Frank Straus Meyer (; May 9, 1909 – April 1, 1972) was an American philosopher and political activist best known for his theory of "fusionism" – a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and traditionalism into a philosophical synthesis which is posited as the definition of modern American conservatism. Meyer's philosophy was presented in two books, primarily In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (1962) and also in a collection of his essays, The Conservative Mainstream (1969). Fusionism has been summed up by E. J. Dionne, Jr. as "utilizing libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends".E. J. Dionne, Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 161.
Personal life Meyer was born to a prominent business family of German Jewish descent in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Helene (Straus) and Jack F. Meyer. He graduated from Newark AcademyAnderson, Brian C. "The Truth That Frank Meyer Knew", Civitas Institute, August 13, 2025. Accessed September 18, 2025. "Meyer became a voracious student of them, first at Newark Academy, then at Princeton University, where he confronted both social anti-Semitism and intellectual alienation." He attended Princeton University for one year and then transferred to Balliol College at Oxford University, where he earned his B.A. in 1932 and his M.A. in 1934. He later studied at the London School of Economics and became the student union's president before he was expelled and deported in 1933 for his communist activism.William C. Dennis "Foreword" in Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Other Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996
Like a number of the founding senior editors of National Review magazine, Meyer was first a Communist Party USA apparatchik before he converted to political conservatism. His experiences as a communist are reported in his book The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre in 1961. He began an "agonizing reappraisal of his communist beliefs" after he had read F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom while he served in the US Army during World War II, and he made a complete break in 1945, after 14 years in active leadership service to the Communist Party and its cause.Dennis, pp. xii–xiii Following the war, he contributed articles to the early free market periodical The Freeman, and he later joined the original staff of National Review in 1955.
After completing his turn to the right, Meyer became a close adviser to and confidant of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder and editor of National Review, who, in the introduction to Buckley's book Did You Ever See a Dream Walking: American Conservative Thought in the 20th Century (1970), gave Meyer the credit for properly synthesizing the traditionalist and libertarian strains in conservatism, starting at the magazine itself.p. xxxiii Meyer wrote a column "Principles and Heresies", which appeared in each issue of the magazine; was its book review editor; and acted as a major spokesman for its principles.
Meyer married the former Elsie Bown. They had two sons, John Cornford Meyer, a lawyer, and then Eugene Bown Meyer, who became a president of the Federalist Society. Both sons hold international titles in chess. John is a FIDE Master, and Eugene holds the rank of International Master, just below Grandmaster.
Meyer converted to Catholicism just before he died of lung cancer in 1972.
Meyer was known in conservative and libertarian circles for his nocturnal lifestyle. Buckley recalled in Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography that Meyer would sleep the day and be on the phone at night on behalf of his journalism and activism. His presentation won him a broad following among conservative intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, who promoted it individually and through the organization he cofounded, the American Conservative Union, and through other modern conservative institutions and think tanks influenced by him, including The Heritage Foundation, The Fund for American Studies, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Young America's Foundation.
Philosophy of history
The most important place to begin placing Meyer in context is his article "Western Civilization: The Problem of Political Freedom", which closed the 1996 edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. As a thinker in what F. A. Hayek"Kinds of Rationalism", Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1967 called the "critical rationalist" philosophical school, which is more empirical than the "constructivist rationalism" of a priori deductivism, Meyer's understanding of world history is central to his philosophy. Meyer's essential argument is explicitly based upon the philosopher Eric Voegelin's multivolume Order and History that all world history until more modern times was composed of "cosmological" societies that unified all social activity under one controlling myth subsuming society and the state into one common understanding and power monism. Meyer labeled the societies "tightly unified"In Defense, 210 in their mores, culture, economies, religion, and government by suppressing all contradictory understandings.
Following Lord Acton's "Liberty in Ancient Times", Meyer found only two historical "stirrings" in which that cosmological unity was even temporarily breached. In Athens, Socrates used his vision of the cave to discover a reality behind its cosmological reality as interpreted by its democratic authorities, which challenged them by viewing ideal forms as the real repository of truth beyond the myths of its culture. The unity was challenged so fundamentally that society turned upon the prophet, killed him, and returned to its previous unity. Abraham likewise rejected the cosmological unity of Ur and claimed a God that was independent of and more powerful than its myth, which Moses reinforced years later by rejecting Egyptian cosmological society to establish a Jerusalem whose prophets would likewise challenge state and society, with Nathan even forcing the monarch to admit evil and to repent. Still, the representatives of state power generally ignored or restricted the challengers, and in any event, a new cosmological state, Rome, ended both stirrings and established an even stronger cosmological unity.
