“ Historians of intellectual conservatism often claim that it consisted of three intellectual movements: the movement conservatism centered on Buckley’s National Review, libertarianism and neoconservatism. I am not so sure that the first two qualify as intellectual movements. In the 1950s and 1960s National Review featured some brilliant mavericks like James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall and Russell Kirk, but for most of its subsequent history it was simply a partisan opinion journal. As for the libertarian intellectual movement, isn’t that a contradiction in terms? How intellectual can a movement be, if it reflexively answers “the market!” to every question of domestic and foreign policy, before the question is even asked?
Michael Lind in his essay ‘Intellectual Conservatism, RIP’. Read it for fuck’s sake.
3 months ago
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