Finished reading The Conservative Mind a few days ago after having it out from the library for a little more than two months. It’s a good book, but one that’s a bit dated. I’d still recommend it to anyone, though I don’t know that it’s one I would ever really re-read. I might get a copy just to make my children read it when they’re old enough, kind of thing. It’s a lot like The Road to Serfdom in that respect. Instead of reviewing the whole thing, which would be rather difficult, since I haven’t read anything like all of what he talks about; I hadn’t even heard of some of the authors he quotes and talks about at length. The book is an overview of conservative thought since Edmund Burke (father of modern conservatism) and up to TS Eliot (the book was originally published in the 1950’s). So what I’m going to do is post excerpts over the next week or so that I found striking. Here’s the first one:
(Quoting Burke) “An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance, and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counter-acting and co-operating powersÂ?.Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption.”
Neh 