Frank Meyer: life, ideas and books

Life

Frank Straus Meyer was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1909. He attended Princeton for a year, then studied at Balliol College, Oxford, taking his B.A. in 1932 and M.A. in 1934, and also studied at the London School of Economics. He was a Communist Party member in the 1930s and early 1940s, and he later wrote about how the party shapes its members in The Moulding of Communists (1961).

After leaving the party and moving to the right, he joined the original staff of National Review in 1955, wrote its column "Principles and Heresies" and edited its book section. He co-founded the American Conservative Union. He died in Woodstock, New York, in 1972, having converted to Catholicism shortly before.

Ideas

Meyer's project was to reconcile two strands that quarrelled in the 1950s: libertarians, who stressed freedom from government, and traditionalists, who stressed virtue and inherited order. His answer, later called fusionism, held that virtue belongs to individuals and has value only when freely chosen, so the state should be limited to police, defence and courts, while the ends toward which free men use their liberty are those of the Western tradition.

The commentator E. J. Dionne summarised the formula as libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends. Meyer treated freedom as a means rather than an end in itself, and conservatism as the preservation of a tradition that itself divides and limits power. He admitted a tension between freedom and tradition and held that it should be lived with rather than resolved.

Major works

• The Moulding of Communists (1961).
• In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (1962).
• Left, Right and Center (1965, co-edited).
• The Conservative Mainstream (1969).

Why conservatives read him

Fusionism became the working compromise of the postwar American right, the umbrella under which anticommunists, free-market economists and religious traditionalists could cooperate. William F. Buckley Jr. gave it a public home in National Review, and in a 1981 address Ronald Reagan credited Meyer with the synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought that shaped modern conservatism.

His ideas influenced institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Young America's Foundation. He argued, sometimes bitterly, with Russell Kirk over whether conservatives should defend freedom first or virtue first, and he drew on the same hostility to central planning as Friedrich Hayek. Debate over fusionism is a reliable test of what a given conservative thinks the movement is for, and that is why Meyer, though less read than Buckley or Kirk, is cited whenever the coalition strains. Readers new to the movement's history will find in his essays the clearest statement of why the right has held together as long as it has, and of what it costs to keep the pieces in one tent.