352
PARTISAN REVIEW
NEW CONSERVATIVE
SHAME AND GLORY OF THE INTELLECTUALS. By
Feter Viereck.
The
Belleon Press. $4.00.
In
Conservatism Revisited
Mr. Viereck announced the
New
Conservatism, a political philosophy for our time. This book is a further
statement about it and an application of its principles to the current in–
tellectual situation. What the New Conservatism comes to is a little
difficult to say: it seems very like the reasonably intelligent liberalism
of a historian who knows the importance of civilization, its artifice and
guile, and defends it against the internal barbarians of the mass, of
technology and specialization, and of the totalitarian state. Mr. Viereck's
conservative heroes are Burke, Disraeli, Randolph and Winston Churchill
among the English, and Hamilton, Randolph of Roanoke, Washington,
and Calhoun (except for the pro-slavery bias) among the Americans.
The Republicans of the Old Guard are characterized as Manchester
liberals, not conservatives at all. The Democrats of the New Deal are
treated as democratic socialists. True conservatism, Mr. Viereck thinks,
is aristocratic; it has a strong affinity for the worker and a mild con–
tempt for the middle class. So he speaks approvingly of Disraeli's "Tory
Socialism." The basic defense of this position is that it conserves the
values of our cultural heritage; indeed it is the universality of value that
Mr. Viereck makes central to his thesis. The enemy, then, is a kind of
intellectual who finds no universal or absolute values, and so for Mr.
Viereck has none at all except those he smuggles in from the Judaeo–
Christian tradition, which he rejects. The syndrome of belief in
this
intellectual is naturalist, pragmatic, relativist and it includes modernist
poetry, non-objective art, and romanticism. Mr. Viereck regards
himself
as an intellectual and the intellectual's function as virtually sacred, so
he denounces his typical contemporary who has lost his real function
of preserving tradition and maintaining standards as a Babbitt
in
re–
verse, an exponent of a new conformism, an addlepate.
All of
this
is clearer in general than it is in detail. There is a con–
tradiction in Mr. Viereck's beliefs, at best an ambivalence, so great that
it vitiates his argument and even his style. He writes as though
his
points were made more cogent by the loudness of his voice. There is
even an opposition between his taste and his style. Mr. Viereck pro–
fesses himself a classicist, yet his writing is impressionistic and has a
dash of the modern ad-man. His prose is what Nietzsche's would be
if
he worked for B.B.D.&O.
Mr. Viereck. dislikes T. S. Eliot, but insists that Eliot is a
great
