Conservatism

Winston Churchill

1874–1965

Winston Churchill was the British statesman who led his nation against Nazi Germany as wartime prime minister — a defender of democracy against fascism and an unapologetic imperialist whose legacy remains contested

Phyllis Schlafly

1924–2016

Phyllis Schlafly was an American conservative activist whose STOP ERA campaign mobilized grassroots religious and traditionalist women and helped forge the modern pro-family movement.

Richard Weaver

1910–1963

Richard Weaver was an American literary scholar and cultural critic whose Ideas Have Consequences became a founding text of postwar conservatism and its case against modern relativism.

Enoch Powell

1912–1998

Enoch Powell was a British Conservative politician whose free-market economics and incendiary opposition to immigration made him a lightning rod for nationalist debate.

Frank Meyer

1909–1972

Frank Meyer was an American writer who fused libertarian means and traditionalist ends into 'fusionism,' the theoretical glue of the postwar American conservative movement.

Klemens von Metternich

1773–1859

Klemens von Metternich was the Austrian statesman who orchestrated post-Napoleonic Europe's conservative order, wielding diplomacy and repression to hold revolution at bay for a generation.

Robert Taft

1889–1953

Robert Taft was the intellectual anchor of mid-century American conservatism, "Mr. Republican," who fused limited government at home with wariness of foreign entanglement abroad.

Paul Gottfried

Paul Gottfried is a paleoconservative theorist whose diagnosis of the managerial state and therapeutic liberalism shaped a dissident strand of the American right

Peter Viereck

Peter Viereck was a Burkean humanistic conservative who rehabilitated the word 'conservative' in postwar America, only to be sidelined by the movement right for his anti-populism and defense of the New Deal

Ryszard Legutko

Ryszard Legutko is a Polish conservative philosopher who argues that liberal democracy shares unsettling affinities with the communism he once resisted

Samuel Francis

Samuel Francis was a paleoconservative theorist who fused James Burnham's managerial-elite analysis with the populist politics of alienated Middle Americans

Benjamin Disraeli

1804–1881

Benjamin Disraeli was a Conservative prime minister and creator of 'One-Nation' conservatism, holding that aristocracy owed obligations to the poor and that social reform would unite the nation

Barry Goldwater

1909–1998

Barry Goldwater was the limited-government, libertarian-leaning conservative whose landslide-losing 1964 campaign nonetheless transformed American conservatism and paved the way for Reagan

Ronald Reagan

1911–2004

Ronald Reagan was the conservative 40th President whose tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-communism marked a decisive turn from New Deal liberalism

Clyde Wilson

Clyde Wilson is a paleoconservative historian whose editing of Calhoun's papers and defense of states' rights shaped the decentralist and neo-Confederate strands of the American right

Jefferson Davis

1808–1889

Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederate States of America, a states'-rights defender of slavery who led the South's attempt to found an independent slaveholding nation

Charles Krauthammer

Charles Krauthammer was a neoconservative columnist who gave post–Cold War American foreign policy its most influential argument for assertive, “unipolar” power

Norman Podhoretz

Norman Podhoretz was an American neoconservative whose journey from Cold War liberalism to hawkish anti-Communism, waged as editor of Commentary, helped institutionalize neoconservatism on the right

William F. Buckley Jr.

1925–2008

William F. Buckley Jr. was the architect of modern American conservatism as a movement — the National Review founder who built its institutions, honed its rhetoric, and policed who was in and who was out

Irving Kristol

1920–2009

Irving Kristol was the godfather of neoconservatism — a veteran of City College's anti-Stalinist left who spent his career asking what liberalism gets wrong about human nature and the limits of good intentions

Joseph de Maistre

1753–1821

Joseph de Maistre was the godfather of European counter-revolutionary thought, arguing that the French Revolution proved liberalism false and that tradition, faith, and the executioner were the real foundations of order

Roger Scruton

1944–2020

Roger Scruton was a conservative philosopher who defended the unfashionable — beauty, belonging, and the inherited past — as human necessities rather than prejudices

Russell Kirk

1918–1994

Russell Kirk was the traditionalist conservative who gave the postwar American right its intellectual soul, defending tradition, order, and the permanent things against modern ideological abstraction

Edmund Burke

1729–1797

Edmund Burke was the founding father of modern conservatism, a reforming Whig whose response to the French Revolution defended inherited institutions against rationalist schemes of social engineering

Michael Oakeshott

1901–1990

Michael Oakeshott was an English conservative philosopher whose skepticism of rationalist politics gave 20th-century conservatism its most sophisticated philosophical voice

Harry Jaffa

Harry Jaffa was a Straussian conservative philosopher who reinterpreted Lincoln and the American Founding as a principled defense of natural right, shaping the West Coast school that still informs the intellectual right

François-René de Chateaubriand

1768–1848

Emigré, foreign minister and founder of French Romanticism, whose Genius of Christianity defended religion by its beauty rather than its truth.

