A few weeks ago (recall) I explained why it is completely natural that conservatism has disappeared from social science for methodological and substantive reasons. I also explained that this made the status of conservativism much more intense and fraught in the humanities, which (I don’t need remind anybody) is a shrinking pie. I don’t understand why conservatism has disappeared from literature, art history, history (if it has), but after teaching a course on conservativism (and modern Machiavellianism), I have a hypothesis about what happened in political philosophy and political theory.
The answer is much simpler, I think. Conservatism, as you define it, is a viewpoint that hardly anyone in our society holds. In the US context, Catholic integralism as espoused by Vermeule and others is no more conservative than Trotskyism - it proposes upending the existing order and placing its own proponents in a position of dictatorial power, to impose beliefs that hardly anyone holds. If anything, views like this are over-represented in academic circles relative to the population as a whole.
There are plenty of people with a disposition to conservatism in the ordinary language sense of the term (me, for example). But they are mostly to be found on the moderate left (since the left has been in a defensive mode for most of the last 50 years), or else are apolitical and simply averse to change without having or wanting any philosophical basis for this.
Yes. The libertarian style of argument fits with that of analytic philosophy.
More snarkily, I'd say libertariansim fits with the caricature version of analytic philosophy as anti-human logic-chopping, bearing in mind that effective caricatures are always based on reality, if distantly.
The answer is much simpler, I think. Conservatism, as you define it, is a viewpoint that hardly anyone in our society holds. In the US context, Catholic integralism as espoused by Vermeule and others is no more conservative than Trotskyism - it proposes upending the existing order and placing its own proponents in a position of dictatorial power, to impose beliefs that hardly anyone holds. If anything, views like this are over-represented in academic circles relative to the population as a whole.
There are plenty of people with a disposition to conservatism in the ordinary language sense of the term (me, for example). But they are mostly to be found on the moderate left (since the left has been in a defensive mode for most of the last 50 years), or else are apolitical and simply averse to change without having or wanting any philosophical basis for this.
This may be true. But in academic philosophy libertarians punch above their weight in the population.
Yes. The libertarian style of argument fits with that of analytic philosophy.
More snarkily, I'd say libertariansim fits with the caricature version of analytic philosophy as anti-human logic-chopping, bearing in mind that effective caricatures are always based on reality, if distantly.
I'll link to https://crookedtimber.org/2016/10/16/locke-nozick-locke/