The Young Stephen Tonsor: Teacher, Historicist, and Conservative

JOSEPH A. AMATO is Professor Emeritus of History
at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota.
His most recent works are On Foot: A History
of Walking (NYU Press, 2004) and Jacob’s Well: A
Case for Writing Family History (2008).

“I am a historian; I am a patient man;
the truth will out.” —Stephen Tonsor

I have been grateful to Stephen Tonsor
since the first day I walked into his classroom
fifty years ago.¹ It was fall semester,
1958, at the University of Michigan. A
friend recommended that I take Tonsor’s
two-semester course on historiography, assuring
me that his class would abound in ideas
and also mentioning that Tonsor was a practicing
Catholic.

Tonsor proved true to my friend’s description.
At a turbulent and querying point
in my life, he ignited my freshly refound faith
with a range of wide-reaching propositions:
that religion, myth, and ritual give form to
time and life; that Greece gave order to a new
form of human thought; that Christianity,
both the culmination and successor to Greek
thought, grew within and was spread by
Rome; that Christian apologetics gave birth
to modern historiographical methods; and
that historicism as born out of Romanticism—
in counterdistinction to the rational,
liberal, secular, and systematizing Enlightenment—
was, to use the phrase of German
Church historian Ernest Troeltsch, “the highest
fruit of modern intellectual life.” I discovered
in Tonsor’s classes the seminal apologetical
notion that Christianity affords the fullest and
most satisfying explanation of reality, time,
and life.

My newly-chosen intellectual mentor
would brusquely enter the classroom and
write on the board five to ten titles of books
pertinent to the day’s lecture. The majority
were recent secondary books, a few of which
were in German and French. Without introductory
pleasantries and no dramatic flair,
Tonsor began the day’s lecture, reading from
a hand-written text. Lectures focused on a
master historian, a school of thinkers, or the
culture of an age. The year-long series of
high but uneven quality lectures proceeded
chronologically; each could be considered a
step in defining history as a craft and, more
importantly, historicism as a way of studying
and understanding the past and unfolding
truth itself. They began with primitive myth,
went from Greek and Roman historians to
Augustine, early Christian historians, Joachim
of Flora, who understood history under three
stages of revelation, the Father, Son, and the
Holy Spirit, medieval chroniclers, and eventually
took up the great founder of historicist
thought, Italian Giambattista Vico. The lec-
tures then considered the emergence of critical
historical methodology in relation to
Protestant and Catholic debates over authentic
Christianity before turning to the modern
historicism, whose foundation was associated
with the thought of Johann Gottfried von
Herder and several German romantic thinkers
and historians. Tonsor focused on the
thought of Hegel and Marx (whose Manifesto
he described as “a great political poem about
the mid-nineteenth century mind”), positivists
August Comte and Herbert Spencer, and
historians like Leopold von Ranke, Jacob
Burckhardt, and Lord Acton, He arrived
finally at such contemporary philosophers of
culture and civilization as Oswald Spengler
and Arnold Toynbee. If Tonsor taught us, his
students, any single thing, it was that historians
reveal deepening human understanding
of time and truth across the ages, while
capturing the views and premises that give
meaning to an age. He set before us the
possibility of knowing ourselves by rethinking
the Western past.

Joseph Ward Swain was one of the first
deep influences on the young Stephen Tonsor,
who at the time of his graduate studies was,
in his own words, “preoccupied in what men
in our culture have thought and how they
have expressed that thought in representational
art, literature, politics, religion, historical
study, and philosophy. I have been
absorbed in the symbolic representation of
human thought.”² Swain’s courses on Greek
and Roman history established important
themes around the development and decline
of reason and power, and the assumption of
the Christian ecumene by the Roman Empire.
Swain’s popular course the “The History
of History” attuned young Stephen’s
mind to the notion that the very organizing
of time has a history. Beyond this, he seeded
his student’s thought with cosmopolitan ideas.
As a graduate student at Columbia, Swain
had studied with the great Carleton J. H.
Hayes. Hayes was as a convert to Catholicism
and sided, as Acton and De Tocqueville
had, with decentralism against the emergent
nation-states. Swain also attended the classes
of John Dewey.

