Who are some of your favorite contemporary conservative authors?

Roger Scrotum

Hopefully. But the marker of my essay told me in conversation that he thought a certain sniffing Slovenian had ideas in parallel with the "alt-right" movement, which shook my confidence a little.

>But the marker of my essay told me in conversation that he thought a certain sniffing Slovenian had ideas in parallel with the "alt-right" movement

WEW lad

What university do you go to, so I can avoid it?

I'd rather not say for fear of doxxing myself, or in the unlikely case that my marker browses Veeky Forums - (although it would be fairly obvious to him, having read my posts, who I am).

My University isn't especially left-leaning or authoritarian about what opinions you should hold. These things are usually at the discretion of the individual marker so I wouldn't worry too much about what University you pick. Universities, by their namesake, employ academics from all over the world and of differing (though usually not so differing) opinions on these sorts of things.

Well then, lets just hope he or she decides to not be a cunt the day the marks are to be done then I guess.

this can be understood as the leftist control on the discourse exercised through institutional power. this is likely a reaction to the discourse espoused by the disenfranchised/outraged. its funny that this very concept is a leftist development of nietzschean thought and suppressed for concerns of being associated with fringe political beliefs on the right.

>its funny that this very concept is a leftist development of nietzschean thought

As someone who has pretty much exclusively read writers of the Left and has only begun recently to dip into Conservative literature, I'm amazed at how often leftist critiques can be applied to the Left itself

I think a good portion of leftist lit consists of stage-IV terminal projection. I think.

Not to mention that they have never ever(at least to my knowledge), actually grappled with Nietzsche's criticism that the Left's god of equality and brotherhood literally is the specter of Christian morals haunting the world.

Michael Oakeshott - Rationalism in Politics

lol

de Benoist

But then I imagine he offends the ideological purity of self identified "conservatives" as much as he does leftists

Argument ad scrutonum: an argument rendered invalid due to being made by Roger Scruton.

eugene vodolazkin

wrote laurus, and the same translator is putting out his new works as well with his input. very exciting.

Short article by him

firstthings.com/article/2016/08/the-new-middle-ages

de Benoist is a New Right thinker who recently claimed to have transcended left and right politics.

He might be interesting for a read but his positions are much more an evolution of an anti-universalist interpretation of interwar fascist and far right thinkers.

He fell for Mohler's conservative revolution meme. You never fall for that.

Recently? He's been saying the same thing since 1968. Tbh the "fascist" interpretations of his work are very weak arguments. His suposednumber one academic rival Tamir Bar-On wrote a 30 page public reply to one of his interviews that amounted to autistic screeching

You will, you chose the wrong field to be a conservative in.

They don't penalise you for difference of opinion. If you think they do you can appeal your grade usually

I think Bannon finally proved what Marxists feared all along, that Post-structuralism were crypto-conservatives.

The problem isn't they judged you too harshly but they softball "acceptable" arguments. You are likely to better grade if you coddle the examiner

im not a conservative, so I might get this wrong, but Alexander Theroux is a great author who seems like a master of conservative satire. Ditto for V.S Naipaul.

VS Naipaul's cynicism in the 70s and 80s was not conservatism, it was despair. Could you recommend a work by Theroux?

fair enough. laura warholic would be my recommendation.

>since 1968
Not exactly, he actually coined the term New Right (Nouvelle Droite) himself.

>Tbh the "fascist" interpretations of his work are very weak arguments.
It's not about interpretations. Benoist is a disciple of Mohler. Mohler was a self-described fascist and butthurt about his former employer Ernst Jünger distancing himself from nationalism post-1945.

In his doctoral dissertation, Mohler labeled all far right and right-wing thinkers from interwar Germany as "conservative revolutionaries" in an effort to salvage nationalist thought from nazi implications.

Benoist tapped into that tradition as well. What I am personally opposed to is not the salvaging of pre-1945 far right thinkers but the universalist-particularist narrative that Mohler invented and on which Benoist has been surfing ever since.

This

Badiou and other maoists called D&G "marketing agents" and proto-fascists. It's nothing new. Besides, D&G influenced Sloterdijk. Still, Deleuze was against power as control and Guattari was a trotskyst militant, saying they are conservative is a bit of a stretch, especially given the gay and lesbian liberation militants they hung out with. Lacan though was pretty conservative, even traditionalist in some twisted and convoluted way.

General: William F. Buckley, Irving Kristol, Russel Kirk, Thomas Sowell, Edmund Burke.

Philosophical thought: Leo Strauss, Eric Vogelin, Friedrich Hayek, Richard M. Weaver, Raymond Aron.

History: Daniel J. Boorstin, Paul Johnson, Jacques Barzun, William H. McNeill, Harry Jaffa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George H. Nash.

Economics: Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ludwig Von Mises, Adam Smith, Eugene Von Bohm Bawerk, Carl Menger, Walter Williams.

Foreign Policy: Norman Podhoretz, Henry Kissinger, Whittaker Chambers, Winston Churchill.

Law and crime: Antonin Scalia, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Q. Wilson, Joseph De Maistre, John Locke, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Warren Burger.

Social Values and Religion: Roger Scrutin, Theodore Dalrymple, Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Blaise Pascal, C.S Lewis, T.S Eliot, Malcolm Muggeridge, G. K. Chesterton.

Oh shit, just realized you said contemporary. I hope this helps anyway.

Can you guys give me the skinny on ENR studies in academia?

I read Bar-On's book Where Have All the Fascists Gone? and it was horribly fucking journalistic. There are a couple other authors like this, including Griffin, that just seem incompetent despite being some kind of self-appointed FASCISMWATCH.

Is it as amateurish, shallow, and shitflingy as it looks?

