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When the noted economist Joseph Schumpeter considered writing a book on the meaning of conservatism, he remarked, "I am pretty sure that no conservative I have ever met would recognize himself in the picture I am going to draw." Many conservatives I know will have that very reaction if they read Jerry Muller's anthology.
Muller, a historian at the Catholic University of America, has penned almost 30 percent of the pages of this "anthology with an argument," a large share for an "editor," and his choices of other voices reinforce his own brand of conservatism. So, idiosyncratically, he finds his progenitor in David Hume, not Edmund Burke, though Burke is amply represented. He showcases "the social science cast of conservative thought," another odd choice. Viewing conservatism as "a product of the Enlightenment" rather than a reaction against it, he gives primacy to the pursuit of earthly happiness through preserving legitimate social institutions. Even so, it takes considerable special pleading to include, say, Matthew Arnold, who presciently described himself as "a liberal of the future."
Muller rigorously separates conservatism from orthodoxy. By contrast, Russell Kirk, widely honored as the father of modern American conservatism, lists, as the first of his six key principles, the belief "that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." Muller's demurral offers instead "historical utilitarianism" as the common conservative denominator, and religious belief figures in only as it is socially useful. Kirk himself put together his own anthology, The Portable Conservative Reader (1982). Of his 44 writers and Muller's 23, only 4 appear in both collections. Thus, we see how protean is conservatism, how difficult to define, being (and here Kirk and Muller agree) less an ideology than a set of dispositions firmly rooted in the exigencies of the times and places of its adherents. It also remains too vital to have attracted the post- prefix that attaches to so many other isms nowadays.
Muller is a highly sophisticated thinker supremely worth reading—and arguing with. His selected authors, several of whom would be surprised to appear in the company of conservatives, offer gems of insight time after time, whether or not read within his imposed framework. And however one defines conservatism, this book makes emphatically clear that America today lives under a liberal hegemony.
—Edward E. Ericson, Jr.
Literary Intellectuals and the Dissolution of the State:
Professionalism and Conformity in the GDR
Edited by Robert von Hallberg
University of Chicago Press
366 pp.; $57, hardcover;
$27.50, paper
Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany
By Charles S. Maier
Princeton University Press
440 pp.; $29.95
The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany
By Jane Kramer
Random House
293 pp.; $27.50
With a whoosh that still leaves the experts breathless, Eastern and Central European statist communism dramatically collapsed during the brief period 1989- 91. This was in reality a multifaceted story, with circumstances at the ideological and imperial center of the Soviet Union quite different from those in the Poland of Solidarity and Pope John Paul II, the Romania of summary justice for the Ceausescus, the Czechoslovakia of a velvet revolution, the Balkan lands of Bulgaria and Albania (which had the furthest to go), and not least the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) as the Soviet bloc's industrially and athletically most developed nation. In quite different ways, these three books offer illuminating accounts of what happened with such suddenness in East Germany during the fall of 1989, but also about what can now be seen to have led up to the crisis and what has fallen out thereafter.
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