Drawing on the riches of the Western tradition, Anthony T. Kronman defends a humane conservativism for our enlightened age

As the party of the left has grown more strident, its conservative critics have responded in kind. Each year conservatives do a poorer job of defending their position as a citadel of human values without lapsing into an angry assault on ideals that they and progressives share. It becomes harder to see the enduring appeal of a true conservatism that celebrates the worth of custom and inheritance; the splendor of what is excellent and rare; the expansive solidarity of our friendship with the dead; and the dignity, indeed necessity, of our longing for a connection to the eternal and divine—while affirming that these timeless human goods are compatible with the modern ideals of equality, toleration, and reasoned argument.

In this bracing book, Anthony Kronman defends a conservative philosophy of life that respects our enlightened ideals but decries the damage their arrogant simplification causes in our moral, political, and spiritual lives. Drawing on the work of Aristotle, Cicero, Spinoza, Burke, Hume, Madison, Tocqueville, Lincoln, Arendt, Heidegger, and others, he argues that humanism is conservatism, today as in the past. He reminds us that our humbling parameters make possible every form of human greatness, every human glory, every human love worthy of the name.

Anthony Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law and a former dean of Yale Law School. He is the author of Education’s End; Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan; The Assault on American Excellence; and After Disbelief. He lives on Block Island, RI.