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The chapter pursues the consequences of the claim that the Greek canon was made based on the performative qualities of its authors, emphasizing its internal friction. As such, it did not embody any timeless values. Its function could be replicated by other traditions influenced by it: first Roman, then European languages and then globally. There is no function today that is uniquely performed by the Greek literary legacy and, in this sense, there is no need to preserve the particular tradition of classical studies. Greek antiquity is worthy of study simply because of its pivotal role, but it essentially expired. And yet, the attitude of admiration toward this type of liberating past experience is a useful one to maintain, as part of an overall hopeful attitude toward the arc of the moral universe.
The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.
This chapter analyzes Schopenhauer’s political beliefs in the context of his biography. Schopenhauer was a well-traveled son of a merchant who failed to gain a foothold in academia and never pursued another career in the professions, business, or government. Without traditional prospects, he settled into a rentier existence. He retained much of his background’s bourgeois attitudes toward property, individual industry, and frugality, but since he was confined to a life outside professional circles, he came to occupy an outsider position and opposed both conservatives and progressives, orthodox Christians and secular radicals. Committed to the idea of a natural intellectual elite, he was skeptical of collective political movements, such as the nationalism and socialism of his own time. Yet he was also critical of the traditional aristocracy with its relative independence from the modern state. His preferred political regime was a nondemocratic, monarchical statism that would protect individuals and their property.
When preferences are incomplete, an agent or policymaker cannot order options from best to worst. Decisions and policymaking are then slanted in favor of the status quo. Individuals and institutions are governed by customary decisions, until a new option appears that allows for an unambiguous improvement. The reshaping of preferences provides a rarely explored escape hatch to this conservatism and is illustrated by how the flexibility of preferences can cure Baumol’s cost disease (low productivity growth in services).
In the conclusion, we review the book’s chapters and argue that Latin America has experienced a resurgence of conservative forces in recent years. We analyze the supply and demand of a broad set of conservative alternatives, paying special attention to the processes of party-building, adaptation, and rebranding. We find that new right-wing forces often have weak organizations, but have been able to mobilize voters along noneconomic cleavages, including security, gender politics, and reproductive rights. The adoption of a highly conservative profile has allowed parties to access lower-class constituencies and mobilize mass support among them. The politicization of cultural issues, such as LGBT rights and religious identities, has contributed to polarization and the rise of populist radical right parties. These parties have flourished within the context of political and economic shocks and benefited from cultural backlashes and the crises of traditional right-wing parties. In these situations, politics becomes a zero-sum game and the stakes get higher. Democratic stability in the region is arguably at its most tenuous state since the age of military dictatorships. Interrupted presidencies have become realities in many countries over the past fifteen years, raising concerns about democratic stability and potential threats to democratic institutions.
Louis Hartz’s triumphalist manifesto for an enduring American liberal tradition, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), certainly did not underestimate the role of ideology in American history, but it misinterpreted the origins of the nation’s prevailing ideologies. Hartz’s underlying argument that all American ideologies emerged from a liberal core contained a kernel of truth. But the terrain of American politics reveals that its political ideologies have been more complex than Hartz comprehended. Hartz’s fundamental misunderstanding of the ideology of the founders led him into problems in defining the liberalism that flourished in American life. Hartz’s insistence on explicating American liberalism ironically produced an original understanding of American conservatism, whether of southern slaveholders trying to fashion Tory conservatism or twentieth-century businessmen trying to insist that conservativism was consistent with the creative destruction that defines capitalism.
This chapter analyzes the right in Venezuela under Chavismo. It argues that the main divide of Venezuelan politics is now between democracy and autocracy rather than the ideological left and right. As authoritarianism and repression have increased and Venezuela’s socioeconomic decline has worsened, right-wing movements and factions have prioritized competitiveness through a centrist approach over an emphasis on ideological purity.
This chapter examines Daniel Boorstin’s contention that historically Americans’ special genius grew from taking a practical, nonideological approach to politics and government. For Boorstin, this approach allowed Americans, unfettered by ideology, to react to changing circumstances with deliberation and confidence. Boorstin argued that even the American Civil War was a nonideological conflict, emerging from a practical sectional disagreement over the need to manage the slavery question. Since Boorstin, scholarship has revealed that he failed to grasp the ideological nature of American politics in the Age of Civil War and the conflicting ideologies that drove North and South to war. Given the horrific conflict, the sweeping nature of emancipation, and the promise, later abandoned, of full citizenship to African Americans, how can the nation now have confidence that the political “genius” of American politics can survive the current era of polarization and disillusionment?
