What's right?('Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement')

Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement By Kevin Smant ISI Books, 381 pages, $29.95

The life of Frank Meyer (1909-1972) encapsulates most of the great political and intellectual struggles of the last century. Born into an affluent New Jersey family, Meyer spent over a decade serving the Communist Party, first as a student at the London School of Economics, later in Chicago, before making his way to conservatism and William E Buckley, Jr.'s National Review, for which he served as an editor and writer. Over the next three decades, Meyer became a central figure on the American Right, both politically and intellectually. In Principles and Heresies, Indiana University history professor Kevin Smant provides the first book-length study of Meyer. It's an important contribution to American conservatism, and to postwar American political and intellectual life in general.

Although Meyer left the Communist Party in 1945 (at some personal risk), his experiences as a high-ranking radical remained with him lifelong. Having seen its dangers up close, Meyer made the struggle against communism a focal point of his work. In painting the communist demimonde of the 1930s and 1940s, Smant further confirms the historical record--now acknowledged by all except for the most recalcitrant leftists--that American communists were then working actively to overthrow our nation's Constitutional system. There were calculated, long-term conspiracies to destroy the United States long before Osama bin Laden arrived on the scene, this book reminds us, and it is the example of people like Meyer that shows us such attempts can be resisted.

Meyer's abandonment of communism was influenced by two books: Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences. They introduced Meyer to freedom, especially economic freedom, and the free intellectual tradition of the West. Uniting freedom and tradition--what became known as ...