Day: October 10, 2025

Christopher Scalia’s 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read) is a book about books that also functions as an extended book list. It is a collection of essay-length chapters that discuss and recommend some of his favorite novels. And it is a reliable guide to younger readers, suspicious and wearied of politicized works of culture, exhorting them to reclaim their patrimony by making great literature central to their intellectual formation.

Its appeal is immediate. Everybody loves a good list: from desert island books to the best walkable cities, unusual collectibles to the omnipresent ranking’s lists. Lists can help to distill what can seem overwhelming into the digestible. They invite comparison, spark conversation, and, often, stir nostalgia. They can also forge emotional connections between the reader and the books they love most. Think of lists that take deeper dives into Middle-earth lore. In sharing them with friends and fellow travelers, many of us experience a sense of literary community as a result.

At their best, lists instruct as much as they entertain, offering readers entry points into common interests and shared traditions. Even Russell Kirk joined the list-making trend late in life with several chapter-length compilations in The Politics of Prudence. Book list mania shows no sign of slowing. In just the last couple of weeks, I received in the mail two books in this genre: God on Stage: 15 Plays that Ask the Big Questions by the prolific Peter Kreeft, and Great Books for Good Men by the similarly productive Joseph Pearce.

A suggestive list, then, can guide one to an array of richer works that might serve to delight while forming our moral imagination. Christopher Scalia understands this appeal. His 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love is more than a clever catalog—it is a cultural invitation. By drawing together novels that combine artistic power with enduring themes and contemporary resonance, he hopes to reawaken among conservatives the habit of reading serious fiction as both pleasure and inheritance.

Scalia’s 13 Novels is not a work of literary theory. It is not a work of comparative literature. It is not a book in search of that great rarity, the political novel. It is not a book about conservatism per se. And, perhaps more controversially, Scalia did not write a book about 13 conservative novels. Rather, he offers a range of fiction in the Anglophone tradition by writers of a conservative bent that he believes warrant the attention, even affection, of those readers possessed of a conservative disposition.

Scalia encourages his readers to embrace a capacious conservatism—a conservatism animated by the imagination, rather than by the usual satchel of abstract ideas and political bromides. That is a worthy objective in every age. But as the commentators on a certain tired “conservative” cable news station say on command: now more than ever!

Scalia credits thinkers like Russell Kirk and Sir Roger Scruton with introducing him to a world beyond politics, one in which the conservative could also be a literary conservator. Scruton warned that art falters when it is reduced to a message. Kirk believed truly remarkable art has a moral end. Both hold that the ideological novel is propaganda, whereas the enduring novel discloses human nature and conveys some aspect of a moral imagination. Though diverse in setting and style, Scalia’s selections echo Kirk and Scruton and converge around themes often emphasized or grappled with by intellectual conservatives—limits, tradition, realism, rootedness, faith, happiness, and the fragility of order.

It is a great day when one opens a book basically aimed at elevating the reading habits and imaginative life of younger conservatives, and finds selections like Scalia’s. Several are worth mentioning.

Sir Walter Scott’s high romance, Waverly, is the indispensable novel for imaginative conservatives and a reflection on both what we owe to the past and the constant need to reconcile change and continuity. It invented the historical novel genre and stands as a paean to one of the great lost causes in history—the gallant but doomed rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45.

Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, an eighteenth-century road trip novel where Odysseus meets Plato in the Nile Valley. It is a mix of travelogue, philosophical inquiry on happiness, and character sketch. Scalia puts Johnson first on his list, not merely for the sake of chronology, but because Johnson has a claim to being the first modern conservative, certainly the first Tory conservative. Because his “vision of fiction was to help form its young readers into better people … he focused on educating younger readers about proper moral conduct and certain principles of human nature.” In his own way, this is Scalia’s project in 13 Novels. And so, he begins with Johnson’s story of the restless young prince of Abyssinia, Rasselas, who leaves his sealed-off kingdom, Happy Valley, and sets out with a wise guide and friends to seek the meaning of human nature and happiness so that he might deliberately know and choose the truth of things himself. The result is a brilliant and charming Johnsonian literary-philosophical pilgrimage.