Swain, who first inspired and then shared
Tonsor’s enthusiasm for the nineteenth century,
was himself a confirmed historicist. He,
like Tonsor, rejected history as a causal
natural science, the concept of which he
identified with the Enlightenment heritage.
He accented sympathetic identification
(Einfühlung) with the past joined to the critical
history of it. He defined the essential
function of the teacher as a transmitter of
tradition. According to Tonsor, Swain defined
the historian’s mission as “the transmission
of the knowledge of the past… The past
is never the dead past. It lives on into the
present and manifests itself, for good or ill, in
contemporary life.”³

Swain helped make the young Stephen a
historicist and thus, in a measure, a traditionalist
and a conservative. He directed Tonsor’s
interest to two great nineteenth- century
Catholic minds, those of Cardinal Newman
and Lord Acton. The older Newman, having
converted from the Church of England to
Roman Catholicism, based apologetics for
his new found faith on the continuity of the
development of Christian doctrine. The
younger Lord Acton, who accepted
Newman’s argument and worked with him
in having free historical inquiry accepted in
the church, was more by birth, marriage,
education, religion, and interest a continental
European than the English lord. A life of
scholarship, books, and passionate learning
gave him an unrivaled comprehensive knowledge
of modern European history and eventually
led to his appointment, despite his
pronounced Catholicism, as a Cambridge
professor and editor of the Cambridge Modern
History.

Acton, Tonsor’s first dissertation choice,
remained central to the thought of both the
young and the mature Tonsor for several
reasons. In his own development and writing,
Acton joined history and religion, fusing
an interest in events, politics, culture, and
morality. In turn, he synthesized his preoccupation
with the history of freedom to
German historicism; and exemplifying what
a Catholic historian could and should be,
Acton entered historical study trusting that the
truth would out. He relentlessly defended
conscience and freedom against the arbitrary
dictates of church and state. Conceiving modern
history from the Reformation on as an
intensifying struggle between power and
emerging conscience, Acton conceived of the
historian as history’s moral judge. This view
joined him to Newman in the publication of
liberal Catholic journals that furthered the
cause of free inquiry in the church, and made
him oppose the 1870 pronouncement of
papal infallibility. Tonsor admired Acton’s
lifelong quest to write a history of freedom—
and his view of developing conscience as a
result “of Christ being risen in the world.”⁴

Tonsor concurred with Acton that
democracy’s advance in our times was certain
and non-reversible, but did not assure
freedom. The French Revolution and Napoleon
revealed the destructive convergence of
the dictatorial will of the people with the
absolute state.⁵ Individual courage, tradition,
and local and federalist institutions
alone protect freedom, liberty, and conscience.
Like Burke, Acton made freedom
the defining difference between the dictatorial
and equalizing French Revolution and
the conservative and freedom-preserving
American Revolution.⁶ Acton’s equation of
decentralization and freedom expressed itself
in his support of the Confederacy’s federalist
cause even after its defeat. Though no defender
or partisan of slavery, Tonsor assures
us, “Acton placed liberty in the forefront of
all goods, moral and political.”⁷ The found
ing of the American republic, based on law,
affirming the individual, committed to the
separation and division of power, was for
Acton, a universal step forward for human
freedom. Conversely, he saw the cause of
“the union” embodying the same degenerative
forces of nationalism, centralization, and
bureaucratic administration that were contemporaneously
undermining the Germanic
Confederation, the Austrian Empire, and the
patchwork of Italian States.⁸ The first of
many intellectual giants in whom the young
Stephen rooted his learning, Acton furnished
Tonsor with good reason to see the unbridled
power of state as the principal enemy of
freedom, religion, culture, and tradition.

Tonsor relinquished Acton as his dissertation
topic when he discovered Gertrude
Himmelfarb’s work on Acton, which produced
the important book Lord Acton: A
Study of Conscience and Politics (1952). With
Swain’s concurrence, Tonsor switched to
what seemed the next best contiguous subject,
Acton’s own mentor, the German Catholic
historian Ignaz von Döllinger (1799 to
1890). Banned as a Catholic from studying at
either Oxford or Cambridge, in 1850 Acton
had gone to Munich for six years, studying at
the University of Munich with Dollinger,
considered by many to be German
Catholicism’s leading historian and historical
theologian. There Acton, whose intellectual
path Tonsor mastered, familiarized himself
with the advanced Catholic intellectual circle,
which included thinker and publicist Josef
Görres, social philosopher and theologian
Franz Baader, and philosopher of history
Ernst von Lasaulx, who constituted a major
link in the historicist tradition from Vico and
Herder to Spengler.⁹

