I should clarify one minor point for the record. Dan wrote that “much of Nisbet is out of print” thereby implying that *some* of Nisbet is in fact in print. So, it’s not true, as I wrote, that “an neglects to mention that Nisbet is also still in print.”

It is too bad that the conservative canon and related books aren’t made available the same way the Mises Institute has made many older works freely available online. How hard would it be to PDF works that came out in the 50s & 60s?  Doubt it would cut into any sales.  If sales are a concern, certainly once these works once in a PDF format could then be available for printing on demand in addition to being free for downloading.

I am somewhat confused as to what you are actually implying about the conservative cannon, Mr. Bramwell.  Do you not think that any young traditionalist would be better off having read Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver than not?  I’m not quite sure what your point is, either now or in you last article,
though I thin that you make many good and insightful points. 

Also, for your information, I enjoy the articles published in Takimag,
and have the perhaps unique distinction of having my application
for membership in The Philadelphia Society rejected back in the
early 1970s.  I haven’t the slightest idea of why, since I was recommended for membership by the now Secretary of the group, William F. Campbell. So your comments relating to TPS certainly don’t offend me.

Once again, as is often the case after a Bramwell essay, I am left wondering what his point is and what he is suggesting as an alternative. I have to agree with Daniel. I WISH modern conservatives would read Weaver and Kirk and Nisbit. They don’t. Instead they read Hannity, Savage and Goldberg. That there is an intellectual movement that keeps the flame burning for the cannon, but that the ideas in the cannon don’t at all translate to the PCfied, liberal “conservative movement” of today proves Daniel’s point. How is the modern conservative movement in any way Kirkian? How is it in any way Weaveresque? If only. The modern conservative movement is more King than Kirk.

What books should be in the cannon? Why are the ones in the cannon unworthy?

What can be said about the cannon is that it is schizophrenic. How can you canonize both Kirk and Strauss?  You can also clearly argue that the cannon needs more books that aren’t from the mid century. The cannon is certainly myopic.

One need only look at how the candidacy of Ron Paul was treated by the Siamese Twins of Big Government and Big Media to understand that the Conservative Canon could be installed next to every Gideon Bible in every motel room and it would not matter a whit. It is like ancient runes to the current generation of courtiers.

The dialectic of the Revolutionary era , promulgated into a sturdy vehicle by the institutions and legislation of the Framers is long gone. It has been replaced by a one party system that has turned a fiat economy from a suspect but manageable concept into a raving lunacy of historic proportions.

We have a degenerate faux monarchy of entitlement now without benefit of the cultural attainment ....aside from technocratic advances.... which that entails. We will create ever more smoothly effective machinery to obliterate the culture we have been bequeathed but now dismiss in favor of busy action and easy comfort. Western Technological Banality and Suicide will, in it’s crowning achievement be the Death of China. We had Montezuma’s Revenge, perhaps the East will come down with Dorito Revenge.

It will be a real Busby Berkeley extravaganza before it ends but even this will become somehow boring after the 24th saturation broadcast in a 24 hour news cycle. The smiling broadcasters will stare into the camera and cheerfully intone: “Mankind set to expire....but first, this commercial break for our sponsors, The Biblelands Casino”.

I take Bramwell to be saying that the books in this so-called canon are not necessarily all that great and that many would not be read but for their canonical status. This is absolutely true.

Generally, what people in a forward-looking regime as ours should be reading is history, not abstractions.  It is knowledge of history that makes one wise, and hence usually conservative, not essays on the ontological character of liberalism - though they, of course, have their place.  Truth is, I’ve never been moved by a word Kirk wrote though I read Strauss, Burke (yes, thinkers can disagree and still be valuable) and Scruton to this day.  The very idea of a conservative canon is a bit embarrassing - reminds me of Edward Shil’s comment on Straussians, “there is salvation within; damnation without.”

Any young person who wants to understand how the world works is better off reading Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (technically a Marxist tract) or Boorstin’s The Image than most works by Kirk.  Men like Burke and Tocqueville read…what else – Roman history, a subject as foreign to liberals as to the heirs of the modern conservative canon.

A good book is a good book and we should encourage people to read good books, not a pre-approved list of ideological bedfellows.

“I take Bramwell to be saying that the books in this so-called canon are not necessarily all that great and that many would not be read but for their canonical status. This is absolutely true.”

