ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first contacts with conservative political thought came as an undergraduate in the late 1960s, first in Sam Coleman's wide-ranging, wonderful courses in social philosophy at Columbia University and later at Michael Oakeshott's lectures at the London School of Economics. I became interested in American conservatism in particular as a sociological topic, however, only sometime in the 1970s while I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. The broader intellectual concern that motivated my interest initially was with ideology, with how our assumptions about the world are socially structured and how these assumptions in turn shape our perceptions and actions. That concern arose from, and was nurtured by, my participation in Leo Lowenthal's culture seminar, an intellectual enterprise that defied the normal limits of semesters and quarters and continued throughout my years at Berkeley. The topics of the seminar ranged widely, but to me the central theme always was that of ideology and its impact on politics. My first round of thanks goes, therefore, to Leo and the ever-changing membership of the seminar, but especially to Jeff Weintraub, Jim Stockinger, and Bob Bell.

An interest in conservatism did not, however, translate into immediate work on the topic. My concern with politics and ideology pushed me in a different direction, to the study of marijuana laws and the public discussion of the drug in America, a matter that occupied most of my last years at Berkeley and led to my writing The Strange Career of Marihuana . My study of the Right began in earnest only after I took a postdoctoral fellowship in 1980 at the University of Michigan in a program called "Sociology, Social Policy, and the Pro-

fessions," funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. There I had the good fortune of working for two years at the Center for Research on Social Organization, an excellent setting for developing an analysis of conservatism as a social movement. I also drew on the many resources of the Institute for Social Research to add analysis of public opinion data to my work. Bill Gamson and Mayer Zald, who first brought me to Michigan, provided the right combination of freedom and intellectual encouragement to get my work under way. They have continued to be important sources of advice and support since then. Thanks also go to the countless others who together made CRSO such a stimulating place, but especially Jim McRae, Ron Kessler, and Bert Useem.

The research I began at CRSO turned into a series of articles and review essays on conservative ideology, conservatism in public opinion, and conservative movements, on which I continued to work after I started teaching at Amherst College in 1982. That fall I joined a faculty seminar on the New Right sponsored by the Center for the Advanced Study of the Humanities at the University of Massachusetts. I am grateful to the seminar for keeping the momentum of my work going and for helping me focus more clearly on specific elements of American conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s, especially the New Religious Right and corporate conservatism. I extend thanks to all the seminar members, including Allen Hunter, who organized it, Dan Clawson, Jim Ault, and Steve Arons.

The following summer I participated in a seminar on feminist and antifeminist movements in America, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, at Duke University. There I gained an understanding of how issues like abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment polarized women and what role they played in the rise of the Right. I also became fascinated with the world of North Carolina politics. Above all, I found another rich, supportive intellectual environment. I am indebted to all the seminar members, but especially to the seminar organizers, Bill Chafe, Jane deHart Mathews, and Don Mathews.

In the ensuing years I worked out many of my ideas in collaboration with others. Jim McRae and I coauthored two articles on American public opinion, and I developed my analysis of big business and the state through much discussion with Dan Clawson. Again, my thanks to both of them. Thanks also to Brian Elliott, James L. Guth,

Paul Luebke, and Corwin Smidt, with whom I have discussed one part or another of this work.

In 1985 I began to pull together the various elements of my research on conservatism into what would become this book. I am grateful to Amherst College for a Trustee Faculty Fellowship, which gave me the time away from teaching to get the project started.

As I did the final revisions on the book in 1988, I had the pleasure of participating in both a Sloan Workshop on Political Technology at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government in Claremont, California, and in a conference on Gender, Politics, and Religion at Smith College. My thanks to Alan Heslop, director of the Rose Institute, and to Arthur Parsons, Susan S. Bourque, and the Project on Women and Social Change at Smith.

Finally, I want to thank Susan Urquhart, who by now has typed and word processed so many pages of my work that I have long since lost count, and my editors at the University of California Press, Naomi Schneider, Amy Klatzkin, and Richard Miller.