What future exists for American conservatism? As a lifelong conservative, I answer this question by looking to the past. The American conservative tradition has produced a host of luminaries since the 1952 publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, but there is one figure in particular that conservatives would do well to rediscover: poet and historian Peter Viereck (1916–2006).

Viereck is one of the most insightful figures in postwar American conservatism, and one of the most compelling, despite the fact that he has been largely forgotten. A cursory survey of histories of conservatism reveals that he has not received much attention of late, certainly not the attention and study he deserves. Matthew Continetti only has three brief references to him in his 418 pages of text in The Right. Patrick Allitt, in his 280 pages of text in The Conservatives mentions him only twice. And there is no mention of Viereck at all in Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Edmund Fawcett’s Conservatism, Andrew Bacevich’s American Conservatism: Reclaiming the American Tradition, or George Will’s The Conservative Sensibility. Claes Ryn, Robert Lacey, Daniel McCarthy, and Lisa Bradford are among the only writers who have taken Viereck’s thought seriously. Viereck deserves more amplification, especially in light of our dingbat politics driven by chaos-obsessed personalities rather than serious ideas.

Viereck was a measured conservative in the school of Burke, Washington, Hamilton, and Adams. In the 1950s, he was considered by William F. Buckley and Frank Meyer, to name two conservative icons of the time, as something of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But Viereck had much more in common with his contemporaries than was often acknowledged. Like Kirk, Viereck understood the Western tradition as being informed by the Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Christians. Like Buckley and Meyer, Viereck was a committed anti-Communist, a proponent of balance and harmony, and held a realistic understanding of the flawed state of human nature. He was an insightful and witty critic of revolutionary leftism, represented especially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and Karl Marx. And as it was for Kirk, the imagination was of primary importance to Viereck. Kirk was a brilliant fiction writer, and Viereck was a prolific poet, winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1949 for his collection of poems in Terror and Decorum.

One feature that sets Viereck apart from his contemporaries, and especially his conservative detractors, was that he had a profound knowledge of authoritarian rightism not only from study but experience. His Harvard PhD dissertation, published under the title Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind, was a scholarly treatment of the origins of German fascism and Hitler’s rise to power. Moreover, Nazism wrecked his immediate family—the Nazis killed his brother on the battlefields of Italy and poisoned the mind of his father. His study of, and tragic experience with fascism moved Viereck to Burkean conservatism. He defined conservatism like this:

The conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure; self-expression through self-restraint; preservation through reform; humanism and classical balance; a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux; and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historical continuity. These principles together create freedom, a freedom built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance but on the bedrock of ethics and law.

Viereck’s is a beautiful articulation of the conservative disposition.

Viereck identified specific features of measured and extreme conservatism. He classified measured conservatism as evolutionary Burkean and extreme conservatism as reactionary Ottantottist. What did he mean?

Viereck argued that Burke’s Reflections birthed modern conservatism in a similar way that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels birthed international Marxism through their Communist Manifesto. For Viereck, what stood out most clearly from Burke’s conservatism was an orientation around tradition, especially the tradition of ordered liberty. Viereck also saw that the Burkean tradition was evolutionary, contrasted with the ossified, counter-revolutionary rightism expressed through French thinker Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821). For Viereck, both the Burkean and the Maistrian strands of conservatism hold up tradition in the face of revolutionary change, but Burkeans stand for traditional liberties whereas Maistrians champion traditional authority. Viereck called the Maistrian tradition “ottantott,” from the Italian word, ottantotto, meaning “eighty-eight.” Viereck wrote, “A reactionary king of Piedmont-Sardinia became almost a figure of fun by wandering about mumbling pathetically the word ‘ottantott.’ … Thereby he meant to say: all problems would vanish if only the world turned its clock back to 1788, the year before the Revolution.”

Burkeans and ottantotts differ in the way they understand the nature of change and how to respond to it. Burkeans see change as natural and inevitable, thus it must be managed by honest deliberation based on constitutional procedure, tradition, and prudence. Ottantotts are resistant to change, deploying nostalgia not for imaginative purposes, but as a test for truth. Ottantotts, since they are counter-revolutionary, seek disruption no less than leftist revolutionaries. They are utopian in a similar way to leftist revolutionaries: their political vision is predicated on obscurantist nostalgia, which is just as abstract as the leftist revolutionaries’ dreams of a perfected society. Both leftist revolutionaries and ottantott counter-revolutionaries seek to build temples in the sky, and have no use for the concrete experience of the past. Viereck saw the Burkean tradition as the predominant conservative tradition in American history. He thought the ottantottist tradition, emerging from the thought of Maistre, as the predominant conservative tradition on the continent of Europe. Considering the development of American conservatism since 1990, there seems to be a clear turn toward ottantottism, especially in its rising populist appeal due to the frustration among many Americans for Republican aimlessness in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

