1 See Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955). 2 Ibid, 62. The Populist Agrarian: Wendell Berry, William Jennings Bryan, and Conservatism in America Russell Arben Fox, Ph.D. Friends University, Wichita, KS foxr@friends.edu / (316) 295-5827 Do not cite without permission Conservatism in a Liberal Order If Louis Hartz’s “liberal thesis” 1 could be summed up in a nutshell, it would probably read something like this: the United States is a society that both emerged from and has throughout its history held primarily to a broad, if sometimes inarticulate, “Lockean consensus” regarding human liberty, human progress, and human rights. This Lockean consensus emphasized the natural dignity of human life, the individuality and sovereignty of that life over the traditions and communities that it may have been born into, and the protection which property rights provide to the choices which that life makes. The result is an America which is free from any fundamental allegiance to, or even any truly deep struggle over, one’s obligations to society, religion, or location, in a traditional European or aristocratic sense: we are a mobile people, capable of taking our identity, salvation, and livelihood with us as we travel and change and choose our way through life. As Hartz put it, the “reality of atomistic social freedom” is the “master assumption” behind American politics and history. 2 Some Americans may adopt a form of “conservatism” out of personal disposition or discontent, but a conservatism which wholly denies the classical liberal verities of human enlightenment, personal liberty, and individual self-