Tonsor’s research for a year at the University
of Munich furthered Tonsor’s attachment
to German culture. At the same time,
Munich placed him at an important center of
Catholic thought, whose faculty included
Joseph Ratzinger, present Pope Benedict
XVI, twentieth-century Catholic theologian
and critic of our times, and theologian
Romano Guardini, whose historicist reflections
on Christ, power, and the modern
world made him a paramount thinker of
post-World-War II Europe and America.¹⁰

Writing under the title “Ignaz von
Döllinger: A Study in Catholic Historicism,”
the young Tonsor already showed
himself critical of his chosen subject. He
examined Döllinger’s initial adoption of historicism,
pointing out that it was far more
developed in Northern German Protestant
circles than in southern Catholic communities.
He also underlined how Döllinger’s first
uses of historicism were not only exploitative
but served him in leveling shameful attacks
against Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchton
and mounting an attack against a Reformation
based on the ambiguous doctrine of
justification by faith. Tonsor even acutely
criticized the mature Döllinger for writing a
disembodied form of the history of ideas,
with a faulty sense of causality. At the same
time, he lauded Döllinger for his profound,
though futile, attempt to convince the besieged
church at Rome to welcome free and
open inquiry and to make historical theology
rather than scholasticism the basis of the
defense of the faith.

From his dissertation, Tonsor came away
with an enhanced passion to serve the truth
and history. His self-chosen role as critical
historiographer would preserve the riches
and gains of romantic history, a history of
great individuals, varied institutions, epoch
struggles, and human freedom. In contrast to
rationalists, whose preference is for generalization
and rational schemes, his view of
history involves chance, surprise, coincidence,
and all the other happenings and
ramifications that are never foreseen.¹¹ With
Döllinger in a measure his own model,
Tonsor depicted him as a devoted scholar
working amidst a crowd of assembling giants
who in a dawning age would war over
freedom and authority.

Tonsor’s dissertation refined his understanding
of history as developmental and
strengthened his faith that “conservatism,
Catholicism and historicism were one.”¹²

Marking his rite of passage from mentored
study to independent critic, his dissertation
fusing German and English historical thought,
made Tonsor a studied historicist and a unique
type of American Catholic intellectual: He
was knowledgeable about the development of
the early church and yet sympathetic to
Luther and the Reformation. At the same
time, it complemented Tonsor’s formation
as a nineteenth-century man and thinker.

The young Stephen took up his first
university appointment and wrote his first
reviews and journal articles as a man moved
by nineteenth-century ideas and principles.
However, Tonsor emerged from his dissertation
not so much as a writer of history but
as a critical gatekeeper of history. His work
had its sharpest edge when commenting on
the irrationality and violence, the despair
and futility of those who cultivated nihilism
in the name of the self and those who sought
to foster meaning with secular schemes divorced
of historical consciousness. In a mature
essay, Tonsor explicitly judged the
desacralization of time as the beginning of
the end of humanity.¹³

Nevertheless, he did not to the best of my
knowledge distinguish in depth types and
uses of historicism or probe philosophically
the nature of historical knowledge. Though
keenly aware of the threat of types of vulgar
historicism as a form of relativism, he never
addressed the issue of how generalizations
and overarching metaphors betray details
and specifics and how unique individuals and
distinct situations defy generalizations. He
did not explore the apparent disjuncture
between historical circumstances and individual
conscience, and personal principles
and natural law.¹⁴ Rather, as a disciple of
Acton, Tonsor (with the aid of such such
religious thinkers as Karl Löwith, Mircea
Eliade, Christopher Dawson, and Romano
Guardini) conceived of history ultimately in
terms of man’s irreversible, singular, and
moral movement through time and in relation
to God’s unfolding Providence.

Although other cultures existed and created
order and meaning, Tonsor identified
Western history as the decisive terrain of
human development and God’s revelation.
He identified a singular advance of human
reason with the Greeks, a succession of true
prophets and a singular Christ with Judaic-
Christian faith, and a necessary concentration
of humanity and its calendars with
Rome, whose imperium prepared the world
for the spread of the Christian church. In
turn, after the civilizing and synthesizing
Middle Ages, he conceived modern Europe’s
elevation of conscience and freedom as decisive
to the fulfillment of Humanity. All
subsequent ages could not supplant this Western
revelation of man and God.

