The rate of blogposts on this blog has fallen recently - only temporarily I hope. The reason is the season. Things, both private and at work, tend to pile up and occupy all available time and energy before the end of the year.

A bad time to plan for a more in-depth review of my current, very interesting, reading.
As an introduction to that to come, and as a way to keep the blog alive, I’ll summarise the status here.

In the October 24 issue of The New Yorker, under the section Life and Letters, the article The First Conservative by Tom Reiss portraits Peter Viereck, poet, historian and conservative ideologue.

I devoured the text.

‘”New conservatism” to combat the “storm of totalitarianism” abroad as well as moral relativism and soulless materialism at home’! As a description of Peter Viereck’s 1940 essay But I’m a Conservative… this sounds not unlike the original conservative essay Reflections on the revolution in France by Edmund Burke!

This had me vacuuming the net for books by Viereck. I was more than successful thanks to kind assistance from friends. In addition to the The New Yorker article, I will soon write about the following books:

  • Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler, 1941 (på svenska Nazismens Rötter, 1942).
  • Conservatism Revisited, The Revolt Against Revolt, 1949.
  • Conservative Thinkers, From John Adams to Winston Churchill, 1956, republished 2006 [sic! copyright year printed as 2006!].

Interestingly, in the defining book Conservatism Revisited, there is a list of other books published by Viereck that mentions the Metapolitics book and its Swedish edition of 1942! I got the Conservatism Revisited book via Abebooks, the Metapolitics book (in Swedish) via Bokbörsen, and the Conservative Thinkers via AdLibris.