I’ve sat in a dark room and asked myself this question many times: where are the intellectual conservatives—and in particular, where are the conservative political philosophers? The answer for the latter is that for all intents and purposes, they simply don’t exist.
When referencing the 20th century, why does T.S. Elliot count as a serious conservative thinker? He was a poet—an extraordinary poet, but still a poet. C. S. Lewis was an apologist and had very little to say about meta-politics, except for some great remarks in the Abolition of Man that with minimal effort could be ported over to political philosophy, albeit with minimal scope. But still. Lewis was an apologist.
What about Mises? The blindingly obvious answer is that Mises has nothing to do with conservatism, and conservatism has nothing to do with Mises.
Conservative organizations regularly include him in their list of recommended authors. Baffling, but understandable, given the absence of any sort of rigorous, foundational work for conservative thought. Who to reference? Surely not Russell Kirk. His seminal work, The Conservative Mind, while doing a half-decent job of coherently expressing a conception of conservatism as such, never achieved critical mass was because Kirk rendered it inextricable from theological foundations. But that’s not the real reason, is it? No, the real reason is that Kirk et al. never engaged in the necessary meta-level analysis beyond superficial platitudes. And that’s about it.
Neoreaction is an attempt at filling in this gap. answer to this lack: How did we get here, where are we going, and what can actually be done?
Conservatives still are content with Kirk. This is why they offer premises almost everyone now denies or at least questions seriously—it’s almost as if they have no access to societal doxastic nets, to the beliefs of the nation. The nation questions your premises, conservatives, and you just blindly repeat your premises.
Hadley Arkes? Robert P. George? When I said there were no conservative political philosophers, I didn’t mean there were no conservative legal thinkers. In fact, there are quite a few. But legal philosophy is different than political philosophy, and the lion’s share of their work is more or less an adoption of new natural law (developed primarily by Germain Grisez and John Finnis, which itself is arguably a modernist aberration of old natural law heavily rooted in metaphysics), which they use in moral examinations of case law and other cases of public morality: pornography, religious freedom, contraception, marriage, abortion—the works.
The Witherspoon Institute has managed to capture some genuine conservatives, but again, they’re not terribly interesting, and are of course barred from adopting illiberalism. They follow the same strategy as First Things: full-speed-ahead-supplication in search of acceptance in public discourse and academia. And because of that underlying rhetorical strategy, the Witherspoon folks are unable to avail themselves of useful tools outside the liberal framework.
But for real ideological development, it’s imperative that the liberal framework is rejected almost wholesale. The Witherspooners et al. are the prime example of blue-pilled conservatism—right motives, but bad analysis.
Whittaker Chambers? No. Barry Goldwater? No.
Sean Han–. You’re not getting it.
Populist demagoguery doesn’t count.
And it’s this tendency towards populist demagoguery that drives away young, intellectual talent. Where do they go? It’s lonely out there. What do they call themselves? Tory anarchists? Fusionists? Burkean whigs? Classical liberals? Ordoliberals? Members of the old right? Traditionalists? Paleo-conservatives? Paleo-libertarians? European conservatives? 18th century American conservatives? Southern conservatives?
Usually they fall prey to the suction effect of libertarianism, which offers an absolute wealth of foundational material. It might be incorrect, ultimately, but there’s enough of the right sort of material to seduce conservative intellectuals over. And then these former conservatives come out (while still insisting they’re deeply conservative) insisting: the state is the root of all evil, virtue can only arise from liberty, the government shouldn’t be in the marriage game, and we should invest all our political resources on lowering the capital gains tax. On a principled basis.
I can’t really blame them. Conservatives offered them nothing.
What about John Kekes? What about Roger Scruton? John Kekes doesn’t engage with the literature, and his book A Case for Conservatism, as I remember it, wasn’t strong and was very limited in scope. Scruton is wonderful on aesthetics, but hasn’t taken the time to seriously engage with political philosophers. Dinesh D’Souza? His Letters to a Young Conservative informs us quite explicitly that modern conservatism is just 18th century liberalism. Jonah Goldberg elsewhere agrees. Conservatism is liberalism, and libertarianism is a subset of liberalism.
Whither conservatism?
This isn’t just the case in political philosophy. This is the case in social psychology, and virtually everywhere else across the board, except for some odd exceptions in law and economics. Not all conservatives are cretins, as Moldbug pointed out, but tendencies are tendencies. There’s a distinct, anti-intellectual flavor to conservatism, and it’s strong enough to drive intellects far from it. Thede dynamics matter. The only intellectuals left either sell their souls or become embittered, crusty curmudgeons without a platform. Exiled paleo-cons floating around a variety of publications kept on the outer-rims of the American right, and they’re not enough to turn the cranky publications that will have them around: World Net Daily, Chronicles, etc.