This linear view of time was based on a
Biblical view of time as an unfolding revelation.
History, above all else, did in fact tell the
story of man and his evolving relationship
with God. It sprang from the fact that there
was one Adam and one Christ. Each age was
equal before God but also was measured by
the irreversible development and irrevocable
revelation. There was no backtracking for
the West or humanity. The Jews, that stubborn
and exclusive people (whom Voltaire so
disliked), taught the world about the one God
and birthed His son in time. With Christ, the
age of ritual and myth was over; with Christ,
historical awareness began. Tonsor had a
faith in the living truth of past. Unlike
Burckhardt, who started as a theologian and
ended as a skeptic, Tonsor did not transform
the culture of Europe into a sustaining faith
in itself. And unlike Nietzsche, Burkhardt’s
violent disciple who declared God and the
past dead, Tonsor saw the past as a conveyor
of a living faith, and he subscribed to notion
that “history,” to use the title of a 1965
article, is “not a revolutionary but conservative
doctrine.”¹⁵

In what would become Tonsor’s distinct
and combative style, history, as he idealized
it, was an expression of full, rich, and contradictory
experience. In history, man of flesh
and spirit, of necessity and freedom, interacted
with God. History as he conceived it
disputed all the disciplines that subject the
past to rational schemes, far-reaching scientific
claims, and progressive dreams. “History,”
Tonsor wrote as supporter of Romanticism
and as an enemy of the Enlightenment,
insists on diversity, complexity, multiplicity,
randomness, and in its most mysterious moments,
general confusion. The demands for
generalization, symmetry, unity, predictability
and utilitarian purposefulness, which
are so much an aspect of the present Zeitgeist
are cruelly rebuffed by history. Moreover, in
spite of its confusion and multiplicity, history
seems to constantly demand human choice,
value judgments and moral actions, insisting
that the historical moment par excellence lies
not in synthetic generalizations but the individuating
moment of choice.¹⁶

Tonsor explicitly embraced a full romantic
historiography, supplementing it by nineteenth-
century literature and poetry, interest
in classical history, ritual and myth, and cultural
theories of formation and decadence.
The enemies of this romantic, humanistic, and
religious view of history had its principal
source in eighteenth-century French Enlightenment
culture, which postulated a uniform
naturalism, and the measure of unchanging
laws and tastes. Tonsor described those Enlightenment
disciples as “social-scientific
philosophes,” who believed that by knowledge
and will humanity could be self-perfecting.

Like any twentieth-century thinker,
Tonsor knew and drew upon a large repertoire
of searching critiques of contemporary
civilization, including those of Catholics
Guardini and Dawson, as well as Burckhardt,
Nietzsche, Spengler, and Toynbee. Nevertheless,
he never acknowledged an unbridgeable
gulf between past understanding and
present conditions. The present, certain to
change, never entirely abandons the past.
Providence withstands the great and evil
deeds; growth and rebirth displace decadence.
Vast and contradictory human nature
and long established institutions are not subject
to instant postive transformation. All is
not penetrable to human reason; all is not
malleable to will and whim; God, his creation,
and his love stand. Our reason, although
forever entangled in our passions,
conditions, and judgments, nevertheless does
measure, at least in rough, what we know.

The young Stephen Tonsor’s own
worldview, so much by taste and active
fashioning of nineteenth-century thought
and art, joined Catholicism, romanticism,
historicism, and conservatism. With this
worldview he taught my generation the
history of Western civilization and the history
of a history, which he had learned from
his mentors Swain, Acton, and Döllinger. Of
course, his world view would be judged by
many different schools of social, regional,
and neo-positivist history today to be intellectually
abstract, epistemologically naïve,
and Eurocentric. Tonsor’s worldview made
the Western tradition paramount in defining
and fulfilling humanity’s natural potential,
while forming the cutting edge of Providence.
Though profoundly cognizant of
wrong, evil, distortion, convolution, misdirection,
and mutability, Tonsor did not make
failure the principal axis of his meditation on
the past. Even war and holocaust in the
twentieth century did not for him vitiate the
worth of tradition. To the contrary, the
worst called for the best in the Western
inheritance. Sanguine, optimistic, religious,
and—the followers of Voltaire would insist—
Panglossian, Tonsor would have the
greatest human narrative turn on man proposing
and God disposing. Not inclined to
construct the past as a global story of populations,
environments, classes, technologies,
or even arts and sciences, Tonsor saw the past
through the lenses of human freedom and
Providence.

