Recommended Booklist for Contemporary Conservatives

Bibliography

Jacob Reynolds, for the Academy of Ideas 2025 festival:

"At a time when the language of politics feels tired and hollow – ideologies staggering about like zombies in search of brains – the reading list for our upcoming event provides a bit of an intellectual armoury to understand precisely why our political vocabulary feels so utterly exhausted. Each book selected is not merely a historical curiosity but a guide to dissecting our confused moment.

Start with Aristotle’s Politics. Here is one of the original attempts to grapple seriously with the organisation of society, power, and citizenship. Aristotle grounds us firmly in the pragmatic reality that politics is fundamentally about how different people with different interests can live together. Given our polarised and fragmented present, Aristotle’s clarity about community, virtue, and practical wisdom seems refreshingly radical.

Fast-forward two millennia to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. Writing in 1941, Burnham noticed that ownership was already slipping from capitalists to technocrats. Burnham saw the rise of a managerial elite supplanting traditional capitalist and democratic institutions. Sound familiar? Today's corporate and bureaucratic technocracy, managing everything from climate policy to cultural norms, demonstrates Burnham’s uncanny prescience. Understanding Burnham is key to deciphering our technocratic reality.

Where Burnham exposed the new class, Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology dissected its mood. Published in 1960, Bell argued that grand narratives had exhausted themselves. The managerial age would be pragmatic, not prophetic. Yet the void Bell identified was quickly filled by therapeutic identity politics and ESG pieties. The apparent end of ideology gave birth to today’s stifling moralism, a pseudo-religious fervour wrapped in technocratic language, suggesting Bell diagnosed symptoms, but perhaps missed their trajectory.

John Rawls’s Political Liberalism represents both the last stand and the crowning ideology of the liberal centre’s last stand. Recognising the reality of disagreement, he nonetheless tried to save liberal institutions from the very centrifugal forces they had unleashed. Unfortunately, his solution was a tight policing of the “consensus”. Rawls’ legacy is the idea that liberal societies would have to jettison true democracy in order to stay “liberal”. Understanding Rawls is understanding why liberalism now polices speech more fiercely than any church court.

To try and plug the gap - and to prepare the ground for discussions on citizenship and belonging - we’ve included this year two books from Roger Scruton. England: An Elegy and Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition. Scruton mourns the institutions, affections and landscapes that once tied English liberty to inherited obligation. With our nod to England’s last philosopher - and former lecturer at this event - we hope to stimulate a discussion of whether conservatism has anything left to contribute to the task of national renewal."

(https://frankfuredi.substack.com/p/the-struggle-for-a-new-political)