Frank Meyer’s effort to hold freedom and order together reminds us that the future of self-government depends not just on power, but on individual and civic engagement, and moral and philosophical clarity.
In mid-1940s, Frank Meyer stood before classroom of union militants in Chicago, denouncing capitalism as a tool of bourgeois oppression and heralding the Soviet Union as humanity’s shining hope. A decade later, he was helping William F. Buckley Jr. build National Review into the flagship of the postwar American Right. While not alone in making the journey from left to right—several National Review colleagues had followed similar paths—Meyer’s metamorphosis was among the most dramatic: from Marxist ideologue and Communist Party organizer to the chief theorist of “fusionism,” the attempt to reconcile libertarian means with traditionalist ends. His work as a writer, editor, and organizer would influence a generation of conservative thinkers and activists.
In The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, Daniel J. Flynn offers a comprehensive biography of this now neglected but essential figure. Flynn, a senior editor at The American Spectator and author of Why the Left Hates America and other books of cultural history, draws on a trove of newly unearthed archival material—among it, Meyer’s private correspondence—to reconstruct the life and thought of a man who stood at the intellectual crossroads of Cold War conservatism. The result is a well-researched and often revealing portrait of a thinker whose ideas remain vital to understanding the past and future of American conservatism.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Civitas Institute
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Brian C. Anderson is the editor of City Journal.
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