Pragmatic Conservatism: Edmund Burke and His American Heirs

This book is a study of pragmatic conservatism, an underappreciated tradition in modern American political thought, whose origins can be located in the ideas of Edmund Burke. Beginning with an exegesis of Burke's thought, it goes on to show how three twentieth-century thinkers who are not generally recognized as conservatives—Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Peter Viereck—carried on the Burkean tradition and adapted it to American democracy. Pragmatic conservatives posit that people, ...