In the aftermath of World War II, the role of the US federal government significantly expanded under the impetus of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Prominent Cold War politicians who are generally classified as “liberal,” such as Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, championed the welfare state and Keynesian economics. American conservatives, however, felt threatened by what they perceived as the liberals’ collectivism and big government. At the same time, American conservatism saw many internal divisions. Traditionalists, such as Russell Kirk, emphasized moral order, religion, and traditional communities, and opposed unbound laissez-faire individualism. Libertarians, such as Friedrich Hayek, put at the forefront individual liberty, limited government, and the market economy, while opposing all forms of coercion—including moral coercion. The two camps debated fiercely in venues such as National Review (founded in 1955), and often openly expressed disdain for each other. The unity of the conservative movement came to be endangered as a result. At that juncture, in the year of 1962, a scholar called Frank S. Meyer published In Defense of Freedom. In this book he systematically expounded “fusionism,” arguing that tradition and liberty are complementary, insofar as it is possible to safeguard individual liberty in politics, as advocated by libertarianism, while maintaining traditional virtues in morality, as demanded by traditionalism. In sum, according to Meyer, only through free choice can true virtue be realized. Meyer above all sought to preserve the tradition of “ordered liberty” rooted in the American founding and to shore up resistance against totalitarianism. His doctrine, conceived in response to the Cold War anti-communist agenda, helped to unite the American Right and exerted great influence on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign as well as the conservative movement of the Reagan era. In 1981, Ronald Reagan, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), praised Meyer for breaking free from the shackles of communism, and fashioning “a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought—a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism.” As a present-day American conservative scholar Daniel J. Flynn puts it, Frank Meyer was “if not the sole architect, then at least an architect of the modern conservative movement.” This is the key thesis of Flynn’s latest biography, published in August 2025, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer. Frank S. Meyer was born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. Deeply attracted to Marxism in his youth, he became an ardent communist while studying at Oxford University in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, he took part in Communist Party’s activities in Britain and the United States, and even became an early leader of the British communist student movement. During World War II, however, he became skeptical of Stalinism and formally quit the party in 1945. And after reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Meyer consummated his turn to anti-communism. In the mid-1950s, Meyer joined National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr., as a senior editor and became a key figure in conservative circles. His most famous contribution was the formulation of “Fusionism,” which had a formative influence on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign and the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Meyer’s ideas laid the foundation for mainstream modern American conservatism and continue to shape debates among conservatives on the relationship between liberty and tradition. For a long time, Meyer was seen merely as a coordinator within the National Review circle or as a subordinate to Buckley, rather than as an original thinker. Early biographies such as Principles and Heresies (2002), while acknowledging the importance of Fusionism, were hampered by insufficient archival materials and did not plumb the depth of Meyer’s dramatic transformation from a communist to a conservative. Flynn’s 2025 book, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, goes far beyond previous scholarship by uncovering long-lost Meyer archives, which include fifteen boxes of warehouse documents and seventeen letters exchanged with Leo Strauss and other notaries. The book is the first total examination of Meyer’s life: from being a leader in the British communist movement, through his complete break with the party and reconsideration of totalitarianism, and finally to his articulation of Fusionism and key role in launching conservative institutions (such as the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom). Notably, in the book, the author elevates Meyer to the rank of a founder of modern American conservatism. He highlights how Meyer’s ideas resolved the internal conflicts on the right in the Cold War and laid the groundwork for Reagan-era conservatism. The book abounds with insights for contemporary debates over balancing liberty and tradition. As many scholars and conservative institutions, such as the Independent Institute, Law & Liberty, and the Russell Kirk Center, praise its depth of research and the newly discovered sources it utilizes, it may properly be considered an authoritative work that fills a major gap in Meyer studies. Earlier, Boston Review of Books obtained Flynn’s authorization to translate and publish one of his important essays, “Rediscovering Meyer and Strauss.” By analyzing a decade（the late 1950s to the mid-1960s） of correspondence between Meyer and Leo Strauss, the article sheds light on their shared anti-communist convictions and profound reflections on totalitarianism. The letters uncovered by Flynn revive intellectual sparks dormant for six decades and afford insight into the preoccupations of the two thinkers amid Cold War crises, and by extension, the origins of American conservatism. On this note, the review has also translated and published Meyer’s well-known political essay “The Meaning of McCarthyism” (1957), which contains Meyer’s critique of American Cold-War liberals who sought appeasement or compromise with communism. Daniel J. Flynn is an American conservative scholar. He is the author of seven books, a senior editor at The American Spectator, and a columnist for National Review Online. He has also served as a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Recently, Boston Review of Books contributing reporter Yao-ching Lin conducted a special interview with Flynn about his new book, The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, with a view to highlighting Meyer’s contributions to American conservatism and the foundations of his thought. It may be hoped that this interview will help to clarify the changes and perplexities within present-day American conservatism. Q: How did you first become interested in the study of the history of American conservatism, and what led you specifically to the figure of Frank Meyer? A: When I wrote about the American left in such books as Intellectual Morons and A Conservative History of the American Left, it struck me that the progressives who dominate academia exhaustively cover obscure events or figures on the left in their scholarly work. Yet, massive figures on the American right lack biographies or academic interest. I felt that I could fill a void created because of the ideological one-sidedness of American academia. In terms of Meyer specifically, I like to write about important figures or events that scholars neglect or overlook. Strangely, when one goes into a bookstore, one can find all sorts of books on Adolf Hitler or Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar. I think we know all there is to know about these figures. I would rather write about someone readers should know about but do not. Frank Meyer, given his life as a founder of the student Communist movement in Britain and role in the creation of the postwar American right, strikes as just such a person. Q: In your view, how large was the role Frank Meyer played in the founding and development of post-war American conservatism? A: Meyer played a major role as both an organizer and theorist. In terms of the former, he helped found numerous organizations that still thrive, such as the American Conservative Union and Philadelphia Society. In terms of the latter, his big idea—fusionism—both described and animated the thought of such figures as Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan. Ironically, Meyer honed his skills as an organizer and began developing his big idea as an active Communist. He found his greatest fame as a writer for National Review magazine and the author of In Defense of Freedom, in which he articulated his philosophy of limited government. Q: What distinguishes Meyer’s conservative ideas from the ideas of more well-known conservative icons such as Russell Kirk or Friedrich Hayek? It is the case that unlike Meyer, the other two have long been known to Chinese-speaking scholars and generated extensive discussions. A: Kirk believed that conservatism was the negation of ideology, a tradition that developed organically rather than emanated from some theorist’s imagination. His philosophy feels more like a mindset than a political program. It also feels in some ways more European than American. Hayek famously rejected the label “conservative” because that word had more statist connotations in Europe than in America. He offered a libertarian outlook that applied to politics and economics but not, unlike Kirk’s outlook, to life. Meyer’s fusionism was very much an American conservatism. He believed that the big, obvious tradition for American conservatives to conserve was the American founding, and that the tradition of the founding meant freedom. Meyer told traditionalists and libertarians that their ideas were in cooperat
