If I Taught Conservative Thought
The works I would choose
Benjamin Storey and Jon A. Shields write,
Conservative thinkers sometimes even embrace fashionable liberal causes for conservative reasons. For example, the agrarian conservatism of novelist Wendell Berry, an influential figure among young traditionalists, has driven him to engage in both anti-war and environmental activism. Conservatives can even embrace revolutionary change when they conclude that our institutions are so broken that there is nothing left to conserve. Hence, our workshop also exposed faculty to the work of Patrick Deneen, author, most recently, of the book Regime Change.
Good Lord, no. Not Deneen. If folks come to your workshop thinking that conservatives are intellectual lightweights, reading Deneen won’t change their minds.
My picks:
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions.
Friedrich Hayek, “The Uses of Knowledge in Society” and “The Pretense of Knowledge” (Nobel address)
Meir Kohn, “Commerce, Predation, and Production”
Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth
Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence
Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law
Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate
Joyce Benenson, Warriors and Worriers
George Will, The Conservative Sensibility
Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community
Shelby Steele, White Guilt
Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement
Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams
Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
Russ Roberts, The Price of Everything
Note that I have not read Caldwell or Perry. But they are highly recommended regarding their respective topics.
I think that someone on the left who went through this curriculum would come away with more admiration for conservatism and some doubts about leftism. I think that if one took the shortcut of reading with AI this corpus, one could still gain a great deal.
substacks referenced above:
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Seems more like a classical liberal or libertarian reading list.
And what is the point of trying to change minds? The essay linked describes Haidt’s epiphany when he “started reading Jerry Muller’s excellent introductory essay in his anthology on conservative thought. By the time he hit the third page, he had to sit down right there in the bookstore to keep reading—the experience, as Haidt puts it, ‘literally floored’ him. ‘I began to see [that conservatives] had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before.’” It seems like Muller took a much less didactic approach and just tried to lay out the history of conservative thought in a planned, thorough, meditative way that would enable a thinking person to draw their own conclusions. Per the Amazon description, the book proceeds:
“chronologically through the following sections: Enlightenment Conservatism (David Hume, Edmund Burke, and Justus Möser), The Critique of Revolution (Burke, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, James Madison, and Rufus Choate), Authority (Matthew Arnold, James Fitzjames Stephen), Inequality (W. H. Mallock, Joseph A. Schumpeter), The Critique of Good Intentions (William Graham Sumner), War (T. E. Hulme), Democracy (Carl Schmitt, Schumpeter), The Limits of Rationalism (Winston Churchill, Michael Oakeshott, Friedrich Hayek, Edward Banfield), The Critique of Social and Cultural Emancipation (Irving Kristol, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, Hermann Lübbe), and Between Social Science and Cultural Criticism (Arnold Gehlen, Philip Rieff). The book contains an afterword on recurrent tensions and dilemmas of conservative thought.” Sounds like the perfect textbook introduction to conservative thought and all one would really need for that purpose.
But from the choices in the list, it seems like the purpose of the proposed class is to pursue an agenda of purifying thought on the right. There are tensions between the various schools of thought on the right and rather than picking winners and losers it might help to select expositions of those tensions.
One wonders if a reading list like the following, using such an alternative approach might help frame issues and divisions more clearly and succinctly as well as improve understanding of the competing claims. How might a student wind up in a different place if they read instead:
(1) The Pursuit of the Ideal, Isaiah Berlin https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-09/Bib.196%20-%20Pursuit%20of%20the%20Ideal%20by%20Isaiah%20Berlin_1.pdf
(2) Hegel on Rousseau
(https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58169/pg58169-images.html#c400b )
(3) Authority : A Sociological History, Frank Furedi, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/authority/9A659EBF0DBD23E92999858514D659E4
In brief: https://frankfuredi.substack.com/p/why-is-authority-always-a-problem
(4) Law and Revolution, Frank Berman
Critical review: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4375&context=uclrev
(5) Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of Moderns, Benjamin Constant
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/constant-the-liberty-of-ancients-compared-with-that-of-moderns-1819
(6) Benjamin Disraeli, speech at Crystal Palace (24th June, 1872)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Maintenance_of_Empire
(7) Lessons of Irish History, Gladstone
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14518/pg14518-images.html#LESSONS_OF_IRISH_HISTORY_IN
(8 ) Why I am not a Conservative, Hayek (https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf )
(9) Post-Liberalism, John Gray
Review: https://pebblegalaxy.blog/2025/10/18/a-critical-review-of-john-grays-post-liberalism-studies-in-political-thought-insights-and-analysis/
My hope is that such a reading list might engender a more nuanced understanding of political thought and perhaps open a few windows into competing schools of thought. By comparing and contrasting, we learn.
I suggest replacing Sowell's 'A Conflict of Visions' with his 'Knowledge and Decisions'