Philosophical Conversations Public Opinion philosophy.com Junk for code
hegel
"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
RECENT ENTRIES
SEARCH
ARCHIVES
Library
Links - weblogs
Links - Political Rationalities
Links - Resources: Philosophy
Public Discussion
Resources
Cafe Philosophy
Philosophy Centres
Links - Resources: Other
Links - Web Connections
Other
www.thought-factory.net
'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Kristol on neo-conservatism « Previous | |Next »
October 10, 2007

In American conservatism 1945 in the Public Interest, Fall, 1995 Irving Kristol decribes the impact of the 1960s. He says that in

the student rebellion of the late 1960s, a rebellion aimed primarily at the liberal professoriate - the small minority of conservative professors were largely ignored. This assault reminded many liberal professors that their liberalism had implicit limits, beyond which lay some quite conservative assumptions about the nature of authority in general, and in a university in particular. There is nothing like the utopian idiocies of the extreme left - the "infantile" left, as Lenin called it - to stir thoughts of moderation among the centrist majority. And from such thoughts of moderation, some second thoughts about the implications of moderation are bound to develop, and these second thoughts will always, in that context or that situation, turn out to involve a conservative modification of the original liberalism.

This refers to 1968 and the way conservative liberals were mugged by the reality of rebellion.

The student rebellion had, of course, close ties with the emerging counterculture, which set out to scandalize and delegitimize the regnant liberalism in its own bold and brash way. Liberal professors and liberal intellectuals liked, at that time, to think of themselves as "broad-minded," but they were nevertheless shocked. It's one thing to give scholarly approval to historical, sociological, and psychological studies that demonstrated our conventional family structure to be less universal, more "culture bound," than one had realized. It is quite another thing to see one's children enticed into sexual promiscuity, drugs, and suicide. The liberal professoriate, and many members of the intellectual community, had always kept its distance from "bourgeois society," and always tried to be "objective" about bourgeois mores. Now, a great many discovered, albeit reluctantly, that they had been bourgeois all along.
This was seen in terms of extreme hedonism, antinomianism, personal and sexual individualism and licentiousness. Hence the turn to authority and the neoconservative critique of contemporary liberalism. Interestingly, Kristol highlights the importance of an active religion-based conservatism in this critique, as it's activism was provoked by militant liberalism and the militant secularism associated with it:
This liberalism and this secularism, in the postwar years, came to dominate the Democratic party, the educational establishment, the media, the law schools, the judiciary, the major schools of divinity, the bishops of the Catholic Church, and the bureaucracies of the "mainline" Protestant denominations. One day, so to speak, millions of American Christians - most of them, as it happens, registered Democrats - came to the realization that they were institutionally isolated and impotent. They quite naturally wanted their children to be raised as well-behaved Christians but discovered that their authority over their own children had been subverted and usurped by an aggressive, secular liberalism that now dominated our public education system and our popular culture.
The conservative Christians began to seek links with traditional conservatives, since they shared common enemies - liberal government, a left-liberal educational establishment, a judiciary besotted with liberal dogmas. But this alliance worked smoothly only up to a point, as there is a difference between the kind of liberty" dear to the hearts of economic conservatives and leaders of the business community, and the "ordered liberty" of serious religion. However, the merger of neoconservatism and traditional conservatism that has been underway since the election of Ronald Reagan, is largely complete.
| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 08:44 AM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

Sour grapes all the way down!

We now have the situation described in a new book titled What Orwell Didnt Know by Andras Szanto.

Which is a critique of the wall to wall propaganda/lies promoted by Kristol's "conservative" friends.
A certain fox immediately comes to mind. And of course the OZ here in Ozland.

 
Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Name:
Email Address:
URL:
Remember personal info?
Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)