The legacy of Peter Viereck: his prose writings.

• Author: Ryn, Claes G.

Much of Peter Viereck's prose writing was framed as an attempt to define a proper conservatism for our time. In 1950 when he published Conservatism Revisited the ideas in vogue among American intellectuals were those of socialism and "progressive" liberalism. The word "conservatism" signified a bias favoring business and a preference for minimal government. Viereck's emphasis on moral and cultural questions and his advocacy of ideas drawn from the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions made him an oddity. He sharply criticized the secular religions of progress that offer salvation through politics. He inveighed against what he called "a morally illiterate culture of unhappy and untragic pleasure-seekers" without roots in "the universals of civilization." (1)

Conservatism Revisited had been preceded in 1941, when Viereck was in his mid twenties, by his first book, Metapolitics, an insightful and pioneering--if philosophically somewhat immature--study of the origins of German National Socialism. The book was profoundly influenced by Irving Babbitt, the controversial Harvard professor (1865-1933). Babbitt had demonstrated the morally opposed potentialities of the imagination, including the arts, and the crucial role of the imagination in shaping human life. Metapolitics traced the disastrous role of perverted imagination and correspondingly perverse politics in Germany. Conservatism Revisited, which is a generally admiring study of Prince Metternich, described a vastly different type of leadership. In Viereck's view, Metternich attempted, through creativity and aristocratic restraint and balance, to meet the challenges of an age of transition. This book was followed in the next few years by four prose works that continued Viereck's effort to define conservatism and, more generally, the spirit of humane civilization. Though from time to time he would revise, update and supplement these books, sometimes substantially, what he published in the 1950s contains the core of his contribution in prose. That these books are now dated with regard to many specific illustrations and the historical circumstances in which they were written does not significantly reduce their value. Their central themes as well as numerous particular insights are easily adapted to the present. That Viereck wrote less prose than poetry after the 1950s may indicate his sense of which medium allowed him to speak in the most profound and timeless manner. Perhaps he was also discouraged by unperceptive reading of his prose and by an apparent lack of interest in his ideas.

Though Peter Viereck received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1949 for Terror and Decorum, his unwillingness over the years to follow poetic fashion limited critical attention to and appreciation for that part of his achievement. The significance of his work as a poet during a long life has yet to be fully recognized. This article, however, will deal only with his prose writings.

A non-conformist conservative

In the 1950s some of Viereck's views--for example, his acceptance of elements of the Welfare State, his concern about civil liberties, and his criticism of Senator Joe McCarthy--blunted the edge of criticism from the left and even earned him qualified praise from some liberals, but these reactions could not conceal a deep tension between his central ideas and the general trend in intellectual circles. Yet Viereck could not comfortably align himself with what was then called conservatism. In the preference for laissez-faire economics he saw a prejudice unduly favoring utilitarian values and economic interests. He thought of his own position as representing a "new" American conservatism, one closer to the great Western traditions and appreciating the need for moral and other restraints on the market. He would find insufficient emphasis on the need for such restraints in William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review, which was started in 1955.

National Review became a catalyst for the quickly expanding movement that became most widely associated with the conservative label. That movement did not, in spite of Viereck's early prominence, come to regard him as one of its leading figures. A major reason was the opposition that he encountered in National Review, whose definition of conservatism differed less from the then-typical American use of the term. The approval that Viereck received from the so-called "liberal establishment" and his deviation in practical politics from positions that Buckley and his circle deemed essential created unease and irritation. Viereck was not willing, for example, categorically to denounce the New Deal, and he argued against rigid, aprioristic notions about the proper functions of government. Though a vigorous anticommunist, he objected strongly to Joe McCarthy. Some contributors to National Review also had reservations about the Wisconsin senator, but Buckley himself wrote extensively in McCarthy's defense.

In 1956 Viereck published Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill, a small survey and anthology of European and American ideas. National Review senior editor Frank S. Meyer, a convert from communism, summarily dismissed Viereck's attempt broadly to define conservatism as "counterfeit." (2) This sweeping judgment was based not so much on the book's contents as on Meyer's general impression that in practical politics Viereck was at heart a liberal. These and similar reactions elicited from Viereck some sharp attacks on his detractors, which only worsened the mutual distancing.

Viereck's influence on what became known as the postwar conservative intellectual movement would be limited. One thinker whose intellectual emphasis was similar to Viereck's but who was accorded great respect...