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Right Minds: A Review of "American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia"

by Ross Douthat
Tuesday, November 1, 2011

BOOK
American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia
Edited by Bruce P. Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson.
Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006.

REVIEW (Excerpt)
Left-wing intellectuals have an irritating habit of trying to define conservatism as a mental illness: as the fruit of an “authoritarian personality” in Theodor Adorno’s famous formulation, or as the unfortunate consequence of neuroses rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity,” as a group of Berkeley psychologists recently claimed. While these forays into political psychoanalysis are risible on their face, the more modest observation that America’s brightest conservatives can be somewhat, shall we say, eccentric is rather more persuasive, as anyone who has spent time in right-of-center circles can attest....

Read the entire review here: http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/2011/11/right-minds-review-of-american.html