Edmund Fawcett’s excellent new book Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition is a companion to his earlier opus Liberalism: The Life of an Idea.
In Liberalism — which I reviewed here — Fawcett, formerly a longtime journalist with The Economist, provided an admirably crisp and generous history of political and philosophical liberalism as a doctrine committed to ongoing change and progress. This new work examines the history of liberalism’s great rival on the right side of the political spectrum, conservatism, and sketches an account of how conservatives first resisted liberalism, then accommodated to it, before starting to push back again once the political left was driven from the field in the 1980s.
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