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 classical liberalism are not rival philosophies but complementary aspects of a single defensible position — became the working synthesis of the American conservative movement from the late 1950s through the 1980s.

Meyer’s case was philosophical, not merely strategic. His central claim was that the traditionalist defence of inherited moral order and the libertarian defence of individual liberty are inseparable: virtue freely chosen is the only kind that counts as virtue, and political coercion that imposes the externals of moral conduct destroys the conditions under which moral conduct is possible.

Key Takeaways

• American political theorist and senior editor of National Review whose synthesis of traditionalist and libertarian conservatism — fusionism — became the operational philosophy of the post-war American conservative movement.
• In Defense of Freedom (1962) argued that virtue requires liberty as its precondition: a coerced moral order is not a moral order at all.
• Former Communist Party organiser whose 1949 break with the Party and subsequent intellectual reorientation produced one of the more influential mid-century American conservative books.

History And Context

Meyer was born in Newark, New Jersey, educated at Princeton, Balliol College Oxford, and the London School of Economics, where he joined the Communist Party in 1931. He worked as a Party organiser in Chicago and at the University of Chicago through the 1930s and into the 1940s. His break with the Party in 1949 — accelerated by reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom — produced The Moulding of Communists (1961), an account of the Party’s psychological and organisational methods that drew on his own experience.

The intellectual setting matters. Post-war American conservatism in the early 1950s was a divided field: traditionalists (Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin) emphasised inherited moral order; classical liberals (Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Frank Chodorov) emphasised individual liberty against state expansion. The two camps treated each other as either insufficient (the traditionalist view of liberalism) or dangerous (the liberal view of traditionalism). Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom argued that this division was philosophically unnecessary and politically self-defeating.

He served as book-review editor and later senior editor at National Review from its founding in 1955 until his death in 1972. The “Principles and Heresies” column was his platform.

The Conservative Position

Meyer’s case in In Defense of Freedom runs as follows. Virtue, properly understood, is the free choice of the good; coerced compliance with moral norms is not virtue but its imitation. A political order that uses state power to enforce moral conduct does not produce a virtuous citizenry; it produces an externally compliant citizenry whose interior life is either passive or actively rebellious. The traditionalist case for state-enforced moral order is therefore self-defeating in its own terms.

Conversely, libertarianism that treats the good life as a private matter beyond political concern is incoherent. A political order requires a substantive account of what kinds of human beings it is trying to make possible; the choice of which liberties to protect and which to constrain rests on prior moral commitments. A purely value-neutral liberalism cannot explain its own preferences.

The fusionist resolution: the proper aim of political order is the maximisation of the conditions under which free moral agency is possible. This entails a defence of constitutional limits on state power (the libertarian element), and a defence of the inherited moral and religious traditions that supply the substantive content of the good freely chosen (the traditionalist element). The two are not in tension; each is the other’s precondition.

Differing Positions

Russell Kirk, Meyer’s principal interlocutor on the traditionalist side, never accepted the synthesis. Kirk treated Meyer’s emphasis on freedom as philosophically thin and historically naive — naive because the inherited moral order Meyer wished to preserve had never in fact been the product of free individual choice but of slow communal accumulation under conditions of substantial unfreedom. The Kirk-Meyer exchange in National Review and Modern Age through the 1960s is the canonical post-war American statement of the traditionalist-libertarian disagreement.

From the libertarian side, Murray Rothbard treated fusionism as a state-friendly compromise that betrayed the libertarian core; the Rothbard-Meyer correspondence is sharp and instructive. Within libertarianism, Meyer is generally treated as a moderate or fellow traveller rather than a libertarian proper.

The political success of fusionism — its installation as the working philosophy of the Reagan-era movement — has been variously read. Defenders (George Nash, Lee Edwards) treat it as the philosophical condition of conservatism’s late twentieth-century political ascendancy. Critics (the post-2010 national-conservative and integralist currents) treat it as the philosophical mistake whose consequences the movement is now living with: a synthesis that produced political coalition at the cost of ceding the substantive moral ground.

References

1. Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), chs. 1, 3, 7.
2. Frank S. Meyer, ed., What Is Conservatism? (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), introduction and the Kirk and Meyer chapters.
3. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 30th anniv. ed. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006 [1976]), chs. 6, 9.
4. Kevin J. Smant, Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), chs. 4, 6.