You can argue with some of Kirk’s conclusions, and you can argue that he in some ways manufactured a conservative intellectual history that wasn’t so clearly there, etc. but his work was great in the sense of impact, influence, etc. and that influence has been largely positive, I believe. Ideas Have Consequences and the rest of Weaver’s work was great by any estimation and I believe wholly positive.

Strauss was great in the same sense that Kirk was, impact and influence, but his legacy is largely negative.

I am not going to criticize anyone who wants to read older works or history, but I don’t get the beef. Maybe it would help if you suggested alternative cannon. I’ll be happy to add additions.

I think it would be worthwhile to push a conservative canon lite.  Books that are small and easily read in the same vein as Conscience of a Conservative and more recently Ron Paul’s Revolution Manifesto.  One book that I would throw into the mix of canon-lite would be Kirk’s Politics of Prudence.

Red Phillips asks, “How can you canonize both Kirk and Strauss?” I answer, “How can you canonize both Isaiah and Ecclesiastes?”

To Red: forgive Ploni; he hasn’t read much of anything, apart from comic book versions of the Right; that’s why he visits this site so much when he should find a library card and actually read Kirk, Strauss, etc.!

Kirk’s Politics of Prudence has too often been read as a defense of political pragmatism. The last thing the conservative movement needs is pragmatism.

“The last thing the conservative movement needs is pragmatism.”

I meant to write “more pragmatism.”

Kirk’s works are kept in print, his reputation constantly puffed, by the family operation at ISI, the Kirk Center, etc.  Several of his books are collections of relatively sophomoric essays, some are gothic thrillers, and some are historical works that take the official Catholic account of the early Church, or the manifest rightness of Catholicism, as a jumping-off point.  (Where else could one find John Randolph as a crypto-Catholic?  For anyone who knows Randolph’s life, the idea is simply goofy.)

The Wonderful Work for which Kirk is mainly known is his ... well, yes, boring _The Conservative Mind..._, which I slogged through dutifully in my graduate school off hours.  Entirely forgettable.

On the other hand, Goldberg calling Weaver “silly” really is too much to take.  Didn’t he and his mother rise to fame on the hem of a certain stained blue dress?  That’s what the conservative movement has come to these days; from Kendall, Bradford, Meyer, and Kirk to Ponnuru, Goldberg, Lopez, and Hitchens.  Not a pretty sight.

Mr. Bramwell’s posts are tangled up in rather embarrassing contradictions that reveal that for all his critical bluster, he doesn’t know what he wants to say.

1. He defines the conservative canon as a set of authoritative works that are not read.

2. He also says that he wishes for (even) more “neglect” of the conservative movement’s canonical texts. Apparently, he wants the conservative canon not only not to be read but to be forgotten.

3. On the other hand, he says, without qualification, that “the canonical authors are all very much worth reading”, but one should read them for their “intrinsic” worth. So he wants the books of the conservative canon to be read more.

What gives?

Mr. Bramwell has now spent a lot of intellectuel energy in criticizing movement conservatism. Fair enough. We get it. But if Mr. Bramwell took his own position seriously, he should stop criticizing the movement, and would start writing some books or essays of the type that he actually thinks should be written.

And he probably shouldn’t write for Taki Mag. If he is right, then seeking attention from the non-conservative-movement-conservative-movement [which is very much a movement like the official movement, albeit without any money] is even more pathetic than making one’s intellectual career within the official movement.

And he should stop wearing bow-ties.

Kirk Critic: It was Bramwell who asserted that Weaver (and the other three men named)sometimes made silly arguments, and Goldberg was repeating the charge mockingly.  This is clear to me even in the context of the above post, and proved by clicking through to the link.  Whatever one may think of Goldberg otherwise, here is setting himself up as a Weaver defender against Bramwell’s criticisms.

The last clause should read “here he is setting himself up as a Weaver defender against Bramwell’s criticisms.” Sorry for any ambiguity or confusion.

Seems a fan letter might be appropriate following some of the above comments, so here it is.  Mr. Bramwell writes some of the best articles at Takimag.  His criticisms of conservatives and conservatism are almost always well-aimed, stimulating, and provocative.  It’s ridiculous to suggest that he’s somehow obligated to propose solutions to the problems he diagnoses; ad sanitatem gradus est novisse morbum.  If Takimag is a magazine for independent conservatives, then it’s the right place for Mr. Bramwell’s articles.

