Conservatism

Any critiques of conservatism?

Edmund Burke (says some change is necessary for conservation)
Nassim Taleb (agrees with Burke on conservatism)

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>Russel Kirk's Concise Guide to Conservatism
It's short, only a little over 100 pages and gives an excellent starting point to get a primer on some Conservative political values to set the groundwork before moving on

>The Conservative Mind - Russel Kirk
Kirk traces out the history of Conservatism in the history of the Anglosphere. His magnum opus, this gives a much more in depth history of conservative thought in the modern age of dominant liberal ideology.

>Framework of a Christian State - E. Cahill
Specifically Christian / Catholic political philosophy where Cahill expounds on the social structure that would best suit a society built around the Christian faith.

>The New Science of Politics - Eric Voegelin
Voegelin himself rejected the name "conservative" during his lifetime, but his philosophy strongly rejects liberal modernity and should be read for that purpose. The New Science of Politics is his main work and talks about what he calls "political gnosticism" which is attempting to immanentise the eschaton by hidden knowledge, scientific or mystical.

>Revolt Against Modernity - McAllister
A book that gives an overview of Voegelin and Leo Strauss' political thought, specifically their criticisms of the modern capitalist liberal democratic regime.

If you get into the Straussians at all it's very advantageous to read Gottfried's book on them.

>natural believes that are the common property of every social being
Do conservatives respect this guy or is he some obscure nutjob that gets memed on /pol/? Because I can’t imagine anyone reading that without having a slight chuckle and then putting that book back where it came from

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This is true but not in the way you think.

He is very respected, even outside conservative circles

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Scruton
youtube.com/watch?v=qFi0rMYuYsA
youtube.com/watch?v=1eD9RDTl6tM

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Eric Voegelin

>person makes thread about essential conservative books
>douche replies with his well prepared, constantly practiced political repartee to turn the thread into another snowball fight
why don't you just fuck off if you're not going to participate in the thread topic?

I know that Traditionalism is kind of a meme on this board (even though it is quite thought provoking), but I would strongly recommend including these two books in any conservatism library:

Crisis of the Modern World - Rene Guenon
Revolt Against the Modern World - Julius Evola

The reason why I feel these are important are because traditionalism is experiencing a sort of renaissance in many conservative intellectual circles at the moment. Whether or not the reader agrees with its ideas, it is still an important topic in and of itself and anyone who wishes to understand the history of conservative literature should be aware of the core concepts put forth in these works.

>n-n-no muh echo chamber
seethe.

Edmund Burke, Juan Donoso Cortes and Carl Schmitt are good groundwork for the modern conservative doctrine.
The Bible, Machiavelli and Hobbes are obligatory prerequisites and that's barely even scratching the surface.

Which books by those authors would you consider essential? Pick one from each.

Conservatism is incompatible with overpopulation and a capitalist society with a dissolving middle class

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For Machiavelli stay away from pop "the prince" it is just a side note ideas from his main work: "Discourse on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius"
Hobbes: Leviathan

Why bother? Hayek BTFO'd conservativism decades ago in The Constitution Of Liberty

Robust paleoconservatism that isn't afraid to activate emergency fascism once in a while isn't. See Samuel Francis.

I’m unfamiliar with him. What would his plan be? I try not to label myself politically, in fact I try to avoid politics, but I think the conditions today are very unique and require a new solution, not looking backwards. All the anons here are in favor of harsh measures, I’m sure. The issue is if leaders use iron fist tactics, they probably can’t be trusted. Also a lot of anons don’t realize how these ruthless leaders would view them, even if they were part of the same party

Alright can you guys tell me if fascism is actually bad? I see it everywhere and I just want a clearer understanding and some unique perspectives.

I highly recommend reading Machiavelli's Discorsi as recommended and Pocock's book on the Machiavellian tradition (which formed the backdrop of the Founding Fathers' mindset).

The whole notion of "plans" is a dangerous one and I think one of the best aspects of the conservative worldview - genuine conservatism, not stupid American conservatism or vague Russell Kirk pining for a simpler time shit - is the intuitive understanding that all plans have to be tempered by concrete experience and by the assumption that the concrete never proceeds according to plan in general. Every political institution, act, actor, and decision is absorbed by its context, creating a synthesis that can't be reduced either to the initial theory or to the context itself. (Lazy conservatism is ironically a result of assuming that "context+experience is everything!" is ITSELF the best political plan, and you're never allowed to have theories or ideals, only try to "conserve" anything and everything that exists in an empty way.)

