ABSTRACT

The deeply felt political commitments that had informed the writing of history in America and Britain during the first four decades of the twentieth century intensified in response to the radically altered exigencies of the Cold War. This was especially true for conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. Convinced that the unprecedented directions taken in the post-war world were fundamentally misconceived, they produced patriotic and cautionary lessons in which history corrected by example. The virtues of an idealized national past, imagined differently in each country, became their test for evaluating the forms and contents of the present as well as for prescribing the future. A few historians, influential far beyond their numbers, resurrected and redefined a conservative historiography. They did not perceive of themselves as political propagandists. Instead, they believed that the historically demonstrated rectitude of conservatism provided an objective perspective for historical understanding. Until supplanted by the more coherent, if fractious, neo-conservatism of the Radical Right in the 1970s, these historians acted individually and often idiosyncratically, rather than as an identifiable group, to shape historical scholarship and to affect national and international policy. In Britain, Herbert Butterfield, Geoffrey Elton and Max Beloff wrote within a continuous 200-year-old tradition that accepted common assumptions about the infirmities of human nature and their disastrous consequences. Unlike Britain, America had no consistent conservative legacy that persisted from earlier centuries. In order to fashion cohesive principles in the absence of a living heritage, conservatives such as Peter Viereck, Russell Kirk and, above all, Daniel Boorstin produced an often personal but still perspicuous conservative historiography based upon American exceptionalism. Elton, Beloff, Viereck and Kirk were aggressively conservative, while Butterfield and Boorstin adopted and used conservative

ideals combatively without identifying, or perhaps even recognizing, themselves as conservatives.