Putting together a reading list for traditionalists and classical conservatives. If you care to contribute...

Putting together a reading list for traditionalists and classical conservatives. If you care to contribute, post some titles

youtube.com/watch?v=CJzyftGfMCk

Anglo-American School
>Lament for a Nation
>Realms of Being
>Ideas have Consequences
>Folkways
>Reflections on the Revolution in France
>Democracy and Leadership
>Religion and the Rise of Western Culture
>The American Republic (Brownson)
>Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
>Quest for Community
>David McCullough's "John Adams"
>The Wasteland
>The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
>Sexual Desire (Scruton)
>The Abolition of Man
>The Benedict Option
>The War Against the Family
>The Abolition of Britain

Continental School
>The Great Transformation
>Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions
>The Concept of the Political
>The Decline of the West
>Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

>The New Science of Politics
>Demons
>The Question Concerning Technology
>The Philosophy of Right

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditionalist_conservatism

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Taine
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

If there is curiosity as to why I have been using the "Appeal to Heaven" flag in the OP, it is because libertarians, who are often equated with classical liberalism, appropriated the "Don't Tread On Me" flag from the American Revolution. So as a counter, I also appropriated a flag from the American Revolution to symbolize traditionalism, often equated with classical conservatism. Despite the characterization of the American Revolution as a movement of "classical liberalism," that is actually not the whole story: we must remember that Edmund Burke, widely regarded as the "Founding Father" of the Anglo-American school of classical conservatism, was very supportive of the American Revolution There were certainly major classical liberals involved in the American Revolution, such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Thomas Paine (all of whom supported the French Revolution), yet there were also classical conservatives involved such as John Adams, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton (all of whom opposed the French Revolution--but while Adams had Cicero for his hero, Hamilton's hero was Julius Caesar). Russell Kirk considered Adams to be, for American traditionalists, equal in importance to Burke. In his "Defense of the Constitution of the United States of America," John Adams said,
>Was there, or will there ever be a nation whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches? The answer in all mankind must be in the negative.
In his commentary and rebuttal to Mary Wollstonefraft's "French Revolution", Adams squarely rejected the liberal conception of equality, and said,
>If [the] empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown, happy indeed will it be for the world; but if all religion and morality should be over-thrown with it, what advantage will be gained? The doctrine of human equality is founded entirely in the Christian doctrine that we are all children of the same Father, all accountable to Him for our conduct to one another, all equally bound to respect each other's self love.
Adams considered rule of law to be vital, and condemned mob violence against Tories. He did not see the American Revolution as overthrowing the law, but upholding it in the face of violation by the British government. He personally admired the British system of government, and said the American system ought to emulate it (in Adams's conception, Congress and the Senate were to be the American alternatives to the House of Commons and the House of Lords). Little wonder that in looking back, Adams proudly considered his legal defense of the British soldiers involved in the Bostom Massacre to be one of the greatest services he rendered to his country. Also little wonder that he was scandalized by the French Revolution, saying, "Dragon's teeth have been sown in France and come up monsters."

The Myth of the state - Ernst Cassirer

There has been some misunderstanding over what the term "conservative" means in "classical conservatism". In contemporary usage, "conserve" often means to "expend slowly". That is *not* what conservatism means in the phrase "classical conservatism"; it is rather meant in the way Burke and everyone else of his time used the word "conservation". "Conserve" meant to protect, guard, watch over. Constables, for example, were called "conservators of the peace". What traditionalism is concerned with "conserving" is not "the past" or "the present", but "the permanent things" (a phrase Russell Kirk lifted from T.S. Eliot). The "permanent things" are things which transcend time and place, they have always been with us. Some examples: Duty, sanctity, piety, purity, grandeur, mystery, sacrifice, earth, land, sobriety, gaiety, craftsmanship, eloquence, honor, shame, rite, reverence, virility, fertility, valor, gravity, merriment, largesse, chastity, awe, horror, mercy, discipline, responsibility, loyalty, faithfulness, order, grace, honesty, sincerity, virtue, family, repentance, silence, song, heritage, distinction, tragedy, nature, wisdom, ceremony, glory, forgiveness, righteousness, truth, splendor, ritual, good and evil, might, delicacy, tenderness, confession, folk culture, high culture, innocence, majesty, decorum, virginity, grief, joy, devotion, modesty, self-respect. Traditionalism is also therefore opposed to "corrosive" or "subversive" values, that is, those values which erode the "permanent things", such as: Hedonism, indignation, nominalism, utilitarianism, individualism, materialism, moral relativism, consumerism, formalism, freethought, scientism, poshlost, iconoclasm, irreverence, philosophical presentism, pornography, mammon, consequentialism, urbanization, brutalism, shamelessness, promiscuity, levelling, novelty.
Richard Weaver said,
>"subversive activity" has an exact application. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more accurate phrase. The expression means plainly an inversion by which matter is placed over spirit or quantity placed over quality.
Traditionalism champions folk culture and high culture over pop culture, because the former two tend to express the "permanent things" (some high culture of course actually attacks the permanent things, but it is still only "high culture" because some permanent thing is exemplified in it) whereas the latter is subversive in the extreme.
Cont

