[lbo-talk] Conservatism

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Sep 14 08:58:26 PDT 2009


No, it is the U.S. use of the word conservatism that is weird. Anyone who has read Carlyle or Burke (or de Maistre) knows that Conservatism is about tradition and authority, and decidedly not about free markets (though it is about the rights of property, somewhat). What is sometimes called conservatism nowadays, i.e. free markets, is not conservatism at all, but 'Manchester liberalism'.

Dennis writes


> I used to read Scruton in The Salisbury Review. Weird Brit rightist
> thought from the 80s.

Yes, my brother-in-law Manjit Kumar once made a comment during one of his philosophy lecturers, and Scruton sniffed the air and said 'I smell a Marxist'.

There is a creepy novel Scruton wrote which is all about being manhandled and abused by hippies in the sixties, which tells you that he is not a real conservative at all, but only a liberal who has been mugged (to borrow that unfortunate metaphor) - like Alan Bloom (note to self, must read Ravelstein, Bellow's fictionalisation of Alan Bloom).

The Tory Alan Clark once said of a fellow Conservative MP that 'he was the kind of man who bought his own furniture' - meaning that he had not inherited it, with the house, like Clark. Real authority, in the conservative schema is not earnt, but inherited, which is why all those Perle's and Strauss's would never have made the grade. As the loathsome Lord Macmillan said disparagingly of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet, 'out go the Etonians, in come the Estonians'.

Oh, and Scruton wasn't the first to say that meat-eating was a mark of the higher species - Engels also insists that the vegetarians got it wrong, meat was a vital leap in evolution.



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