List of Great Conservative Thinkers

This list is adapted from Russell Kirk's book The Conservative Mind, first published in 1953. Important antagonists against conservatism who helped shape conservatism are denoted with a dagger (†).

Proto-Conservative Philosophers

 * Plato's Republic
 * Aristotle's On Politics
 * Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government
 * Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws
 * Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations

Founders' Generation

 * Edmund Burke
 * John Adams
 * Alexander Hamilton
 * Fisher Ames
 * John Marshall

Romantics & Utilitarians

 * Jeremy Bentham
 * Walter Scott
 * George Canning
 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Southern Conservatives

 * John Randolph
 * John Calhoun

Liberal Conservatives

 * Thomas Babington Macaulay
 * Fenimore Cooper
 * Alexis de Tocqueville

Transitional Conservatism

 * John Quincy Adams
 * Orestes Brownson
 * Nathaniel Hawthorne

Imaginative Conservatism

 * Karl Marx †
 * Benjamin Disraeli
 * John Henry Newman
 * Walter Bagehot

Legal and Historical Conservatism

 * John Stuart Mill †
 * Auguste Compte
 * James Fitzjames Stephen
 * Henry Maine
 * William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Conservatism Frustrated

 * James Russell Lowell
 * Edwin Lawrence Godkin
 * Henry Adams
 * Brooks Adams

English Conservatism Adrift

 * George Gissing
 * Arthur Balour
 * William Hurrell Mallock

Critical Conservatism

 * Irving Babbitt
 * Paul Elmer More
 * George Santayana

Global Conservatism

 * Chateaubriand's The Genius of Christianity (France)
 * Juan Donoso Cortés (Spain)
 * Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (Austria)
 * Feliks Koneczny (Poland) (comparative sociology, is he a conservative?)

Movement Conservatism, 1953-2000

 * Russell Kirk
 * Phyllis Schlafly
 * William A. Rusher
 * William F. Buckley
 * Milton Friedman
 * Peggy Noonan
 * George F. Will
 * Irving Kristol
 * Antonin Scalia