ABSTRACT
Throughout his work, Viereck historically illustrates that political order cannot survive without the ethical support of custom and culture. Leaders must actively incarnate goodness, truth, and beauty. This is not a romantic plea for perfection, only an appeal for humble accountability. Liberty, however, requires the wisdom of what Viereck refers to as "conservative dissent" to ensure that values are bona fide embodiments of order and not sophistry. Conservative dissent edifies the public imagination with enduring perception. The ethical synergy of form and substance reveals the universal texture of the human predicament from within the context of our actual experience. Form without substance lacks inspiration; substance without form lacks purpose-both artistic exaggerations immoderately disfigure experience. Viereck's model for the independently ethical natural aristocrat is the unadjusted individual. Unadjustedness is the passionate celebration of all things human. Understanding the complex range of human potential, unadjusted perceive world with imaginative integrity and "the rich, helter-skelter plenitude of man" shines forth from their fiction.
