-Caveat Lector- http://www.suba.com/~rcarrier/revcon.html "Surely 'revolutionary conservative' is a contradiction in terms!" Not at all. In fact, to my mind it's the only way in which one can be a conservative in these times. But what is meant here by "conservative"? It's best to approach this question by beginning with what conservatism is not. Conservatism is not mere inertia, but principled behavior (Conservatism is not simply, or even primarily, being in favor of the status quo. Were this so, a Stalinist in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign would be a conservative, since he would be in favor of preserving the status quo, i.e. keeping Stain in power. There is a sense in which this statement is true, but it is a very shallow one. At deeper levels of consideration, it is wholly false. A conservative wishes to preserve the status quo, not simply because it is the status quo, but because the status quo is in accord with certain political and cultural principles that the conservative embraces and in terms of which he acts. This means that one has to distinguish between conservative behavior and conservative principles. Simply being in favor of the status quo, whatever that may be, is at best conservative behavior, but this behavior need not be based on conservative principles. This is the case with the Stalinist: his behavior is in some sufficiently broad sense conservative, but his principles are in no wise conceivably conservative. To describe the principles of Stalinism as conservatism is to engage in debasing the language. Conservatism is not ideological, but principled When I say that there are conservative principles, I am not saying that there is a conservative ideology. The conservative does not conceive of his principles as describable in detail independent of a particular political and cultural context. Conservatism does not admit of applicability in a manner indifferent to time, place, or history. Although conservatism does have general principles, what is primarily conserved are institutions, and these are diverse. Conservatism therefore differs in flavor from place to place and from time to time, and one flavor cannot be reduced to another. Diversity in flavor does not entail incoherence at the level of principle, though. Although applied in a diversity of ways in a diversity of contexts, conservatism does possess a coherent body of principles. One formulation of these principles is presented by the late Russell Kirk in his magisterial work The Conservative Mind: (1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.... (2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems... (3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have often been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum.... (4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.... (5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power. (6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence. (pp. 8-9) Conservatism is not reactionary, but pious In this list of principles, the first one--the belief in a transcendent order that determines what the good is for human beings--comes first for a good reason. This is because it is the most basic of these principles. What this principle affirms is that there is a metaphysical order, supraindividual and non-human, that stands over and above the physical order of things and is the grounding, enlivening source of the physical order. This transcendent order is mysterious: one can have knowledge of this dimension of Being, but one can never fully grasp it in a way that allows one to exhaust its possibilities and thereby master it. Knowledge of transcendence comes to us through tradition. "Tradition" is here used in a double sense that follows from its etymology. Tradition is the activity of handing down or across. The tradition that conservatism embraces is not only the activity of handing something down from earlier to later generations; it is also and primarily the activity wherein the transcendent order hands itself down to us. By living traditionally, human beings allow this metaphysical order of the good to infuse our fundamental understandings, attitudes, and practices. Human life is thereby informed and ordered by transcendence, given a unity whereby one may attain to the good that transcendence has determined for us. We know the transcendent order by means of tradition. But part of what we know through the tradition is that this order is mysterious, that it ever lies beyond our full grasp. The anti-conservative and anti-traditional person--in a word, the "liberal"--is one who denies the existence of transcendence. He claims that the only order that human life may have is the "order" specified by the wants and desires that each individual human being happens to have. To live is not to discover and adequate oneself to suprahuman principles of conduct that determine what one should desire, but rather to discover empirically what one's desires are and to find the most efficient means of satisfying them. The liberal thereby posits an order which is uniform (because equally applicable anywhere and anywhen), transparent (because abstract), and rational (in the sense of being restricted to the calculation of the efficiency of means). In contrast, the transcendent order affirmed by the conservative is manifold--it can and has been realized in the temporal order in a variety of ways that are equivalent, but not reducible, to one another. It is mysterious--the transcendent order is not known apart from, but only in and through, the various traditions it has granted to us; and while humans may act to preserve a tradition, it is beyond their power to create a tradition from whole cloth. And it is suprarational--the discovery of the transcendent order and the standards it enfolds is prior and superior to the calculation of the most efficient means to ends that calculative reason, by its very nature, cannot evaluate. In