Caesar became the "sanctified symbol of the cosmos", in Meyer's terms,In Defense, 221 and came to dominate the known world. About the same happened in China, India, Persia, the Americas, and the rest. Modern times did not break the unity until a small voice in Rome's hinterlands cried out, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." The Incarnation, the "flash of eternity into time" as Meyer labeled it,In Defense, 219 effectively severed the unity by its concrete effects and proved even more empirically enduring in Europe than Caesar. However, it created not a new unity but a "tension"In Defense, 220–221 between empirical power and a mystical power sourced from another world but energizing this world. In Europe are "two sets of tensions" of church and state contested and later added other tensions from cities, towns and estates that culminated in a Magna Carta that demanded for no single force to unify the rest, which created the conditions for freedom under agreed upon law, rather than a single state-enforced cosmological way.
The idea of dividing power to allow freedom within its tradition was only partially realized in medieval EuropeIn Defense, 222 and was later challenged fundamentally by the rise of national monarchies and parliaments, which claimed a divine or popular right and power to reconstitute itself in new cosmological or utopian forms to retrieve the sense of order and unity promised by monism. Before the tension was tamed in England, it was transferred to America, where it was protected by its colonial isolation, allowing the tension and balance of power between freedom and tradition to reach its zenith in the US Constitution.In Defense, 223– The utopian temptation to return to the cocoon of cosmological or radical unity, however, survived even in America.In Defense, 215–216
Whether reform was domestic, as from Woodrow Wilson,The Study of Administration, Washington, D.C., Public Affairs Press, 1955; originally published 1887 or more foreign influences, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hobbes, and Niccolò Machiavelli, they saw division of power and the tradition that sustained its tension as the central societal problems of modern times, with the task of reform to remove the impediments to a restored unity. To Meyer, the task of conservatism was to preserve the tension of the Western tradition to protect human freedom, which was inherently pluralist.
Freedom and tradition
In his most influential book, In Defense of Freedom, freedom was defined in what Isaiah Berlin would label "negative" terms as the minimization of the use of coercion by the state in its essential role of preventing one person's freedom from intruding upon another's. While left-utopianism was considered the immediate threat to the survival of this freedom, Meyer aimed at a "New Conservatism" as the principle antagonist against liberty from the right in his day. This new conservatism viewed society as an organism whose agent was the national government rather than the states or private entities.In Defense, 57 The new conservatives were less statist than the left and even rhetorically supported freedom, but it was a freedom defined as an end rather than a means,In Defense, 74 with Meyer using Clinton Rossiter's 1955 definition of positive freedom in his Conservatism in America as his major foil.In Defense, 75
Meyer argued that virtue could reside only in the individual.In Defense, 78 The state should protect freedom but otherwise leave virtue to individuals. The right of others to freedom must be respected by the individual even if the state does not respect it.In Defense, 83–84 The state has only three legitimate functions: police, military, and legal system,In Defense, 100 all necessary to control coercion, which is immoral if not restricted. There is an obligation to others but it is individual, for even the "Great Commandment" is expressed in individual form: God, neighbor and oneself are each individual.In Defense, 82 Virtue is critical for society and freedom must be balanced by responsibility but both are inherently individual in form.In Defense, 69 Forced values cannot be virtuous.In Defense, 121 The question of how to preserve moral order is important but would take "another book"In Defense, 81 which he never wrote. Yet even when the state takes properly limited acts to protect freedom, tradition will necessarily shape every such decision.In Defense, 84–86
Freedom by itself has no goal, no intrinsic end.In Defense, 157 Freedom is not abstract or utopian as with the utilitarians, who also make freedom an end rather than a means.In Defense, 79–80 A utopia of freedom is a contradiction in terms.In Defense, 87–88 In a real society, traditional order and freedom can exist together only in tension.In Defense, 98 To retain the essentiality of both freedom and tradition, the solution to the dilemma is "grasping it by both horns".In Defense, 80 The solution is a synthesis of both, even in the face of those such as Leo StraussLeo Strauss, Natural Right and History 1953 who argue that no such synthesis is possible or even logical. Donald Devine has argued Meyer's synthesis is a first principle or axiom that is as valid as Strauss's monist first principle and relates this to Hayek's critical rationalism philosophical tradition and those he identifies with it such as Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Montesquieu, John Locke, Adam Smith and Lord Acton.Donald J. Devine. America's Way Back, Wlimington, Delaware, ISI Books, 2012, Ch. 6
Critics Traditionalist critics