A political outlook is as much a temperament as a philosophy.

Temperamentally, conservatives tend to be pessimistic yet cheerful; accepting of human frailty yet still willing to pass judgment; largely secular yet respectful of religion's place in a civilized society; literate, scientific and historically minded yet grounded in common sense rather than theory.

If liberals are driven mostly by a desire to redress injustice and inequality and optimistic belief that humanity shares in their desire, traditional conservatives take an approach to public policy and collective action that is largely negative rather than prescriptive.

(Part of the enduring fascination of a figure like George Orwell and the reason for the never-resolved battles over his legacy is that though he was a tireless advocate for social justice and for a socialist state, temperamentally Orwell was as conservative as he was left-wing.)

There is no technical fix for the problems of humanity, Theodore Dalrymple asserts in a recent essay about Shake- speare, a statement that is as succinct a summary of the traditional conservative position and as revealing a glimpse of the conservative temperament as you will find.

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of the British writer Anthony Daniels, who worked for several decades as a doctor in British prisons and psychiatric hospitals, an experience that provided him with ample material for many works deeply critical of the welfare state.

In "Life at the Bottom," he analyzes the intellectual foundation that makes a permanent underclass possible; in "Romancing Opiates," he takes a skeptical look at the idea that heroin withdrawal is an unbearably painful and traumatic experience that necessitates a huge bureaucracy to support it.

In his latest work, "The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism," Dalrymple presumes to examine the soul of Western Europe.

On the surface it would seem that Europeans have a lot to be proud of: 65 years of peace, stability and prosperity; a social welfare state that is the envy of the world; a culture that has broken with the militarism, theocracy, racism and imperialism of the previous two millennia; a generous and humane policy toward non-European immigrants; and so on. Written just as Europe's debt crisis — the gravest threat to the European social-welfare state seen so far — was beginning to develop, "The New Vichy Syndrome" purports to show how precarious the state of affairs really is.

For Dalrymple, Western Europe is a culture in decline. Europeans are simultaneously smug and anxious. In discarding religion and nationalism, even in their increasing childlessness, they have lost any sense of a transcendent purpose. In fact, "nonjudgmentalism" (a false virtue Dalrymple demolishes in his provocative polemic, "In Praise of Prejudice"), material comfort and limitless choice are the chief values of contemporary Europe.

Their anti-militarism and anti-nationalism have turned into a kind of cravenness in defending European Enlightenment values, such as free speech and the separations of church and state, as witnessed in their response to the controversy over the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

Unlike other conservative writers on the growth of Islam in Western Europe, such as Bruce Bawer or Christopher Caldwell, Dalrymple isn't an alarmist. The greatest threat to Europe's welfare doesn't come from the increase of Europe's Islamic population or from Islamic terrorism but from Europe's unwillingness to find anything worth salvaging in its own past.

"The New Vichy Syndrome" is ultimately about the uses of history. What Dalrymple calls the "miserabilist view of history" — an approach that sees nothing but folly, slaughter and exploitation in our past — accounts for Europeans' mixture of apathy and fear.

The most interesting passages in this rather diffuse and impressionistic book are about the battle over the interpretation of Europe's recent history. As Mark Rousso demonstrated in his "Vichy, the Ever-present Past" (a work that coined the phrase Vichy Syndrome), the French went from silence and denial about their collaboration in the Nazi occupation of France to an obsessive guilt-mongering on the subject, once most of the principals were safely dead.

For Dalrymple, this miserabilist view is a masochistic consequence of Europe's current powerlessness. But what is more important is the behavior it produces: the demolition of prized architectural landmarks in favor of modern architecture; an art culture that values the "transgressive" and has for the first time in memory produced no great living artists; and a people that "fear the future because they fear the past."

The back is as big as the front, the yogi Amrit Desai was fond of saying. In other words, any virtues will have corresponding defects that are equal in size. Can we, for example, have Napoleon's sense of national purpose without his overreaching militarism?

Typically, Dalrymple doesn't offer any solution to this paradox. Like most conservative writers since Paul Johnson, what he does is blame left-wing intellectuals.

The "New Vichy Syndrome" isn't one of Dalrymple's best works. Readers looking for an introduction to his writing would be better served reading his magisterial verdict on Tony Blair's political career, "Delusions of Honesty," a short polemic worthy of the best of Christopher Hitchens.

But it is an entertaining read. Like many eccentric, unclassifiable works, its real energy is in its digressions and footnotes. Here, for example, is one about the recent increase in Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to British subjects:

"Not everyone will rejoice at this, since the prize seems most often to be awarded to those who refrain from indulging in or encouraging the violence that they had previously indulged in or encouraged."

John Broening is a freelance writer in Denver.

NONFICTION

The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

by Theodore Dalrymple, $23.95