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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was the most consequential economist of the American right in the twentieth century. He rebuilt the case for free markets at a moment when Keynesian management was...
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 4 May 1979 to 28 November 1990, the longest continuous premiership of the twentieth century and the first held by...
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the German philosopher and economist whose theory of class struggle became the most consequential political doctrine of the modern age. With Friedrich Engels he wrote the...
G.K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was a London journalist who became one of the most quoted defenders of tradition, family, and faith in the English language. Across some eighty books, a...
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth-century Italian Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher whose synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian doctrine became the most influential intellectual framework in the Western Catholic tradition....
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher whose ethical and political writings supply much of the intellectual foundation on which later conservative thought rests. Born at Stagira in 384 BC, he studied...
Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) was a German-born political philosopher who, after fleeing Nazi Austria in 1938, taught for most of his American career at Louisiana State University and later returned to...
Yves Simon
Yves R. Simon (1903–1961) was a French-born Catholic philosopher whose mid-century work in political philosophy gave the Thomist tradition its principal twentieth-century defence of democratic government. Trained under Jacques Maritain,...
Richard Weaver
Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) was an American rhetorician, cultural critic, and English professor at the University of Chicago whose 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences gave post-war American traditionalist conservatism one...
Frank Meyer
Frank Straus Meyer (1909–1972) was an American political theorist and one of the founding senior editors of National Review, whose articulation of fusionism — the position that traditionalist conservatism and...
Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson (1889–1970) was an English Catholic historian whose central claim — that European civilisation is intelligible only in light of the Christian religion that gave it its integrating form...
Joseph de Maistre
Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre (1753–1821) was a Savoyard magistrate, diplomat, and writer whose works after the French Revolution constituted the most uncompromising intellectual counter-attack on Enlightenment political philosophy produced in...
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Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was the most consequential economist of the American right in the twentieth century. He rebuilt the case for free markets at a moment when Keynesian management was the settled consensus, showed that inflation is a monetary phenomenon rather than a wage-price accident, and argued that economic freedom and political freedom stand or fall together. His work moved from technical journals to the living rooms of ordinary voters, and the policies that followed — the end of conscription, floating exchange rates, inflation targeting, school choice — carry his fingerprints. Conservatives claim Friedman as a founder, though he called...
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 4 May 1979 to 28 November 1990, the longest continuous premiership of the twentieth century and the first held by a woman in Britain. She won three general elections, broke the industrial power of the trade unions, sold state industries and council houses, restored price stability at heavy cost, and reversed her country's assumption of managed decline. She is also the figure through whom conservatives argue with each other. To one camp she is the standard: a leader who understood that inflation is a moral question, that state ownership corrupts...
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the German philosopher and economist whose theory of class struggle became the most consequential political doctrine of the modern age. With Friedrich Engels he wrote the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848); his Capital (1867) supplied the movement's economic system.1 For conservatives Marx is the arch-ideologue: the thinker who reduced civilization to economics, declared war on property, family, religion, and nation, and licensed the total states of the twentieth century. Engaging him seriously remains a conservative obligation, because his heirs never left the field. Born in Trier on 5 May 1818, Marx edited the Rheinische Zeitung,...
G.K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was a London journalist who became one of the most quoted defenders of tradition, family, and faith in the English language. Across some eighty books, a weekly Illustrated London News column that ran from 1905 to 1936, and thousands of essays, he argued with wit rather than rancour that the modern world was not too conservative but too timid to be sane.1 Conservatives return to Chesterton for two devices above all: his account of tradition as the extension of the franchise to the dead, and the principle now called Chesterton's fence — the rule that a...