This book analyzes the transformation of the political right in Latin America in response to the strengthening of left-wing parties and movements throughout the region. While Latin America's post-2000 left has been widely studied, little is known about right-wing political formations during and after that time. There is a paucity of research on recent phenomena associated with the reorganization of the Right: the polarization of Latin American electorates and elites; the rebranding of pre-existing conservative parties; the creation of new right-wing parties; and the rise of the radical right. This volume provides a comprehensive account of the strategies used by the political right since 2000. It analyzes both the supply side (parties, movements, and personalist vehicles) and the demand side (voters and public opinion) to provide a description and explanation of how the right has recast itself as a new political force across the entire region of Latin America.
From the outset, US military intervention in Vietnam provoked popular campaigns and mass rallies in support of the United States global anticommunist agenda. While these early initiatives were often orchestrated by rightwing activists long versed in the practices of populist anticommunism, the burgeoning of domestic opposition to the war intensified and greatly diversified prowar activism. Appealing to patriotism, conservative leaders rallied popular support in favor of total victory but later endorsed Richard Nixon’s call for “peace with honor.” As the war dragged on, internal divisions eroded the confidence of prowar conservatives in achieving their aims and forced them to reevaluate the political viability of their hardline Cold War rhetoric. Rightwing activists still managed to make use of grassroots patriotic campaigns to marshal support for the war, particularly among white ethnic workers opposed to the antiwar movement and wider social changes. In so doing, conservatives altered the nature and direction of their agenda, and furthered a new majoritarian political coalition. This chapter explores the origins and nature of these grassroots campaigns in support of the Vietnam War and demonstrates that the groundwork for a decades-long resurgence in populist rightwing patriotism was born amidst domestic strife over American purpose in Vietnam.
Since 2017, Republican lawmakers in a growing number of US states have formed ideological intraparty organizations, modeled after the US House Freedom Caucus, that seek to move state policy further rightward. What explains the appearance of these state freedom caucuses, and what kinds of lawmakers are more likely to join them? We show that the creation of these caucuses was initially motivated by concerns that state-level legislative Republican parties are too ideologically heterogeneous but has since been driven by conservative entrepreneurs seeking to spread freedom caucuses nationally. We also provide evidence that conservative legislators are more likely to join a new state freedom caucus, as one would expect, but also that, in a few states, lawmakers who are more electorally vulnerable lawmakers or lack internal influence have also been more likely to join. These findings underscore how state-level ideological caucuses can appeal to members’ multiple goals and serve as instruments of vertical polarization in a federal system.
In recent years, a number of online outlets aligned with the right has emerged in Thai politics. Though it is often assumed that such actors are merely an extension of the Thai state propaganda apparatus, as the moniker “IO (short for Information Operation)” implies, closer inspection of their contents suggests a more complicated picture. Employing the morphological approach of ideological analysis, this article argues that the Thai Online Right articulates a decidedly conservative worldview, upholding a social order centred around the monarchy, and opposing particular instigators of change, similar to more traditional Thai conservatives. The concepts and ideas they deploy to bolster these core ideas, however, seem to emphasise more materialistic and personalised elements, as well as draw from more contemporaneous “Western” right-wing conspiracy theories, making their conservative expression a strange blend of the old and the new. The findings have implications to the study of conservatisms, both in the Thai context and comparatively.
The role of social movements and civil society actors in rights advancement has been frequently emphasised. The assumption is that legal mobilisation by civil society actors works towards the extension of rights and the emancipation and advancement of justice for distinctive (minority) groups in society. While traditionally, socio-legal attention on social movement and civil society actions around rights promotion was particularly prominent in the US, for some time now the European context has also been approached from such a socio-legal lens. However, a one-sided, liberal–progressive understanding of social mobilisation around rights has, importantly, been put to the test by recent manifestations of societal actors. Conservative actors tend to (1) promote a restrictive interpretation or a radical reinterpretation of existing rights (e.g. abortion, free speech), (2) limit the diffusion of new rights (e.g. the rights to euthanasia or legalizing surrogate maternity) and/or (3) call for the interruption of the further extensions of rights (e.g. with regard to same-sex marriage, LGBTIQ issues). The analysis of legal mobilisation by such conservative right-wing actors indicates that mobilisational repertoires are strikingly similar to those of liberal actors. This article will discuss the notions of civil society and legal mobilisation and call for a rethinking of these concepts, in part because of the increasing manifestation of societal actors that are in contrast to the traditional liberal paradigm. The article will subsequently engage in a detailed study of one such actor – the Polish legal think tank Ordo Iuris (OI) – with regard to its third-party or amicus curiae interventions at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), stressing the difference of orientation of such interventions from those of liberal actors and also indicating dimensions of ambivalence and similarity in their approaches.
