History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America

Abstract

Abstract This book provides a compelling explanation of the contents and substance of conservative ideas, their intentions and consequences, and the historical contexts that contributed to their formulation and dissemination among a variety of audiences. The book adds a novel, comparative dimension to the study of those ideas that informed conservatism by examining the subjects, motives, and personal and intellectual origins of historians who were also successful, polemical public intellectuals. Until at least the 1960s, in their search for a persuasive and wide appeal, conservatives depended upon history and historians to provide conservative concepts with authority and authenticity. Beginning in 1913 in Britain and 1940 in America, conservative historians participated actively and influentially in debates about the heart, soul, and, especially, the mind of conservatism. Four historians in Britain, F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Keith Feiling, Arthur Bryant, and Herbert Butterfield, and three in America, Daniel Boorstin, Peter Viereck, and Russell Kirk, developed conservative responses to unprecedented and threatening events domestically and internationally. They shared basic assumptions about human nature and society, but their subjects, interpretations, conclusions, and prescriptions were independent and idiosyncratic. Uniquely close to powerful political figures, each historian also spoke directly to a large public, who bought their books, read their contributions to newspapers and journals, listened to them on the radio, and watched them on television. Additionally, the book addresses the dominance of both conservatism and Conservatism in 20th‐century Britain and the delayed development in America, until the Reagan ascendancy, of both a Conservative party and popular conservatism.