Theories aren't self-sufficient entities, they have to serve values and choices made prior to theorizing. Do you want to live in a society with a legitimately democratic supermajority of trannies who think raping kids is fine? Are you so committed to democratic "legitimacy" and the integrity of the administrative state, whoever might be at its helm and whatever they might be doing with it, that you would allow that to happen and for your whole way of life to be crushed by it?

You can abstain from questions like these, or consider them only theoretically, during times of peace when the world is asleep. But soon your entire perspective on "plans" is going to shift dramatically, because questions like these will cease to be theoretical. Then you will find yourself swept up in events and processes in which every single decision is concrete, because it has to be. You won't have the time or the luxury to decide whether you want to support Candidate A or Candidate B on purely notional, theoretical grounds, because the fact that Candidate A just strategically allied with the faction that wants to murder you will make the decision for you. This won't necessarily make Candidate B squeaky clean either, but you will have to commit to your moral and theoretical disagreement with him at a different level (e.g. committing to trying to reform and shape Candidate B's movement in a healthier direction now that you have entered it, or committing to only a pragmatic temporary alliance and working toward a better third option down the road).

Sam Francis spent his early career diagnosing the failures of conservatism to prevent the administrative-technocratic state, with its neoliberal-neocon facade, from taking shape. His masterwork is a use of every form of critical theory (left and right) to elaborate a concrete praxis of "how does one destroy this state and replace it with one governed by and for normal people." He tended toward a white ethno-nationalism but it's not essential to his viewpoint either.

>All the anons here are in favor of harsh measures, I’m sure. The issue is if leaders use iron fist tactics, they probably can’t be trusted.
Well again, you often don't get a choice. Suppose you're an ardent French Revolutionary, but the Revolution lapses into Jacobinism, about which you have many mixed feelings, and then France's very existence is threatened by its enemies. Then Napoleon emerges, and he seems like a gift from heaven because he wins victory after victory, but you also disagree with various aspects of his goals (he has made France a dynastic monarchy again, he is an imperialist). Do you say "Napoleon isn't perfect, he's conquering for the sake of conquering at this point, I'm going to shoot him and let France be destroyed instead?" This is a concrete decision, its parameters are set for you, you can't bring it to a higher level through abstraction. Even choosing to desert your post and go hide out in a cottage somewhere might be contributing to the destruction of France and de facto choosing one of the two options, and it may even cause your own death and the rape and killing of your own family as well.

Look at Rhodesia or Ireland. What choices did the average joe have? What about a sensitive poetic soul who really wasn't racist? Was there any "winning" move from a purely abstract theoretical perspective in Rhodesia? Sometimes all you can do is put on some fruity little shorts and fight. That's why it's good to read classical authors like Machiavelli who had to deal with these problems in a concrete way, and didn't have the luxury of sitting on the internet debating the ultimate meta-theory.

Bad from whose perspective? From the Islamist genital mutilator in Germany currently? Probably. From the perspective of the Italian or German about to be turned into an economic satellite of English finance in the 1930s, with the Bolsheviks at the door? Probably less clear. From the perspective of the Eastern European groaning under the oppression of Soviet tyranny and Russification policies, when the Germans show up, liberate your region, reconstitute your country as a republic, and invite your best and brightest into the pan-fascist SS aristocracy? Also less clear.

Do you think that the world is a fundamentally cozy place where nations all naturally get along and there's no need for power blocs or balance-of-power geopolitics? Maybe you find fascism completely incomprehensible then, just like the ardent capitalist and believer in progress through the expansion of capitalism finds the Bolshevik revolution incomprehensibly "unnecessary." But if you believe like Kerry Bolton:
counter-currents.com/tag/breaking-the-bondage-of-interest/
or like Carroll Quigley:
thirdworldtraveler.com/Banks/Tragedy_Hope_excerpt.html
that the world has been enslaved to a network of financial powers who didn't even see the fascist countries in "ideological" (much less moral) terms, but simply saw them as rebellious slaves, maybe you can begin to understand why people like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Ezra Pound called for a European "third axis" between the two great axes (Eurasian and Anglo-American) that could resist the attacks of both.

