [...] Looking to the state to promote virtue, they forgot that the power of the state rests in the hands of men as subject to the effects of original sin as those they govern. They could not, or would not, see a truth the classical liberals understood: if to the power naturally inherent in the state, to defend its citizens from violence, domestic and foreign, and to administer justice, there is added a positive power over economic and social energy, the temptation to tyranny becomes irresistible, and the political conditions of freedom wither." (p.25)
"In ultimate terms, upon the basic issue of human destiny, truths have been given us that we cannot improve upon, that we can only convey and make real in the context of our time." (p.25)
"Power of a magnitude never before dreamed of by men has been brought into being. While separation of power has always been essential to a good society, if those who possess it are to be preserved from corruption and those who do not are to be safeguarded from coercion, this has become a fateful necessity under the conditions of modern technology. To the analysis of this decisive problem and to the development of political and economic solutions of it, classical liberalism contributed mightily. If we reject that heritage, we should be casting away some of the most powerful among our weapons against socialism, Communism, and collectivist Liberalism. The traditionalist who would have us do so because of the philosophical errors of classical liberalism, like the libertarian who rejects tradition because it has sometimes been associated with authoritarianism, seriously weakens the development of conservative doctrine." (p.26)
"The economists of the liberal British tradition, from Adam Smith through and beyond the vilified Manchesterians, like the Austrian economists from Menger and Bohm-Bawerk to Mises and Hayek, analyzed the conditions of industrial society and established the principles upon which the colossal power that it produces can be developed for the use of man without nurturing a monstrous Leviathan. Without their mighty intellectual endeavor, we should be disarmed before the collectivist economics of Marx, Keynes, and Galbraith." (pp.26-27)
-Frank Straus Meyer, "Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism", 1964, in Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996, 238 pages.
"That which is called liberalism today has deserted its heritage of defense of the freedom of the person to become the peculiarly American form of what in Europe is called democratic socialism. This transformation was the result of a fatal flaw in the philosophical underpinnings of nineteenth-century liberalism. It stood for individual freedom, but its utilitarian philosophical attitude denied the validity of moral ends firmly based on the constitution of being. Thereby, with this denial of an ultimate sanction for the inviolability of the person, liberalism destroyed the very foundations of its defense of the person as primary in political and social matters." (p.33)
"The conservatives of the last century were sound in their fundamental philosophical position, upholding the objective existence of values based upon the unchanging constitution of being as the criterion for moral thought and action. They staunchly held the line against the assault of utilitarianism, positivism, and scientism; but on another level they failed philosophically, deeply misreading the nature of man. They would not or they could not see the correlative to their fundamental philosophical position: acceptance of the moral authority derived from transcendent criteria of truth and good must be voluntary if it is to have meaning; if it is coerced by human force, it is meaningless." (p.34)
"We are told that what is not in the tradition of Burke-or of the medieval synthesis-or of Plato-cannot call itself conservatism: anyone who insists upon freedom in the political and economic sphere together with "legitimate" conservative beliefs is really half liberal, half conservative, a sad case of intellectual schizophrenia." (p.36)
"Without something in the nature of an ideal image of what a good society should be, without an end which political action can strive to approximate, there is no basis for judging the rights and wrongs of the practical alternatives that constantly present themselves." (p.37)
"The only equality that can be legitimately derived from the premises of the freedom of the person is the equal right of all men to be free from coercion exercised against their life, liberty, and property. This is the touchstone of a free society. For the rest, the capabilities of men, specific and inherited, should determine their position, their influence, and the respect in which they are held." (p.38)
"I do not assume that reason is the sole possession of a single living generation, or of any man in any generation. I do assume that it is the active quality whereby men (starting with a due respect for the fundamental moral knowledge of ends and values incorporated in tradition) have the power to distinguish what ought to be from what is, the ideal from the dictates of power. Upon these assumptions, I shall attempt to reestablish, in contemporary contexts, principles drawn from the nature of man." (p.40)
"The apprehension of man as of such a nature that innate freedom is of the essence of his being, is the central axiom upon which this critique of political thought is founded." (p.48)
"They are, indeed, ideal principles and must be adapted in the light of the material situ~tion and the demands of conflicting interests. They will need to be made concrete in different ways under different circumstances." (p.48)
"The art of politics at its best is guided by fundamental principle, but operates by judgment, by prudence. Both are necessary; without the guiding principles of political theory, based in turn upon fundamental philosophical considerations, the practical art of politics is without direction and soon becomes an exercise in expediency for expediency's sake." (p.49)
-Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, 1962, in Frank Straus Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996, 238 pages.
