In the 1950s, American conservatives—then a scattered group of fugitives—sought an intellectual ancestor who embodied their principles and whose writings could be applied to the contemporary United States. Books like Peter Stanlis’s Edmund Burke and the Natural Law and, most famously, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind repackaged the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke into an all-purpose conservative champion. Where Burke stood against Jacobinism during the French Revolution, conservatives could resist communism during the Cold War. As Burke had stood for eternal verities in 1790, so too he could now stand for the natural law against an emerging liberal relativism.
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