[2] Meyer was born to a prominent business family of German Jewish descent[3][better source needed] in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Helene (Straus) and Jack F.

[5] Like a number of the founding senior editors of National Review magazine, Meyer was first a Communist Party USA apparatchik before he converted to political conservatism.

[6] Following the war, he contributed articles to the early free market periodical The Freeman, and he later joined the original staff of National Review in 1955.

[citation needed] After completing his turn to the right, Meyer became a close adviser to and confidant of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder and editor of National Review, who, in the introduction to Buckley's book Did You Ever See a Dream Walking: American Conservative Thought in the 20th Century (1970), gave Meyer the credit for properly synthesizing the traditionalist and libertarian strains in conservatism, starting at the magazine itself.

Buckley and others has recalled in Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography that Meyer would sleep the day and be on the phone at night on behalf of his journalism and activism.

As a thinker in what F. A. Hayek[9] called the "critical rationalist" philosophical school, which is more empirical than the "constructivist rationalism" of a priori deductivism, Meyer's understanding of world history is central to his philosophy.

Meyer's essential argument is explicitly based upon the philosopher Eric Voegelin's multivolume Order and History that all world history until more modern times was composed of "cosmological" societies that unified all social activity under one controlling myth subsuming society and the state into one common understanding and power monism.

Meyer labeled the societies "tightly unified"[10] in their mores, culture, economies, religion, and government by suppressing all contradictory understandings.

Following Lord Acton's "Liberty in Ancient Times", Meyer found only two historical "stirrings" in which that cosmological unity was even temporarily breached.

Abraham likewise rejected the cosmological unity of Ur and claimed a God that was independent of and more powerful than its myth, which Moses reinforced years later by rejecting Egyptian cosmological society to establish a Jerusalem whose prophets would likewise challenge state and society, with Nathan even forcing the monarch to admit evil and to repent.

The idea of dividing power to allow freedom within its tradition was only partially realized in medieval Europe[14] and was later challenged fundamentally by the rise of national monarchies and parliaments, which claimed a divine or popular right and power to reconstitute itself in new cosmological or utopian forms to retrieve the sense of order and unity promised by monism.

While left-utopianism was considered the immediate threat to the survival of this freedom, Meyer aimed at a "New Conservatism" as the principle antagonist against liberty from the right in his day.

Actually, Bozell at the end recommended a social policy based upon the moral principle of subsidiarity, which is not all that different from Meyer's position.

A Parry article[48] argued that the Meyer libertarian critique was correct about the state and reform did necessitate a revision of tradition once the previous vision had lost its energy.

Restoration required a new "prophet" who would have to convince people freely to adopt the revision, not to rely upon force, which simply cannot be inspiring enough for substantial change.

[29] Ronald Hamowy[57] argued Meyer's synthesis cannot hold because there was a fundamental difference between a classical liberalism that promoted markets and freedom and a traditionalist conservatism that resisted it.

It rejected many elements of a comprehensive fusionism that could have created a movement that achieved great things but failed in this by purging powerful voices on the right who did not follow its party line.

Rejected by the fusionist right these tended to see themselves as martyrs to their principles, especially excluded by the neoconservatives who controlled access to intellectual funding and prestige.

Bottum instead offered a new "tension" between religion and the Enlightenment, a new fusionism of religious traditionalists and secular "foreign policy neoconservatives" as they have been gathered at The Weekly Standard magazine, where he was an editor.

He was sensitive that this might be viewed as a "fairly cynical bargain" manipulated by the neoconservatives but insisted it resulted from "mutual persuasion" in debate with the social conservatives.

While Bottum argued the coalition survived the controversy, it is unclear whether the two can manage the legitimacy question since it is primary for the neoconservatives and only at best secondary for the religious traditionalists.

[63] It was the classical liberal F. A. Hayek in "Freedom, Reason and Tradition"[64] who most systematically and relentlessly pursued the nature of a libertarian/traditionalist synthesis but was loath to give it a label.

While not arguing for this on religious grounds, he acknowledged his empirical position was "closer to the Christian tradition of the fallibility and sinfulness of man, while the perfectionism of the rationalist is in irreconcilable conflict with it".

[citation needed] As Ronald Reagan assumed the pinnacle of power of the presidency in 1981, in his first speech to an audience of his conservative allies in Washington, he reminded them of their roots.

After listing "intellectual leaders like Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, [and] Ludwig von Mises" as the ones who "shaped so much of our thoughts", he discussed only one of these influences at length.

[70] "It's especially hard to believe that it was only a decade ago, on a cold April day on a small hill in upstate New York, that another of these great thinkers, Frank Meyer, was buried.

"It was Frank Meyer who reminded us that the robust individualism of the American experience was part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture.

He pointed out that a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions, these civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace.

"[72] "We can make government again responsive to the people by cutting its size and scope and thereby ensuring that its legitimate functions are performed efficiently and justly.

"[73] The essence of this fusionist synthesis was "cutting the size and scope" of the national government and "returning power to the states and communities" to allow the traditional "social consensus", its "robust individualism", and the free market to restore prosperity and civic vitality.