Next, Scalia includes Fanny Burney’s wonderful novel, Evelina. Burney was in some ways a Jane Austen in training, and this novel is a very clever and funny story about how manners shape freedom, civility, and the significance of unwritten rules of behavior. Strangely though, Scalia only refers to her as “Frances” never as “Fanny.” Jane Austen and Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith, would have.

Scalia rightly includes Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-utopian meditation on why no community can escape original sin, The Blithdale Romance. As Russell Kirk put it,

The Blithdale Romance is the history of a fanatic reformer who is determined to redeem criminals by appealing to their higher instincts; and when all is done, he is grimly resigned to attempting the reformation of one criminal only, himself. … This was the substance of Hawthorne’s resolute conviction: that moral reformation is the only real reformation; that sin always will corrupt the projects of enthusiasts who leave sin out of account; that progress is a delusion, except for the infinitely slow progress of conscience.

In his hilarious lampoon of the modern culture of journalism, Scoop, Evelyn Waugh makes media madness into comic opera and proves as only he can that satire can be both delightful and devastating. This addition is particularly germane in today’s climate. As Scalia wrote in a Washington Post article, Scoop’s relevance is suggested by the way Waugh lampoons “fake news” and the herd habits of the press corps. He also perceptively observes, “the novel’s depiction of an insular, gullible and sometimes dishonest press will strike a chord with many readers in the Age of Trump—or in the Age of the Anti-Trump Media.”

A more somber addition is V. S. Naipaul’s stark tale of postcolonial Africa, The Bend in the River. Joseph Conrad might have found a way onto Scalia’s list—Under Western Eyes, Secret Agent, or, of course, The Heart of Darkness are certainly worthy candidates for inclusion. As it is, Naipaul’s haunting book reads like Conrad rewritten for the late twentieth century: civilization under siege, delicate, and taken for granted, a warning “of the thin barrier separating civilization from terror.”

Christopher Beha’s rejection of the technocratic illusion that society and life can be managed like a spreadsheet, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, is another fine inclusion. A liberal writer and former editor of Harper’s Magazine who also possesses a Catholic and culturally conservative disposition, Beha’s Index is a big, ambitious New York novel blending baseball, politics, and family into a meditation on hubris and life’s tragic complexity. It’s a fine contemporary work, but a modern favorite of mine is another Beha novel that is deeper, richer, and more beautifully written, his What Happened to Sophie Wilder. Add that to your list! Or maybe his enjoyable, Arts & Entertainments, Beha’s satire of our celebrity age and a modern moral comedy.

From Scott’s historical memory, Burney’s manners, and Johnson’s moral realism, through Hawthorne’s critique of utopian delusion and Naipaul’s tragic vision of civilization, to the Catholic conservative voices of Waugh and Christopher Beha, who satirize and illuminate modernity, Scalia approaches his list of novels as a continuum of moral imagination. He also includes novels by Willa Cather, Muriel Spark, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Lief Enger, and P. D. James. Together, they testify that the permanent things endure amid the flux of modern times.

At the outset of this review, I mentioned that Scalia’s 13 Novels is an extended book list. I might have said that it is an extended book about a book list: at 300 pages, it is too long. In drawing out detailed plot, character, and conservative lessons from each novel—most at substantial length—Scalia risks instructing more than inspiring, explaining away what ought to be discovered. A shorter, evocative approach might have captured more of the “romance of reading” and less of the seminar pitch. Still, if the result is that conservatives pick up works by Johnson, Scott, Hawthorne, Cather, Spark, or Waugh, perhaps the tradeoff is worth it. Though given that less than fifty percent of the US population reads for pleasure these days, the length of the book and each of his chapters might be its biggest challenge.

Another model for this book genre that a lot of young Christian conservatives read in the 1980s—and, if like me, have returned to over the years—is the rich, brilliant, and powerful primer by James J. Thompson Jr. entitled Christian Classics Revisited (1983). Also, a book about books, it fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and comes in at 160 pages. His wise essay meditations on 25 novels were really guides for pilgrims like us on a journey through life in its spiritual, social, and political dimensions. Thompson, who would later edit the Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, in his clarity and concision, managed also to convey the depth of each work within a larger tradition. He had a generation of conservatives collecting those books and talking about them. And marveling at, in addition to the authors he included, how great a writer Thompson was! I hope that reception for Scalia, when he looks back upon how his list of novels was received.

