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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I suggest replacing Sowell's 'A Conflict of Visions' with his 'Knowledge and Decisions'
I'm not famliar with many of these works, but several seem just anti-progressive, not conservative.