At the very same time the scenario in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart was coming into play and norms inculcated in university education mattered infinitely more, conservatism spurned the university. When liberal memetic supremacy succeeds in hijacking societal status mechanisms, the battle is fought and won and done with.
Conservatives (the same applies to Christians in general) circled the wagons and developed mirrored, yet baptized institutions. Conscious wagon-circling started in the 1930s, but the fundamentalist movement hasn’t succeeded on any measure at keeping entryism on conservative institutions at bay. Neither has it succeeded in keeping the wider supremacy of liberalism at bay.
Conservative/Christian universities needed to obtain professors from somewhere, and often in order to signal prestige, they hired from Ivy Leagues. That sort of strategy is doomed to produce the opposite result of the original mandate, especially in universities where professors can have substantial autonomy and the ability to disregard overall university objectives. Progressive imperialism leads to degradation of institutions. What cultural institution have they invaded that has resulted in revitalization? I’d be curious if our readers can come up with any examples. Colonize, degrade, destroy social capital. Former church buildings now run by a transsexual priest are converted into condos.
You might not be interested in the public sphere, but the public sphere is interested in you. Withdrawal is not an option. But engagement is not an option, either, at least without the slow and gradual cession of tenets to the mainstream. It’s pretty common to see these two themes endlessly in conflict with one another in Christian circles, but the same sort of group-strategy rhetoric present in Christianity exists in other ideologies—libertarianism, for instance. Not too long ago, Jeffrey Tucker penned an article entitled, Why Do People Fall Away From Liberty? Try and read that without mentally replacing ‘liberty’ with Jesus or the Church.
Modern academic libertarianism has opted for the engagement strategy, albeit with significant costs, namely the turn-your-stomach prostration going on over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (BHL). It comes off as wanting in the club so badly that he’ll go out of his way to signal separation from vulgar libertarianism, saying things like “Krugman is a better economist than Rothbard.” And in a recent article at BHL, in stereotypical fashion, Jason Brennan just dismisses the Let the Baby Boomers Die argument (already an uncharitable way of phrasing it for most proponents of the view, but who’s counting?) outright. Have a read of the comments section for good follow up.
In case it’s removed, I’ll preserve it here.
JoshInca: “There’s a number of problems with this post. 1) The baby boomers are going to die, as has everyone that ever lived. So the dichotomy of let them die vs don’t let them die is a false one. 2) The idea that the baby boomers are universally near destitute is a false one. The vast majority of baby boomers will do just fine.
3) Why shouldn’t individuals suffer the consequences of their decisions? Saying that it’s not their fault is subtle paternalism, stripping ‘them’ of agency and seeking to ameliorate that situation creates ever greater perverse incentives towards more reckless behavior.”
Jason Brennan: “Jasper wanted me to tell you he agrees. In fact, Jasper thinks he’s not really the evil twin, and it’s unfair for me to poison the well by calling him that.”
Letting boomers face the consequences of their actions is a legitimate line to pursue, but BHL isn’t having it because it’s distasteful to his colleagues, and just so icky. And if it’s icky, it’s not to be mentioned, except as an aside. To even take it seriously (academics abuse this word, as academics are status-obsessed and just have to be taken seriously by their colleagues, or they’ll just die. Emphasis added for dramatics. Note that this is the favorite argument of boring and stupid graduate students: Nobody takes *that* view seriously, anymore) is a clear sign of sociopathy.
It’s unfortunate seeing academics participate in the form of Brian Leiterness. Having taken it so long from his mainstream colleagues, Brennan and the rest inflict the same on others. Cathy Reisenwitz is of a lesser order, but Reisenwitz is a little different in terms of motivations. It’s fairly obvious that she receives psychic income from hysterical attention, whether it’s good or bad is immaterial. BHLers want validation from the academic community, and Reisenwitz just wants attention.
There’s such a rich array of material to draw from, I could write a weekly feature doing a roundup of BHL pieces, noting how most of is reducible to: “See, we’re not like *those* crazy libertarians. Why don’t you love us and give us academic validation? Please?”
If anything, this should result in at least some soul-searching. Surely that’s not too much to ask. That’s not to say that BHL folks don’t ever go outside the mainstream. Obviously markets for organs is a controversial issue, but that doesn’t negate any of my prior points.
It’s all terribly boring to have to maintain stupid pretenses, but I understand. They don’t know any other way. Frame control, thede management, social dynamics—all of those things are elusive.
Had they been a little more conscientious, they could’ve examined groups that had a high degree of internal, ideological purity, yet aggressively overtook the mainstream. Or: groups that completely cut themselves off from civil society and maintained a robust, internal culture.
The real answer to the endless ‘engage or avoid’ debate is that frame control and thede management are the more important causal determiners of success or failure, not the strategies as such—but again, it depends on the goal.
