| Summary: | Peter Viereck (1916-2006) is the acknowledged forerunner of the United States conservative movement that growed after WWII. Indeed, from 1940 onward, he made the case for a New Conservatism, charged with the implementation of classical and Christian ‘absolute moral laws’ and with the safeguard of the American tradition, based on civil liberties and humanitarian values. He considered conservatism to be at the centre of the political spectrum, between totalitarian ideologies as much as between statism and individualist atomism. This led Viereck to clash with the 1950s and 1960s right-wingers, who expelled him from the conservative camp. Also through the use of unpublished sources, this essay aims to reconstruct those noteworthy events in the history of the American political thought.
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