There’s one minor element of the book that I found off-putting. I think Scalia occasionally damages his own cause, and in doing so could give evidence to those who will charge him of making literature a means to a political end. He often descends to speaking in an informal style that clashes with the high tone of his novels and his own analysis. When he does, he is less and not more relevant (surely not a conservative aspiration!). Along these lines, he peppers in pop culture references (which I doubt most of his young readers will understand) and invokes contemporary conservative journalists, pundits, and DC-types that give a possible wink to the accusation that he has a principally partisan political end in mind for his novels.

Still, as we head toward the fall and short, darker days, Scalia’s 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read) can be a warm and enlightening companion, directing unsure readers to some undeniably great works of fiction that are both artistically delightful and morally serious.

At its best, Scalia’s 13 Novels refreshes the conservative literary imagination by showing that great fiction is not hostile to conservative sensibilities but is a deep well of wisdom that affirms limits, memory, duty, and hope. These novels model what T. S. Eliot called in East Coker the “wisdom of humility,” the cultivation of which Kirk believed essential for the renewal of culture.

For young conservatives especially, Scalia’s 13 Novels is not merely a syllabus but an invitation to undertake what amounts to an intellectual pilgrimage. To read these novels is to be wiser, humbled, deepened, and prepared for the common work of sustaining civilization.

The arts, along with almost everything else, have become a political lightning rod. Many commentators have warned of the Trump Administration’s effects on the arts, which include, among other things, sweeping changes to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. There has been a vast re-staffing of the Kennedy Center, the nation’s symbolic performing arts house. Former Washington Ballet dancer Stephen Nakagawa, who previously criticized the “radical leftist ideologies in ballet,” was hired as Director of Dance Programming. The administration does certainly have political and ideological goals, but critics act as though the “capture” of public arts, in which politically powerful groups control funding and artistic agendas, is something new when, in fact, previous incarnations of these organizations clearly reflected a left-wing agenda. In a pluralistic society, people are bound to disagree over what art deserves prioritization. 

Whereas many cultural economists have taken as a given that the government must directly support the arts, in Realizing the Values of Art: Making Space for Cultural Civil Society, Valeria Morea and Erwin Dekker encourage readers to rethink the very foundation on which cultural policy rests. In an innovative and thought-provoking volume, the authors contend that we should begin discussions of art by exploring why people produce it in the first place: to pursue their values. Both consumers and producers pursue art for the values it enables them to imagine, realize, or evaluate. This may seem like a heterodox starting point for a cultural economics treatise, but the authors make a persuasive case that this should be the foundation for a shift in arts policy.

Don’t expect, however, the authors to discuss in philosophic detail what constitutes great art or beauty. The authors discuss values commonly thought of as universal, such as beauty or enlightenment, in a social context: “The diverse values of the art are realized through social practices, rather than through an esoteric activity, where isolated individuals seek to realize some absolute goal of beauty or perfection.” This suggests that value itself is socially defined and therefore malleable, rather than permanent and enduring. The authors treat cultural policy as a collective action problem, considering how to make space for different types of art when public values come into conflict. 

Today, much cultural policy is focused on the so-called positive externalities of the arts for the economy. For instance, Morea and Dekker point to the European Commission’s Cultural and Creative City Monitor, which attempts to measure value across three dimensions: cultural vibrancy, creative economy, and the enabling environment. The authors correctly argue that this sort of study only encourages instrumentalization of the arts by reducing the value of the arts to their economic contribution. High marks are given to arts organizations that contribute to tourism, generate innovation, and create job opportunities. The environmental dimension, which looks at the institutional and governance factors that influence the openness, tolerance, and trust of the overall culture, ignores more informal organizations, failing to take into account communities in which “true” value is being created. The authors point, for instance, to a vibrant underground Venetian art scene, through which local artists offer an alternative to the Biennale, a tourist-dependent contemporary art festival, thereby reclaiming, in a sense, space in their city. 

