Robert Bork, The Tempting of America (1990): The single best critique of liberal jurisprudence, and an argument for interpreting the Constitution by consulting the intentions of the framers.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987): A great teacher’s learned account of how our best young minds came to the conclusion that there are no truths.
Patrick Buchanan, Right from the Beginning (1988): A pugnacious and absorbing account of how the author came of age as a conservative.
Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952): A profoundly personal and deeply moving account of one man’s liberation from the shackles of Communism.
George Gilder, Men and Marriage (1986): An iconoclastic argument for why “women’s liberation” produces angry women and emasculated men.
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962): Capitalism’s most powerful advocate in recent decades makes his argument for the free market.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944): This hugely influential book shows the similarities between Communism and fascism and makes one of the first and best defenses of libertarian individualism.
Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims (1981): A devastating account of the gullibility and outright stupidity of prominent liberal intellectuals who made pilgrimages to Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba.
Harry Jaffa, The Crisis of the House Divided (1959): Through an examination of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, this book offers deep and subtle reflections on the exercise of political statesmanship.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953): A broad survey of the intellectual breadth of conservative thought, with a special emphasis on Edmund Burke.
Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995): Learned and incisive essays by a former liberal who was “mugged by reality” and moved right.
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (1965): This study of England before the Industrial Revolution shows the virtues, and the limitations, of the world that was transformed by technological capitalism.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1949): Why capitalism works and socialism doesn’t, by the great man of Austrian economics.
Margaret Mead, Male and Female (1949): A comprehensive and politically incorrect survey of sex differences and their social consequences.
Charles Murray, Losing Ground (1984): One of the best arguments against the welfare state, this book became the intellectual blueprint for welfare reform.
George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (1976): A useful historical account of how American conservatism went from obscure philosophizing to a mainstream political movement.
Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution (1991): A wonderfully revealing book that tells the reader a lot about Reagan, and a lot about Peggy.
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962): The limits of social engineering and of rational blueprints for society, advanced elegantly and reasonably by the English philosopher and essayist.
George Orwell, Animal Farm (1946): A parable about the totalitarian temptation embodied in socialism.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957): A fast-paced novel that is also a capitalist manifesto; it celebrates the entrepreneurs who build and make new things.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1974): A devastating indictment of Soviet Communism, and a story of one man’s spiritual triumph over the gulag.
Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America (1981): Just one—because I had to choose one—of Sowell’s many books refuting the presumption that discrimination is the main reason why ethnic groups succeed or fail.
Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (1990): A revealing look at the psychological underpinning of affirmative action and other race-based policies.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1950): One of conservatism’s most important philosophers makes an eloquent defense of natural right against the twin currents of relativism and historicism.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (1952): A learned, sometimes cryptic, account of liberalism as the modern version of an old Christian heresy.
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1944): One of the great novels of the twentieth century makes the argument against the twentieth century.
Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948): The Southern Agrarian diagnosis of the ailment of Western civilization—the decline of belief in an abiding moral order.
Copyright © 2002 by Dinesh D’Souza
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data D’Souza, Dinesh, 1961-
Letters to a young conservative / Dinesh D’Souza. pm. cm.—(The art of mentoring series)
eISBN : 978-0-786-73909-7
1. Conservatism—United States—Correspondence. 2. Youth—United States—Political activity. 3. Politicians—United States—Correspondence. 4. Right and left (Political science) I. Title. II. Series
JC573.2.U6 D76 2002
320.52’0973—dc21
202008679
/
Letters to a Young Conservative Page 16
