Conservatism: Origins, Traditions and Thinkers Lecture 1 May 16, 2006
Important Concepts: Right and Left Political Spectrum Radical and Reactionary
Classical Liberalism Montesquieu (1748) John Locke (1670s) Adams Smith (1776) Thomas Jefferson (1776) John Stuart Mill (1859)
Modern Liberalism John Rawls (1971) John M. Keynes (1919) Isaiah Berlin (1969)
The French Revolution
Joseph de Maistre
Edmund Burke
A new concern? NO T. Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) Life without government is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”
The American Revolution-1776
"a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve".
Loyalists vs. Revolutionaries
Declaration of Independence “ Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. ”
Back to Burke’s definition: The American Dilemma… What to preserve?
Louis Hartz The Liberal Tradition in America
Two Orientations: Community and Individuals
Two Orientations: Community Traditionalist-Reformist
“Organicists” Russell Kirk -more concerned with reversing -negative view of society
“Reformists” Peter Viereck -concerned with adaptation -positivist of society
Paleoconservatives 1)Nativists 2)Isolationists 3)Protectionists 4)State Right’s 5)Anti-Welfare State
Neoconservatives 1)Opportunity 2)Interventionism 3)Free Trade 4)National Government 5)Conservative Welfare State
The Problem of Organicists Goes back to Burke… What to Preserve? Is conservatism ahistorical? Is there a starting point?