Viereck did not merely “punch right” in his writings. He was as pointed in his criticism of the Left as he was to those on his right. Viereck rightly found the source of modern revolutionary leftism in Rousseau, particularly in his books Emile (1762) and The Social Contract (1762). Viereck rooted Rousseau’s modern leftism in his estimation of human nature as essentially good. Rousseau famously began his Social Contract with the statement, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A catchy and oft-quoted statement, but what did Rousseau’s arresting metaphor signify? Rousseau’s chains binding humankind consisted of tested tradition and custom. Viereck fired back in reply, “‘In chains, and so he ought to be,’ replies the thoughtful conservative, defending the good and wise and necessary chains of rooted tradition and historic continuity.” While Rousseau considered rooted tradition to be the chains of imprisonment, Viereck believed that it was law rooted in tested custom and tradition that functioned as the necessary guardrail to keep humanity from careening over a moral cliff. And while Rousseau was more influential in Europe, Thomas Paine (1737–1839), the celebrated American revolutionary author of Common Sense (1776) and Rights of Man (1791)—a direct rebuttal to Burke’s Reflections—became the fountainhead of the leftist thought in America, according to Viereck. Paine’s progressive optimism and faith in human nature led him to imprudently reject the wisdom of tradition and custom. For Viereck, one’s instinct to follow either Paine or Burke would indicate whether his disposition was liberal or conservative.

Perhaps most relevant to today’s culture, Viereck observed that the conservative disposition is profoundly humanistic. Thus, conservatism directs one to the cultivation of the interior personal life. Viereck opened his book, Unadjusted Man in the Age of Overadjustment, this way: “The fight is for the private life.” This fight for the private life was a struggle against conformity to the ever-changing whims of prevailing popular political and social culture. We in contemporary times might describe the prevailing culture in terms of consumerism, obsession with political personalities and cults, psychological slavery to whatever is trending on social media, overdependence upon a dehumanizing technology, and the thralldom of mass-produced and soulless art, music, literature, and film, and the commercial use of nature as a playground for adventure-obsessed, spiritually impoverished, overgrown adolescents. Our culture is distinct from Viereck’s in the 1950s, but what he wrote in 1956 still holds:

We can talk civil liberties, prosperity, democracy with the tongues of men and of angels, but it is merely a case of “free from what?” and not ”free for what?” if we use this freedom for no other purpose than to commit television or go lusting after supermarkets.

The person immersed in and shaped by the prevailing ephemeral and trivial culture is what Viereck called “the overadjusted man.” Such a person may enjoy certain civil liberties, but he is not truly free.

For Viereck, adjustment to the culture pertains to one’s attitude toward it as well as to the extent one is being shaped and controlled by it. The person shaped and defined by the culture—the overadjusted person— has a weak interior life that cannot guard his mind and heart against the culture’s debasing influence. One can be maladjusted to the world, too, in that such a person is misanthropically cut off from the world. Overadjustment and maladjustment both degrade the soul. The overadjusted person is completely immersed in the present, momentary culture, while the other is utterly cut off and alienated by it. In contrast, the unadjusted person resists being shaped by the culture, but nevertheless lives and moves in it, and serves the world for its good.

Viereck deployed three geographic metaphors to illustrate his concept of cultural adjustment: an island, a mainland, and a peninsula. The misanthrope who is maladjusted, or never-adjusted, is on the island; the overadjusted is on the mainland; but the unadjusted is on the peninsula. The unadjusted person is neither cut off from the culture nor conformed to it. He is, in the spirit of Christ’s High Priestly Prayer in John 17:14–19, in the world, but not of the world. Furthermore, in Viereck’s words, he is a person of “adjustment to the ages, non-adjustment to the age” in that he is shaped by the collected wisdom of Western civilization, but not shaped by the shifting sands of the prevailing and ever-changing culture of the moment.

In terms of his personality, Viereck was most certainly an eccentric. We would regard him as an eccentric, and he was regarded so by his colleagues and his students. Viereck was a history professor for nearly fifty years at Mt. Holyoke College. Students going from place to place on campus would often see him perched up in a tree. He was habitually fifteen or so minutes late to class. He would address himself only to the light fixtures as he lectured. He never took roll. He never returned graded papers and never gave any feedback. He would run into things as he walked, being absorbed in thought. And he wore a muffler around his neck all year, even during the warm seasons. He forgot to request an office when he joined the faculty in 1948, and so he had no on-campus office and did not have office hours.

Despite these idiosyncrasies, he was beloved and admired by his students, even considering the occasion when a group of students invited him to Sunday dinner in the dormitory, but he showed up an hour late because he forgot about daylight savings time. His oddities, bizarre as they were, reflected the emphasis he placed on the individual personality over mindless conformity, which bears an underappreciated significance to the conservative disposition. In our own culture, which is too often obsessed with mindless conformity, a professor like Viereck probably would just be fired, and that would be that. Our times are blander and our skies greyer in the absence of such eccentric geniuses, people of personality. Alas, we are the poorer. And while Viereck was rejected by many movement conservatives during the 1950s, his articulation of the meaning of conservatism is exquisitely delivered in and through his life and writings.

Viereck’s thought can still serve to ground and inform our thinking of what it means to be an aspirational conservative. Viereck’s poetry still offers a sense of what it means to be human. American conservativism would be richer if it would add Viereck to its canon, alongside Kirk, Oakeshott, Voegelin, and Buckley. The defense of civilization needs as much help as it can get.