From Free Life, Issue 26, December 1996
ISSN: 0260 5112

This book describes and analyses one of the most important phenomena in modern British politics: the rise of yourn libertarians within the Conservative Party.

While to "New Right" has been popularly associated with a reactionary agenda of social and political control, Dr Evans argues that so far as its younger members are concerned, it rests on a radical agenda that is explicitly internationalist, individualist, culturally relativist, and secularist. Under analysis, members of such groups as the Conservative Collegiate Forum, the young Conservatives, and the National Association of Conservative Graduates, oppose religion, sexism, and militarism, and severely question a state-sponsored Monarchy, a politically-imposed and conformist "family", state policing, and all other forms of tax-funded and state-regulated authority.

Adhering to a world-view which has more to do with individualist - or "property rights" - anarchism than with any traditional ideology such fascism, the study examines the social background and political psychology of the young libertarians and concludes that they represent the antithesis of traditional Burkean thought. For while Conservatives have historically adhered to the authority of religion, prescription, instinct, and communitariansm, libertarians place their faith in the authority of reality, reason, man, and capitalism.

As a school the epistemology of which is reason, this important book suggests that this new generation represents a post-modern paradigm-shift in both Conservative activism and thought.

Iti Saflaia