What would you recommend as an alternative to Mohler's vision, also?

>No Hoppe, Boutang, Carlyle, Gaulle, Baudelaire, Bossuet, etc
???

There is a difference between Conservatism, Libertarianism, and reactionary politics.

Pierre Manent
Pascal Bruckner

Not OP, but I've been circling around reading Strauss for a little while now. Any recommendation on where to start? Anything I need to read before him?

Natural Right and History

Yeah, I'm sure. I guess I've taken some of the online hyperbole surrounding academic practice too seriously.

What field can you be conservative in if not the humanities? Also, I'm not especially conservative myself, I was just experimenting with conservative ideas. Honestly I really don't know where I stand politically nowadays. Maybe economically left and socially conservative? I'm not even sure the two positions are compatible.

>What field can you be conservative in if not the humanities?
Business, Economics, Surgical/Dental, Geology.

Right. I guess I meant culturally conservative.

Theology, In Italy.

Mohler identifies liberalism as some sort of secularised Christian universalist ideology and proposes a counter-ideology which is build on particularistic nationalism and cultural relativism. Benoist's ethnopluralism builds on that.

It is basically a rejection of the pre-1945 narrative that there are superior cultures and races. The New Right basically maintains that difference is what makes us human.

What I dislike about it is the equation of modern liberalism with universalism as liberalism itself is a status quo laissez-faire approach to human affairs and in itself particularist. At the same time it is also universalist as exemplified by American neo-imperailism and democracy export.

I think Benoist and Mohler offer some valid criticisms of modern ideology but their approach is faulty. There is no clear distinction between particularism and universalism in political ideology.

As for academic introductory works I can't help you much as I follow the New Right through its own publications out of personal interest. The scene is actually quite small and its influence is not as big as is sometimes suggested.

Benoist's influence on the Front National is marginal and the German New Righters have only resurfaced recently. Mohler had some influence in the 1980s as a political advisor of CDU chancellor candidate Franz Joseph Strauss. Contemporary New Righters are trying to make inroads into the AfD but are basically divided between pragmatists (around the Junge Freiheit newspaper) and hardliners (around the Institute for State Policy, a self-described think-tank).

>trotskyst militant
Weren't they also both born to literal fascists? there's the theory they infiltrated and reported on the activities of the various communist groups to the Gaullist government.

le tobacco industry shill face.jpg

I wouldn't call him a conservative but it's a really good book. There's not a lot of right-wing fantasy. I wish somebody would upload the early release version of Sea of Skulls.

>There's not a lot of right-wing fantasy
Only the best stuff.

>name yourself "Voice of God"
>actually think that's a clever reference
I read his Moon book and it was a shitty Heinlein ripoff. No thanks.

What's the moon book? I've only read the ATOB and the Summa Elvetica.

>There's not a lot of right-wing fantasy.
I feel like fantasy is conservative by default, through the mere acknowledgement of history and perennial human themes.

Yeah I know right? Conservatives more like conservatards. LOL

fantasy is reactionary
sci-fi is fascist

Generally I think sci-fi deals with displacement and the undermining of culture by demonstrating through thought experiment how transient it is in time and space, and how physical circumstances can warp or break it down. Fantasy by contrast tends to change physical and metaphysical settings while retaining perennial themes, and thus is 'conservative' or yeah, reactionary. Sci-fi is more amenable to leftism because leftism by default is a radical reimagining of human culture.

There mere acknowledgement of the importance of history, or belief in perennial struggles of humankind, is conservative to the extent that a thoroughgoing leftism must cut the present off from them in order to radically reorganize human society. Leftism is ahistorical by nature.

These theories, like those about Zizek being a right-wing plant, seem a bit far fetched to me. Why would someone dedicate their entire life to contemplating and advocating for left wing ideas while at the same time being a spy for the opposite side? It seems counter-productive for their masters in the long run. I get that some don't consider it "real" leftism, but it still gets people attached to certain words and ideas.

Is Scruton actually good? All I've seen is him getting owned by Terry Eagleton.

You should read about the soviet spies who did such a good job at their covers they became paranoid that Russia would think them a double agent and that America knew and was feeding them bad info.

My point is that intellectuals doing this are actively promoting the enemy's agenda. Sure some spies probably helped the side they were spying on so they didn't get caught, but probably not by creating rather widespread belief systems.

what is it about Deleuze's philosophy that connects him to proto-fascism
I know nothing about him because I'm a Veeky Forums baby but I see him mentioned all the time by people like Nick Land and accelerationists

never read, doesn't strike me as conservative though. any links to back that up?

It probably has to do with the fact that Debord and Deleuze are been incredibly unproductive for the left while incredibly effective tools for the right.

Examples

>Letterist International using the methods described by Debord achieve nothing, seriously they achieved so little it drove Debord to suicide because he thought his theories were wrong and useless
>Israeli and CIA Military start reading his theories in the early 00's and put them into practice
>They're so successful at implementing Debord's concepts they start to require every officer familiarize themselves with his works and it becomes the new Art of War
>Same with Deleuze

Then there's Bannon and Trump.

Bar-On is a retard. The problem with these critics is that they try to "categorize" these right-wing thinkers on superficialities. He never counters de Benoist on the actual validity of his analysis. Why bother when you can just call him a fascist.

do you have any specific references about intelligence agencies using french theory?

frieze.com/article/art-war

>tfw Olavo tem razão

Good post.

He has repeatedly said that he's only a conservative because he believes in God and doesn't understand why anyone not believing in God would be a conservative. So he's pretty much worthless.

That's just objectively wrong, Peter Hitchen's conservatism is well formulated, doesn't rely on religion and very mainstream.

You could try Houellebecq.