Peter Berkowitz - Varieties of Conservatism in America

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Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 533

Copyright 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

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First printing, 2004
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Varieties of conservatism in America / edited by Peter Berkowitz.

p. cm. (Hoover Institution Press publication series ; 533)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8179-4572-5

1. ConservatismUnited States. I. Berkowitz, Peter, 1959II. Series: Hoover Institution publication ; 533.

JC573.2.U6V37 2004

320.520973dc22

2004018281

Index

Randy E. Barnett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor at Boston University School of Law. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he served as a criminal prosecutor in Chicago. His areas of scholarship include constitutional law, contract law, criminal justice, political theory, and jurisprudence. He is the author of The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Clarendon Press, 1998) and Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton University Press, 2004).

Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is a founding codirector of the Jerusalem Program on Constitutional Government and served as a senior consultant to the Presidents Council on Bioethics. He is the author of Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995), as well as the editor of Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic (Hoover Institution Press, 2003) and of the companion to this volume, Varieties of Progressivism in America (Hoover Institution Press, 2004). He has written on a variety of topics for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and journals.

Joseph Bottum is books and arts editor of the Weekly Standard, poetry editor of First Things, and author of The Fall & Other Poems.

Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1972. In addition, he has been the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985 and a senior fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School since 1983. His books include Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (University of Chicago, 2003); Cases and Materials on Torts, 8th edition (Aspen Law & Business, 2004); Torts (Aspen Law & Business, 1999); Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty With the Common Good (Perseus Books, 1998); Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Rights to Health Care? (Addison Wesley, 1997); Simple Rules for a Complex World (Harvard, 1995); Bargaining With the State (Princeton, 1993); Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Harvard, 1992); Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (Harvard, 1985); and Modern Products Liability Law (Greenwood Press, 1980).

Jacob Heilbrunn is an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times. He was previously a senior editor at the New Republic. He was a 1994 Arthur F. Burns fellow and a 1998 Japan Society fellow. He is currently writing a book on neoconservatism for Doubleday.

Mark C. Henrie is senior editor of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. He is the author of A Students Guide to the Core Curriculum (ISI Books, 2000) and editor of Doomed Bourgeois in Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman (ISI Books, 2001).

Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is editor of Policy Review, Hoovers Washington, D.C.based bimonthly journal. He writes a weekly column about politics for the Washington Times and is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard. He is the editor of the forthcoming Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America, and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 2004).

This book and its companion volume, Varieties of Progressivism in America, appear under the auspices of the Hoover Institutions Initiative on American Individualism and Values. Both volumes are animated by the conviction that it is advantageous, particularly at this moment of high partisan passion in the United States, to explore the inclinations, opinions, and ideas that inform partisan differences, as well as the principles that partisans in America share. The volumes, and the conviction that animates them, have enjoyed the generous support of Hoover Institution director John Raisian and deputy director David Brady.

THE INTENSE PARTISAN strife of the past several years has impeded understanding of the hard choices ahead. By suggesting that for every issue, at home and abroad, we must choose between two bitterly antagonistic and utterly irreconcilable alternatives, the polarization of our politics obscures the critical differences and distinctions within, as well as the important continuities that link, Left and Right in America. This book challenges the reductionist tendencies of the moment by bringing into focus the varieties of conservatism in America. Its companion volume, Varieties of Progressivism in America, addresses the same challenge but on the other side of the political spectrum.

Whereas to many critics all conservatives look alike, conservatives themselves disagree, sometimes sharply, about what it means to be a conservative and who is entitled to bear the name. To be sure, all conservatives agree that it means committment to conserving moral and political goods that are in danger of being lost or degraded. But which goods? Is it traditional morality and religion that conservatives seek to conserve? Or is it rather the basic legal framework of a free society? Or is it the manners, mores, and principles of a self-governing people? And what are the most pressing dangers to which the American political order gives rise? The quest for unfettered personal autonomy? The trampling of rights of property and contract? The consumption of the moral capital on which freedom depends? These are the questions that divide conservatives in America today. The chapters in this book demonstrate the variety of answers put forward by classical conservatives, libertarians, and neoconservatives.