Keeping the tablets.

'CONSERVATISM," like "liberalism," has been in the United States a remarkably capacious term. Social conservatives, libertarians, paleos, neos, Burkeans, Agrarians, Austrianschool economists, and many other types of thinkers have all sheltered under the word-umbrella "conservatism." In examining a work like American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (ISI, 979 pp., $35)--the massive new reference book shepherded by Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson, under the auspices of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute--probably the key question to ask is: Does the book include everybody? Not, of course, every figure of some importance within conservatism--even the more than half a million words contained in this volume couldn't promise that--but every important type of conservative?

And it is the highest achievement of this book that, yes, all varieties are here, and all are fairly treated. The editors in their introduction disclaim any intention "to establish any orthodox definition of conservatism"; they seek, rather, to provide "information and insight on the persons, schools, ... and other topics of major importance to the nature and development of the conservative intellectual movement in America since World War II." The two key limitations to be noted here are a) "intellectual"--that is to say, the book has a bias toward theorists, as opposed to those engaged in the daily work of politics and punditry; and b) "since World War II"--pre-1945 issues and events are treated only if they had a direct bearing on postwar American conservatism. And both of these limits are well judged, making the work much more useful than it would otherwise have been. The tone throughout is polite; few intra-conservative body blows are exchanged. David Boaz of the Cato Institute writes the article on libertarianism; paleo historian Paul Gottfried contributes the entry on paleoconservatism.

It is all the more striking, then, that among the few lapses from the overall geniality and evenhandedness is the entry on the most important issue of the day. To write the entry on the Iraq War, the editors chose John Zmirak, who is a passionate and eloquent opponent of the war; and he writes with his customary elan. Zmirak compares some supporters of the war to the French right-wingers who continued, "against all evidence," to persecute Dreyfus, and declares: "Whether the nationalist Right in America will suffer a comparable loss of moral credibility is an open question." I suppose we supporters of the war can be grateful that Zmirak believes our loss of moral credibility remains an open question; but from our perspective, a war to overthrow a tyrannical regime--when it is accompanied by a resolve, simultaneously idealistic and prudent, to help the people liberated from that regime build a better one to succeed it--can certainly be presumed morally legitimate. Zmirak's skeptical view is not uncommon among conservatives, but it is far from a majority view within the movement. The editors would have been better advised to choose a more balanced approach on this issue.

More entries of the Zmirak type would, of course, have made the book more entertaining for the casual browser; but a reference work need not be especially amusing. This Encyclopedia is, on the whole, fair, solid, and reliable--an important contribution to the conservative bookshelf, and a good resource for others who want to learn about conservatism in all its manifestations.

* Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith (Ignatius, 241 pp., $18.95) is an essential book: an anthology of the best religious writings by one of the most eloquent men of faith of the 20th century. Edited by Cecil Kuhne and with an introduction by William F. Buckley Jr., the book captures the tone of Muggeridge, in writing and in conversation.

The title comes from one of Muggeridge's favorite passages in English poetry, from Blake: "This life's dim windows of the soul / Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole, / And leads you to believe a lie / When you see with, not through, the eye." Muggeridge explains that to see through the eye "is to grasp the significance of what is seen, to see it in relation to the totality of God's creation." To strengthen our grasp of these realities, he urges us to read the Bible and mystical works: "These are the literature of the Kingdom ... Who would live in a new country and not bother to study its literature?" And he offers some further, eminently practical advice: "Love laughter, which sounds loudly as heaven's gates swing open, and dies away as they shut."

* The late Czeslaw Milosz--a Pole who lived in American exile--is best known to conservatives for The Captive Mind, his outstanding 1953 book of anti-Communist political philosophy. But Milosz was, in his primary vocation, a poet, and his 1980 Nobel Prize for literature was well deserved, as the new volume of Selected Poems: 1931-2004 (Ecco, 267 pp., $24.95) demonstrates. It would be inaccurate to call Milosz a political poet, but his works do not flinch from describing the political realities of his century. He fought for reality against theory, and for a human meaning beyond intellect. In one of his poems, he writes of a Miss Jadwiga, a hunchbacked librarian who lost her life buried under the rubble of an apartment building:

   No one will ever know about her last
     hours,
   Time carries her in layers of the Pliocene.
   The true enemy of man is generalization.
   The true enemy of man, so-called History,
   Attracts and terrifies with its plural
     number.
   Don't believe it....
   The little skeleton of Miss Jadwiga, the
     spot
   Where her heart was pulsating. This only
   I set against necessity, law, theory.
   Milosz recognizes the evanescence of

this world--but he reflects it in a spirit not of despair but of kindness. From another poem, entitled "This World": "It appears that it was all a misunderstanding. / What was only a trial run was taken seriously." A change, he writes, is going to come. "Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror--/ They are children again. / The dead will wake up, not comprehending. / Till everything that happened has unhappened. / What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much." The mystery of evil--of which the 20th century gave us too many illustrations--does not have the final word. Evil has happened, it is a reality; it cannot be simply wished away; but there remains a deeply rooted human hope toward its "unhappening." Ezra Pound counseled poets--the word itself comes from the Greek poietes, "maker"--to "make it new"; Milosz here reflects that principle all the way back to the original Maker, whose work all poets in their own manner carry forward.

* When he was a fourth-grader back in the 1960s, Eric Shawn was proud of the $39 he collected for UNICEF as a Halloween trick-or-treater. Flash forward four decades: The same Eric Shawn is now a hard-hitting journalist reporting the truth about the misdeeds that have become sadly characteristic of the United Nations. Nor, upon reflection, should this career arc appear all that surprising: The noble, altruistic spirit that led to the formation of the U.N. now lives most vigorously in the organization's critics, who seek to hold it to high standards. Shawn's new book, The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World (Sentinel, 336 pp., $23.95), tells a sad story about how far the U.N.'s reality has fallen short of its creators' intentions.

* We all know--or should--that there were powerful, successful women even before the triumph of Sixties-style feminism. In Voices of the Silent Generation: Strong Women Tell Their Stories (Avisson, 389 pp., $29.95), Barbara Baillet Moran has assembled an impressive array of oral histories of women who reached adulthood in the 1950s, and lived their lives with toughness, resilience, and a "strong moral sense."