Neither a Turnoff Nor a Silver Bullett
Austin Bramwell and Gerald Russello have taken different sides on whether American conservatives need a “canon of great books” to guide them. While Bramwell has disputed the value of this project, Russello aided by Dan McCarthy has argued on its behalf. Despite my forty-year involvement as a scholar dealing with the American Right and, more recently, the faux Right, I find myself unable to come down fully on either side. There are two reasons for my indecisiveness. Although Russell Kirk, the early Buckley, Frank Meyers, James Burnham and other exponents of what was called “American conservatism” in the 1950s are well worth reading, Bramwell is correct that they are not particularly useful for understanding today’s “conservatism.” In fact there is less continuity between these conservative founding fathers, whatever their own differences might have been, and the current “movement” than there is between the Weekly Standard and Humphrey Democrats of the 1960s. Reading the proposed canon yields about as much insight into the current “conservatism” or yields about as much instruction concerning how to take the conservative movement back as do the sermons of a seventeenth-century Anglican divine for those trying to reorganize the British Tory party. Bramwell exaggerates their stale, off-putting qualities, but he is on target when he remarks that the old founding fathers are no longer effective in drawing people to the right.
My second reason for indecisiveness is that the thinkers in question are worth studying, but not for the reasons suggested. One should study them for what they have become, namely, erudite theorists, piquant stylists, and/or interesting writers about a period of time that now belongs to history. Ascribing these characteristics to those whom Russello and McCarthy seek to praise is by no means a putdown. I would consider my life well spent if I too landed up in the same category. But such an honor has nothing to do with the present “conservative movement,” or with leading that movement back to a largely mythic past. In fact being a progenitor of the present movement may not be an honor at all, considering where its talking heads have taken the US—and considering where they might drag us during a McCain (and Lieberman?) presidency.
There were continuing references to conservative founding fathers in the 1980s, while the neoconservatives were taking over the Right. While this ritualistic practice (or the fact that Heritage showers praise on Kirk) does not discredit those being quoted, it does suggest that paying homage to past conservative writers has not saved the Right from alien appropriation. Having our canon will not change the direction in which the American Right has gone and will likely continue to move. Moreover, the present power elite have been issuing their own, well-publicized hagiography. Last year NR printed their list of the ten greatest conservative works, and Kirk and his Conservative Mind were not even on it. At the top of this list were the neocon darlings Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa. The current movement has its own inspirational reading, which may or may not overlap ours, but what it recommends receives far more attention than any canon that our side might call to public attention.
That said, there are scholarly reasons for studying Kirk, Rothbard, Weaver, Burnham and other figures associated with postwar conservatism or libertarianism. Their works are still worth pondering although not necessarily for political direction. But perhaps that shouldn’t matter. The movement that some of our readers would like to revive is now on a life-support system. And those who may eventually succeed in redirecting the conservative movement would not likely be students of a “canon.” They would be people of action often driven by outrage, but in all likelihood not those devoted to the aesthetics of Russell Kirk. It is also an unfortunate fact that most of our canon writers who were then around did little or nothing to prevent the straying of their movement. And most of those who in the 1980s ran to collaborate with the neoconservatives claimed to be loyal disciples of the “great thinkers” of postwar conservatism. This is not so much a criticism of those who would figure in our canon as it is recognition of the results of the unequal distribution of power. Having our own canon or referring back to older ones would not affect this reality.
Like Russello, but unlike Bramwell, I wish to praise those conservative greats, whether or not they drive young people away from what is already an illusory “conservative movement.” James Burnham, Robert Nisbet, and Murray Rothbard, among many others, shaped my view of the democratic managerial state, and I consider these figures to have been brilliant analysts of their age. All of them are important for me in the same way as Pareto and Weber, namely, as relevant social thinkers who helped explain our historical direction. I was also newly impressed by Kirk, when I encountered Russello’s interpretation of his aesthetic dimension. The presentation of Kirk as an anti-modernist, with one foot in classical European conservatism and the other in postmodernist theory, made me appreciate the subject of Russello’s monograph-- no less than the author. In any case all such thinkers have much to teach, even if their value is no longer related to a now misrepresented “American conservatism.” Their best writings recall Thucydides’ description of the study of great events, by helping to “make us wise for all time.”
Comments
I think the dividing line should be drawn around modernism. The pro-modernists, whether of the left or right wing variety, are on one side. The anti-modernists, whether pre- or post-, are on the other.
