The Legend of Edmund Burke

In the hope of exorcising the fears of their liberal readers (perhaps the most anxious readers they have) that Conservatism is little more than a revival of crude reaction, the New Conservatives have had to give certain intellectual assurances. These are, as one might expect, gestures of reverence for civil liberties and an abhorrence of the malpractices of orthodox capitalism. Thus Mr. Peter Viereck dissociates himself from McCarthyism, and Mr. Russell Kirk, another leader of the conservative intellectuals, will have no part of laissez-faire economics. A few more qualifications of that sort and the New Conservatism will become indistinguishable from Liberalism itself. Indeed, a critical reader will be inclined to consider such professions more as apologetics than as tenets of a creed. For, certainly, this is not the Conservatism we have known in the past.

Speaking of the past, Santayana said that those who are ignorant of it are destined to repeat its errors; but he might ha...