Frank Meyer
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Frank Straus Meyer (1909 – 1972) was a libertarian political philosopher and co-founding editor of the National Review magazine.
Frank S. Meyer was born to a prominent Jewish business family in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Princeton for one year but was displeased by the anti-semitism and snobbery he found there. He then transferred to Balliol College at Oxford University. He later studied at the London School of Economics.
Meyer was an active communist early in life before his conversion to conservatism. As a conservative, Meyer was a close adviser to and confidant of William F. Buckley.
In the late 1960's, Meyer engaged in a debate over the role of Abraham Lincoln with conservative Harry V. Jaffa. Meyer argued that Lincoln's abuses of civil liberties and expansion of government power should make him anathema to conservatives, while Jaffa defended Lincoln as a continuation of the Founding Fathers. [1]
Meyer is best known for his theory of "fusionism" - a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and traditionalist Judeo-Christian conservatism. (Murray Rothbard argued, however, that Meyer's fusionism was actually the natural law-natural rights branch of libertarian thought that Rothbard and others followed.)
Meyer married the former Elsie Bown. They had two sons, John and Eugene. As of October 2006, the latter is president of the Federalist Society.
[edit] See also
- http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article2751.html
- http://www.nrbookservice.com/BookPage.asp?prod_cd=C6010
- Book Review on 'Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement'
