Which philosophers should I read in order to understand conservative philosophy and in what order should I read them? I've already read The Republic if that means anything.
>>7871068
Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke are essential—I'm not sure it matters which you read first.
>>7871068
Hobbes - Leviathan
Montesquieu - The Spirit of the Laws
Herder - Yet Another Philosophy of History (should be read in light of Kant's 'Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose)
Burke - Reflections on the Revolution in France
Hegel - Philosophy of Right
Nietzsche - On the Genealogy of Morals
Schmitt - Political Theology, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, and The Concept of the Political
Oakeshott - Rationalism in Politics and other essays, and On Human Conduct
Hayek - Law, Legislation, and Liberty
Finnis - Natural Law and Natural Rights
le meme philosophers thread
>>7871185
le ebin "only insufferable leftoids can be serious philosophers and everybody else is le meme!" meme
>>7871105
Burke? Total Shitlord.
At a party Evola is the guy in the corner doing blow and every now and again cutting in to make a snide remark followed by a cynical laugh.
>>7871308
Chaim Potok? Crikey.
What no Hunter S. Thompson? What the f*ck is wrong with you people?
>>7871365
>Hunter S. Thompson
>conservative
>>7871308
How is Hesse right wing? Never read Glass Bead Game but I can't see it
>>7871391
oh lol I should have looked at the thing in the rop right
nvm
>>7871224
le edgy 19 yr old if he doesn't like my philosophers he must be carl the cuck redditor
60 % of the names here are just mentioned because they're cinsidered edgy. But go ahead, I won't keep you from labeling Hobbes as conservative it seeking anything of depth in Julius "Memes on Wheels" Evola.
>>7871224
feeling sensitive?
>>7871380
Enoch Powell's so-called "Rivers of Blood" speech is also an essential for all serious conservatives
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html
>>7871068
A new Breivik in the making? he also placed all the meme philosophers into his facebook account. Not that he read them, though.
>>7871465
>it's an "all right-wing people are Anders Breivik" post
So called conservatives today are nothing more than liberals of the right. "Conservatism" does not mean an implicit defence of global capitalism
>>7871502
>Implying Conservatives can't also be culturally conservative
>>7871608
How can you be cuturally conservative when you place the destructive forces of economic liberalism above all else?
>>7871365
>Burke
>bad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDqadw-fJE
>>7871613
Economic liberalism isn't destructive. Burke and Hayek were of a piece with Adam Smith on this. Neo-liberal crony capitalism that bends over for the throbbing cock of multinational corporations is destructive, but that's a totally different thing.
>>7871157
>montesquieu
LOL
O
L
>>7871631
Capital knows no borders, global Neoliberalism is merely the full extension of the captalist system.When material becomes elevated above all other facets of life, any notion of "conservatism" goes out the window in its universal progessive agenda
>Hayek
One of the great forefathers of neoliberal policy
>>7871613
Flash news, people's system of beliefs isn't coherent at all. Everyone, aside from reactionaries, knows this.
>>7871641
Your hatred of individual human decision-making betrays a dangerous and very left-wing political metaphysics. You, sir, are no conservative.
>>7871634
One of the first coherent prophets of particularism.
>>7871647
fedoras raining from the sky
>>7871648
>particularism
Whatever that means, bro. If you meant to say that Montesquieu's mumbo-jumbo on weather and races is relevant today, or was relevant during the enlightenment age, you're an idiot.
Montesquieu is read because he is one of fathers of our modern representative democracies.
Dante's De Monarchia, Aquinas De Regno.
>>7871105
This desu.
>>7871308
Too many shit desu.
>>7871647
Your fetishism of individualism replaces all notions of community that is the basis of conservatism. When Barre said, "the individual is nothing, society is everything", his conception of the Nation state was one that subsumed the will of the individual to its collective whole towards its common good, including the conservation of the spiritual, intellectual and cultural traits of the people. We may understand that the individual only exists as it is situated within the collective.
THis is the inverse of Thatchers famous "Society does not exist, there is only the individual", whose neoliberal policy has fastened the rootless nature of modernity and its vices (cosmoploitanism, universalism, progressivism, egalitarianism) all in the name of the material world (where the almighty dollar is our only god)
>>7871690
>the individual is nothing, society is everything
Ironically, this comes from sociopath, basement-dwelling, internet reactionary heroes.
How is "society everything" if you reject the actual society that much? Or did you wish to say that your own personal, moralistic, visions of an ideal society should be "everything"?