With modernity comes something unprecedented in all of human history: a total war on all permanent things. This is not to say modernity hasn't brought some beneficial things, by no means, but the traditionalist dinguishes between what is beneficial about modernism, and what is poisonous. And the war on the permanent things is what is poisonous. This war is not limited simply to state policy, it is a war that permeates our entire society and lives from the macro to the micro. It is the traditionalist's part to uphold and defend ("conserve") the permanent things against this continuous onslaught, to hold the line to the last breath, and counterattack wherever we can. To prevent mercy from being usurped by tolerance, to prevent self-respect from being usurped by self-esteem, to prevent joy from being usurped by fun, to prevent justice from being usurped by equality, to prevent celibacy from being usurped by sterility, to prevent devotion from being usurped by sympathy, to prevent tenderness from being usurped by sentimentalism; to prevent the entire world from becoming one standardized collection of fungible "units", a world with no quality, only relentless quantity.

You've got my interest

I'll look at it, thanks

Pleased that I do, and welcome

Just don't forget that some of us classical conservatives are loyalists. The revolution was a mistake imo

We tried to defy the natural order of the world and ended up defeating ourselves. We sold out God's country to globalism and degeneracy. I love the idea of the revolution, but it what it ended up being was pitiful.

The Collected Writings of Marx
Minima Moralia - Adorno
Lectures on Biopolitics - Foucault
Homo Sacer - Agamben
The Society of the Spectacle - Debord
The Invention of Tradition - Hobsbawm
The Age of Capital - Hobsbawm
The Culture of Narcissism - Lasch
The Realm of Lesser Evil - Michea
The City of Man - Pierre Manent
Democracy in America - Tocqueville
A world beyond politics? - Manent
An Intellectual History of Liberalism - Manent
Political Theology - Carl Schmitt
Nomos of the Earth - Schmitt

That is somewhat true. While Russell Kirk liked the revolution he attacked the effort to make the planet one giant copy of America obsessed with buying and getting

You might check out Theology and Social Theory

I've not read some of these books, but I plan to, and they are related to the thread.

Continental School
>Reinhart Koselleck - Crisis and Critique
>Augusto del Noce - The Crisis of Modernity
>Panagiotis Kondylis - The Political and Man and Power and Decision
>Karl Mannheim - Conservatism
>Paul Gottfried - After Liberalism and The Strange Death of Marxism

Gottfried is an American, but I feel he is more intellectually indebted to European conservatism, specially German, than to the likes of Buckley and, may God forbid me for uttering this word, the neocons.

Has anyone here ever read Hippolyte Taine?

It looks interesting.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Taine

>This reaction led Taine to reject the French Constitution of 1793 as a Jacobin document, dishonestly presented to the French people.[14] Taine rejected the principles of the Revolution[15][16] in favor of the individualism of his concepts of regionalism and race, to the point that one writer calls him one of "the most articulate exponents of both French nationalism and conservatism."[17][18]

>Other writers, however, have argued that, though Taine displayed increasing conservatism throughout his career, he also formulated an alternative to rationalist liberalism that was influential for the social policies of the Third Republic.[19] Taine's complex politics have remained hard to read; though admired by liberals like Anatole France, he has been the object of considerable disdain in the twentieth century, with a few historians working to revive his reputation.[20]

Classical is basically pre Buckley. Will check him out

Gottfried demolishes the likes of Buckley and even Kirk in "Conservatism in America". He calls out the entire movement for being empty when not simply classical liberal. It gets worse when the neocons take over and the movement becomes everything that conservatism was understood to be before Buckley opposed: an universalist, utopian project of world transformation through political action.

Mm, Kirk's review of Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" lambasts his individualism as anti-Christian . It's tricky to reconcile that with classical liberalism

Although I would concur that Anglo traditionalism is much friendlier to liberalism that Continental traditionalism

What's he think of Richard Weaver?

He mentions him only in a few paragraphs, he doesn't consider Weaver too much important to the shape conservatism took in America.

Bonus track, Gottfried on Augusto Del Noce.

>Burke
>conservative/traditionalist
He was a Whig. Might as well throw in Walpole in there too

Nope, will look into it though

A Whig in Burke's time meant someone who supported the Glorious Revolution and opposed absolute monarchy. He wasn't a Whig in the sense it came to mean by 1820

But he was OUR Whig

>meet a Straussian
>introduces you to more Straussians
>introduce you to yet more Straussians
>everyone thinks you're Straussian

>Straussians
>conservatives

Pick one.

It's sad that this needs to be reminded, but unconditional support for liberal American universalism IS NOT conservatism.