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Frank Meyer (1909-1972) was a prominent figure on the American right in the 1950s and 60s. Beginning as a Marxist and a member of the communist party as a young man, he moved to the right, partly under the influence of F. A. Hayek's  The Road to Serfdom. In later years, he attempted to provide a philosophy that would synthesize several of the different elements or currents of American right-wing thought. in 1962 he published In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo.

Neither to the older nor to the newer forms of the scientistic methodology will this book make any concessions. Its fundamental premise is the "historic conception of man as a rational, volitional, autonomous individual," as a free being who lives between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and error, and fulfills his destiny in the choices he makes.

This power to make choices, this innate freedom lies at the center of the drama of human existence….No objective methodology, however strict, can disprove the existence of the autonomous self and validate determinism, as no intuitive outlook, based upon the subjective, can disprove the existence of the external world and validate solipsism….

The apprehension of man as of such a nature that innate freedom is of the essence of his being, is the central axiom upon which this critique of political thought is founded. It further assumes that the primary mode of achieving understanding in the study of man, more particularly in moral and political enquiry, is the use of reason operating within and upon tradition, reason deriving extended conclusions from simple apprehensions of the nature of man. Man as he exists, a complex whole, is the starting point. The conclusions are the principles which define the social and political conditions under which he can best fulfill his innate destiny." [Frank Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, p. 47-48.]


In the area of government, Meyer took a view similar to classical liberalism:

But if the state is regarded as an institution critically delimitable and serving a given function in the affairs of men, it can then be brought under criteria derived from higher philosophical consideration....

From the primary problem of politics, the tension of freedom and order, we have drawn the principles for judgment of that adequacy: those principles demand a state capable of maintaining order while at the same time guaranteeing to each person in its area of government the maximum liberty possible to him short of his interference with the liberty of other persons....

The state therefore has two natural functions, functions essential to the existence of any peaceful, ordered society: to protect the rights of citizens against violent or fraudulent assault and to judge in conflicts of right with right. [Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays, p. 98-100]