Canon Fire
At Taki’s Magazine, Austin Bramwell asks some questions that the Philadelphia Society will never answer, the best one being the piece’s title, “Is the Conservative Movement Worth Conserving?” Although Austin’s own views are not hard to discern, his questions ought to be approached with an open mind. Take this one:
• The Failure of the Canon: To what extent would anyone read the authors of the movement conservative canon (Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer et al.) if a conservative movement did not exist to promote their works so relentlessly?
This one can be answered definitively: many of these works would not be read at all if the conservative movement were not promoting them. We can say that with some degree of certainty because, in fact, the conservative movement does not promote them, and they aren’t read. Kirk is a partial exception, since ISI (and to a lesser extent some of the other youth-oriented movement organs) keeps him in circulation. But how about Meyer? The Liberty Fund still publishes In Defense of Freedom and Other Essays, but his other works — The Conservative Mainstream, The Moulding of Communists, and the anthology What Is Conservatism? — are all long out of print. Admittedly, the market for books on Communist organizational techniques is pretty thin these days, and The Conservative Mainstream is a compilation of “Principles and Heresies” columns from National Review. Essay collections by living authors usually don’t sell; the economics of selling a collection of Meyer essays would be daunting indeed.
You can find Wilmoore Kendall books fairly easily on-line, but none has been reissued in the last decade. There’s still a cache of Regnery’s 1985 edition of The Conservative Affirmation in ISI’s warehouses, I believe. Kirk has the Kirk Center, but I’m not aware of anyone pushing to get students to read Kendall or Meyer. (Apart from the Liberty Fund, to some extent.) Most or all of James Burnham’s books are out of print — it set me back a few bucks to buy good used copies of The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians. And I’ve been surprised to discover just how much of Bill Buckley’s oeuvre is unavailable. His best and most important books (not always identical), such as Up From Liberalism, The Unmaking of a Mayor, and Cruising Speed, are a little hard to get.
Outside of the National Review world, some of the other big names of 20th century conservatism fare better. Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott have dedicated academic followings of various sizes, and whole shelves of Strauss and Voegelin are in print. The Voegelin and Oakeshott scholarly communities seem to survive without orbiting the conservative movement too closely. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences is in print from the University of Chicago, and the Liberty Fund still publishes The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver and In Defense of Tradition: The Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver. The movement probably is responsible for much of Weaver’s enduring status — certainly movement types like to say “ideas have consequences,” even if they’ve never read the book — but he’s worth reading despite that.
The movement doesn’t particularly recommend that anyone read Robert Nisbet, and much of Nisbet is out of print, but his reputation may well improve despite the movement’s neglect. A friend of mine working for a libertarian think-tank tells me he recently heard a lecture by an interesting left-leaning professor who cited Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress in his talk — and who cited it as if the author were some little-known genius. Nisbet’s stock should rise over time, in part because he isn’t too closely identified with the movement.
The great libertarian economists would still be read absent a conservative movement, of course: certainly Hayek and Schumpeter would be. Mises might not be as popular as either of them, but if there weren’t an Austrian economics movement to keep his memory alive, I suspect he nonetheless would have made a comeback sooner or later. The Chicago and Public Choice schools would also thrive with or without a conservative movement.
The more I think about it, the less I see a connection between the conservative canon and the conservative movement — though I shouldn’t be surprised. There are worthy parts of the canon (Nisbet, arguably Burnham) that languish despite the movement’s existence. There are others, like Meyer and Kendall, or go unread largely because of the fragmentary and topical nature of what they wrote — which can be said about Buckley, too. Kirk and Weaver do benefit from the movement’s exertions, though I suspect Ideas Have Consequences, like Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, would find a readership even without the movement (after all, Ideas became a success years before there was a movement). And even Kirk endures more because of a dedicated corps of Kirkians than because National Review or the Heritage Foundation cherishes his memory. Although his following is mostly outside of the academy, Kirk probably belongs in the same category as Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott. He would have less of a following without the movement, it’s safe to say, and figures like Meyer and Kendall would be all but forgotten — just as they’re all but forgotten even with the movement.
Perhaps in answering this question, we have answered several of Austin’s others as well. Including this one: “Setting the Party Line: Who gets to decide what positions constitute ‘conservatism’”? Not people who write books, evidently.
Duly blogged, with accustomed hat-tip, and even more accustomed still lack of sobriety:
aleksandreia.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/%e2%99%ab-blind-dead-on-the-rightwrapped-up-like-adduced-and-other-rumors-of-the-night-%e2%99%ab-or-bleeding-a-dead-hearse/
“Kirk probably belongs in the same category as Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott”
You can’t seriously mean this. Kirk, it seems to me, very squarely falls in the Meyer-Kendall category. He was an interesting writer for his time, but none of what he wrote will be read a few decades from now. His life was more interesting than his writings. He was a typical “second-hand trader in ideas.”
