Most influential books for conservatives.

Right-Wing News asked conservative bloggers to list the books that most influenced them. I happy to see that Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ended up Number 7 on the list. I first read that book when I was in 6th Grade and re-read it every year until I was in High School. Whether I was dealing with Randites or Libs, I found its attitude of empirical uncertainty - "I don't know, but you don't either" - useful in dealing with folks who had the Answer.

As for the other entries, I have to wonder who seriously would list either Coulter or Limbaugh. Those two are fine for getting the juices flowing, but they're preachign to the choir. They're hardly seminal or likely to stand the test of time.

An author who deserves to stand the test of time, but apparently isn't going to, is the now largely forgotten Alexander Bickel. Two of Bickel's books really - The Morality of Consent and The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress - deserve to be unearthed by any conservative - actually by any person interested in a view of a Constitution that is something more than the chance concurrence of 5 justices. Here's an interesting passage of an interview I found through Google:

At Yale, you encountered and studied under one of the two mentors in your life -- Alexander Bickel, who was a Professor of Law.

Yes.

Tell us his impact on you and the educational journey you've taken.

Alex Bickel had an enormous impact on me. He is a man who was born in Bucharest, came to this country at age twelve, became a brilliant student himself, clerked for Justice Frankfurter. He was, in the classroom, electric. Alex Bickel had a mind of enormous originality. He encouraged students to engage him and debate him. He was enormously generous. He helped me when I wanted to enter law teaching. Alex Bickel was the most important teacher I've ever had.

What did he teach you?

Constitutional Law. He was a constitutional law person, but he had views on constitutional law which were quite out of the received conventional wisdom at the time, and today, I think, sadly, are hardly regarded at all. I regard them highly, but history has, in a sense, passed by his views. Maybe they'll come back someday.

What were those views?

Well, he is very much a person of judicial restraint.

I see.

Very much a person of keeping the Supreme Court out of federal courts, generally, out of decisions that ought to be made by legislative and elected officials.

I would also include Irving Kristol's Two Cheers for Capitalism and Norman Podhoretz's Breaking Ranks which is an invaluable history of the Stalinist mindset of the Old and New Left and the crack-up of that orthodoxy that led to the Neo-Conservative Movement which provided the Reagan Revolution with much of its firepower. I might also include James Q. Wilson's Thinking About Crime which did much to re-orient American policy on crime and punishment from the self-defeating model that had previously ruled supreme.

Someone once said that the "Golden Age of Science Fiction" was whenever you were fourteen. If you check the publication dates of the books above, I guess you could conclude that the "Golden Age of Political Writing" was whenever you were nineteen.