Traditionalist and libertarian ideas largely dominated the American Right’s agenda in the era immediately after World War II. Fusionism is the term applied to the attempt during the 1950s and 1960s to reconcile the philosophical gap that existed between these strands of “conservative thought.” Traditionalists emphasized the importance of religious and moral beliefs in the quest for virtue. Libertarians stressed the importance of reason and freedom. There was unified opposition on the Right against the expanding welfare state. However, traditionalists often were (and are) willing to use state power to attain their goals—which was (and is) anathema to libertarians. Frank Meyer, a leading figure of the American Right in the early post–World War II era, led the attempt to reconcile these divergent strands of conservative thought.
The early postwar Right reflected several important influences. First, critiques of statist policies by libertarian economists provided intellectual support for the decentralized market economy. The Right was highly critical of the collectivism of the Roosevelt New Deal, and especially benefited from contributions of the Austrian School of Economics. Ludwig von Mises in Socialism (1936) proved that central direction dooms an economy to failure. F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944) showed that central planning was inconsistent with individual liberty. Henry Hazlitt, Wilhelm Röpke, and Chicago Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman also made notable contributions.
Anticommunism, including opposition to Soviet imperialism, was a second critical factor shaping the Right. Communism appeared to pose a unique threat to most on the Right, as the Iron Curtain of collectivism descended on Eastern Europe and the specter of domination by the Soviet Union haunted the West. The publication of Whittaker Chambers’s book Witness (1952) was a defining moment in the anticommunist movement in the United States, revealing that communist views and practices were implacably hostile to the very foundations of a free society. Witness provided a graphic account of Chambers’s transformation from a communist agent into a dedicated enemy of collectivism. In 1955, when William F. Buckley, Jr., founded National Review, a periodical that became especially influential among traditionalist conservatives, Buckley considered the Soviet threat so important that he was willing to accept the idea that Big Government would be necessary in the struggle against collectivism.
The historical foundations of society, the “permanent things” that traditionalist conservatives emphasize, were a third important influence on the postwar conservative movement. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948) and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953) were especially influential. Weaver was a critic of moral relativism and mass culture, and Kirk echoed Weaver in holding that change does not imply progress. Kirk contributed a set of first principles that reflected the conservatism of Edmund Burke. This set of integrated beliefs, traceable to biblical antiquity, addressed the religious and moral concerns of traditionalists. For Kirk, the classical and Christian virtues were not incompatible with a decentralized market economy; indeed, he affirmed that private property was a moral and social good.
Libertarians and traditionalists found a significant amount of common ground in the postwar Right. However, traditionalists were clearly more concerned with ethical than economic issues and emphasized the moral implications of collectivism for traditional institutions and practices. Libertarians, on the other hand, stressed the importance of economic freedom and individual liberty and emphasized statism’s inevitable infringement upon the individual’s right to choose, whatever the area of choice.
An ideological rift between traditionalists and libertarians threatened the conservative movement in the 1950s. F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960), which made a formidable case for limited government, a free market, and the impersonal rule of law, reflected this tension. Hayek emphasized that knowledge is subjective and highly specific to time and place. Thus, decentralized market signals play a uniquely important role in the discovery, coordination, and transmission of information throughout society. However, Hayek criticized conscious planning on utilitarian grounds rather than appealing to universal and immutable truths. Moreover, in a postscript titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek concluded the book with a forceful rejection of conservatism. He criticized traditionalist conservatives for being willing to use state power to achieve their goals.
The ideological differences between traditionalists and libertarians appeared irreconcilable as they debated the relative merits of freedom and tradition in the early 1960s. Libertarians charged that traditionalists were not mainly interested in limiting statism but were seeking to use state power to promote the conservative agenda. On the other hand, traditionalists maintained that libertarians paid too little attention to the foundations necessary for society to survive—foundations rooted in religious belief, including order, morality, truth, and virtue.
Would it be possible to develop a conservative tent under which libertarian and traditionalist philosophies could be united in a single political theory? Frank Meyer, a Christian libertarian, led the movement to find such a common ground. Meyer argued that the differences were not fundamental because they shared a common tradition and were united against a common enemy, collectivism. Indeed, the alleged inconsistency between freedom and reason (emphasized by libertarians) and tradition and virtue (stressed by traditionalists) was false. The history of the West has been a history of reason operating within tradition, and conservatism should embrace both. Moreover, Meyer believed that James Madison and the other founding fathers already had largely reconciled the two overriding principles, freedom and authority, in debates over the U.S. Constitution.
Furthermore, Meyer argued, “social engineering” is anathema to all on the Right, whether they place paramount importance on freedom or virtue. In either case, emphasis is placed on the importance of the individual. Meyer, a former communist, found the welfare state incompatible with both freedom and virtue. He thought that most Americans shared his views concerning freedom, virtue, and anticommunism.
Meyer explained his fusionist views in numerous articles and, most notably, in his book In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (1962). Meyer shared with traditionalists the view that the achievement of virtue is ultimately the most important of problems; he shared with libertarians a concern for freedom. Meyer considered a free economy necessary for the preservation of freedom and freedom a prerequisite for a virtuous society. Moreover, unlike many traditionalists, he maintained that achievement of virtue is not a political problem because virtue cannot be secured through political means. Instead, the appropriate role of the state is to establish and maintain the conditions of freedom.
Meyer stressed that freedom implies not virtue but choice—the option to choose between virtue and vice. Unless people are free to be vicious they cannot be virtuous because no coerced action can be virtuous. Thus, any attempt to legislate virtue destroys the very freedom that the individual must have to seek the good.
Wilhelm Röpke, a German economist, also played an important role in the development of fusionist thought. Indeed, his book A Humane Economy (1960), was a model of fusionism. It combined a defense of economic freedom acceptable to many libertarians with a traditionalist defense of Christian humanism. Röpke, a critic of “modern mass society,” emphasized the importance of family, church, communities, and tradition as the indispensable supports of a free society. In this view, individuals can “breathe the air of freedom” only to the extent that they are willing to bear the required burden of moral responsibility.
The fusionist movement only temporarily reduced tensions within the American Right. The yoking of cultural traditionalism, economic freedom, and an activist foreign policy never convinced many libertarians, such as Murray Rothbard. In the 1960s, fusionism lost much of its momentum, as stresses on the Right resulting from the Vietnam War mounted and an organized libertarian movement developed. Many of these libertarians were just as disdainful of traditionalist conservatives as they were of liberals.
The problems in uniting groups of the Right under a common tent are even more pronounced at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Right now includes not only traditionalists and libertarians, but also neoconservatives, paleoconservatives, “nativists,” antiabortionists, and the religious Right, among other groups. It is unlikely that any future philosophical alliance will be as successful as the earlier fusionist movement in reconciling the differences between these groups. First, differences between libertarians and other “conservatives” became more pronounced with the passage of time and therefore more difficult to reconcile. Second, some tension and conflict is inevitable between individuals who place primacy on tradition and virtue and those for whom the freedom to exercise reason is of paramount value. Many people in the latter group no longer identify themselves as conservatives.
Further Reading
Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement
George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945
Kevin J. Smant, Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer, Fusionism, and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement
This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, p. 338.
