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Watch
on the Right
Conservative Intellectuals
in the Reagan Era
J. David Hoeveler Jr.
Winner of the 1992 Council for Wisconsin Writers Award for
Best Scholarly Book
The ascendancy of conservatism in the last twenty years is an
unprecedented episode in American intellectual and political
history. In Watch on the Right, J. David Hoeveler Jr.
gives us enlightening, often immensely entertaining, portraits
of the key thinkers behind this "revolution." As Hoeveler
writes, "conservative thinkers hang their hats on many different
racks," and this book dramatizes for us the breadth of the
conservative coalition as exemplified by the eight writers surveyed:
William F. Buckley Jr. George Will, Robert Nisbet, Irving Kristol,
Hilton Kramer, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., and
Michael Novak.
These eight "gurus" of the right represent a very wide
spectrum of conservative thought, but Hoeveler also considers
the present-day conservative renaissance against the literary
background that has given the movement its identity since Edmund
Burke. Amid the multiple voices unifying themes do emerge. American
conservatives share a hostility toward the liberal "new
class"—the professional media and academic elites and
the entrenched government bureaucracies that still believe in
the perfectibility of society by enforced social engineering.
Moreover, conservatives of all persuasions are united in struggling
to sustain traditional values against the onslaught of revolutionary
capitalism and technology, and all are profoundly hostile to
imperialistic communism on the Soviet model.
Despite the existence of a generic conservatism, however, Hoeveler's
portraits provide us with a fascinating tour of the shifts and
turns in modern social thought from the decline of liberalism
in the late 1960s to the current era—a path that leads through
such diverse areas as the Cold War, bourgeois culture, art and
aesthetics, civil rights and the welfare state, New Age culture,
and the gender revolution.
To a whole generation that has never known anything but conservative
leadership, Watch on the Right will explain, in clear
accessible prose, how the movement flourished in the 1970s and
1980s. For readers who saw it happen (but never thought it would)
and for liberals (who are feverishly trying to recover "their
" mandate), this book as no other pulls the ideological
threads of the story together.
Watch on the Right is illustrated with delightful pen-and-ink
caricatures.
J. David Hoeveler Jr. is professor of history at the
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is the author of The
New Humanism: A Critique of Modern America, 19001940 and
of James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition: From
Glasgow to Princeton.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
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January 1991
LC: 90-013021 JA
348 pp. 6 x 9
8 line drawings
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