In the summer of 1953, on the eve of
setting out for his doctoral research on
Döllinger and a year before he started to
teach at the University of Michigan, Tonsor
heard Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind as a
thunderclap. Kirk’s reading of the past present
squared with his own. He reaffirmed Tonsor’s
own belief: contemporary civilization needs
religion. Tonsor could only shout ‘Amen!'”
to Kirk’s prescription for the conservative
cause to prepare society to accept Providential
change and let emergent life and society
flourish in the ancient shelter of Western and
Christian civilization. Widely read in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century American and
English conservative thinkers, Kirk announced
to a generation and an age wearied
of centralizing, collectivizing, and warring
nation states, that liberalism was neither
infallible nor inevitable. Moreover, Kirk
declared that liberalism, insofar as it repudiated
the past and espoused rationalism, individualism,
and secularism, had shown itself to
be antithetical to man, community, and civil
society. Kirk summoned conservative thinkers
to defend man and tradition “against the
total community, the omnipotent state, which
had found in the new restless masses the
instrument for its triumph.”¹⁷

Kirk’s influence on Tonsor lay in shared
scholarly and poetic views. Kirk’s fusion of
American and English nineteenth-century
thought corresponded with Tonsor’s joining
of German and English nineteenth-century
historical thought. Additional threads joined
them in a single traditional fabric. Though
born in southern Illinois, Tonsor joined Kirk
by becoming a fellow Michigander, who
preferred the Michigan countryside to Detroit
and its automobiles. Tonsor, ever ambivalent
about the condition of public higher
education, undoubtedly appreciated Kirk’s
withdrawal from academia, when he forsook
a post at Michigan State University for full
immersion as a writer, family man, and even
service as a justice of the peace in the rural life
of the northern Michigan countryside, at
Mecosta. Tonsor also took equal pleasure that
a small conservative publishing house, owned
and operated by Henry Regnery (who within
a few years would become Tonsor’s close
friend and long-time correspondent), discovered
Kirk’s manuscript and turned it into
an influential book. Surely Tonsor’s sense of
indebtn isi-btness to Kirk, the conservative intellectual
entrepreneur, was magnified in 1957
when Kirk founded this journal Modern Age,
on whose editorial board Tonsor served for
many years.

However, as much as they shared poetic
impulses and scholarly worldviews, Tonsor
did not believe their traditionalism and conservatism
coincided on all points. He regarded
Kirk’s criticism of capitalism as excessive,
and he demarcated a more serious
line of division when he contended that Kirk
did not succeed in the task of translating
“permanent things” into forms that could
accommodate the world of change, the world
of history.”¹⁸ Believing that Kirk failed to
accept modernity’s irresistible drive to the
market, push towards equality, and rendezvous
with democracy, Tonsor judged that
Kirk’s vision was limited to a moralizing
politics against the central state. “Half of the
contemporary conservative movement,”
Tonsor contended in this retrospective assessment,
“was terra incognita to him, a land
filled with wild beasts and monsters.” Kirk,
Tonsor opined, did not peer down into the
well of evils, sin, and irrationality found in
the human heart that Dostoevsky knew so
well. Kirk, Tonsor wrote, “was a conservative,
a traditionalist, but not ‘a man of the
Right’, as Whittaker Chambers described
himself.”¹⁹ Kirk, Tonsor had it, did not stand
in full opposition to the Promethian secularism
and make God the first and primary
source for an understanding of man, history,
and human hope. However, not wishing to
be harsh, ungrateful, or “expecting too much
of one who has done so much,” Tonsor
concluded his retrospective essay, “Let us
praise a great man whose vision enables us to
take up the task of recasting ‘the permanent
things’ into the living reality of the present.”²⁰

In a short essay entitled “The Conservative
Search of Identity” published in 1965,
Tonsor showed himself to be a man of the
right. Historicist, romantic, and nineteenthcentury
“amateur,” Tonsor put himself on
the side of individuality, variety, and mystery
in opposition to Enlightenment rationalists
and scheme builders. As if to immunize
himself against the narrow strictures of
rational discourse at the outset of his essay,
Tonsor (a keen reader of poetry and an
appreciator of culture as defined by Herder,
Burckhardt, and Meinecke) put on the mantle
of American democracy’s great poet and
appreciator “of opposites and polarities, Walt
Whitman. “Do I contradict myself? Very
well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I
contain multitudes.)”²¹