To this point, Morea and Dekker’s biggest objection to quantitative attempts to measure the value of the arts is the lost information regarding the dynamics of entry, adjustment, and exit that happen between the diverse array of groups in civil society, analogous to what the price system tells markets about what to produce and when. By joining particular artistic entities, people signal which movements and social practices are becoming more influential. To facilitate a fluid cultural civil society, the authors argue for a separation of arts and state akin to the separation between religion and state. 

Indeed, Morea and Dekker seek to move the arts “beyond market and state,” to paraphrase the Nobel Prize address of the political economist Elinor Ostrom. Just as Ostrom argued that no panacea or optimal form of governance exists to solve the “tragedy” of the commons, the authors argue that no optimum form of governance, public or private, exists for the arts either. Cultural civil society operates in a variety of institutional forms with a plethora of collectives, artistic circles, and co-creation communities. There is a decentralized, polycentric form of governance. The authors contend that the arts should no longer be viewed simply as perennially struggling “creative industries” that cannot exist without government support, but rather as a decentralized group of civil organizations more akin to religious organizations.

Valeria and Morea suggest that artistic innovation need not arise from institutional backing, and they cite various cases in which creativity effectively thrived in the absence of support, public or private. They discuss the rise of hip hop from neglected neighborhoods in the Bronx in the 1970s and how artists repurposed spaces in the empty houses of East Berlin following the collapse of the wall. These successes in cultural entrepreneurship and self-governance indicate the resilience and innovation of cultural civil society, even in the absence of institutional frameworks. 

Ostrom described how society could solve collective action problems in this decentralized, self-governing manner, and Morea and Dekker indicate that this could be translated to cultural civil society. Elinor and her husband, Vincent, initially studied how public goods such as safety were produced by cooperation between the citizens and police. The arts are similar, contend Morea and Dekker, in that they are artifacts of cocreation, requiring, for instance, the participation of the audience to gain meaning. This idea of cocreation is especially inherent in modern arts, which can be temporally liminal and invite open-ended interpretation. The authors cite the work of the contemporary artists Jeanne-Claude and Christo, who wrapped landmarks such as the Arc de Triomphe in giant sheets of fabric. These temporary, site-specific public artworks use existing art to create new meaning. As products of cocreation, they depend upon, for instance, complex institutional partnerships and the interpretation of passersby to be fully realized.

The audience is a central part of this decentralized cocreation process, argue the authors. They draw on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, for whom, the authors write, “the ‘human contribution’ to art does not merely consist of the creation of artefacts or the acts of performance, but just as much of the attention that is paid to art, the way that individuals and social groups attend to art.” The authors later discuss Star Trek fan communities, “instagram museums,” and even online meme culture in which “participants” infuse preexisting works with new meaning through the creation of fan content. According to the authors’ framework, these art communities practice decentralized self-governance in the creation process. While the authors note that the “public good” category is far too narrow for the arts in general, public art is created for shared spaces, so it’s conceivable that an Ostromian solution of decentralized governance that arises directly from the needs of particular communities is viable. 

Surely fan and popular art can be generated without any government support, although guardrails should remain, adapted to our digital age, to protect the original owners’ copyright. High art, however, and the lack of market recognition of its value could signal a need for government funding. Ballet, opera, and art museums arguably have an enduring value that markets cannot reflect because of insufficient availability, information, and mass appreciation. Yet, Morea and Dekker, suspicious of any claims of universal value in the arts, choose a different tack to address this fairly common argument. 

The authors contend that government funding of the arts, which has traditionally privileged high-brow art over popular art, has crowded out marginalized communities, encouraged a dependence on the state, and an unresponsiveness to changing tastes. Morea and Dekker point to national museums, whose purpose came about in European capitals in the 1800s to relate an officially sanctioned narrative of national identity based on the idea that that identity would be a permanent fixture of society. Then, according to the authors, with the advent of modern art, “art for art’s sake” became entrenched after World War II, alienating the average viewer from the ivory tower modernist tastes of the elite. More recently, governments have prioritized social change, supporting marginalized artists by using, for instance, graffiti art to transform and even gentrify neighborhoods, a co-opting that the authors argue could transform street art away from its transgressive roots. Morea and Dekker seem to say that no matter the art government chooses to favor, the preferential treatment will spawn a negative spillover effect of social contention as differing public values come into conflict. 

