Williamson, a former literary editor at National Review, provides an entertaining exploration of the ambivalence and inconsistency among self-described conservatives (USA version). Some conservatives say that the essential role of conservatism is as a means to collective self-knowledge, through nationalism, cultural uniformity and the enforcement of religious orthodoxy; others insist that collectivism is the enemy of economic welfare, humane government, objective truth, and morality alike. Some conservatives believe that freedom arises spontaneously out of the character of the people; others say that power precedes liberty—that only under the protection of an effective, well-organized government can liberty exist at all. Conservatives believe that Human nature is flawed and/or God-given. Some conservatives insist that a market economy is essential for individual liberty, but others see that the 'creative destruction' of a profit-driven economy undermines the order and stability of communities, the loci of meaning and identity for the individual. Some conservatives claim that modernity is the child of Protestant Christianity, but others see that modernity destroys tradition.

The primary distinction within the conservative tradition, according to Williamson, is the difference between a conservatism founded on eternal principles, and the conservatism that appeals to historical context and the status quo, prudence, and pragmatism. The latter he dismisses as the ‘pseudo-conservativism’ of the Establishment, the Republican Party, and the neo-cons (ascendant under Bush II, when the present collection was published [2004]). For Williamson, “conservatism, rightly understood, is man’s willingness to discern for himself, and to accept from God, a fundamental, practical, just, human, and unchangeable plan for man—and to stick with it" (emphasis in the original). In the parlance of 21st c. American political gobbledygook, then, Williamson is a self-styled paleoconservative, a member of the New Old Right. (The original Old Right either began with U.S. independence and ended with the U.S. Constitution [Williamson’s view], or sprang from the laissez-faire/isolationist opposition to WWI and the New Deal [Murray Rothbard’s version]).

Among the 52 books treated here are the usual suspects (Burke, Hayek, Kirk, et.al.), some paleo-con tracts avant la lettre, and some others that Williamson must pound with vigor to fit into his sharp-edged square holes. Several selections Williamson acknowledges as tangential to his primary concerns, but he insists on their value for what he would have liked them to mean. The Conservative Bookshelf, then, is less a guide to key conservative texts than it is an illustration of how a committed, backwards-facing paleoconservative reads. ( )