Although the name of Francis Graham Wilson has faded into obscurity, Wilson was among the first to define a coherent American conservatism, having preceded the major publications of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Peter Viereck.

As M. Susan Power states in her useful introduction, Wilson's main interests were Catholicism, conservatism, public opinion, and Spanish political philosophy. Born in Texas, he pursued a quiet life as a professor of political philosophy at the University of Illinois and the University of Washington.

The editors have compiled this collection of essays, written during the 1930s and 40s, into three parts: one, human nature and modern ideology; two, the definition of conservatism and its various aspects; three, "sources of renewal," including analysis of democratic theory, Jefferson, Cicero, and The Federalist.

Power asserts that Wilson offered an original interpretation of American political philosophy based on the classical quest for self-knowledge. This quest for ultimate meaning revealed both a shared human experience and a divine basis for history. In our time Christian conservatism has received a good deal of skepticism, with good reason, but I found Wilson's approach to be among the least intrusive, the most reasoned and flexible. Important to Wilson's view, for example, was the Catholic notion of subsidiarity, or localism, which dispersed political power and authority and which relied for its sustenance on the moral sense of the people. Localism of this sort was very much in the American tradition.

In this context I might also mention Wilson's belief, partly influenced by papal encyclicals, that the captains of industry in his day failed to take their moral leadership seriously, a remark that could be torn from today's newspapers. I am reminded of an observation by Russell Kirk that human beings, not being objects, naturally resist being treated like objects. Wilson was not the first conservative to draw attention to the limitations of industrialism or the mentality it fostered (Carlyle, Coleridge, and Henry Adams also had their doubts) but true to his nature he refused to settle for dividing the issue into legal absolutes or false dichotomies (e.g. Luddite pastoral versus Orwellian skyscrapers). Wilson could see that life divided itself into primary and secondary changes (essential and nonessential elements). That approach was fundamentally conservative in its recognition that the preservation of a moral order occurred among the tension between opposites: past and future, stability and progress, order and liberty, community and the person. Every generation must work to apply first principles to the particular circumstances in which it lives.

While Wilson's prose is free from the academic jargon that would later infect universities, it does proceed in a plodding style which might try the patience of the modern reader. This is not to say it is unreadable, only that it lacks, for example, the literary sense of Kirk or the plain speaking of Nisbet. Yet it covers enough of the foundations in a sufficiently nuanced way to encourage serious reflection about conservatism.