From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

We're delighted you're listening to this podcast. If you enjoy it, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or elsewhere.

Please also be kind enough to leave us a favorable review. Now at the journal's editorial page, we believe strongly in free expression. And each week on this podcast, we explore in depth and candor issues of topical and indeed philosophical or historical interest. We speak in depth to people who are leading figures in their fields, practitioners, experts or commentators, to try to give us a better understanding

of the major issues of our times. My guess this week is Yoram Hazani, one of the leading thinkers in what might be called the conservative revisionist movement of the last decade. Professor Hasanir's Israeli by birth, but was raised and educated in the United States. He's been a thoughtful and forceful proponent of the School of Political Thought, known as National Conservatism, taking issue with the prevailing conservative orthodoxes, many of the prevailing conservative orthodoxes of the last 50 years or so, emphasizing the centrality conservative ideals of nationalism, religion, revival of traditional family and community values, restraint in foreign policy. His works provided something of an intellectual scaffolding for the populist movement that's gained ground in the last few years, especially with the election of Donald Trump and the British vote to leave the European Union in 2016. He's the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, I'm sure that someone will be hearing about in the course of this discussion, and president of the Herzl Institute. And he's out with a new book, Conservatism, a rediscovery, an intellectual history of Anglo-American conservatism,

with some provocative takes on what's gone wrong for conservatives and some trenchant ideas on how to put it right. Professor Hasany, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So let's start, if we may then, since your book is about conservatives, I say it's an intellectual history, history but also a kind of an assessment of where conservatism now and where it needs to go.

So let's start then with sort of defining the terms.

What is conservatism? Well, there are different kinds of conservatisms. Obviously, it's not a

movement like liberalism or Marxism that claims to offer an absolute prescription for every country

in the world. So there'll be different kinds of conservatisms in different nations. The book is primarily about Anglo-American conservatism,

which is a tradition that goes back at least five, six hundred years in England and then crosses

the Atlantic before the American founding with the American Federalist Party. Let's say that the best

place to start, I think, is with the

thinker named John Fortescue. He is kind of in the late 1400s, believe it or not,

300 years before in Montesquieu, he describes in his book, Praise of the Laws of England,

he describes a traditionalist view of the English constitution, which should sound very familiar to us. It talks

about the separation of powers, the importance of the checks and balances between the king in

parliament, the rule of law. He compares the English constitution to the Roman law in France and

Germany and points to the advantages of the jury trial and the

ban on torture. He's especially concerned with the question of private property that he'd be

protected from the government and points out that freedom, individual freedom, is directly

related to private property. So he's obviously defending a conservatism that is, at that point,

...