Misguided Guardians: The Conservative Case Against Neoconservatism

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According to the conventional wisdom among self-declared representatives of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley is the master to whom conservatives owe an eternal debt of gratitude for expunging from their ranks the dregs–the racists, anti-Semites and extremists of all sorts–that threatened the movement’s social respectability.

This account, however, isn’t history at all. It is ideology or politics taking refuge behind the value-neutral guise of history. In reality, the conservative movement has long since been a predominantly neoconservative movement. While there is plenty of historical, sociological, and polemical literature on neoconservatism, there is relatively little that treats it philosophically. Yet, as Misguided Guardians shows, neoconservatism is indeed a distinctive philosophical theory inasmuch as it consists of conceptions of knowledge, ethics, and the state that differ in kind from those underlying traditional conservatism. Moreover, neoconservatism is an expression of Rationalism, exactly that orientation against which conservatives have been railing since at least the time of Burke.