With the labor and foresight of Kirk, Stanlis, Nisbet, Strauss, and others, Burke and de Tocqueville secured important positions in the academy and so did their interpretation of these two men.

We Won: Burke and De Tocqueville

by Bradley J. Birzer

Figureheads Coming and Going
For any of us interested in the history of post-war American conservatism (and, I assume you must be, or you wouldn’t be reading The Imaginative Conservative), we owe an immense debt to several historical figures and personalities—most immediately to Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, but also to Cicero, St. Augustine and, perhaps, Sir Thomas More.

It’s impossible to imagine a post-war conservatism without the ideas and examples of these men. Every major figure of the 1940s and 1950s looked especially to Burke: Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk, and Robert Nisbet. Others, not as well known today, include Peter Stanlis, Father Francis Canavan, and Ross Hoffman, all contributed to the Burke revival. To be sure, they each had different understandings of Burke, but, very importantly, they also each respected him. It’s well worth remembering, however, that while Cicero has been a constant in the western tradition, the other pre-twentieth century figures have enjoyed (to put it positively), at best, mixed careers and reputations.

Thomism had, in its various forms, overtaken Augustinianism in the late nineteenth-century Catholic mind, and American Protestants, so deeply indebted to the North African, became, in many ways, too evangelical to appreciate or even remember the great saint. Not until the 1,500th anniversary of his death (1930), did Catholics (Christopher Dawson, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain) embrace St. Augustine and his thought.

Five years later, the pope’s canonization of Sts. John Fisher and Thomas More revived More as well.

Though Burke helped shape British thought in its drive to destroy the remnants of the French Revolution and preserve the Tory Party of the nineteenth century, most scholars of that century considered him at best a utilitarian, when they considered him at all. He had devout followers, but they remained few in number. Not until the very late 1940s did many consider Burke anything more than a lucky prophet. Most thought of him as somewhat mad, especially in his “hysteria” regarding the French Revolution.

De Tocqueville also held little appeal in America after the publication of his two-volume Democracy in America, since he was so critical of American institutions and culture.

Rediscovering Burke and De Tocqueville

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