In other words, they (by this I mean conservatives AND libertarians, and any other interested parties) should’ve studied Islam and communism, as just two examples. For an absolutely fascinating account of the internal dynamics of communism, see Dedication and Leadership Techniques.
Because you might not click on it, let me bait you with a few select quotes from the book, which is written by a Catholic Priest, who was a former communist for many years:
“This document helps us to answer a question: “How did the Communists capture one-third of the world’s population by 1950, given the fact that Lenin had only a handful of followers in 1900?”
“How did the Communists mobilize the support of Western intellectuals, Russian terrorists, and peasants in Asia, Africa, and Latin America?”
Speaking of which, as a brief aside, the Catholic Church is an example of an institution that has been reasonably externally robust in spite of successive waves of entryism. And by that, I mean they’ve been raped by many-an-ideology, whether by Protestantism, homosexualism, and communism, specifically in the form of liberation theology. Strong walls on the outside, but rotting from the inside.
Conservative political pundits who secretly read Steve Sailer is the best mainstream conservatism can offer. First Things is the best they can offer. Witherspoon is the best they can offer. Liberalism of thirty years ago is the best they can offer. Appease liberalism and liberalism will swallow you whole. Conservatism sent away its intellectuals, and other ideologies opened their arms wide.
Asking conservatives to be good at political theory may be a little bit like asking Catholics to be good at contraception.
This post seems to be conflating two different questions. Where are contemporary academic conservatives, and, are there any conservative philosophers tout court?
Regarding the latter, perhaps the problem is an absence of non-English sources. Of twentieth century writers, Charles Maurras was rigorous and widely intellectually respected (he was the backbone of Eliot’s politics). Likewise Schmitt, who, though a legal philosopher, was certainly more philosophical in themes. Perhaps Carlist thinkers like Juan Vazquez de Mella, or economic nationalists like Othmar Spann? To say nothing of the pre-20th century philosophers, of which there are many, and many of very high intellectual stature, all rather arbitrarily excluded.
Actually, I’m not dismissing anything. Like Tyler does with Tyrone, I think there’s something to the argument I presented, but I presented it an extreme way.
I think that that’s exactly my point, though. Based on the way you framed your original post and your follow up replies in the comment section, it’s extraordinarily hard to interpret it as anything other than dismissal for signalling purposes–your private thoughts on it, notwithstanding.
I’m a long-time reader of BHL. Nobody who blogs at BHL is stupid. Not self-aware, perhaps, but not stupid. This was just borne out of my frustrations with the academic posturing so endemic to the discipline. And like I said, Brian Leiter represents posturing incarnate. I guess as long as you’re aware of the academic status games BHL plays, it’s not as bad, but to think of it more strategic terms, there are other ways to play the game besides ‘engage with supplication’ or ‘flight and isolation’.
But academics don’t usually take the time to consciously think like that because it’s distasteful, despite the fact that they _do_ engage in status games. But if you’re already going to play status games, might as well make them systematic and effective, no?
THE WRONG QUESTION?
Does intellectual conservatism exist? This may be the wrong question.
I’ll argue that yes, intellectual conservatism does exist. Although, when you say “intellectual” it is somewhat troublesome, because it’s not sufficiently articulate for the purpose you intend. Instead, humans demonstrate the ability to argue( persuade or justify) using a limited number of frameworks – and those frameworks constitute a spectrum of complexity from the simplistically intuitive to the ratio-empirical. The question is, what form of argument do you consider to be classifiable as intellectual, where on this spectrum to conservatives conduct their arguments, and for what reason do they fail to conduct their arguments in the manner you consider intellectual.
ARGUMENTATIVE SPECTRUM
1) EXPRESSIVE (emotional): a type of argument where a person expresses a positive or negative opinion based upon his emotional response to the subject. While used as an argument, it is not. It is merely an opinion or expression.
2) SENTIMENTAL (biological): a type of argument that relies upon one of the five (or six) human sentiments, and their artifacts as captured in human traditions, morals, or other unarticulated, but nevertheless consistently and universally demonstrated preferences and behaviors.
3) MORAL (normative) : a type of argument that relies upon a set of assumedly normative rules of whose origin is either (a)socially contractual, (b)biologically natural, (c) economically necessary, or even (d)divine.
4) HISTORICAL (analogical / correlative):
5) RATIONAL (internally consistent)
6) SCIENTIFIC (correlative and directly empirical)
7) ECONOMIC: (correlative and *indirectly* empirical)
8) RATIO-EMPIRICAL (Comprehensive, internally consistent and externally correspondent)
Conservatism, when discussed outside of economics, where it is almost never discussed, is almost always expressed in arational terms (moral argument). Sometimes it is expressed in legal terms – the classical liberal and constitutionalist argument). Sometimes it is expressed in what we call the Burkeian or ‘psychological’ form of argument. But rarely as an analytic, scientific, or economic argument. And never as the central propositions of conservatism – because those central propositions would be untenable to a popular democratic polity – even if they were indeed morally, economically, and politically superior. This is because the popular democratic argument is a failed one, that is in direct conflict with conservatism as a social, economic, political and legal strategy.
