For over four decades, George W. Carey has engaged students, scholars, and educated laymen in a searching conversation regarding the nature and right ordering of public life. He is perhaps best known as an expositor of conservatism, not because most of his writings have addressed that philosophy and persuasion but because his method and his vision of the good capture what is best therein: prudence in the service of the tradition of natural-law thought that lies at the heart of Western civilization. Whether discussing the workings of American political institutions, the nature and roots of social and political traditions, or the moral underpinnings of constitutionalism, Carey consistently has argued for a practical understanding of politics and its limits, along with an integrated vision of human sociability and its historical, political, and moral constituents.

Born in 1933 as the son of a well-known professor at the Northwestern University School of Law, Carey grew up in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois. As an undergraduate at Northwestern he first encountered Charles Hyneman, one of America’s most prominent political scientists, who is remembered today primarily for his writings on American political thought. Hyneman’s commonsense approach to the study of politics, his openness to serious discussion of varying philosophical viewpoints, and his concern to understand self-government, the rule of law, and ordered liberty had a far-reaching impact on Carey. Through Hyneman, Carey met another thinker whose work would profoundly affect the evolution of his own thought: Willmoore Kendall, the combative conservative icon. Taught by Kendall to question the liberal platitudes offered by most of his professors, Carey began to challenge them in print even before entering graduate school.

In 1957, after graduating from college Phi Beta Kappa with high honors and serving a stint in the Marine Corps, Carey commenced graduate work at the University of Illinois, where he studied municipal government and intergovernmental relations under Charles Kneir. He transferred to Indiana University, where he worked informally with Hyneman, who was teaching there. In 1961, Carey completed his doctoral dissertation, which examined the implications of political equality in theories of democratic government and pointed out the potentially destructive nature of equality when held as an ideal. Carey then immediately took up teaching duties in the government department at Georgetown University—a position he has never left, despite several offers. He did spend the 1964–65 academic year as a Visiting Associate Professor at Indiana, where he worked with Hyneman in putting together A Second Federalist: Congress Creates a Government (1967). With contents taken from congressional debates during the early years of the republic, this volume fleshes out the original understanding of the Constitution by showing how that document was interpreted in the course of establishing the actual institutions of American government.

During the early 1960s, Carey developed a close working relationship with Willmoore Kendall. The collaboration, continuing until the latter’s death in 1967, bore fruit in several cowritten articles, including “Towards a Definition of Conservatism,” “The ‘Intensity’ Problem in Democratic Theory,” and “The ‘Roster Device’: J. S. Mill and Contemporary Elitism.” Carey and Kendall also coedited a volume, Liberalism Versus Conservatism: The Continuing Debate in American Government (1966), and an interpretive introduction to a new edition of The Federalist.

Although he declined to assume the directorship of the program in politics and literature that Kendall had founded at the University of Dallas and was directing at the time of his death, Carey accepted the invitation of Kendall’s widow to expand into a book a series of lectures Kendall had delivered at Vanderbilt University in 1964. The result, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970), is one of the very few truly essential works in the study of American political thought. Consisting of edited versions of four Kendall lectures and four additional chapters written by Carey (one of which incorporates material from an additional Kendall lecture), Basic Symbols employs the methodology developed by Eric Voegelin in his exploration of the historical unfolding of the American political tradition.

Carey is a prolific writer. In the decades since the appearance of these works, he has published several books, including The Federalist: Design for a Constitutional Republic (1989), In Defense of the Constitution (1995), and A Student’s Guide to American Political Thought (2004). He has edited or coedited more than a half-dozen others—including Community and Tradition: Conservative Perspectives on the American Experience (1998), Freedom and Virtue: The Libertarian/Conservative Debate (1998), The Post-Behavioral Era: Perspectives on Political Science (1972), The Political Writings of John Adams (2000), and The Federalist: The Gideon Edition (2001). His many articles have appeared in such major political science journals as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, the Western Political Science Quarterly, and the Review of Politics, as well as in more popular publications including National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Modern Age, the Intercollegiate Review, the American Spectator, and the University Bookman. A longtime member of the board of trustees of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Liberty Fund, Inc., he also served as a member of the National Council on the Humanities from 1982 to 1988.

From 1971 until 2005, Carey served as editor of the Political Science Reviewer (PSR), where he continues as editor emeritus. Published annually, the PSR consists of article-length reviews of classic and contemporary works in political science, broadly conceived. It has sought in particular to foster in-depth examination of works that the contemporary discipline of political science has largely neglected. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the same concern for the state of the discipline of political science that had inspired Carey’s work at the PSR motivated him to join forces with Theodore J. Lowi, a prominent political scientist and outspoken social democrat. Together they led a successful effort to force the American Political Science Association to open its meetings to presentations by scholars who did not share the commitment to the statistical approaches that dominated the profession at the time.