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- Jun 21, 2012
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There are, it seems to me, two main threads intertwined within modern Western conservatism (American and otherwise), and that these divergent viewpoints differ in a greater degree than the superficial rubric of "libertarian" against " authoritarian" that is sometimes used to describe it.
For the sake of indirect communication, I'll broadly refer to them as "Burkean" and "Bismarckian" conservatism. Though neither figure is perfectly representative of the tendency I've ascribed their names to (Burke, after all, was personally a traditionalist and Bismarck was certainly a great modernizer in his own right), they're sufficiently representative of each in kind to be useful.
The first tendency, the Burkean, might paradoxically be said to include both figures popularly labeled "neoconservatives" and right-winged libertarians. These groups are often assumed to be two hostile and warring camps, but underlying both perspectives is a commitment to a worldview derived basically from Enlightenment-style thought. Right-libertarians might invoke the spectre of Hegel in denouncing "neoconservatism", while the dialectitians in this latter camp might regard the right-libertarian empiricism as shallow, but both believe that they are conserving a Western tradition of rationality derived from abstract principles. In practice, Rand's concept of Reason as "the guiding fundamental of free society" is little different from Hegel's "the Rational is the Real and the Real is the Rational", no matter how different the systems undergirding both statements may be.
The second group, the Bismarckians, may also be called 'T'raditionalists. They reject the primacy of any humanly-induced Reason used as a tool for social organization, and regard claims to unbiased access to pure knowledge, uncolored by culture, with skepticism. Accordingly, they are less likely to go in for unmitigated paeans to abstracted capitalism - see The American Conservative's recent trajectory into New Dealesque economic rhetoric - and may lean populist on certain technical issues of the economy.
For myself, I regard both positions as woefully useless and the intellectual tension between them drove me from the conservative camp. Like the Bismarckians I am skeptical of Rational Utopianism (and the concept of 'reason' altogether), but I categorically reject the retrenchment of Christianity as a solution - it was, after all, Christianity's promise of a "new Heaven and a new Earth" that brought us here. I share my individualism with the Burkeans, but have little truck with their systematizing.
If the Right could get
For the sake of indirect communication, I'll broadly refer to them as "Burkean" and "Bismarckian" conservatism. Though neither figure is perfectly representative of the tendency I've ascribed their names to (Burke, after all, was personally a traditionalist and Bismarck was certainly a great modernizer in his own right), they're sufficiently representative of each in kind to be useful.
The first tendency, the Burkean, might paradoxically be said to include both figures popularly labeled "neoconservatives" and right-winged libertarians. These groups are often assumed to be two hostile and warring camps, but underlying both perspectives is a commitment to a worldview derived basically from Enlightenment-style thought. Right-libertarians might invoke the spectre of Hegel in denouncing "neoconservatism", while the dialectitians in this latter camp might regard the right-libertarian empiricism as shallow, but both believe that they are conserving a Western tradition of rationality derived from abstract principles. In practice, Rand's concept of Reason as "the guiding fundamental of free society" is little different from Hegel's "the Rational is the Real and the Real is the Rational", no matter how different the systems undergirding both statements may be.
The second group, the Bismarckians, may also be called 'T'raditionalists. They reject the primacy of any humanly-induced Reason used as a tool for social organization, and regard claims to unbiased access to pure knowledge, uncolored by culture, with skepticism. Accordingly, they are less likely to go in for unmitigated paeans to abstracted capitalism - see The American Conservative's recent trajectory into New Dealesque economic rhetoric - and may lean populist on certain technical issues of the economy.
For myself, I regard both positions as woefully useless and the intellectual tension between them drove me from the conservative camp. Like the Bismarckians I am skeptical of Rational Utopianism (and the concept of 'reason' altogether), but I categorically reject the retrenchment of Christianity as a solution - it was, after all, Christianity's promise of a "new Heaven and a new Earth" that brought us here. I share my individualism with the Burkeans, but have little truck with their systematizing.
If the Right could get