Even then: Does that mean you agree with every aspect of every fascist economic theory? That isn't even possible, since they are vary so widely. But what if you agree with the fundamental goal of preserving Europe against the "levelling of man" carried out by both Anglo finance and Bolshevism, while being ambivalent about currently existing fascism? Then you become like Evola, or Heidegger, or a thousand other fascist intellectuals who wanted to give inner form and unity to this new civilization that was dawning, while also understanding that it was necessarily still rough-hewn. The Athenians executed the Melian men and enslaved their women and children.

Always ask these questions in concrete ways. Has so-called "liberalism" DE FACTO been any less authoritarian than fascism? It is brutally authoritative, there is no way to operate outside of it without it calling you a criminal and killing you. It increasingly forces you to do bizarre perverse things. It calls you perverse for finding them perverse.

What do you personally think states and politics "do" when things are basically normal, and healthy? What do you basically think normal and healthy mean, politically? Would you rather live in a liberal democracy of trannies that is a (perfectly legal) facade for oligarchic dominance, or a monarchy that is de facto far more free than the democracy?

Burke - Considerations on the Revolution in France
Donoso Cortes - Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism
Carl Schmitt - The Concept of the Political and his essay on The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (sometimes printed together)

However, keep in mind that this is just an introduction to the beginning of the first chapter of what might be considered as "conservatism". Every one of them has their contemporaries with their own contributions or oppositions. And after that more and more from each side of the argument.
Some of this stuff might not be what you intend to find if you're looking for le based fashtrad schizo memes.
This, however, is just political theory and far from actual politics. If you truly wish to get to know more on conservatism (or any other of the three main doctrines), read on history, watch documentaries, read the news from many different publishers to get the idea of how and what might be going on and what to do about it.

Regarding Hobbes and Machiavelli - Leviathan, Discourses on Livy + The Prince
They both wrote a lot of other stuff important for history and law, but these are the very basics and often enough to get you going.
For The Bible, you gotta read it all man.
Plato and Aristotle I would also put in the prerequisites.

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Can't thank you enough for the effort post, user. Finding meaningful conservative literature in this day and age is like searching for rolexes at a landfill. I'll definitely be grabbing these and putting them in the rotation. The only books in your post that I've read are the philosophy books but it was a long time ago. I am curious to see what I would get out of them now.

I don’t want to fight or anything like that. I just want the economy to be better and I think a plan is needed for that. The country has rapidly gone downhill in the last 20 years so I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want a plan in place, even if it doesn’t turn out to expectations? I wouldn’t consider myself liberal but being on this site has made me hate poltards as much as SJWs. Both are delusional. Not talking about you specifically. I just think it’s funny poltards call for an iron fist, but if they were under that iron fist…grass is always greener and it’s always someone else’s fault for their problems, yet they are their own worst enemy

>thinking conservative
Oxymoron

>Can't thank you enough
you can, got some money?

>Seethw

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This

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Rightoid here. Read this looking for the Leftoid's understanding of us. Author's central claim, that conservatism is about thwarting the emancipation of the lower orders, is correct. The book is a collection of essays that vary widely in quality: sections on Burke, Calhoun and Maistre were fantastic and innovative, sections on Rand and Scalia were silly and incoherent, sections on Nietzsche and Hobbes were original but questionably argued.

The high point was his realization that the Right since 1789 has not been "traditionalistic" in any real sense. All of our beliefs and political programs are steeped in the awareness of the Left as an immanent "movement", and the real radicals of the Right in some way or other, starting with Burke, have wanted to create an activist vanguard to oppose it. He harps on the ambivalence the Right views traditional elites with through Burke and Maistre's critiques of the the failed French Aristocracy. That exact same critique is made by us today against the cuckservatives, the RINOs, the as Francis called them. To Robin's credit this is absolutely essential to understanding the psychology of the Right as a movement. Mr. Robin's moral directionality precludes him from calling conservatives "revolutionaries" but that's basically what we are or want to be: soldiers of a "New Old Regime" that is more sublime and more fanatical than the old one that failed and probably deserved to fail.