This article examines the Committee for Constitutional Government, a conservative organization that spearheaded a novel form of mass-based mobilization and direct-mail propaganda to counter New Deal reforms from 1937 to the late 1950s. I argue that the members of the committee offered a supple and variegated response to New Deal liberalism, one with deep roots in the American past. Organizationally, the committee differed from other conservative groups of the period in the vastly greater reach of its propaganda, the small-donor financial base of its operations, and its extensive cultivation of a grassroots movement committed to right-wing reform. The committee was a critical political actor from 1937 to 1955, systematically shaping legislation and countering the trend toward social democracy in America. The ultimate result of its campaigns was to retard the growth of the administrative state and help formulate a cogent conservative critique of reformist liberalism.
This chapter examines Kerouac in the context of 1950s literary culture in the United States, with particular emphasis on the Cold War. The 1950s was the decade Kerouac became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road, and the decade he produced the bulk of his most significant writing, including Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and Mexico City Blues, among others. This chapter explores the relationship between Kerouac’s literary production during the 1950s and the multilayered cultural imperatives of the Cold War.
This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s last major novel, Vanity of Duluoz in the context of the 1960s. This novel was composed under fraught conditions as Kerouac labored under intense financial pressure to earn money to pay for his mother’s debilitating illnesses. Not only was it a struggle for Kerouac to complete it, the novel also powerfully documents Kerouac’s struggle with reconciling his traditional, “conservative” upbringing with the nascent “Beat” rebellious energies – born in the forties and continuing into the sixties – a conflict which this chapter explores.
The introductory chapter argues that the near universal rise of the radical Right is more than a series of national coincidences and that despite differences in their ideas and policies, a globally connected Right is emerging. One indication of this is the emergence of global networks and events such as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the NatCon Conferences, and the Madrid Forum. However, the globality of today’s radical Right goes beyond mere transnational networks, and requires a wider rethinking of its relationship to the global in two ways. First, the radical Right is constituted by transnational interactions operating at multiple scales. Second, it defines itself and is co-constituted by its relation to the global, not just to the national. The chapter also discusses the vexed issue of defining the Right and the difficulties of studying the Right.
'No true Christian could vote for Donald Trump.' 'Real Christians are pro-life.' 'You can't be a Christian and support gay marriage.' Assertive statements like these not only reflect growing religious polarization but also express the anxiety over religious identity that pervades modern American Christianity. To address this disquiet, conservative Christians have sought security and stability: whether by retrieving 'historic Christian' doctrines, reconceptualizing their faith as a distinct culture, or reinforcing a political vision of what it means to be a follower of God in a corrupt world. The result is a concerted effort 'Make Christianity Great Again': a religious project predating the corresponding political effort to 'Make America Great Again.' Part intellectual history, part nuanced argument for change, this timely book explores why the question of what defines Christianity has become, over the last century, so damagingly vexatious - and how believers might conceive of it differently in future.
This chapter tracks the changes to the American conservative movement that have unfolded since the heyday of William F. Buckley, who founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955. Centered on Buckley’s defiance of all things left wing and on his provocative writings on welfare, critiques of the New Deal, and Cold War anxieties, this chapter shows the conflicted relationship many contemporary American conservatives have with his legacy. "Serious conservatives" who place themselves in Buckley’s lineage find themselves alienated in the contemporary media landscape, which, although displaying the same incendiary spirit as Buckley’s essays and his television show Firing Line, lacks the intellectual seriousness that many found in his writings. More generally, this chapter identifies the recurrent themes in conservative writing and dwells on the agitational poetics of conservative essayism.
This article traces the history of the Office of Economic Opportunity/Community Services Administration, focusing on Richard Nixon’s failed attempt to dismantle it in 1973 and Ronald Reagan’s successful effort in 1981. I explore main two main questions: Why was Reagan able to succeed when Nixon had failed? and What does the dismantling of the agency reveal about the development of American conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s? Drawing on original archival materials, I argue that the Reagan administration learned from Nixon’s failures and adopted a more professional, managerial stance when it dismantled the agency in 1981. In addition, recent work in history and political science has explored how the multiracial democratic vision articulated by LBJ’s Great Society helped fuel the modern conservative movement. By focusing on the long-term opposition against OEO/CSA, this article provides new insights into how conservatives articulated an alternative ideology to postwar liberalism.