Strauss and Voegelin are not taken seriously at all in the academy. I’ve never read much Voegelin, but I quite liked Strauss as a student. To the extent that he promotes careful reading, he is a plus, of course, but at the end of the day his writings suffer because what he seems to be hiding is the secret that he has nothing to hide. In any case, he refused to make “arguments” so is of no use to the argument-oriented academic philosophers. They may be liberals, but at least they argue — that’s why Oakeshott is still read, and will probably continue to be read for quite a while.
I agree with you on Nisbet.
What I had in mind in comparing Kirk to Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott was not the nature of what he wrote but the nature of his following. Strauss, Voegelin, and Oakeshott all have devoted followings who will preserve their works no matter what. Strauss is not taken seriously by most academics, but the minority that does take him seriously takes him very seriously indeed, and Straussians are quite numerous in political science departments, though still a minority. Voegelinians are fewer, but still plentiful enough to justify the University of Missouri’s complete works of Voegelin series. There was a Voegelin group at last year’s APSA meeting that had no connection that I knew of to the conservative movement. They seemed to be a small but dedicated corps of academic Voegelinians.
I come down on the side of putting Kirk in the same category because he too has a school of followers, though the Kirkians are less academic than Voegelinians or Straussians. But for each of these groups, the disciples are dedicated enough to keep the master’s works in circulation, regardless of what happens to the conservative movement or what trends develop in the academy.
Sam Hooft writes: “none of what he [Kirk] wrote will be read a few decades from now”.
Really? This argues for an even more depressing cultural future than the recently-issued statistics about white America’s imminent minority status suggest.
I should have thought that quite apart from the content of Kirk’s thought, the sheer majesty and elegance of Kirk’s prose at its best would be enough to ensure his survival (among thinking readers, that is. No-one is suggesting that he will ever enjoy Da Vinci Code-sized sales figures).
Except by those who fetishize originality per se, an author cannot be disposed of by being called “a second-hand trader in ideas”. This description could at least as well be applied to C. S. Lewis, say, and is just as incapable (rightly) of impairing Lewis’s fame.
Gibbon and Macaulay continue to be read – in spite of the former’s comically inadequate understanding of religious faith and the latter’s often strident Whiggishness – because, fundamentally, they could use the English language much better than can most people. I cannot speak for Voegelin, but I suspect that what is true of Gibbon and Macaulay is equally true of Kirk. (At least within the United States. Alas, I do not know of any Australians – apart from myself – who have ever read more than five pages of Kirk’s output; nor do I know of any Englishmen in that category. Perhaps this ignorance explains the dreadful susceptibility of both peoples to armed neocon cant.)
Oh no, C.S. Lewis was actually very original — I am not making a fetish of ‘originality’ incidentally, I’m largely with Babbitt on that — Lewis wrote so well, he made it look so easily that it’s often overlooked that he present many original arguments. I think Lewis will continue to be read for a long time.
R.J. Stove wrote: “Alas, I do not know of any Australians – apart from myself – who have ever read more than five pages of Kirk’s output; nor do I know of any Englishmen in that category. Perhaps this ignorance explains the dreadful susceptibility of both peoples to armed neocon cant.”
Well Mr Stove can add one additional Australian to those you have read some Russell Kirk. I haven’t read as much as he has, but I have read, “The Conservative Mind” (7th rev. ed.).
This Australian ignorance of Conservative writers and thinkers doesn’t just apply to Russel Kirk. In a number of personal conversations I’ve had to explain who Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Southern Agrarians, and the American Old Right are.
Oops that should be “WHO have read”
I must agree with Rob and “Mild”, however ‘bad’ the intellectual conservatism is doing in the USA, we Australians look upon it with some envy.
The much smaller pond of intellectual debate here is almost completely dominated by various species of social democrat. There is some market liberalism about but that’s about it. The only saving grace is that the general public has a deep (and wholly understandable) anti-intellectualism (…that the social ‘democrat’ elites always bemoan, often to the point of outright class hatred…) that makes them largely immune. At least from frontal attack.
Of course over time the social democrat pond does manage to leak into the public policy tank via various rusty bureaucratic pipes.
I don’t see too much promotion of Burke, Hume, Jane Austen, Robert Frost, Aristotle, for example (to mention the ones I’ve learned most about conservative thought from). Hume’s skepticism is an antidote to the surety surrounding the movement. Frost and Austen show that people actually live real lives. Burke, I would have thought, makes promoting revolution (as in Iraq and Afghanistan) a non-starter for conservatives but who am I kidding. Aristotle, if nothing else, can show people that politics is not about policy-identification.