Much of Peter Viereck’s prose writing was framed as an attempt to define a proper conservatism for our time. In 1950 when he published Conservatism Revisited the ideas in vogue among American intellectuals were those of socialism and “progressive” liberalism. The word “conservatism” signified a bias favoring business and a preference for minimal government. Viereck’s emphasis on moral and cultural questions and his advocacy of ideas drawn from the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions made him an oddity. He sharply criticized the secular religions of progress that offer salvation through politics. He inveighed against what he called “a morally illiterate culture of unhappy and untragic pleasure-seekers” without roots in “the universals of civilization.”
Conservatism Revisited had been preceded in 1941, when Viereck was in his mid twenties, by his first book, Metapolitics, an insightful and pioneering—if philosophically somewhat immature— study of the origins of German National Socialism. The book was profoundly influenced by Irving Babbitt, the controversial Harvard professor (1865-1933)…