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Entry: My Book Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/my_book#4379 Post contents: In anticipation of my reading Gottfried’s book, three theses: <b>1. There is no such thing as conservatism in the USA.</b> – The Hamiltonians, Republicans, and Neoconservatives are New Whigs. – Jefferson loved Paine. Calhoun started out a Jeffersonian. In the _Disquisition_ he’s what Europeans call “Liberal”, and I’ll call “Classic “Liberal”. Like the Classic Liberals, he dislikes democracy and has put its finger on democracy’s central fault. – Robert Taft is a Classic Liberal. – Mencken and Goldwater are libertarians. – The only Real Conservatives in the USA are Kirk, Wilhelmsen, and remotely those two escape artists: Henry Adams and Bernard Berenson. <b>2. Some movements in Europe called “conservative” are in fact nothing of the sort. </b> a. The Browns – one and all revolutionaries based on racialist, nationalists, Fascist (the Italian movement) b. Absolutism – more Newtonian-Mechanical, the theist’s Hobbes. c. Carl Schmitt – Absolutism rescripted, into pure Hobbes; the Donoso Cortes of the Dictatorship speech d. Christian Democracy: classic natural law and Catholic Social Teaching since Leo XIII e. The Hegel of _Philosophie des Rechts_ 3. <b>Real Conservatism comes in shades a. The founder: Justus Möser b. The Blancs: De Maistre, Bonald, the Ultras and Charles X Bourbon, Carlists, the Jacobites and the Anglican Non-Jurors, the Legitimists (whose thought became proto-Christian Democracy), Donoso Cortes, Neo-Gallicanism, Wilhelmsen? c. The Neo-Ultramontanes: De Maistre, Lamennais, Veuillot, Pius IX d. Burke as Old Whig, High Church Anglicanism of Laud and the anti-Latitudinarianism, Charles I Stuart, High Toryism of Samuel Johnson, the later Coleridge, Newman, Pusey, Waugh, Eliot, Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis. Roger Scruton e. conservatives of the _Romantiker_ Circle: Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the young Schelling, Adam Heinrich Müller f. The Storm and Stress conservatives: Chateaubriand e. the later conservatives: Carl von Savigny, Friedrich Gentz, Ernst Brandes, Karl Ludwig von Haller, Görres, the earlier Windthorst, Le Play, Émile Keller, René de la Tour du Pin, Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury. g. The extremist conservatives: Maurras & co. I would enjoy reading about Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's distinction between traditionalism and conservatives. For Karl Mannheim, Conservatism was simply traditionalism come into a political consciousness in light of the challenge of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. For Mannheim, Conservatism is: a. preference for the concrete rather than the abstract, or that one starts with the concrete. A conservative looks at a completed structure, not a blueprint. b. a qualitative concept of freedom, extended to estates c. one approaches things from behind, from its history, and the longer the history, the better. d. a spacial concept of history: the presentness of the past. e. the organic (as metaphor) over the mechanical or atomic. Sent at: 2008 12 02