>>7871631
I'll admit the only Hayek I've read is his essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" but from what I can tell his understanding of what markets are differ radically from a classical liberal like Adam Smith who thought that markets arise as a natural datum instead of a constructed reality which requires the active intervention of a state as well as the establishment of a specific system of law... Hayek also places the essence of markets in competition instead of mere exchange, the point being that competitive entrepreneurial activity should extend to all forms of social relationships.
>>7871696
I suggest you reread the rest of my post. Membership in the collective does not destoy the individual identity, rather it is the basis of it. Ultimately I am a pluralist, who believes in the right of difference. That however is impossible when we live in a unipolar world that is characterised by Global captialism that is erasing all barriers between people and subsuming them into its universal whole so that may better operate within its captialist system.
>>7871308
What should I read before I get into the decline of the west?
>>7871706
An organic view of the state, defence of elitism
>>7871706
He was liberal chiefly by accident. He was trying to defend elitism and kind of accidentally opened a hole by saying that the rights of government originate in the consent of the governed, which people like Locke expounded on. But he was in favor of monarchy and even absolutism over a mediated monarchy.
Anyways, conservatism and the right are kind of a meme, what constitutes right wing politics depends on your country.
>>7871740
Understand Nietzsche, particularly On the Genealogy of Morality. Decline of the West is basically an elaboration of Nietzsche's ideas about ideas into a theory of history.
>Nietzsche
>Conservatism
Never go full retard
>>7871157
>Burke
>Hayek
>Trump
Utterly grotesque, that image is cancer.
We also have to separate Conservatism from Toryism from Fascism.
Fascists are not conservative. Ultra-Reactionaries like Franco or the Iron Guard could maybbee be called fascist. I know that Evola greatly respected the Iron Guard.
>>7871068
Certainly not Evola. He wasn't a conservative, I'm unsure which moron started the meme.
Now we want to separate capitalism and conservativism.
I would certainly say that the entire Platonic tradition is at least from our perspective conservative, value wise. So Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas.
From here the what is conservative is muddled because of America and England twisting conservativism and liberalism where the modern day confusion comes from. Both are generally speaking left wing- progressive and liberal ideology.
There's a certain lack of conservative authors until the 20th century to my knowledge, but in it Hilaire Belloc is the essential read, I cannot stress this enough. Chesterton too and now Edward Feser. Hayek is a valuable read, although he isn't a conservative and doesn't identify as one.
>>7871706
He isn't. Materialism in general isn't conservative and he is one of the fathers of liberalism.
>>7871825
This is part of the struggle in pulling apart modernists like Pound from reactionaries like Carlyle. The "right" can be defined as those that believe inequality is a moral good. Yes it is moronic to call Nietzsche a conservative, although he was right wing.
>>7871844
it is moronic to drag nietzsche into the left/right wing dichotomy aswell.
>>7871844
Right left division is extremely vague. People would place Ratzinger next to Nietzsche as being right wing which is absolutely retarded.
Also forgot, Ratzinger is a fantastic conservative author
>>7871825
I don't agree with the antipolitical meme. He was political, he just had a very simple political philosophy. That the majority of humanity was worth basically nothing in the long run and that the few geniuses among us are responsible for everything good in the world.
He proposed a theory of distribution, that the stupidest people who are as such the most capable of enduring drudgery should have the worst jobs and that the smartest people should live unrestrained by morality and minimally restrained by law. He favored an extremely liberated aristocratic class and a less than liberated status for plebs.
His criticism of conservatives in his day was chiefly that they held too tightly to the corpse of Christianity and that they offered too many concessions to the rising liberal and socialist movements. He said the aristocracy of his day had essentially committed suicide and was no longer worth defending.
He has a generally cyclical view of history and claimed that conservatives were completely unable to reverse degeneration in society, and could only hope to stall it. He accepted the label of "aristocratic radicalism" which was applied to him by one of the few philosophers who paid attention to him during his time. And perhaps most illuminating were his letters around the Paris commune, which showed his absolute hatred of socialism and collectivist anarchism.
Nietzsche was a broadly conservative thinker. He did present quite a few ideas that have been appropriated by progressives but part of this was his intention. He occasional wrote of the 'New Age' that was coming with anticipation rather than fear as a conservative would, mostly because he felt that the only way we could return to renaissance/classical greek values was to debase the illusion of progress in western morality, which was done in the world wars (which he also largely predicted, claiming that within 50 years of his time there would be a struggle for world domination which would be won by whichever side had the Russians and Jews on it).
>>7871861
Liberalism is not about egalitarianism and it's left wing so the very definition of equality here makes the division meaningless.
