Traditionalist conservatism

Traditionalist conservatism, as known today, is rooted in Edmund Burke's political philosophy, which represented a combination of Whiggism and Jacobitism,[1][failed verification] as well as the similar views of Joseph de Maistre, who attributed the rationalist rejection of Christianity during previous decades of being directly responsible for the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution.

The modern concepts of nation, culture, custom, convention, religious roots, language revival, and tradition are heavily emphasized in traditionalist conservatism.

Individuals who embrace non-Thomistic understandings of natural law rooted in, e.g., non-Aristotelian accounts affirmed in segments of Greco-Roman, patristic, medieval, and Reformation thought, can identify with traditionalist conservatism.

[15] Traditionalist conservatives believe that human society is essentially hierarchical (i.e., it always involves various interdependent inequalities, degrees, and classes) and that political structures that recognize this fact prove the most just, thriving, and generally beneficial.

[18] Two concepts play a role in organicism in conservative thought: Traditional authority is a common tenet of conservatism, albeit expressed in different forms.

[42] Traditionalists defend classical Western civilization and value an education informed by the sifting of texts starting in the Roman World and refined under Medieval Scholasticism and Renaissance humanism.

Similarly, traditionalist conservatives are Classicists who revere high culture in all of its manifestations (e.g. literature, Classical music, architecture, art, and theatre).

[43] An example of a traditionalist conservative approach to immigration may be seen in Bishop John Joseph Frederick Otto Zardetti's September 21, 1892 "Sermon on the Mother and the Bride", which was a defence of Roman Catholic German-Americans desire to preserve their faith, ancestral culture, and to continue speaking their heritage language of the German language in the United States, against both the English only movement and accusations of being Hyphenated Americans.

American social critic and historian Russell Kirk wrote: "The Reflections burns with all the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the fabric of civil society dissolving before his eyes.

[50] Burke's legacy was best represented in the United States by the Federalist Party and its leaders, such as President John Adams and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.

[58] Three cultural conservatives and skeptics of material development, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and John Henry Newman, were staunch supporters of Burke's classical conservatism.

According to conservative scholar Peter Viereck, Coleridge and his colleague and fellow poet William Wordsworth began as followers of the French Revolution and the radical utopianism it engendered.

[59] Thomas Carlyle, a writer, historian, and essayist, was an early traditionalist thinker, defending medieval ideals such as aristocracy, hierarchy, organic society, and class unity against communism and laissez-faire capitalism's "cash nexus."

Carlyle, a lover of the poor, claimed that mobs, plutocrats, anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, and others were threatening the fabric of British society by exploiting them and perpetuating class animosity.

Newman (who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845 and was later made a Cardinal and a canonized saint) and the Tractarians, like Coleridge and Carlyle, were critical of material progress, or the idea that money, prosperity, and economic gain constituted the totality of human existence.

[66] Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, Newman, and other traditionalist conservatives' beliefs were distilled into former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's politics and ideology.

When he was younger, Disraeli was an outspoken opponent of middle-class capitalism and the Manchester liberals' industrial policies (the Reform Bill and the Corn Laws).

In order to ameliorate the suffering of the urban poor in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, Disraeli proposed "one-nation conservatism," in which a coalition of aristocrats and commoners would band together to counter the liberal middle class's influence.

Disraeli's ideas (especially his critique of utilitarianism) were popularized in the "Young England" movement and in books like Vindication of the English Constitution (1835), The Radical Tory (1837), and his "social novels," Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845).

In the early 20th century, traditionalist conservatism found its defenders through the efforts of Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and other proponents of the socioeconomic system they advocated: distributism.

Originating in the papal encyclical Rerum novarum, distributism employed the concept of subsidiarity as a "third way" solution to the twin evils of communism and capitalism.

Distributist views were accepted in the United States by the journalist Herbert Agar and Catholic activist Dorothy Day as well as through the influence of the German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher, and were comparable to Wilhelm Roepke's work.

Following in the footsteps of Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, he wrote After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948).

Dawson, a contributor to Eliot's Criterion, believed that religion and culture were crucial to rebuilding the West after World War II in the aftermath of fascism and the advent of communism.

Phillip Blond, a British philosopher, has recently gained notoriety as a proponent of traditionalist philosophy, specifically progressive conservatism, or Red Toryism.

Blond believes that Red Toryism would rejuvenate British conservatism and society by combining civic communitarianism, localism, and traditional values.

John Barth, a postmodern writer and literary theorist, said: "I confess to missing, in apprentice seminars in the later 1970s and the 1980s, that lively Make-It-New spirit of the Buffalo Sixties.

Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle both praised novels such as Old House of Fear, A Creature of the Twilight, and Lord of the Hollow Dark as well as short stories such as "Lex Talionis", "Lost Lake", "Beyond the Stumps", "Ex Tenebris," and "Fate's Purse."

Kirk was also close friends with a number of 20th-century literary heavyweights, including T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Madeleine L'Engle, Fernando Sánchez Dragó, and Flannery O'Connor, all of whom wrote conservative poetry or fiction.

[75] With regard to both literature and cultural revival among speakers of Celtic languages, the same argument can be made for Saunders Lewis, Máirtín Ó Direáin, John Lorne Campbell, and Margaret Fay Shaw.