Highly recommended: My old friend Mark Lilla’s essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education lamenting how academics neglect conservative and/or right-wing ideas. The occasion for Lilla’s article is the opening of a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at UC-Berkeley. Even if the center does its job well, Lilla’s point will remain valid for a very long time. Professors in the humanities and social sciences tend to combine indifference to conservative ideas with a self-serving belief that there are no conservative ideas, just the “irritable mental gestures” once dismissed by literary critic Lionel Trilling. And unfortunately, lots of right-wing “intellectuals” today—not to mention their explicitly anti-intellectual minions, some of whom spent Saturday waving asinine placards on the Washington Mall—confirm the prejudice by confusing populist sloganeering with serious thought.
The fact, though, is that there is a rich and varied tradition of conservative ideas that is very much worth reading and studying, both for the sake of our national self-understanding and for the challenge it poses to settled liberal assumptions. That those ideas are rarely read or studied in the nation’s universities is an intellectual and scholarly disgrace that we can only hope will be rectified in the future. Bravo to Berkeley for taking the first tentative step toward doing so.
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COMMENTS (1)
What academics most neglect is the Comparative Study of words and worlds.
I spent nearly 6 years in college examining the ideas of Intellectuals. Mostly liberal and leftist ideas, true. Especially back when, in the sixties and seventies, you only found conservatives and their ideas on the sides of milk cartons.
But what most Intellectuals all share in common is the manner in which they connect words to other words that define and defend each other circularly. The internal logic of their arguments is rarely examined existentially....attaching the words to ever evolving circumstantial contexts of contingency and chance and change.
Instead, they all sound like my words above.
Ah, but I am more ... view full comment
What academics most neglect is the Comparative Study of words and worlds.
I spent nearly 6 years in college examining the ideas of Intellectuals. Mostly liberal and leftist ideas, true. Especially back when, in the sixties and seventies, you only found conservatives and their ideas on the sides of milk cartons.
But what most Intellectuals all share in common is the manner in which they connect words to other words that define and defend each other circularly. The internal logic of their arguments is rarely examined existentially....attaching the words to ever evolving circumstantial contexts of contingency and chance and change.
Instead, they all sound like my words above.
Ah, but I am more than willing to explore Conservative Ideas with respect to any particular social, political or economic issue. Pick one and let's give it a go.
george