Volume 26, Number 15 · October 11, 1979
Nervous Liberals
By Michael Walzer
The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics
by Peter Steinfels
Simon and Schuster, 335 pp., $11.95
A genuine conservatism expresses a sense of crisis and imminent or actual loss. Its tone is perfectly caught in the opening lines of Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, where Hooker explains his purpose in writing: 'Though for no other cause, yet for this, that posterity may know that we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream….' And, more stridently, in the gothic prose of Edmund Burke: 'But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold…' etc.
Review, 4561 words
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