The Contemporary American Conservative Movement

Abstract

The American conservative movement that began to gain steam in the post–World War II era had, by the 1980s, emerged as a transformative political force in the United States and the world. Yet sociology has been slower than other disciplines to come to grips with conservatism. In the hope of spurring more research, we review the substantial literature on the conservative movement produced by historians, political scientists, and serious journalists since the mid-1990s, along with the more limited number of sociological contributions. After identifying what we see as a promising approach for conceptualizing conservatism, we illustrate the benefits of sociological engagement by showing how three areas of sociology that might at first glance seem disconnected from the movement—the sociology of intellectuals, theories of social change, and scholarship on stratification—could profit from consideration of the conservative case.