1.The idea of conservatism -- 2. Burke and the politics of prescription: Burke's career -- The radical systems -- Providence and humility -- Prejudice and prescription -- The rights of civil social man -- Equality and aristocracy -- The principle of order -- 3. John Adams and liberty under law: Federalists and Republicans -- Alexander Hamilton -- Fisher Ames' vaticinations -- John Adams as psychologist -- The aristocracy of nature -- American constitutions -- Marshall and the metamorphosis of federalism -- 4. Romantics and utilitarians: Benthamism and Walter Scott -- Canning and enlightened conservatism -- Coleridge and conservative ideas -- 5. Southern conservatism: Randolph and Calhoun: Southern impulses -- Randolph on the peril of positive legislation -- The rights of minorities: Calhoun -- The valor of the South -- 6. Liberal conservatives: Macaulay, Cooper, Tocqueville: Burke's influence upon liberalism -- Macaulay on democracy -- Fenimore Cooper and a gentleman's America -- Tocqueville on democratic despotism -- 7. Transitional conservatism: New England sketches: Industrialism as a leveller -- John Quincy Adams and progress: his aspirations and his failure -- The illusions of transcendentalism -- Brownson on the conservative power of Catholicism -- Nathaniel Hawthorne: society and sin -- 8. Conservatism with imagination: Disraeli and Newman: Marx's materialism; and the fruits of liberalism -- Disraeli and Tory loyalties -- Newman: the sources of knowledge and the idea of education -- The age of discussion: Bagehot -- 9. Legal and historical conservatism: a time of foreboding: Liberalism moves toward collectivism: John Stuart Mill, Comte, and positivism -- Stephen on the ends of life and politics -- Maine: status and contract -- Lecky: illiberal democracy -- 10. Conservatism frustrated: America, 1865-1918: The gilded age -- James Russell Lowell's perplexities -- Godkin on democratic opinion -- Henry Adams on the degradation of the democratic dogma -- Brooks Adams and a world of terrible energies -- 11. English conservatism adrift: the twentieth century: The end of aristocratic politics: 1906 -- George Gissing and the Nether world -- Arthur Balfour: his spiritual conservatism; and the tide of socialism -- The books of W.H. Mallock: a conservative synthesis ; Positivism deflated; socialism vs. ability -- A dreary conservatism between wars -- 12. Critical conservatism: Babbitt, More, Santayana: Pragmatism: the fumbling of America -- Irving Babbitt's humanism: the higher will in a democracy -- Paul Elmer More on justice and faith -- George Santayana buries liberalism -- America in search of ideas -- 13. The recrudescence of conservatism: Old radicalisms fade -- The planners' state and the new elite -- The conservatives' task; and their prospects in Britain -- The fertility of conservative thought in the United States: critics and economists ; Possible forms of conservative society -- The plan of action for American conservatives ; America as a destructive force; and as the conservator of civilization.