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:

1. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions.

2. Friedrich Hayek, “The Uses of Knowledge in Society” and “The Pretense of Knowledge” (Nobel address)

3. Meir Kohn, “Commerce, Predation, and Production”

4. Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth

5. Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence

6. Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law

7. Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset

8. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate

9. Joyce Benenson, Warriors and Worriers

10. George Will, The Conservative Sensibility

11. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community

12. Shelby Steele, White Guilt

13. Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement

14. Mary Eberstadt, Primal Screams

15. Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

16. 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.

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Teach Students Conservative Thought