Beyond Burke, Origins of American Conservatism

What it means to be an American “conservative” has become hotly contested.  Nearly everyone engaged in this dispute, however, claims intellectual descent from Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irishman whose thought Russell Kirk called, “the true school of conservative principle.”  This lecture will ask what it means to be an American conservative and consider whether we can move beyond this Burke-centrism to locate the origins of American conservatism.