This book critiques and challenges the rise of communitarian thought in America. With a skeptical eye, Bruce Frohnen seeks to cut through the communitarians' rhetoric of community, commitment, and spirituality to reveal the egalitarian materialism at the core of their enterprise.

Frohnen argues that the "new communitarians"--exemplified by political philosophers Charles Taylor and William Galston, as well as popularizers like Bill Clinton, Amitai Etzioni, Garry Wills, Mario Cuomo, and Robert Bellah--are actually old liberals trying to salvage political legitimacy by advocating allegiance...

Often loud and acrimonious, the public tug-of-war between a reinvigorated conservatism and a liberalism in apparent disarray has obscured an equally important competition-that among conservatives themselves.

In Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism, Bruce Frohnen joins the fray in an effort to rescue the essence of conservative virtue from rationalists and materialists of whatever political stripe. He argues that we have "lost and must attempt to regain the conservative good life and the outlook which made it possible." The tools needed to do that, according to Frohnen, are...

In Community and Tradition, eight distinguished scholars articulate the clearest statement to date of the conservative vision of community.