Robert Nisbet

Robert Nisbet was a conservative American sociologist who argued that the modern state's growth hollowed out the communities and mediating institutions on which liberty depends

Wilhelm Röpke

Wilhelm Röpke was a German ordoliberal economist whose vision of a decentralized, morally grounded market shaped West Germany's postwar social market economy

William Wilberforce

1759–1833

William Wilberforce was a British parliamentarian whose evangelical faith drove the campaign to abolish the slave trade, founding a tradition of conscience-led moral politics.

Adam Müller

1779–1829

The Romantic economist who attacked Adam Smith in the name of the state as a living whole, and gave German conservatism its case against the market.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1772–1834

The poet who brought German idealism into English and argued for a national clerisy — an endowed class charged with cultivating the nation's intellectual life.

Otto von Bismarck

1815–1898

Otto von Bismarck was the arch-practitioner of Realpolitik who unified Germany through blood and iron, then pioneered the welfare state to undercut socialism — authoritarian substance beneath parliamentary forms

Calvin Coolidge

1872–1933

Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president and an apostle of laissez-faire limited government whose restraint presided over Roaring Twenties prosperity — the anti-FDR for small-government conservatives

Charles de Gaulle

1890–1970

Charles de Gaulle was a French nationalist who founded the Fifth Republic, blending dirigiste economics and conservative social values in a politics that was neither left nor right

Dwight D. Eisenhower

1890–1969

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a moderate conservative Republican president who accepted the New Deal while pursuing fiscal restraint — and whose farewell warning against the military-industrial complex proved prescient

Margaret Thatcher

1925–2013

Margaret Thatcher was Britain's free-market conservative Prime Minister, the 'Iron Lady' whose program of privatization, deregulation, and broken union power remains the template for market conservatism worldwide

Friedrich Schlegel

1772–1829

The theorist of the Jena circle who defined Romantic poetry as永 permanently unfinished, invented modern literary criticism, and ended a Catholic Habsburg conservative.

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk was an American conservative activist, increasingly aligned with populist nationalism, who built Turning Point USA into a leading engine of youth mobilization on the right

James Fitzjames Stephen

1829–1894

The judge whose Liberty, Equality, Fraternity answered Mill point by point, arguing that coercion is the basis of all society and that liberalism conceals it.

James Q. Wilson

James Q. Wilson was a pragmatic, evidence-oriented postwar American conservative whose 'broken windows' theory reshaped policing and whose work anchored a data-driven, morally serious strand of the right

Heinrich von Treitschke

1834–1896

The Prussian historian who taught a generation that the state is power, that war is morally necessary, and whose antisemitic campaign made prejudice respectable.

Charles Maurras

1868–1952

Founder of Action Française, who made an atheist's case for Catholic monarchy, coined integral nationalism, and was convicted of collaboration in 1945.

Friedrich Carl von Savigny

1779–1861

Founder of the historical school of law, who defeated codification in Germany by arguing that law grows from a people's spirit rather than being made by legislators.

John C. Calhoun

1782–1850

John C. Calhoun was an American statesman whose theory of the "concurrent majority" armed states' rights and the defense of slavery with a rigorous constitutional philosophy.

Jonathan Sacks

1948–2020

Jonathan Sacks was a British rabbi and public philosopher who argued that free societies and markets depend on a shared moral covenant they cannot generate on their own.

Louis de Bonald

1754–1840

Counter-revolutionary theorist who argued that society precedes and constitutes the individual, and that language proves it — the first systematic sociological conservatism.

Thomas Carlyle

1795–1881

Thomas Carlyle was an anti-democratic Victorian prophet who attacked industrial capitalism and parliamentary government with equal ferocity, preaching hero-worship while his 'cash nexus' critique fed the socialist tradition