The lobby of the San Antonio hotel last Friday held the hushed afternoon stillness that settled like dust in the lull between check-ins. It was broken only by the sharp click of expensive heels on marble and the lively chatter of my colleagues returning from their excursion to the Alamo.
I watched them drift through the brass-trimmed revolving doors, their faces flushed from exertion, while I nursed a sweating glass of tea and mourned the historic site I missed entirely. Sadly, having just arrived from the airport, I would not remember the Alamo.
Twelve years carved deep changes in The Philadelphia Society since its last strategic leadership retreat, our present reason for convening. That legendary occasion – which I knew only through minutes and memories shared by others – was guided by voices now stilled.
Looking at our assembly, I could see how time reshaped us: some faces weathered by years of service, others, like mine, still adapting to the weight of stewardship. We came to do as they had done before us: preserve what mattered while finding the courage to change what must.
To understand what brought us to that San Antonio hotel, one should understand The Philadelphia Society itself – though describing it feels rather like trying to capture lightning in a mason jar. Since 1964, it served as a gathering for minds that left a mark: Nobel laureates who revolutionized economic thought, academics who rewrote our understanding of America’s story, and intellectuals who helped define modern conservatism.
I think of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Coase – economists whose ideas ignited sparks. Or Russell Kirk, whose ghost still seems to hover at our meetings, along with Mel Bradford and Forrest McDonald, their voices echoing in our ongoing conversations about what makes a society both free and good.
The Society has always been more than its luminaries. It includes professors, lawyers, philanthropists, judges, journalists, clergy and business leaders, all bound by a shared pursuit: to understand and strengthen ideas of ordered liberty.
In our regular meetings – twice a year in grand hotel ballrooms in different cities nationwide – we wrestle with the pressing questions of our age. The faces change – some presidents, like Ed Meese, Ed Feulner, Larry Arnn, Leonard Liggio, Ellis Sandoz, and Midge Decter, have led us through different seasons – but the essential character remains: thoughtful people seeking clarity in complex times.
While last weekend’s deliberations must remain properly sequestered behind closed doors, The Philadelphia Society itself merits examination as an intellectual wellspring of conservatism. In an age when political figures increasingly resemble mere vessels – conduits through which ideas flow rather than wellsprings from which they spring – the Society’s role becomes ever more vital.
Today’s elected officials, with vanishingly rare exceptions, are not philosophers but technicians. They operate downstream from the headwaters where serious thinking originates.
The Philadelphia Society has long served as one such headwater, a source of the intellectual capital that, through various tributaries of influence, shapes public discourse and policy. When one traces the lineage of conservative ideas that have animated American politics these past six decades, one frequently finds their antecedents in the Society’s proceedings, where thinkers of consequence met to refine and articulate the principles that politicians later transformed into platforms and programs.
The Society’s mission is to “sponsor the interchange of ideas through discussion and writing, in the interest of deepening the intellectual foundations of a free and ordered society, and of broadening the understanding of its basic principles and traditions.”
It continues: “In pursuit of this end we shall examine a wide range of issues: economic, political, cultural, religious, and philosophic. We shall seek understanding, not conformity.”
These lines underscore the crucial distinction between intellectual cultivation and political mobilization. While partisan machinery exists to marshal voters behind predetermined positions, the Society pursues something altogether more refined and difficult: the rigorous examination of first principles as they collide with modernity’s ceaseless disruptions.
Such is not the work of campaign strategists who must necessarily simplify complicated ideas for mass consumption. Rather, it is the deliberate cultivation of creative tension among conservatism’s various traditions classical liberal, paleo, traditionalist, libertarian and others – whose productive friction generates light rather than merely heat.
Though political operatives must necessarily reduce ideas to actionable bullet points, serious thinking about civilization’s greatest challenges requires the patience to sit with uncomfortable questions. How should timeless principles adapt to technological upheaval? What aspects of order must be preserved amid necessary change?
Such questions resist bumper-sticker solutions. They demand instead what the Society provides: a forum where minds can grapple with complexity without the pressure to reach immediately actionable conclusions.
While the ballot box has its season and the campaign trail its purpose, there remains this other, quieter necessity: the patient cultivation of ideas, like gardeners tending delicate shoots that may not flower for years. This is slow work, somewhat removed from the urgent chaos of electoral politics, but no less vital. For while parties may win their majorities and lose them again, ideas till the soil in which political life takes root.
Before we adjourned on Sunday, a friend mentioned the Alamo again – that symbol of last stands and lost causes – and I thought of a parallel. Perhaps too grand, it nevertheless illuminates an essential truth animating the Philadelphia Society’s mission: that ideas, carefully tended, outlast both victories and defeats.
As my Uber driver wound through busy streets on the way to the airport, I recalled how this city reinvented itself across centuries while keeping its core character intact – rather like the principles we gathered to consider, unchanging in essence but ever new in application.
And I smiled, grateful to be part of something lasting.
Allen Mendenhall is Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Professor in the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University and Executive Director of the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy. Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.
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