This approach found similar expression across Europe with fluctuating success. This kind of British national conservatism survived and thrived in varying forms well into the 20 th century when it was buried by Thatcherite neoliberalism. This changed with the evolution of European society from that of aristocratic estates, to social classes, to the masses, at which point the old conservatism mostly withered before the mass ideologies of Left and Right.Ī successful example of the conservatism described by Mannheim was Benjamin Disraeli, who defended those further down the social ladder while remaining loyal to the romantic aristocratic vision of his Young England days. Any moral universality could only be apprehended and attained through the particularity of historical circumstance.Īttendant on this was attachment to a particular social base that conservative thinkers and politicians identified with, entering into a dialectic, each shaping the other. Those who participated in this conservative “way of thinking” wrote and spoke in favor of social hierarchies and “took aim at the materialist scientific approach to government and to economics embodied by the rising bourgeoisie.” Abstract, universalist propositions divorced from the historical and cultural context of the society in question were, at best, useless and, at worst, dangerous. Thinkers such as Edmund Burke, his continental contemporaries, and their descendants into the early 20 th century were defending a particular way of life under attack from various forms of revolutionary rationalism. As Paul Gottfried has said, the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim saw conservatism as “the fashioning of a worldview relating to an existing social situation.” Given this essay’s contention is that Peterson’s vision is not conservative, what is a conservative worldview? For Yoram Hazony, conservatism “refers to a standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.” Conservatism is the effort to receive and maintain an inherited way of life. It is instead Hayekian liberalism delivered with a Calvinist grimness. Grant, would recognize it as conservative. The result is a grab-bag so mixed that neither Russell Kirk nor the elegist of Canadian Toryism, George P. #Criticism of unherd fullThis tendency is on full display in Peterson’s attempt at a philosophical framework. One has to surmise this because the manifesto is completely lacking in the socio-cultural and political-economic specificity integral to conservatism up to the mid-20 th century. Jordan Peterson recently recorded “ A Conservative Manifesto,” to lay out what he views as a viable political philosophy for, one surmises, the American right. “ It is instead Hayekian liberalism delivered with a Calvinist grimness.”
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