Then he promptly launched his attack
against liberalism by contending that its
underlying spiritual error was its intolerance
of diversity and inability to accept the “organic
union of opposites.” Liberalism, Tonsor
contended, does not permit living and sundry
points of view. It substitutes the counterfeit
myth of pluralism for the real embrace of
reality. He diagnoses contemporary conservatives
suffering from the same anemia. “The
blunt truth,” he wrote, “is that most conservatives
do not know what manner of men
they are; they have no clear conception of the
society they wish to create, have no organic
relationship to the past or present, hold no
grand design, entertain no enduring principles,
and are responsible to no whole and
healthy vision either of man or society.”²²

A pure liberalism is a coherent body of
doctrines derived from certain principles, so
that a true conservatism, Tonsor assumed, is
a synthesis of contradictory principles held
forever in precarious balance. For the articulation
of a conservative credo, the thinker
must find guidance in historical explanation
rather than philosophical analysis. For Tonsor
there was no greater illumination of the
matter of freedom and authority than to be
found in the works of Alexis de Tocqueville
and Lord Acton. They were masters of this
dialectic. Standing near the center of power,
they distrusted power. Religious men at
heart, they verged on being schismatic.
Suspicious about the worst in human nature,
they optimistically hoped for the best. Aristocrats
by birth, they acknowledged the
democratic transformation of western society,
which practice and defense of freedom
alone could save from tyranny. Affirming
the vital importance of human action in the
present, they understood the world as ordered
by Providence. They did not rebel
against, nor did they despair of God’s care.
Only a Providential view accounted for “the
fundamental nineteenth century project of
the restoration of order, the restoration of
purpose, and the restoration of value around
restoring meaning to history.”²³ De
Tocqueville declared, “For my own part I
doubt whether man can ever support at the
same time complete religious independence
and entire political freedom. And I am
inclined to think that if faith be wanting in
him, he must be subject; and if he be free, he
must believe.”²⁴ Acton affirmed, “The Christian
notion of conscience demands a corresponding
measure of personal liberty. The
feeling of duty and responsibility to God is
the only arbiter of a Christian’s actions.”²⁵

Tonsor agreed with Acton, De
Tocqueville, Burckhardt, and Kirk that the
worst tyranny was the tyranny of the majority.
“Democracy,” Tonsor wrote, “tended
to bring absolute conformity and tyranny in
its wake unless it was checked by churches,
constitutions, economic interests, divided
powers, and decentralization and plurality of
authority.”²⁶ As much as Acton and De
Tocqueville considered economic and social
equality crucial for a functioning democracy,
religion also played a crucial role. “The
doctrine of the immortality of the soul,”
Acton declared, “is the greatest benefit which
a democratic nation derives from its belief,
and hence belief is more necessary to such a
people than all others.”²⁷ Religion, Tonsor
concurred, is essential to the fabric of society,
a powerful check against the central
state, and crucial for civil liberty. Acton and
De Tocqueville supplied Tonsor with an
optimistic “libertarian conservatism” that
equipped him for a full entrance into the
conservative movement, as thinker, writer,
editor, and institutional participant.

I conclude this essay as I began it, with
personal reflections on Tonsor, whom I began
to visit annually starting ten years ago on
annual returns to Detroit to visit my parents’
graves. Professor Tonsor and his wife
Caroline’s warm affection starts with greetings
at the door of their small and humble
house, which they purchased in 1957, his
third year at the University. It extends to
solicitous concerns about my family, goes on
to talk about books and ideas, and eventually
leads to the offer of a glass of sherry, and a full
and handsome country dinner. All this occurs
through the good graces of Caroline,
whose bountiful flowers fill the front of the
living room. In one corner sit Stephen’s
worn easy chair and two towers of books and
papers. In wintertime, the fireplace is alive
with a crackling fire. Tonsor’s home strengthens
me for my visit to anarchic, changing,
and deteriorating Detroit.

In its domestic order the Tonsor household
feels like a serene island, befitting an
educated nineteenth-century man. Reading,
walking, and gardening measure his
days. Daily, he reads his breviary, gnaws
away at one of the two to four towers
adjacent to his easy chair, watches German
television, listens to music, and takes a long
daily walk, which up to a few years ago
invariably led him to campus and buying
books. In the last several years Stephen falls
asleep reading the great nineteenth-century
American amateur historian Francis
Parkman’s France and England in North
America. Both he and Caroline pay attention
to keeping themselves in writing paper and
pens for the sake of their correspondence,
which I have enjoyed since 1999.

