In the September Bradley Lecture, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review, and author of the new book The Death of Conservatism (Random House, 2009), will discuss the current state of conservatism, examined from a historical and philosophical context. Mr. Tanenhaus argues that for seventy-five years, conservatives have been split into two factions, the “realists” who believe in the virtues of government and the “revanchists” who distrust government and society.  He argues that the “revanchists” have won the argument about conservatism and that this has caused conservatism to falter. Steven F. Hayward and Henry Olsen of AEI will respond to Mr. Tanenhaus.

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of both The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section of the New York Times. From 1999 to 2004 he was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he often wrote on politics. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications. He is the author of The Death of Conservatism (Random House, 2009), and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (Modern Library, 1998), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

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