gottfried european roots

7/28/2019 Gottfried European Roots

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TheEuropean Roots ofAmemcan Consemttim

A DISTINCTIVE characteristic of the Americanconservative movement which emerged afterthe Second World War is its demonstrableconnection to certain European thinkers. Thiseager assimilation of European thoughtamong modem conservatives distinguishesthem from most earlier representatives of theAmerican Right. Neither the angry reactionsof some businessmen and politicians to theNew Deal in the 1930s nor the SouthernAgrarian protest against cultural and in-dustrial modernization suggest specific con-tact with any European current of thought.Perhaps a limited parallel may be drawn be-tween contemporary conservatism and theNew Humanism developed before the FirstWorld War by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer


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More. A band of bookish academics centeredmainly around Harvard and Princeton, theNew Humanists drew upon European, mostlyFrench, literary and social critics to constructtheir brief against sentimental art,humanitarian politics, and romantic ethics.Their involvement with politics, however, wasboth spasmodic and ineffective. Unliiemodem conservatives they failed to transformtheir educational-cultural critique into a pro-gram for political action.What is unique about the modem conser-vative movement are the continuing ties be-tween theory and practice and, even more in-triguingly, between European critics ofmodernity and the present battle of Americanconservatives against relativism andsecularism in education and further socialleveling. Some key participants in the form-ulation of thisconservative response were andare of Central European origin. Like suchmentors of the New Left as Eric F rom,Herbert Marcuse, and Theodore Adomo,these emigres, too, had fled from HitlersThird Reich. It may in fact be possible toview them as a kind of counterintelligentsia,attempting to mobilize their adopted societyagainst what their fellow-refugees were thenteaching: the desirability of a secular, collec-tivist order appealing to mans appetitivenature and assuming his infinite plasticity.These counterintellectualswere of course notall cut from the same cloth; and asone con-siders such names as Eric Voegelin, LeoStrauss, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Mises,Thomas Molnar and Gerhard Niemeyer,Modern Age writers all, it becomes obviousthat they range across a wide spectrum ofbeliefs, from Thomism through neoclassicismto various forms of libertarianism. None-theless, certain experiences and attitudes seemtoprovide a unifylng link among them. Theyhad each seen at first hand the operation ofNazi tyranny, but unlike the leftist emigres,were outraged by totalitarianism, not simplyby Nazism. Unlike the Left, they associatedthe wickedness which they had experienced toa retreat from civilization, not merely to afailure to enact their kind of revolution. Final-ly, almost all of them defined this retreat interms of a crisis of values characteristic ofmodem times. Although their interpretations

of this crisis may have differed, they all iden-tified the present with a process ofdehumanization of which Nazi and Com-munist oppression were the most extreme ex-amples.Each one saw his task in relation to thecrisis perceived and hoped to instruct the ris-ing generation on what moral legacy wasneeded to redeem the modem West. Leam-ing and teaching, for all of them, entailed anact of recovery. For the explicitly Christianmembers of the counterintelligentsia, theirpurpose was defined as helping men to turnaround. The Christians, Niemeyer and

Molnar, and the more classically-mindedVoegelin chose Platos term jel- iagogi? (aturning about) to characterize the result of aspiritual awakening, which they sought to en-courage in the present drifting age. The morepolitically-minded Strauss called for a retumto the study of the ideals of justice and virtueas expounded in the texts of Plato, Aristotle,and Xenophon.All of the European-rooted writers viewedthe crisis of modernity as cumulative innature. Strauss and Voegelin stressed par-ticular watersheds in the development of themodem moral and political dilemma. Ac-cording to Voegelin, modem thinkers lost theattunement to the divine ground of beingfound in both the classical Greek philosophersand the prophets of ancient Israel. Denyingthe transcendent, they became futated on thehere and now and like the gnostic heretics inthe early church, they despised the world asthey found it, believing rather in the immi-nent arrival of Gods Kingdom (or, from amodem standpoint, the ideal social order) onearth. This latterday gnosticism had un-leashed a series of cataclysms. The RussianRevolution and the Nazi catastrophe carriedforward what the radical wing of the Refor-mation and the French Revolution hadalready expressed in a more restrainedfashion. All of them reflected the continuingobsession with totally transforming society byviolence and through the participants innerlight or by a science of revolution.European-rooted scholars suchas Niemeyerand Molnar have incorporated Voegelins pic-ture of a cumulative Westem crisis, althoughMolnar, a conservative Catholic, has also

