Books with title The Conscience of a Conservative

For a huge number of Republicans, Goldwater's book, The Conscience of a Conservative was must reading. I believe it is just as vital today as it was then, and Senator Goldwater addresses many topics that could be torn from today's headlines. In this book, Goldwater offered a clear warning about impending dangers to the survival of our American freedoms with recommendations of appropriate action to avoid those dangers. Had Goldwater been elected, we might find today's political landscape very different. This book explores the perils of power, States rights, Civil rights, taxes and spending, and perhaps the most important, the welfare state. In the America of today, with a man in the White House like President Obama, The Conscience of a Conservative becomes, once again, must reading.

The Conscience of a Conservative is an original work of politics and philosophy, a vision of the nation and the world as it should be, not a compromise with the world as it was. It is a fusion of the three major strains of conservatism in 1960—traditional conservatism, classical liberalism or libertarianism, and anti-communism. It is a book by a conservative for conservatives at a time when conservatives were beginning to realize the potential of their political power.

The Conservative was a journal edited and self-published sporadically by H. P. Lovecraft between 1915 and 1923. Some of its pieces were written by Lovecraft himself, but many of them were written by others, and included not just political and social commentary on the issues of the day, but also poetry, short stories and literary criticism. In spite of its name, Lovecraft's style of conservatism bore little resemblance to what goes by that name in America today, and instead was first and foremost a call for a cultural revival - an appeal to a return to the deepest wellsprings that had inspired Western culture from its origins. The period covered by The Conservative coincided with some of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century, including the First World War and the Russian Revolution. For Lovecraft and his fellow authors, however, the answer to navigating the chaos of their time was not crude nationalism or socioeconomic policies, but could only be understood in terms of race, culture and a strong sense of morality. An opponent of both democracy and liberalism, Lovecraft desired a return to the aristocratic values of earlier ages. Whether one reads these texts as a record of Lovecraft's own worldview, or as a window into the times in which they were written, The Conservative remains a fascinating document. This edition includes a special introduction placing it within the context of Lovecraft's life and career by Alex Kurtagic. H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is widely considered to have been the greatest writer of horror fiction of the twentieth century. Best-know for the stories that comprised his "Cthulhu Mythos," Lovecraft depicted a dark world dominated by unseen and malevolent forces, which mirrored his own hostility to everything associated with the modern world, which he saw as being in a continual state of decline and decay. He continues to be extremely influential upon writers, filmmakers and artists to this day.