Whether reform was domestic, as from Woodrow Wilson,The Study of Administration, Washington, D.C., Public Affairs Press, 1955; originally published 1887 or more foreign influences, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hobbes, and Niccolò Machiavelli, they saw division of power and the tradition that sustained its tension as the central societal problems of modern times, with the task of reform to remove the impediments to a restored unity. To Meyer, the task of conservatism was to preserve the tension of the Western tradition to protect human freedom, which was inherently pluralist.
