Introduction to Conservatism: Four Book Recommendations

I sometimes wonder (and I’m sometimes asked) what I think would be the single best thing to read, what book I would recommend, to introduce someone to the ideas of conservatism for the first time, or to persuade those not yet persuaded.  (To date, I’m not sure I have an answer.  Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Arthur C. Brooks’s Who Really Cares—and of course C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity—were significant and influential for me, but I’m not sure any of them is a direct answer to that question.)

In a recent interview, Ben Shapiro asked Jonah Goldberg more or less the same question; Goldberg gamely offered some impromptu thoughts on the subject.  Here’s the list:

• Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions
• Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
• Richard Brookhiser’s Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace
• Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.’s The Decline of American Liberalism

Here’s a partial (approximate, amateur) transcript:

SHAPIRO:  OK, so, before we take off, I want to ask:  Aside from your book—we’re talking about the creation of good citizens, and the creation of people who believe in the enlightenment—what are the three to five other books that you would have people read, to educate themselves as good citizens who understand these values properly?

GOLDBERG:  Oh, that’s an interesting question.  Well—we’ll put aside the entire Shapiro oeuvre?  (laughs)

SHAPIRO:  (laughs)  No, no—as well you should!  They don’t fit into this—my next book, maybe, but not the ones I’ve written so far.

GOLDBERG:  Yeah, so—Tom Sowell’s Conflict of Visions, Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit—not because I think it’s his best book, but I do think it’s his most accessible book that gets at a lot of this stuff.  I would not say The Road to Serfdom.  Gosh, what else?  You know, I’m a big believer in history; I like—Deirdre McCloskey was a big influence on me on all these books, and I like her books, but I’m not sure they get to the core of raising good citizens.  Whatever the best biography of George Washington is, I think, would be pretty useful, and then as a follow-on to that, Rick Brookhiser’s book on George Washington’s guide to manners and civility, because I think that stuff is really, really important.  And again, you know, this is more of a “gotcha” question than the Trump stuff—

SHAPIRO:  (laughs)  Yeah, sorry, doing book lists is rough.

GOLDBERG:  Yeah, no, it’s just—it’s off the top of your head, and then you spend the next three weeks with that esprit d’escalier thing—Ah!  I should have said this, I should have said that…

SHAPIRO:  It’s a fairly good reading list; so you don’t have to come up with others.

GOLDBERG:  Yeah—so there’s a book I really love that almost no one has ever heard of that I was just reminded of today ’cause his son thanked me for mentioning it on Twitter this morning:  Arthur Ekirch, called The Decline of American Liberalism.  It’s pretty largely forgotten, but it’s a great history about how—charting sort of how liberalism went from meaning classical liberalism in America to meaning sort of collectivism.  I think it’s a kind of a useful thing, and it’s pretty digestible.  But I reserve the right to come up with a whole new list of books when I think about it.

SHAPIRO:  (laughs)

It’s an excellent interview, and The Ben Shapiro Show is an excellent show; listen to the whole thing here.