John
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Paul,
Thanks for the kind words, and your typically erudite and gracious analysis. I don’t think we disagree all thhat much, except that I believe Kirk’s aesthetic dimension may still have the power to inspire people who want to know a body of thought concerned with things other than ephemeral political victories.
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Excellent essay! I got National Review and read almost all the issues from 1960 to about 2003. There is a lot of good worth studying. However all our dreams and hopes seem to have ended in ashes. It leaves a bittersweet taste in my mouth.
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Shouldn’t a true conservative canon include thinkers like Hayek and Hazlitt? Or maybe Humanae Vitae? Which come to think of it, is the absolute essence of all conservative belief in one simple Encyclical?
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“This is not so much a criticism of those who would figure in our canon as it is a
recognition of the results of the unequal distribution of power.” -P.G. There’s no redress of that reality except at this point violently not that that is a sure fire solution due to our impotence. I am humbled but is God forever mocked-?-one could ask rhetorically/or whatever way one desires. Puts me in mind of both the new testament and I wish I could think of her name right now but an illuminating and worthy southern,
female writer post wwII (who always seemed in her works to know the score between inevitable good and evil) - ‘Behold the kingdom of heaven the violent bear it away.’ (I could google her - but I don’t google much.
I giggle.) It’s a sort of double-edged sword kind of statement as is a lot of the NT - i.e. sometimes the inanely violent ruin the peace… but if it gets so bad, only the violent restore the kingdom, or the approximate balance in this word requisite. That’s the NT - the hero the prince of peace - but paradoxically not ‘above and beyond overturning tables of the money changers if in the temple [of Life.] ACTUALLY life itself is rarely that large. Historically the prince of peace the Essene Jesus wouldn’t have, he was educated. His counterpart or opposite at the time the revolutionary might have if robbing the tables. But put them together as one [yin & yang] and there’s a good plot. Enter historically in literature Anton Chekhov, who says intuitively sorry no such thing. But he didn’t get the spiritual sufficiently into it even if there is no plot. That’s why I’m thinking that female, Southern writer of what the 50’s? It’s a rough game or perhaps more than that, literature - you might want to tackle instead being a center on a football team? HIKE! Hike? Yes idiot. The whole team went off sides. The educated usually settle to be a king of comedy. It lowers the blood PRESSURE. Ain’t
life grand? That’s the point, I guess (intuit), it’s the question never an ‘answer.’ -?- Sorry, paul g. back to you. What’s that female southern writer’s name? darn, but I ain’t google’ing it.
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John Medaille said:
“I think the dividing line should be drawn around modernism. The pro-modernists, whether of the left or right wing variety, are on one side. The anti-modernists, whether pre- or post-, are on the other.”
As an apt example of the important affinities between pre- and post-modern here’s a linkto a wonderful interview with John Milbank:
http://theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=370
Excerpt:
To my mind then, modernity is liberalism, liberalism is capitalism (‘political economy’) and capitalism is atheism and nihilism. Not to see this (or rather not to fully see this) is the critical deficit of Marxism. Again, Taylor is right: all critical resistance to modernity is ‘romantic’’ in character: it 1. allows that more freedom and material happiness is a partial good; 2. yearns also for elements of lost organic values and 3. realises that the anti-body, anti-festivity, anti-sex and doctrine of hell-linked disciplinary and over-organised character of Latin Christendom is ironically responsible for the Enlightenment mentality.
I’m starting to think that this triple romanticism is more fundamental than left/right characterization, which after all is a kind of accidental result of the French Revolution. Both left and right, as André de Muralt argues are nominalist: either one favours a strong single centre of money or power or both (right) or the rights of the many singly or when totted up (left). Both positions are also in the end atheist.
We need instead a new kind of ‘romantic’ politics that is specifically religious, and often Christian, in thinking that one can only get distributive equality on the basis of agreed values and an elite transmission and guarding of those values. A more Carlylean and Ruskinian politics then—basically left yet with elements that are not really right so much as pre-modern and traditionalist. Strictly speaking the pre-modern predates right versus left. In Great Britain Phillip Blond is developing a crucially important new mode of ‘Red Toryism’—which might in my view equally be seen as a kind of ‘traditionalist socialism’. This is starting to be noticed in very significant public places and in effect marks the political translation of the paradox of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ and the beginning of its entry upon the political stage.
The hard thing now for critical thinkers to do is to think outside ‘leftism’. They have to see that if neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism have totally triumphed this is because the left in traditional mode is incapable of carrying out an adequate critique. In the end this is because it’s atheistic – one needs to be religious to recognize objective values and meanings as not just epiphenomenal. Today in Great Britain the left is more or less now defining itself as scientistic which actually permits an underwriting of a new mode of fascism and ‘racism’ as said above.
