Bøker av J. David Hoeveler

The ascendancy of conservatism in the last twenty years is an unprecedented episode in American intellectual and political history. In Watch on the Right, J. David Hoeveler Jr. gives us enlightening, often immensely entertaining, portraits of the key thinkers behind this "revolution." As Hoeveler writes, "conservative thinkers hang their hats on many different racks," and this book dramatizes for us the breadth of the conservative coalition as exemplified by the eight writers surveyed: William F. Buckley Jr. George Will, Robert Nisbet, Irving Kristol, Hilton Kramer, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., and Michael Novak. These eight "gurus" of the right represent a very wide spectrum of conservative thought, but Hoeveler also considers the present-day conservative renaissance against the literary background that has given the movement its identity since Edmund Burke. Amid the multiple voices unifying themes do emerge. American conservatives share a hostility toward the liberal "new class"--the professional media and academic elites and the entrenched government bureaucracies that still believe in the perfectibility of society by enforced social engineering. Moreover, conservatives of all persuasions are united in struggling to sustain traditional values against the onslaught of revolutionary capitalism and technology, and all are profoundly hostile to imperialistic communism on the Soviet model. Despite the existence of a generic conservatism, however, Hoeveler's portraits provide us with a fascinating tour of the shifts and turns in modern social thought from the decline of liberalism in the late 1960s to the current era--a path that leads through such diverse areas as the Cold War, bourgeois culture, art and aesthetics, civil rights and the welfare state, New Age culture, and the gender revolution. To a whole generation that has never known anything but conservative leadership, Watch on the Right will explain, in clear accessible prose, how the movement flourished in the 1970s and 1980s. For readers who saw it happen (but never thought it would) and for liberals (who are feverishly trying to recover "their " mandate), this book as no other pulls the ideological threads of the story together. Watch on the Right is illustrated with delightful pen-and-ink caricatures.

In the Progressive Era of American history, the state of Wisconsin gained national attention for its innovative economic and political reforms. Although the Wisconsin Idea is often attributed to a 1904 speech by Charles Van Hise, David Hoeveler argues that it originated decades earlier, in the creative and fertile mind of John Bascom.

Present a synthetic treatment of the colonial colleges, tracing their role in the intellectual development of early America through the American Revolution. This work focuses on Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, the College of New Jersey (Princeton), King's College (Columbia), the College of Philadelphia (Penn), among others.