Conserative Capitalism

Few beliefs seem more fundamental to American conservatism than faith in the free market. Yet throughout American history, many of the major conservative intellectual and political figures have harbored deep misgivings about the unfettered market and its disruption of traditional values, hierarchies, and communities. In Conservatives Against Capitalism, Peter Kolozi traces the history of conservative skepticism about the influence of capitalism on politics, culture, and society. Kolozi discusses conservative critiques of capitalism—from its threat to the Southern way of life to its emasculating effects on American society to the dangers of free trade—considering the positions of a wide-ranging set of individuals, including John Calhoun, Theodore Roosevelt, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, and Patrick J. Buchanan. He examines the ways in which conservative thought went from outright opposition to capitalism to more muted critiques, ultimately reconciling itself to the workings and ethos of the market. By analyzing the unaddressed historical and present-day tensions between capitalism and conservative values, Kolozi shows that figures regarded as iconoclasts belong to a coherent tradition, and he creates a vital new understanding of the American conservative pantheon.

This book is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the essential relationship between markets and morals. Smith, Burke and Marx, Durkheim, Polyani and Hayek - all sought to situate market exchange and property-based acquisitiveness in the broader context of human interaction and social values. This framework of interdependence and ethics embeds the capitalist market economy in an ongoing whole of which the calculative present-day is but a part. The book argues that the stability of conservatism anchors the dynamism of entrepreneurship in a matrix of patterns and habits without which orderly free enterprise would be at risk of degenerating into the Hobbesian war of each against all.

The shock waves of conservative advances have reached into every corner of American and British politics. Parties of the right have prospered, while parties of the left have stumbled, retreated, and are now regrouping. The agenda for both right and left is set by the terms of the free-market doctrines that have displaced the post-war consensus politics of liberal capitalism. This volume describes and challenges the ideological basis of the free-market right. Though critiques of the policies of the Reagan and Thatcher governments are hardly in short supply, this major new study offers the most thorough and up-to-date analysis available. No other book considers in such depth conservative ideas and policies on both sides of the Atlantic. It provides the first clear account of the distinction between conservative and other forms of capitalism. It also examines the fault lines dividing opposing camps within conservative capitalism and their consequences for domestic policy in Britain and the US. Linking political theory and public policy, it is one of the few critical appraisals of the New Right based on a clear understanding of what the arguments for the free market really are. Finally, the authors demonstrate what the left needs to learn from its failures, how to remould its understanding of the relationship between politics and the market, and how to recapture the lost initiative.

Smith, Burke, Marx, Durkheim, Polanyi and Hayek--all sought to situate market exchange and property-based acquisitiveness in the broader context of human interaction and social values. This book explores that framework of interdependence and ethics that embeds the capitalist market economy in an ongoing whole of which the calculative present-day is but a part. It argues that the stability of conservatism anchors the dynamism of entrepreneurship in a matrix of patterns and habits without which orderly free enterprise would be at risk of degenerating into the Hobbesian war of each against all.

A compelling explanation of how conservatism is no longer what its founders intended and how it has been transformed into a tool of materialist economics and emptied of much of its original meaning. During America's 19th-century Gilded Age, free-enterprise capitalist ideas distorted and deeply obscured traditional political conservatism. Conservatism today, argues distinguished historian Mario R. DiNunzio, is a grotesque version of the ideology crafted by its founders, including John Adams in America and Edmund Burke in England. This compelling book provides a survey of conservative thought and its transformation that originated in the late 19th century, exposing the influence of that transformed conservatism on 20th-century American politics—from Hoover to Goldwater to Reagan and on to the Tea Party. It explains the historical foundations of conservative thought and the radical transformation of conservatism into a vastly different ideology primarily concerned with the defense of unfettered capitalism and extreme rights of individuals, as opposed to the values of traditional conservatism: community, good order, tempered change, and enduring values. DiNunzio challenges conservatives and scholars of conservatism to confront the differences between what passes for conservatism in modern-day American politics and the tenets of the original conservative tradition.

Finally, a book that shows that conservative economics is neither fantasy nor "voodoo " and also explains conservative economics in language and terms meant for the nonprofessional layperson . This manuscript provides the argument that conservative economics is based on sound economic theory all the way back to Adam Smith, the father of modern-day economics. This book first provides the reader with the theoretical bases of conservative economics, stated in understandable lay terms. Along with the theory, it identifies general public policies consistent with the conservative theory with clearly stated justifications to the conservative policy doctrines. The second part of this book is focused on proposing public policies on a number of current national economic issues, complete with arguments on behalf of those policies. Throughout this manuscript, Judeo-Christian values underlie the economic theory and policies proposed. Contained herein is perhaps the first, most truly comprehensive composition on conservative economics ever written.

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s stirring call for the democratic left to counter the conservative stranglehold over American religious and economic culture in order to put egalitarianism and ecological integrity on the political agenda. An eminent political theorist known for his work on identity, secularism, and pluralism, Connolly charts the path of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” source of a bellicose ethos reverberating through contemporary institutional life. He argues that the vengeful vision of the Second Coming motivating a segment of the evangelical right resonates with the ethos of greed animating the cowboy sector of American capitalism. The resulting evangelical-capitalist ethos finds expression in church pulpits, Fox News reports, the best-selling Left Behind novels, consumption practices, investment priorities, and state policies. These practices resonate together to diminish diversity, forestall responsibility to future generations, ignore urban poverty, and support a system of extensive economic inequality. Connolly describes how the evangelical-capitalist machine works, how its themes resound across class lines, and how it infiltrates numerous aspects of American life. Proposing changes in sensibility and strategy to challenge this machine, Connolly contends that the liberal distinction between secular public and religious private life must be reworked. Traditional notions of unity or solidarity must be translated into drives to forge provisional assemblages comprised of multiple constituencies and creeds. The left must also learn from the political right how power is infused into everyday institutions such as the media, schools, churches, consumption practices, corporations, and neighborhoods. Connolly explores the potential of a “tragic vision” to contest the current politics of existential resentment and political hubris, explores potential lines of connection between it and theistic faiths that break with the evangelical right, and charts the possibility of forging an “eco-egalitarian” economy. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s most urgent work to date.