‘Left Christians’ now have much more to stress the Christian bit if they are truly going to be able to make a critical intervention.
Atheism is bourgeois oppression. Atheism is the opium of the people—it claims to discover an ontology which precludes all hope. This is what someone like Žižek now openly says. We need now to celebrate instead the faithful legacy of peasants, learned, honourable and paternalist aristocrats, Christian warrior kings like Alfred the Great, yeomen farmers and scholars. Péguy is the man for the hour. William Cobbett also.
Chesterton and Belloc likewise.
Now, I of course would want to qualify one or two of Milbank’s points (so as to modulate
his categorical rejection of liberalism and capitalism is a mutualist/left-libertarian
direction), but regardles: these are the sorts of ideas I would love to see paleo-type
conservatives engaging. That doesn’t mean giving up the writings of Nisbet, Burnham, or Weaver, but
re-work and modify them to eliminate their partial captivity to certain 50’s-era assumptions.
Peace,
Araglin
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I suspect Gerald Russello and I are on the same wave length in our understanding of the
value of Kirk or for that matter Eliseo Vivas. We are looking primarily at aesthetic
thinkers who make culturaly conservative statements. As for John Millbank, he is a well
educated historian of social theory,but most definitely not a political traditionalist.
Millbank has no trouble attacking Joseph deMaistre from his premodernist
sacramental standpoint as some kind of lackey of the Enlightenment, but like Catherine
Pickstock and others in his movement of Anglo-Catholic liturgical traditionalism, this
Cambridge professor is on the multicultural, socialist Left.
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Professor Gottfried,
I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my comment re: Milbank and Pickstock (who, as I recall, may have shared an issue or two of Telos with you in the 90s…
By way of response, though: I don’t blame you for being suspicious of my claim that paleoism might stand to learn something from Milbank politically - after all, he has has said and written a number of things over the years which appear to have come straight out of the “multiculturalist, socialist left”: like, when he reproached the then-Pope John Paul II for what he perceived to be quasi-fascistic elements in Centessimus Annus, or in his (to my mind) unfair treatment of Maistre and Bonald…
However, I don’t think (in his heart of hearts) that he ever really meant those sorts of things, but that they were just rhetorical concessions that he felt compelled to make in order to get on in the Academy.
Even in his earliest writings, when he describes himself as a “socialist,” he makes fairly clear, when one takes the time to follow his footnotes, that he has in mind a very pecular sort of “blue socialism,” inspired largely by Cobbett, Ruskin, Maitland, Chesterton, Tolkien, etc. (with a dose of Marx, but a stronger one of Proudhon, Kropotkin, Landauer, etc.). It’s an extremely anti-statist socialism, which looks much more to the Church, producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, free associations for mutual aid, and other intermediate bodies to achieve the sorts of social ends that he favors.
In his more recent work, he has seemed much more willing to speak openly about his politically traditionalist sympathies: see, e.g., his piecees “On Complex Space,” “The Gift of Ruling,” “Liberality versus Liberalism,” and “The Future Of Love: A reading of Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est.” Admittedly, none of this works unqualifiedly embrace conservative or traditionalist ideas but for the most part even his hesitations read more like rhetorical hedges to prevent this or that maoist conversation partner from pinning him down and winning cheap points by outing him as a full-on reactionary.
Finally, while as far as I know, he is still an “Anglican” of sorts at present, I’m betting that he’ll become an actual (not anglo-) Catholic before you know it.
Thanks,
Araglin
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What ever happened to Plato and Marcus Aurelius and Livy and Homer?
Of course I’m half-joking in that I don’t doubt that the vast majority of takimag readers *do* read these writers and others like them. I just think studying the classics should take precedence to studying the canon of a vaguely-defined political movement - not to trivialize the importance of Burke ‘n’ Kirk. After all, they permeate *all* Western thought in one way or another, liberal or conservative.
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“Millbank has no trouble attacking Joseph deMaistre from his premodernist sacramental standpoint as some kind of lackey of the Enlightenment, but like Catherine Pickstock and others in his movement of Anglo-Catholic liturgical traditionalism, this Cambridge professor is on the multicultural, socialist Left.”
-Paul Gottfried
If we don’t know our limitations we have one more. When those of influence and power don’t know their limitations we have MANY more?
Yup. Thought gathers language into simple saying. -Heidegger
Paul S. (above) : the female southern writer’s name you’re thinking of as well as her works is I suspect
Flannery O’Connor -?-!
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