A reply to “anti-strauss”: I didn’t mean to give any offense with my comment on canonization.  I really meant it as a serious answer to Mr. Phillips.  Just from my comic-book edumacation, I really doubt that the works of Kirk and Strauss are any less compatible than the books of Isaiah and Ecclesiastes.  Ideologically-based canons--the Bible being the, uh, canonical example--tend to include ideologically contradictory works. I am interested in checking out this place you recommended--I believe you called it a “library”?--but at present I’m too busy reading Takimag.

In response to Ploni, let me counter with a quote:

“Every movement throws off disgruntled outsiders (conservatives sometimes call them “paleoconservatives”) who feel bitterly their loss of power. They write obsessively, sometimes quite fancifully, on the alleged perfidies of the mainstream.”

Its author? Austin Bramwell.

Also, it is perhaps too much to ask for consistency across Mr. Bramwell’s articles if he can’t even manage consistency within his articles, but I do want to point out that in his big-splash article “Goodbye to All That"-written for the American Conservative after Buckley asked for his resignation as trustee of the National Review, he had this to say of the canonical writers that he now announces as being such good reads:

“Although it boasts a carefully husbanded canon of supposedly foundational texts, the men who wrote them—Kirk, Strauss, Voegelin, Weaver, Chambers, Meyer—were notorious eccentrics given to extravagant claims whose policy implications remain largely obscure.”

I have no problem with criticisms of the conservative movement, and I don’t necessarily think that the critic is obliged to offer an alternative. But my problem is that I don’t always understand what Mr. Bramwell is getting at with his criticisms. They seem shotgun. I thought the first half on the War of “Goodbye to All That” was brilliant. Later my ox (and any self-identified paleo’s ox) got gored. Fine. I’m a big boy. I can take it. Just what are we then left with per Bramwell? Maybe I’m just dense.

Mr. Hooft – I think a more sympathetic reading would show that I haven’t really contradicted myself. I suggested a useful test for determining whether the movement canon is adequate qua canon – namely, do even those who reject conservatism feel compelled to read the canonical books, in the same manner that even those who reject liberalism feel compelled to read Locke of Mill (or in the same manner that everyone feels compelled to read Burke)? The answer is no. I would classify the canonical writers as “major minors,” to borrow the critic’s typology. Major minors are worth reading, but they aren’t essential.

Also, while I understand that many take umbrage at my language, that the authors are generally “eccentric” and “extravagant” is simply true. The joke, “Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton!” is funny precisely because Voegelin’s theorizing (to take one example) leaves the real world so far behind.

As for me… I write for Taki’s for the simple reason that they’re interested in publishing what I have to say. Nonetheless, perhaps I should confess to a certain hypocrisy in continuing the very conversation (re: conservatism and the conservative movement) that I am arguing should cease. I guess you should never trust a man in a bow tie! ;)

Dear Mr. Bramwell:

Those who stridently attack their fathers don’t get the benefit of charitable readings.

I quoted your earlier assertion of the major-minors as being “eccentric” and prone to “extravagance” [with which I agree, actually] to contrast with your claim in today’s post that they are very worthwhile reading. This, I suggest, is confused or even contradictory. (Unless your position is that movement conservatives should NOT read the conservative canon, because for them it’s pernicious, but all others should, because for them they are worthwhile).

Anyway, I know as a corporate lawyer and young father you are unlikely to have much time on your hands, but you should really cease publishing these articles. You were reared in the Movement. You publicly broke with it and criticized it. A gentleman gets to publish 1 one of those articles. “Goodby to All That” was that article. But now you’ve started repeating yourself. So enough with this.

Instead the good doctor wants more of this: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/who_are_we/
please, but then not so half-baked.

You guys are losing not because of poor financing, but because your pseudo-scientific materialistic reasoning is boring and hopeless. Neocons’ fantasies brought people some hope, Global Warming is about salvation, even Obama brings hope to some. Try bring people hope you too, and they will love you.

Absolutely agree with Dimitri.
Red Phillips says: I don’t necessarily think that the critic is obliged to offer an alternative.
Well, how else do you want to attract people and convince them to support your movement? The media abound with criticism of all kind. Maybe Mr.Bramwell’s message is that the movement needs less canon and more pragmaticism. For example, how can conservatives cede the ecological issue to liberals? Doesn’t conserve also pertain to the enviroment?