Tonsor ended one letter to me in 2004,
declaring

I have always maintained that history cannot be
a social science…. There is hardly an element in
the historical process, which is predictable. History
is governed by what I call the “bridge at
Chappaquideck factor.” (Had it not been for that
Teddy Kennedy might have become President.)
Accident, contingency, the inventive break with
the past—all determine the past of tomorrow. I
like to quote a great but forgotten historian—
“The study of the past is like driving down a road
at night—and in reverse. All we can see in the light
of the headlights is the road we have already
traveled.” …The role of the historian is not to
predict the future but to discern as fully as possible
the texture of the past.

With this Tonsor announced what he had
been all along—a great reader, historical
critic, and man of faith who would defend
what he took to be the richest and greatest
part of our Christian and western inheritance.
For Tonsor there is no real diversity in
the present without the recognition of true
variety in the past.

His mission, however, as an informed
conservative critic, did not produce a run of
books or even that single life-distinguishing
book. He was like the thinkers with whom he
and friend Regnery identified in that they
would never write anything resembling a
real book.²⁸ Tonsor was too much a combative
German Luther to be a French Calvin, or
for that matter a scholastic, of systematic
theology. At the same time, he recognized no
alternative beyond the bounds of human
nature, the depths of impenetrable freedom
and the canopy of Providence. Additionally,
the incisiveness and alacrity of mind which
made his first drafts his final drafts led him to
write what he knew rather than to explore
and, thus, discover what he thought.

Yet there are other reasons why Tonsor
did not write the book that would have
placed him among the first famous founders
of American conservatives. He was too committed
as a teacher, too conscientious a
member of a university and its history department,
too dedicated an ally to the conservative
cause to concentrate his talent and
ambition on a single book. Professor Tonsor
traded a big work for writing essays and
reviews, sitting on committees, hosting great
speakers, sponsoring dissertations, considering
recent scholarship, while admiring the
great and mighty “amateurs”—the poets,
novelists, painters, and historians of the nineteenth
century. He drained the passion of his
scholarly work on sundry causes and even
administrative chores. And then too, he kept
his obligations at home to a wife, five children,
and a host of grandchildren, as well as
to friends and neighbors. And always there
was prayer and worship, and a church to
serve and to chide. And out back there has
always been a garden filled with roses and
lilies to tend and make bloom.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: This small essay accumulated a
large debt. My thanks first go to Stephen Tonsor, who
punctuated our regular correspondence with lengthy
biographical notes. They also include my friend and
former student of Tonsor, Steven Reubleman, who
shared his memories in a lengthy telephone conversation
in February, 2007; to local California researcher, Barbara
Zoeller, and the cooperative staff of the Hoover library,
which hold the Tonsor papers and the rich and extensive
correspondence with friend Henry Regnery, which
would serve as the source of a revelatory essay on the
emergence of conservatism from the late 1950s until the
early 1970s. Librarians from my home university, Southwest
State University, supplied a lot of pertinent primary
and secondary literature, while my friend and colleague
Professor David Pichaske and former history student Jody
Gismer straightened out more than one crooked sentence.]

NOTES

1. An earlier and full recollection of Stephen Tonsor is
   found in my Bypass: A Memoir (West Lafayette, Ind.:
   Purdue University Press, 2000), 115-121.
2. Letter of
   Stephen Tonsor to Joseph Amato, September 21, 2004.