>Discussing left/right dichtonomy with Americans
>>7871874
Liberalism is absolutely about egalitarianism, political egalitarianism. Socialism expands this to economic egalitarianism. Feminism, et. al. expand it to egalitarianism for people of x group.
It's part of Nietzsche's criticisms of liberalism and its friends. To him, Christianity = Liberalism = Socialism = Feminism = Anarchism, they're all the same shit at the end of the day. All of them assume equality of some degree.
>>7871905
The more I know about Nietzsche the more retarded he becomes.
>>7871914
Maybe if everything you 'know' about him comes from memes.
But I don't think that's an absurd notion, that once we determine that the souls of men are of equal value, that we then must slowly come to assume that everything else about them ought to be equal as well, their representation, their wealth and ultimately in anarchy their authority.
Nietzsche was not a scalpel cut here, pinprick there kind of philosopher, he seldom nitpicks. He usually takes broad swipes with boisterous language at everything which is why teenagers love his edgy meme quotes.
>>7871914
Have you ever actually opened one of his books?
You sound p. retarded, mang.
Aristotle
>>7872037
kek
>>7871992
Yes, Birth of Tragedy and Beyond Good and Evil.
>>7871981
>Maybe if everything you 'know' about him comes from memes.
No, my dislike of him comes primarily from reading him.
>But I don't think that's an absurd notion, that once we determine that the souls of men are of equal value, that we then must slowly come to assume that everything else about them ought to be equal as well, their representation, their wealth and ultimately in anarchy their authority.
I don't hold that an absurd notion, it's perfectly sound. The notion that Christianity equals liberalism and other such partially egalitarian systems if true is just stupid.
>Nietzsche was not a scalpel cut here, pinprick there kind of philosopher, he seldom nitpicks. He usually takes broad swipes with boisterous language at everything which is why teenagers love his edgy meme quotes.
That's exactly what I dislike about him. I can understand the opinions themselves, but the method itself is so random, unsystematic and all over the place that it's all just a bunch of assumptions which he never tries to prove beyond giving a vague assertion.
>>7871068
Do not forget the textbook conservative philosophy 'How to be a conservative' by Roger Scruton and his other works.
His works are apt summaries of conservatism, at least in the British sense.
Likewise, if you want to hop into conservatism from a libertarian perspective, opt for 'Democracy: The God That Failed' and 'A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism'. Both explain in less than 300 pages the necessity for traditionalism and conservatism within libertarian philosophy, if libertarianism, is indeed, to work in practice.
>>7871415
How is it an essential? His St. George's speech is an essential.
His Birmingham speech is a comment on immigration of the time. It is not the encapsulating speech of the philosophy of Enoch Powell.
>>7872314
Any writings by him you'd recommend?
>>7872341
In the political sphere, he only published speeches generally. He wrote books relatively infrequently - he wrote an analysis of the Gospel, a short biography of Joseph Chamberlain and there were two books - not even books again - of his thoughts on Christianity, 'No Easy Answers' and 'Wrestling with an Angel' - both discuss politics in relation to Christianity (a spoiler - he concludes that as the Bible does not teach on things like, for example, immigration it is delegated to the human). There is also 'Enoch Powell on 1992', but that's rather out of date of course.
In terms of collection of speeches - there is Reflections. Then there is his earlier work - Still To Decide, A Nation Not Afraid, and Freedom & Reality. I would warn you - they are about the time they are published (especially economics) but nonetheless are interesting if you wish to know about Enoch. Reflections, I suppose, is the best overview out of the pick. It was collected whilst he was alive but was not of his doing. Spans the whole course of his views with speeches - no essays, though prefaced by the editor who off the top of my head was again Richard Richtie. There is of course more collections but I'd rather not bore you.
If you wish for essays on Enoch Powell (along with his speeches!) there is the recently published - 2012, published when he turned 100 (had he lived) - called 'Enoch at 100'. It contains essays on those who knew him and presents his views. It is overall sympathetic - as with all written accounts that I know of.
For a biography, whilst there is some out there, Heffer's 'Like a Roman' simply will never be beat. One of the best. Very sympathetic again, but ultimately that is the very best.
Take your pick.
Foundations:
Aristotle
Anthony Ludovici
Carl Schmitt
Joseph de Maistre
Market Economics:
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Jews:
Culture of Critique by Kevin McDonald
Race and IQ:
The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide by Richard Lynn
The Bell Curve by Charles Murray
European Civilization:
Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray
A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark
>>7872395
I'll look for collected speeches and the gospel analysis sounds interesting.
>>7871842
Underrated post.
>>7872884
Most certainly. People need more Belloc.
>>7872513
Well, that went to shit pretty quickly.