Contention over the values displayed in public art is bound to arise and has arisen more in recent years, especially with calls to tear down public statues of figures such as Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and Cecil Rhodes. Writing that “the violent destruction of objects which are meaningful to others is certainly not the way forward,” Morea and Dekker point to the very nature of public art and national museums as the problem. They argue that in an increasingly heterogeneous society, it makes less sense to prop up a specific version of national history and identity. Aside from a misplaced emphasis on traditional museums as being the root of social contention, Morea and Dekker thoughtfully propose a public policy rooted in epistemic liberalism that ensures an open space for people to pursue different public values without favored groups receiving unfair advantages. 

To that end, the authors emphasize the importance of institutional diversity in cultural civil society, especially with their case study of the Queer Museum in Brazil. After encountering both public and private hurdles to secure funding, the Queer Museum held a successful grassroots crowdfunding campaign to become a reality. The authors argue that the government should provide only the guardrails to allow for this diversity. They point to Italy as an example, which has created a variety of legal forms to recognize more informal associations, including volunteer organizations, association networks, mutual associations, philanthropic entities, and social enterprises. These broader recognitions create “a legal framework for different types of communities to govern themselves” and encourage a diverse cultural society. Presumably, these would be somehow more expansive than the United States’s current tax exemptions for non-profits, but Morea and Dekker give no concrete proposals. 

In the final chapter, the authors lay out a visionary heterotopia that embraces a variety of ideas and institutional arrangements, exploring, with the same spirit of diversity of thought, this rather quaint concept from the vantage point of the philosophers Michel Foucault and Robert Nozick. Nozick, for instance, imagined a heterotopia in which people could either join a dominant set of social practices or create new ones. Varying social practices could compete for members, but none would be inherently superior to another. In practice, this means that public squares would be occupied not with publicly commissioned art exemplifying a single narrative but by a rotating array of diverse practices. The authors don’t say much about how this diversity would be enforced, although they indicate that this “framework” would be a task for the government. 

The authors suggest “creating space” for alternative cultural movements, with Morea and Dekker pointing to the autonomous community Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen as an example of this utopia. Founded by squatters on an abandoned military base in 1971, this experiment has since become a magnet for counter-culture artists, both dependent on Copenhagen for tourism but also deeply self-governed, at least in the sense that Copenhagen allows the thousand or so residents to self-organize to govern matters such as business, education, and waste collection. According to the authors, this “counter-cultural square” indicates how public squares can allow for alternative cultural civil society, even if they must tread a pathway between establishing legitimacy and becoming co-opted by institutional forces. 

Nonetheless, can a hippie cultural community truly provide the starting point for a decentralized, polycentric “heterotopia” on a large scale? It’s conceivable that broader legal frameworks are needed to allow for more alternative, self-governing communities such as this to arise—on a certain scale, this could encourage the expression of alternative viewpoints—but it seems that this soft-form anarchism could also foster more fragmentation rather than social cohesion. According to the authors, however, contestation is simply part of how cultural society works. The reader feels excited about the possibility of a Tocquevillian cultural civil society, but it’s possible that within this milky relativism, the search for the good and the true that is inherent in artistic creation and appreciation will be lost in a kind of post-state democratic experiment. 

What Morea and Dekker propose is more of a framework for collective action problem-solving rather than any specific policies, yet some of the implications of their ideas will meet resistance from many artists themselves. One wonders how many artists will choose to vote out government funding boards. Regulatory “capture” may be especially difficult to expel in the arts because some people’s livelihoods have become dependent on funding. Yet, Morea and Dekker are more interested in an overall framework for a robust civil society than in policy prescriptions. 

At the same time, some arts do thrive with structured arrangements. The arts can stand for stability as well, and the idea that art has moved beyond the permanence of traditional museums seems doubtful. If everywhere became Freetown Christiania, would space still exist for traditional museums that celebrate artworks that have withstood the test of time? Can we still appreciate the difference between Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and its cocreation counterpart, the meme of a Mona Lisa? Perhaps, but I worry maybe not in “Freetown.”