Back in the 1950s, when Bill Buckley and his friends launched National Review, they pretty self-consciously attempted to blend the kinds of traditionalist conservatism that looked back to Burke or de Maistre with what may be described as Manchester liberalism which in the 20th century was associated with people like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. The key to the success of American conservatism was its ability to maintain, for decades, a stable coalition between the "Manchester liberal" types, and the various social and cultural conservatives, traditionalists, and often outright racists.
John B. Judis's biography of Buckley, "William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives" notes that Buckley at one time attempted to write a full scale treatise on conservative political philosophy which would attempt to synthesize the various forms of conservatism together into a coherent body of thought. He eventually gave up the project when he apparently realized that this couldn't be done. There was among other things the obvious thing that a full throated defense of free market capitalism is incompatible with the defense of traditionalism, since capitalism itself is the greatest force for undermining and destroying time hallowed traditions as Marx noted long ago.
Jim Farmelant
---------- Original Message ---------- From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: [lbo-talk] Conservatism Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:58:26 +0100
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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