major spokesman for its principles. Meyer married the former Elsie Bown. They had two sons, John Cornford Meyer, a lawyer, and then Eugene Bown Meyer, who became a president of the Federalist Society. Both sons hold international titles in chess. John is a FIDE Master, and Eugene holds the rank of International Master, just below Grandmaster. Meyer converted to Catholicism just before he died of lung cancer in 1972. Meyer was known in conservative and libertarian circles for his nocturnal lifestyle. 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. His bright intellect and passionate presentation won him a broad following among conservative intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, who promoted it individually and through the organization he cofounded, the American Conservative Union, and through other modern conservative institutions and think tanks influenced by him, including The Heritage Foundation, The Fund for American Studies, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Young America's Foundation. Philosophy of history The most important place to begin placing Meyer in context is his article "Western Civilization: The Problem of Political Freedom," which closed his 1996 In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. As a thinker in what F. A. Hayek 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" 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. In Athens, Socrates used his vision of the cave to discover a reality behind its cosmological reality as interpreted by its democratic authorities, which challenged them by viewing ideal forms as the real repository of truth beyond the myths of its culture. The unity was challenged so fundamentally that society turned upon the prophet, killed him, and returned to its previous unity. Abraham likewise rejected