3. Ibid.
4. Stephen Tonsor, Quest for Liberty: America in
   Acton’s Thought, Occasional Paper, No. 1 (Grand Rapids,
   Mich.: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and
   Liberty, 1993), 3. This piece is also found on the institute’s
   web page, http://www.acton.org/print.php.
5. For the
   lectures Acton delivered at Cambridge in 1910, which
   have been recently published and prefaced by Tonsor,
   see John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Lectures on the
   French Revolution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000).
6. For Acton and the French Revolution, see Tonsor’s
   introduction to and essay in “Equality as a Factor in the
   American and French Revolutions,” Reflections on the
   French Revolution: A Hillsdale Symposium (Washington,
   D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990), xiii-xvii, 114-137.
7. Tonsor, Quest for Liberty, 3.
8. Ibid., 6-7.
9. These German
   thinkers are discussed in Tonsor’s Doctoral Dissertation,
   “Ignaz von Döllinger: A Study in Catholic Historicism,”
   (University of Illinois, 1955), 50; they have a place in
   Tonsor’s early essay, which in addition to ” The Historical
   Morphology of Ernst Von Lasaulx,” Journal of the History
   of Ideas, Vol. 25 (July-Sept., 1964), 374-392) are found,
   along with other pieces as nineteenth-century Catholic
   and Protestant thinkers subjects as separate entries Tonsor
   wrote for The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 1968.
10. Guardini was exceptionally important to American
    Catholic thought in the 1950s and 1960s. Regnery
    published Guardini’s magisterial The Lord (1954) and
    Power and Responsibility (1961), while Sheed and Ward
    published The Death of Socrates (1948) and The End of the
    Modern World (1956), and Pantheon, The Last Things
    (1954). He also played a significant role in the pre-World-
    War-One German Youth Movement, a subject of a
    planned and partially researched book Tonsor never
    wrote.
11. “Ignaz von Döllinger,” 182.
12. Stephen
    Tonsor, letter to Joseph Amato, January 19, 2005. For a
    summary of Tonsor’s work on Döllinger, see his short
    piece on him in The New Catholic Encyclopedia and his
    “Lord Acton on Döllinger’s Historical Theology,” Journal
    of the History of Ideas, Vol. 20, No. 3 (June-Sept., 1959),
    329-352.
13. Stephen Tonsor, “Myth, History, and the
    Problem of the Desacralized,”Continuity, No. 4/5 (Spring,
    1982), 11-29.
14. For part of Tonsor’s direct consideration
    of historicism, see his early essay, “Freedom and the
    Crisis in Historiography,” Modern Age, Vol. 8, No. 1
    (Winter, 1963/64), 235-43. Also, see his reviews of
    Andreas Kraus’ Vernunft und Geschichte: Die Bedeutung der
    Deustschen Akademien fur die Entwicklung der
    Geschichteswissenschaft in Spaten 18. Jahrhundert (1963), in
    The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Mar., 1965),
    87-88; Fritz Wagner’s Modern Geschichtsschreibund: Ausblick
    auf eine Philosophie der Geschichtswissnenschaft (1960), ibid.
    Vol. 35, No. 4 (Dec., 1963), 388-389, and his combined
    review of George Mosse’s Culture of Western Europe and
    The Crisis of German Ideology, Vol. 37, No. 4. (Dec., 1965),
    490-49. For an introduction to the complexity and
    breadth of the topic, aside from a variety works by Donald
    Kelly, Maurice Mandelbaum, Haydn White, Leonard
    Keiger, and Joseph Mali, see Georg G. Iggers, concise
    “Historicism,” Dictionary of Ideas, Vol. 2 (New York:
    Scribners, 1973), 456-464. In retrospect, if Tonsor would
    have developed his thought on these issues, he might have
    framed issues that came to divide the proponents of
    Straussian natural law neo-conservatives from the traditional
    historically based (paleo) conservatives, which he
    is taken to represent. For a useful piece on intellectual
    origins of conservatism, see Mark C. Henrie,
    “Straussianism,” American Conservatism, 821-826.
15. Stephen Tonsor, “History: A Revolutionary or Conservative
    Tradition,” Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 2, No. 4
    (Jan.-Feb., 1966), 235-243; reprinted in ed. Schneider,
    Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, 113-126.
16. Ibid., 236.
17. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to
    Eliot 7th Rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001),
    487.
18. Tonsor, Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, 320.
19. Ibid., 319-320.
20. Ibid., 320.
21. Stephen Tonsor,
    “The Conservative Search of Identity,” ed. Frank S.
    Meyer, What is Conservatism? (New York: Holt, Rinehart
    and Winston, 1965), 133.
22. Ibid.,134.
23. Ibid.,136.
24. Cited ibid., 138.
25. Cited ibid., 140.
26. Ibid., 142.
27. Ibid., 149.
28. Tonsor and Regnery concurred that
    American postwar conservative political scientist,
    Willmoore Kendall was one such a brilliant man who
    would never write the true book his mind merited. They
    didn’t believe his Conservative Affirmation, which Regnery
    published in 1963, counted; Tonsor-Regnery correspondence,
    March 12, 1967.