Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Revolt 1815 - 1949 (Signed)

Viereck, Peter

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949

Inscribed by Peter Viereck to A.O. Lovejoy on front end page. Hardcover and dust jacket. Small tears to jacket. Good binding and cover. Shelf wear. Small markings on front end page, else unmarked. The letter A printed on copyright page. $2.50 price on jacket. xv, 187 p., 20 cm. 

Arthur O. Lovejoy (1873-1962) was a leading philosopher, historian of ideas, and public intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century. He is perhaps best known today for his role in establishing the principles of academic freedom (through his work in founding the AAUP) and for founding the Journal of the History of Ideas. He was Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins from 1910 to 1938, and continued to write and be active in the History of Ideas Club until his death in 1962. From 1915 to 1940 he was second in stature within American philosophy only to John Dewey, and while he is mainly studied today by intellectual historians, his early work on pragmatism and philosophy of mind follows an analytic method that has aged quite well. The Great Chain of Being (1936) remains an acknowledged classic in the history of ideas.

Peter Viereck, was one of the very few American writers, perhaps the only one, to win Pulitzer prizes for both history and poetry. He taught history, and in particular Russian history, for almost 40 years at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. In later years he poured forth long, complex poems that grappled with the largest metaphysical questions. His greatest achievement, however, was written when he was just 25 years old, and originally titled Metapolitics: From the German Romantics to Hitler (1941). In it he traced the origins of Nazi thought to the German romanticism of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche and beyond. He uncovered anti-Semitism, state-worship, and the romantic cult of the folksoul not only in obscure 19th-century wild men such as Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Julius Langbehn, and in crazy toadies to Adolf Hitler such as Alfred Rosenberg, but also in figures such as Wagner, Nietzsche and Stefan George. But he also pointed out that even those romantic intellectuals - including Wagner, Nietzsche and George - tempted by extreme nationalism ended by rejecting it. Viereck was hailed as one of modern American conservatism's founders - though not by many conservatives. In 2005, a contributor to the arch-conservative magazine National Review pointed out indignantly that Viereck denounced Senator Joe McCarthy, the 1950s red-baiter, and voted for the 1952 and 1956 Democrat presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, both, to true conservatives, marks of a dangerous liberal tendency. Yet Viereck's Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Revolt (1949), was a pioneering work. Viereck claimed as his heroes such then unfashionable role models as Edmund Burke, Walter Bagehot and Prince Metternich, and proposed a moderate conservatism as a safe road between fascism and communism." - The Guardian