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stressed the effects of the dissolution of Chris-tian Aristotelianism and the modem adver-sarial relationship between faith and reason.Straw, seizing upon a picturesque phrase,has called attention to the waves of modemi-ty. He has likened the breakdown of theclassical political tradition to a piecemealweakeningof something under growing attackbefore being entirely abandoned. Tracing theorigins of this process to Machiavellis recklessdivorce of political theory from moral values,he identifies Locke and, more particularly,Rousseau with a further wave of the modemspirit, which found its final expression inNietzsche. Both Locke and Rousseau tried tolocate in man a political nature, but lackingthe ancient belief inhisunchanging moral be-ing, could only justify civil society as a pro-vider of material rights or emotional satisfac-tion (Rousseau). Finally Nietzsche, who ex-alted Greek fatalism but despised Platonicmorality, proclaimed the transvaluation ofall values. Free spirits were called upon tolook beyond good and evil and to renew a bythen decadent West by supplyingit with newethical doctrines. As a bold but desperatemodernist, Strausss Nietzsche is presented asthe ultimate victim of the disease heseeks tocure. A classically-trained nihilist, he tries tosave others from his own condition byteaching moral relativity.It should be noted that evensoimpassionedan advocate of individual liberty as Hayekprovides his own specific view of Westemcultural disintegration. The Westem con-sciousness of liberty isseenas reachingitshighpoint in the nineteenth century with the com-ing to political age of the American and Euro-pean bourgeoisie. Both the pressures of massdemocracy and the eroding middle-classsenseof spiritual worth are viewed as contributingto the new serfdom already being imposed bya socialist bureaucracy. Unlike the moretraditionalist refugee scholars, Hayek hasdefended modernity while being an avid criticof classical conservatism. But he has alsodepicted the plight of the modem West moremovingly than others with whom a tradi-tionalist may feel philosophically more com-patible. He has described the period ofWestern middle-class dominance as a brief in-terlude of liberty between an old

authoritarianism and what may wel prove tobe an even worse tyranny.In trying to assess the overall impact ofscholars with European roots on American

conservatism, it might be useful to avoidstating the obvious. The obvious in this casewould be that American conservatives havegravitated toward European scholars whowrite sympathetically about their own con-cerns. Yet, one must be on guard against ex-aggerating the intellectual dependencethereby implied. I for one doubt thatAmerican conservatives would have beenpowerless before the assaults of the intellectualLeft but for the presence of certain Europeanmentors. Some of the most vigorous andcreative minds on the post-war Right have infact belonged to native-born Americans. TheEuropeans did, however, provide the move-ment with a broader sense of perspective.Because of the contact with Europeanthinkers, American conservatives have linkedtheir own struggles, historically and concep-tually, to a larger civilizational framework.Moreover, those intellectual controversieswhich resounded through inter-war Europeanuniversities-e.g., between historicists andanti-historicists, neo-realists and neo-nominalists, lovers and despisers of moder-nity- have at last become matters of concernfor American conservative intellectuals.Most significantly, the Central Europeanshave redefined conservatism in a way thatmay continue to benefit us several centurieshence. They discarded the romantic myth ofa golden past which may serve as an object ofnostalgia for any given present. They ex-amined the problematic and rootlesscharacter of their age and sought to deal withmodernity by recovering lost truths andunderstandings. In a real sense, they wereprepared to say with Nietzsche: Let the deadbury the dead! What they hoped to revivewas not Greek clothing nor eighteenth centuryAmerican speech, but sound principleswherever they found them. Thus Hayekcloses The Road to Serfdom by noting:Though we neither can wish nor possess thepower to go back to the reality of the nine-teenth century, we have the opportunity torealize its ideals-and they were not mean.We have little right to feel in this respect

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superior to our grandfathers and we shouldnever forget that it is we, the twentieth cen-tury, and not they, who have made themessof things.An erudite Straussian, Stanley Rosen, hasdefended a conservatism of principle in abook dealing with the nihilist component inboth Marxism and modem existentialism. He

attributes to hs study of Plato the knowledgethat it is wrong to understand the return tothe origins in a historical sense. Rosens re-jection of modernity proceeds from an in-tellectual critique of the value-denying andultimately anti-philosophical nature ofdistinctively contemporary thought. In hiscase (and in Strausss and Voegelinsas well)this critique confirmed his conviction: thatthe Platonic-Aristotelian concept of the rela-tion between reason and thegood is superiorto the modem, or predominantly modem,conception.Thissober quest for the recoveryof past truths is a characteristic of all thoseCentral Europeans who have contributed toAmerican conservatism. Shunning the searchfor utopia in the past as well as the future,

these thinkers occupied themselves with thedefense of traditional values such as justiceand freedom. And they did so not becausethese ideals were quaint or old, but because ofwhat seemed their intrinsic merit. Thus therefugee scholars taught us to see, as Aristotlehad, that renewing a polity may be no less anachievement than founding one.Z

-PAUL GO~TFR~EDThisargument against utopianizing the past should byno means be equated with any glorification of the present.Thereisa shallowformof prpsendsn now beiig prodaim-

ed by some liberal revisionists who consider post-GreatSociety America the highest point in human social evolu-tion. The mat compelling evidence cited for this view,however, derivesfrom thesize of the G.N.P. and the ef-fects of technological advances. Like vulgar Marxists,these analysts generally disregard ethical, spiritual, andaesthetic questionsor treat t hemwithin the contextof anexpandingtechnologyand welfare state. It s obviouslynotmy intention to defend this or any other symptom ofpresentkt complacency-or, even less, to ascri be it to theworthy subjects of this tribute. *Perhapseven morepert i -nent is the other part of this maxim from The Politiw,Book Four:. . justas the actof relearning(metamantha-n&) may be no lessworthwhile than learning somethingfrom scratch(manthaneina am&).

306 Summer/Fall1982

gottfried european roots

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