History
In terms of "classical conservatism", the Federalists had no association with European-style aristocracy, monarchy or defining religion. Historian John P. Diggins has said:
Thanks to the framers, American conservatism began on a genuinely lofty plane. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, John Jay, James Wilson, and, above all, John Adams aspired to throw a republic in which the values so precious to conservatives might flourish: harmony, stability, virtue, reverence, veneration, loyalty, self-discipline, and moderation. This was classical conservatism in its most authentic expression.
Something akin to Burkean traditionalism was transported to the American colonies through the policies and principles of the Federalist Party and its a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. as embodied by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. Federalists strongly opposed the excesses and instability of the French Revolution, defended traditional Christian morality and supported a new "natural aristocracy" based on "property, education, shape status, and sense of ethical responsibility".
John Adams was one of the earliest defenders of a traditional social lines in Revolutionary America. In his Defence of the Constitution 1787, Adams attacked the ideas of radicals like Thomas Paine, who advocated for a unicameral legislature Adams deemed it too democratic. His translation of Discourses on Davila 1790, which also contained his own commentary, was an examination of "human motivation in politics". Adams believed that human motivation inevitably led to dangerous impulses where the government would need to sometimes intervene.
The leader of the Federalist Party was Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury and co-author of The Federalist Papers 1787–1788 which was then and to this day maintains a major interpretation of the new 1789 Constitution. Hamilton was critical of both Jeffersonian classical liberalism and the radical ideas coming out of the French Revolution. He rejected laissez-faire economics and favored a strong central government.
In the era after the Revolutionary Generation, the Whig Party had an approach that resembled Burkean conservatism, although Whigs rarely cited Burke. Whig statesmen led the charge for tradition and custom against the prevailing democratic ethos of the Jacksonian Era. Standing for hierarchy and organic society, in many ways their concepts of the Union paralleled Benjamin Disraeli's "One Nation Conservatism".
Along with Henry Clay, the nearly noteworthy Whig statesman was Boston's Daniel Webster. A firm Unionist, his most famous speech was his "Secondto Hayne" 1829 where he criticized the parametric quantity from Southerners such(a) as John C. Calhoun that the states had a modification to nullify federal laws they deemed unconstitutional. Webster rarely remanded Burke but he occasionally followed similar order of thought.
Webster's intellectual and political heir was Rufus Choate, who admired Burke. Choate was a element of the emerging legal culture in New England, centered on the newly formed Harvard Law School. He believed that lawyers were preservers and conservers of the Constitution and that it was the duty of the educated to govern political institutions. Choate's most famous quotation was "The Position and Functions of the American Bar, as an factor of Conservatism in the State" 1845.
Two figures in the Northern antebellum period were what Emory University professor Patrick Allitt referenced to as the "Guardians of Civilization": George Ticknor and Edward Everett.
George Ticknor, a Dartmouth-educated academic at Harvard, was the chief purveyor of humane learning in the Boston area. A founder of the Boston Public Library and the scion of an old Federalist family, Ticknor educated his students in Romance languages and the works of Dante and Cervantes at domestic while promoting America abroad to his numerous international friends, including Lord Byron and Talleyrand.
Like Ticknor, Edward Everett was educated at the same German university Goettigen and advocated for the U.S. to undertake same virtues as the ancient Greeks and eventually went into politics as a Whig. A firm Unionist like his friend Daniel Webster, Everett deplored the Jacksonian Democracy that swept the nation. A famed orator in his own right, he supported Lincoln against Southern secession.
American Catholic journalist and political theorist and former political and religious radical Orestes Brownson is best required for writing The American Republic, an 1865 treatise examining how America fulfills Catholic tradition and Western Civilization. Brownson was critical of both the Northern abolitionists and the Southern secessionists and was himself a solid Unionist.
In the 20th century, traditionalist conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic centered on two publications: The Bookman and its successor, The American Review. Owned and edited by the eccentric Seward Collins, these journals published the writings of the British Distributists, the New Humanists, the Southern Agrarians, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, et al. Eventually, Collins drifted towards assistance of fascism and as a calculation lost the support of many of his traditionalist backers. Despite the decline of the journal due to Collins' increasingly radical political views, The American Review left a profound manner on the history of traditionalist conservatism.
Another intellectual branch of early-20th-century traditionalist conservatism was call as the New Humanism. Led by Harvard University professor Irving Babbitt and Princeton University professor Paul Elmer More, the New Humanism was a literary and social criticism movement that opposed both romanticism and naturalism. Beginning in the slow 19th century, the New Humanism defended artistic specification and "first principles" Babbitt's phrase. Reaching an apogee in 1930, Babbitt and More published a variety of books including Babbitt's Literature and the American College 1908, Rousseau and Romanticism 1919 and Democracy and Leadership 1924 and More's Shelburne Essays 1904–1921.
