Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals, Babbitt Jr. vs. the Rediscovery of Values (Signed)

Viereck, Peter

Beacon Press, 1953

Flat signed by Peter Viereck on front end page. Hardcover and dust jacket. Tears to jacket. Dust jacket in protective mylar cover. Good binding and cover. Shelf wear. Clean, unmarked pages. xvi, 320 p., 22 cm. 

"A powerful, often violent, often eloquent, often bitterly sardonic attack on mushy liberalism." - Gilbert Highet 

"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