Frank Straus Meyer (1909–1972) was a libertarian political philosopher and co-founding editor of the National Review magazine.
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Frank S. Meyer was born to a prominent business family in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Princeton University for one year but was displeased by the antisemitism and snobbery he found there . He then transferred to Balliol College at Oxford University. He later studied at the London School of Economics and became the student union's president before being expelled and deported in 1933.[1]
Meyer was an active communist early in life before his conversion to conservatism and his joining of National Review. As a conservative, Meyer—like many of the magazine's founding senior editors an ex-Communist—was a close adviser to and confidant of founder/editor William F. Buckley, Jr.
Meyer married the former Elsie Bown. They had two sons, John and Eugene. The latter is president of the Federalist Society.
Frank Meyer converted to Catholicism before he died of lung cancer in 1972.
In the late 1960s, Meyer engaged in a debate over the role of Abraham Lincoln with conservative Harry V. Jaffa. Meyer argued that Lincoln's abuses of civil liberties and expansion of government power should make him anathema to conservatives, while Jaffa defended Lincoln as a continuation of the Founding Fathers.[2]
Meyer is best known for his theory of "fusionism"—a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and conservatism. (Murray Rothbard argued, however, that Meyer's fusionism was actually the natural law-natural rights branch of libertarian thought that Rothbard and others followed.[3] Meyer's philosophy was presented in two books, In Defense of Freedom and a collection of his essays, The Conservative Affirmation. It was reviewed affirmatively by journalist Ryan Sager in 2007's The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party, in which Sager called for a principled revival of Meyer's fusionism to save the embattled party following its 2006 electoral defeats.
Meyer was known in conservative and libertarian circles for his nocturnal lifestyle—Buckley among others has recalled (in Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography) that Meyer would sleep by day and be on the phone by night on behalf of his journalism and activism.
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