Radical Conservatism: U.S. Literature Against Liberalism

Contemporary political discourse, reduced to a mutually exclusive logic that demands team loyalty and recoils at the whiff of complicity, has abandoned a set of highly generative ideas. On the surface, these ideas seem conservative--family, tradition, history, the land, autonomy, private property--but they can be deployed to achieve radical ends--antiracism, anticapitalism, inclusion, solidarity, diversity, and climate repair.

Radical Conservatism reintroduces these mutually inclusive ideas and thinks beyond the rigid polarities that define political thought today. Radically conservative thought offers a provocative critique of the liberal-capitalist status quo, but it does so in a way that is neither left-collectivist nor right-populist. Rather, radically conservative ideas are classically conservative, but given our contemporary political climate, they register as remarkably radical.

To do this conceptual work, Radical Conservatism turns to a rich vein of twentieth and twenty-first-century U.S. literature. This repertoire is generally hostile to the status quo liberalisms that have shaped normative U.S. political thought for centuries. From Sherwood Anderson to Ernest Gaines, and from bell hooks to Marilynne Robinson, the literature studied in Radical Conservatism pursues a humble, compassionate, non-judgmental, and generous engagement with the whole world.