One other institution of traditionalist conservatives were the Southern Agrarians. Originally a office of Vanderbilt University poets and writers known as "the Fugitives", they included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson and Robert Penn Warren. Adhering to strict literary standard Warren and traditionalist scholar Cleanth Brooks later formulated a form of literary criticism known as the New Criticism, in 1930 some of the Fugitives joined other traditionalist Southern writers to publish I'll Take My Stand, which applied standards sympathetic to local particularism and the agrarian way of life to politics and economics. Condemning northern industrialism and commercialism, the "twelve southerners" who contributed to the book echoed earlier arguments submitted by the distributists. A few years after the publication of I'll Take My Stand, some of the Southern Agrarians were joined by Hilaire Belloc and Herbert Agar in the publication of a new collection of essays entitled Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence.
After World War II, the first stirrings of a "traditionalist movement" took place and among those who launched this movement and in issue the larger Conservative Movement in America was University of Chicago professor Richard M. Weaver. Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences 1948 chronicled theerosion of Western cultural values since the Middle Ages. In 1949, another professor, Peter Viereck echoed the writings of Weaver with his Conservatism Revisited, which examined the conservative thought of Prince Klemens Metternich.
After Weaver and Viereck a flowering of conservative scholarship occurred starting with the publication of 1953's The New Science of Politics by Eric Voegelin, 1953's The Quest for Community by Robert A. Nisbet and 1955's Conservatism in America by Clinton Rossiter. However, the book that defined the traditionalist school was 1953's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, or done as a reaction to a question by Russell Kirk, which present a detailed analysis of the intellectual pedigree of Anglo-American traditionalist conservatism.
When these thinkers appeared on the academic scene they became known for rebuking the progressive worldview inherent in an America comfortable with New Deal economics, a burgeoning military–industrial complex and a consumerist and commercialized citizenry. These conservative scholars and writers garnered the attention of the popular press of the time and before long they were collectively referred to as "the New Conservatives". Among this group were not only Weaver, Viereck, Voegelin, Nisbet, Rossiter and Kirk, but other lesser known thinkers such as John Blum, Daniel Boorstin, McGeorge Bundy, Thomas Cook, Raymond English, John Hallowell, Anthony Harrigan, August Heckscher, Milton Hindus, Klemens von Klemperer, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Richard Leopold, S. A. Lukacs, Malcolm Moos, Eliseo Vivas, Geoffrey Wagner, Chad Walsh and Francis Wilson, as living as Arthur Bestor, Mel Bradford, C. P. Ives, Stanley Jaki, John Lukacs, Forrest McDonald, Thomas Molnar, Gerhard Neimeyer, James V. Schall, S.J., Peter J. Stanlis, Stephen J. Tonsor and Frederick Wilhelmsen.
The acknowledged leader of the New Conservatives was self-employed adult scholar, writer, critic and man of letters Russell Kirk. Kirk was a key figure of the conservative movement: he was a friend to William F. Buckley, Jr., a columnist for National Review, an editor and a syndicated columnist, as well as a historian and horror fiction writer. His most famous work was 1953's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana later republished as The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Kirk's writings and legacy are interwoven with the history of traditionalist conservatism, with his influence felt at the Heritage Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and other conservative think tanks most especially the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.
The Conservative Mind was written by Kirk as a doctoral dissertation while he was a student at the St. Andrews University in Scotland. previously the author of a biography of American conservative John Randolph of Roanoke, Kirk's The Conservative Mind had laid out six "canons of conservative thought" in the book, including:
U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater gained national attention by way of The Conscience of a Conservative, a book ghostwritten for him by L. Brent Bozell Jr. William F. Buckley, Jr.'s Catholic traditionalist brother-in-law. The book advocated a conservative vision in keeping with Buckley's National Review and propelled Goldwater to challenge Vice President Richard Nixon, without success, for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination.
In 1964, Goldwater returned to challenge the Eastern Establishment, which since the 1930s had controlled the Republican Party. In a brutal campaign where he was maligned by liberal Republican primary rivals Rockefeller, Romney, Scranton, etc., the press, the Democrats and President Lyndon B. Johnson, Goldwater again found allies among conservatives, including the traditionalists. Russell Kirk championed Goldwater's cause as the maturation of the New adjusting in American politics. Kirk advocated for Goldwater in his syndicated columns and campaigned for him in the primaries. Goldwater's subsequent defeat would result in the New Right regrouping and finding a new figurehead in the late 1970s: Ronald Reagan.
Fundamental differences developed between libertarians and traditional conservatives. Libertarians wanted the free market to be unregulated as possible while traditional conservatives believed that big business, whether unconstrained, could impoverish national life and threaten freedom. Libertarians also believed that a strong state would threaten freedom while traditional conservatives regarded a strong state, one which is properly constructed to ensure that not too much power accumulated in all one branch, was fundamental to ensure freedom.