Fusionism

The resurgent American conservative movement of the 1950s embraced two conflicting schools of thought. The first, consonant with the principles of libertarianism, held that maximizing individual liberty should be the chief end of political society; the other took its bearings from the principles articulated by Edmund Burke and stressed the need for an organic community grounded in the precepts of an objective, divinely ordained moral order. In 1962, Frank S. Meyer, then on the editorial board of the National Review and a regular contributor to its pages, wrote In Defense of Freedom, in which he endeavored to resolve the apparent differences between these two schools the in hope of rendering American conservatism philosophically coherent and consistent. In the same year, L. Brent Bozell, also a ...