Anyways, that was his main insight. Like I said if you can find his Maistre and Burke essays you should just read those instead of the whole book. Normalfag conservatives won't like the central claim because they've been buck broken by liberalism but yeah, our movement is fundamentally about preserving and expanding hierarchy and inequality. Freedom is the freedom to be unequal. Norms are good as long as they are inegalitarian norms. Individualism means "don't agitate against capitalism", not "we support the individual as the primary social unit". On that last point, read Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed or something on why the Right is not individualistic. I'd been cribbing him for years before I read that one kek

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Carl Schmitt - Concept Of The Political
Russell Kirk - The Conservative Mind
James Burnham - The Machiavellians
Alexis De Tocqueville - Ancient Regime And Revolution
Christopher Lasch - Revolt Of The Elites
Samuel T. Francis - Leviathan and Its Enemies
Georges Sorel - Reflections On Violence
Walter Russell Mead - Special Providence (he shares a birthday with me)

I would recommend these writings to you
>Richard Hooker - Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie
>Robert Filmer - Patriarcha
>Edmund Burke - Reflections on the Revolution in France
>Alexander Knox - Essays on the political circumstances of Ireland: written during the administration of Earl Camden
>Joseph de Maistre - Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions
>Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn - Liberty or Equality
>George Grant - Technology and Empire

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Conservatives don't understand what it means to be human. They are terrible boring autistic people

What does conservatism even mean today? Just looking towards the past for answers, or maintaining the status quo?

How do you guys respond to the fact that societies and governments only seem to get less conservative over time? That Democracy itself is a progressive concept, and Feudalism and the Monarchy are both dead and buried systems that aren't coming back? That aristocracy is gone and it would take the collapse of society for it to come back? That our cultural institutions willingly shot themselves in the foot? That it may be impossible for us to have a stable conservative society in a world with global regulated commerce and massive cultural pressure?

I'm kinda apolitical but I fancy myself sympathetic to conservatives. I just wonder how you guys really feel once the cards are all laid on the table. To me it seems pretty fucked

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I feel the same way as well.

I'd recommend Venus in Furs by Sacher-Masoch, because conservatism is masochism. Conservatives have done nothing but lose for every century that they have existed. Any self-proclaimed conservative of any time period would be deemed a giga-degenerate liberal by a conservative twenty years prior, because conservatism does NOTHING but lose. It is paradoxically the only constant of the ideology.

It's funny that new holistic sciences (systems biology, e.g.) support a conservative civilization because unpredictability and chaos is best mitigated by slow change, but progressives want fast change because of their cult of pseudoscientific dialectical historicism (the future is surely utopian).

But what if what we need is change and fast?

You could have something like a barbell strategy, but for the most part a conservative society would fair better against things needing fast change because it'd be less fragile to failure.

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Ah yes, because concentrations camps and forced marriages are the same as seeing a brown person on the train

But we aren’t part of a conservative society(except the 1%) and it would be really difficult introduce one nowadays so the point is moot. I’m pretty apolitical except I feel strongly about the dissolving middle class and the constant rat race we are subjected to. Maybe I just have issues with capitalism even though I think every man should be able to make and keep their own…except times have changed and the baby boomers got all of the slices of pie simply because they were born at the right time. Different times need different thoughts. What would be a good conservative strategy to appease me, while not creating massive unrest in some segments of the population? Genuinely curious

I'm not conservative but apolitical. I do think conservatism would give human survival a better chance based on mitigating unpredictability, and taking too much risk is bad (hedging bets). (I find distributism interesting for a conservative society). We can change the system by education and policy changes, like what any ideology does.

I think the education system is impossible to reform. We are living in a time with overpopulation, dwindling resources, high housing prices, etc. Combine the massive population with later stage capitalism, and see how the youth have to be prepared for the world (aka workforce). Jobs are increasingly becoming specialized and more and more niche to fit more people in the workforce. The education system had to change to fit the workforce,

One of the recent things that interests me is the "slow movement."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)
Pic is what a representation of a distributed economy. Looks similar to ecological systems. I think nature itself is slow, conservative, and worth learning from to understand sustainability, which Earth's systems are very good at.

I agree that we're likely doomed. I'm not optimistic, though I can hope for a better future. Sometimes great things rise from ash. Forgot pic.

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Yeah. I’m just kinda venting, not against you though. Everyone can point out the problems, but can never offer realistic solutions (if they exist). And a certain section of anons can only offer inhumane and violent solutions. Keep in mind that these anons can’t even leave moms house or talk to a girl, let alone pick up a gun and fight. They would also probably be considered undesirable and culled. Just so sick of delusional selfish thinking in politics