So, conservatism is argued most often, “arationally”. The value of conservatism, as an *ARATIONAL* social system of myths, traditions, habits, and formal institutions, is that such a structure, much like religious faith, is impervious to fashionable changes, and in particular, verbal manipulation by Schumpeterian public intellectuals. In fact, I have argued, and I think successfully, that conservatism as practiced is demonstrably scientific: evidentiary – while progressivism is demonstrably and successfully verbalist. A fact which is somewhat humorous or ironic or depressing depending upon one’s own disposition: in effect while conservatism is arationally structured, and progressivism is rationally structured, it turns out that conservatism as practiced is scientific, and progressive is unscientific (religious). Furthermore, science itself is practiced demonstrably, not argumentatively – which only serves to lend credence to the conservative prohibition on hubris, and the mandate for demonstrated results rather than verbal hypothesis.
THE PROBLEMS OF AN ‘INTELLECTUAL’ CONSERVATISM
1) Just as we solved the calculus and physics, before we solved economics and social science, conservatism has been unsolved (unarticulated in ratio-scientific terms) because it is a more complicated system than we had anticipated. And such complicated systems of thought are very hard to use in argument. Worse, they are hard to use in political argument because, under a democratic polity, we require numbers, and complicated arguments are the province of a permanent minority. Until conservatism is articulated in ratio-empirical form, and until public intellectuals can reduce those complex statements to simple narratives and memes, conservatism (Anglo-European Aristocratic Egalitarianism) is an advanced form of social order that is nearly impossible for ordinary people to argumentatively defend.
2) There doesn’t appear to be demand for intellectual argument in conservatism, precisely because conservatives are so dependent upon taught, learned and innate moral intuition. If conservatives cannot ‘feel’ it then they don’t trust it. This turns out to be fairly good when one prevents adding false ideas to conservatism, but it turns out to be fairly difficult to argue conservatism rationally. So therefore, as a majority, conservatism can function and persist in a body of people. But under democratic rule, cultural and political diversity, the need to argue rationally in order to produce laws, and the ability to use law to impose changes upon the body politic, conservative arationalism is a weakness because conservative principles are not sufficiently defensible against (dishonest) framing, loading, overloading, pseudo-rationalism, and pseudoscience. Which is why the 20th century has been so harmful to conservatism: the cosmopolitans were merely superior at using the media to broadcast and repeat as a mantra, nearly any framed, loaded, overloaded, pseudo-rational (postmodern), and pseudoscientific (marxist-socialist) program.
3) I generally test my ideas in the libertarian (libertine) community precisely because libertarianism (libertinism) is an intellectual ideology: structured as a very rigid, very analytic, moral, legal, and economic argument. Libertarians (libertines) are wrong, which is why their argument fails universally in all political populations. But at least it is possible to conduct conservative argument in moral, legal, and economic terms, and develop one’s arguments there. Most of us find, that even if we produce, as you say ‘intellectual’ philosophy, but I would state as ‘ratio-empirical, moral, analytic, legal, and economic philosophy’, conservatives behave so anti-intellectually, that the advocacy of conservatism in ratio-empirical, analytic, moral, legal, and economic terms, is exasperating.
SO THE QUESTION MAY BE “WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES SO ANTI-INTELLECTUAL” rather than why are no conservative philosophers extant. I’m here. A few others are. But the conservative community does not demonstrate a demand for ‘intellectual’ arguments. All things considered, that is not necessarily a criticism. It just so happens that if the academy and the state conspire rather than are separated as were church and state, and in an age of expensive consumer-driven media, financed by hedonistic consumption, conservatives face a perfect storm of destructive incentives, against which traditionalism is not a sufficiently resistant means of argument, because we lack the economic means of ostracizing bad behaviors.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
This clarifies a lot of the points raised by the OP. It seems to me that much of the ‘intellectualism’ of the left is word-salad sophistry designed to status signal, rent seek and solidify the power of the liberal elite. For fun, try out the postmodern generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
The central problem appears to be the democratic system, as outlined by Moldbug. But to what extent are conservatives actually a different breed (if you count them as ‘right liberals’ philosophically – how long will it be until every liberal premise is absorbed into conservative platforms (e.g civil rights dogma)? How will the left manufacture and magnify increasingly minor squibbles? Does the right require an intellectually and philosophically coherent foundation to withstand and defeat liberalism? Should average-joe republican need to understand it for it to work?
Douglas Hyde, while a Catholic convert in the 1950s, was never a priest.
Thanks for that correction.