light of this understanding of transcendence, it should be no surprise that the fundamental attitude of the conservative is piety, a reverence for the transcendent order in all its ineliminable mystery and a loyalty to the traditions granted by it (we know not how or why) and through which it is known. The other five conservative principles that Kirk enumerates--affection for the manifold; the necessity of social order; the linkage of freedom and property; the reliance upon prescription; and the distrust of change for its own sake--may well be seen as the practical expressions of conservative piety, of the reverential loyalty that finds its basis in the traditional gift of transcendence. It should be clear from the last enumerated principle that the reactionary, in the sense of one who resists any change at all, is a poor conservative indeed. Time and circumstances will bring with them the necessity for change, at which point the conservative who resist such necessary change ensures only that what he loves may not be conserved at all. But such change cannot be admitted at any cost, nor must it occur as quickly as possible. Change is on occasion necessary, but the conservative will take pains to ensure that it will take place as a reform of the historical institutions that incarnate the principles on which he acts, and not as a revision that overturns them. The piety of the conservative, his loyalty to the mystery of his tradition, means that he knows well that there is a providential character to his tradition. He senses that there is a hidden strength in these institutions, and that it is far better to seek reforms that will allow this hidden power to exercise itself than to chase after wholesale revisions that can only cut one off from it. Conservatism is not the ideology of capitalism It should also be clear that conservatism is not a synonym for the ideology of capitalism. The conservative has a healthy distrust of capitalism, and especially of its tendency to usurp the place of other institutions in society. It tends to elevate itself and its merely economic considerations to primacy of place within a community. This entails not only an implicit denial of a transcendent order, but also an explicit denial of the diversity of human existence (a denial shared by present-day "multiculturalism," which, far from affirming the distinctiveness of cultures, denies to any culture the authority to conserve its distinctiveness); the priority of prescription over abstract design (as can be seen in the "anarcho-capitalists" and in many libertarians); and the dangerousness of innovation (of which capitalism has been a main force in recent history). Conservatives do to some extent defend capitalism, since they defend the rights of property, the affirmation of which is part of capitalism. Private property, the institutions by which each person has effective ownership and control of the means of providing for himself and for his family and friends, allows each person to be to some extent or other independent of others and responsible for himself. But they tend to defend capitalism as the lesser evil, recognizing at the same time that there are other aspects to society that are only imperfectly grasped (if not missed entirely) in economic terms and that have priority over merely economic considerations. This is the case with the institutions of private property, which conservatives defend primarily for other than economic reasons. If economic concerns were all there is--if life were nothing more than a matter of getting and spending--then economic arrangements which made it possible to get and spend as much as one can at the cost of dependence upon others and irresponsibility to oneself should be preferable (and the present state of affairs suggests that many do find it preferable). The conservative recognizes the political and cultural dangers of such dependence and irresponsibility. He defends private property primarily as a bulwark against these dangers, and not merely because it is economically efficient. The managerial revolution, conservatism's triumphant foe If the reader is shocked by the claim that conservatives have no great love for capitalism, he will be even more shocked by the claim that conservatism is not an actual political force in present-day society. And I do make this claim. There is no prominent political institution in present-day society that is identifiably conservative, in the sense specified by the principles enumerated above. Nowadays conservatives in the political realm are--I shall not say a spent force, but certainly a defeated one. Conservatism as an actual political force in present-day society has been defeated by what the late political theorist James Burnham calls the "managerial revolution." According to Burnham, there has been a political and social revolution in the past century, one that has undermined the power of capitalist and pre-capitalist institutions. Essential to capitalism is the notion that ownership and control go together. In capitalism, control of the company one owns is secured by legal ownership of that company, and the one who legally owns the company is typically the one who controls it. The individual capitalist, legal owner of his company and direct administrator of it, is the typical agent in the capitalist economy. And in principle there seems to be no significant difference between the corporation and the individually owned company save the number of owners holding legal title to the corporation. But this is not so. As the size and complexity of the corporation grows, so does the distance between legal ownership and administrative control. It becomes increasingly necessary to hire managers--those whose profession it is to administer the running of the corporation and have the technical and managerial education to do so. These managers--professional engineers and administrators who are the product of specialized academic training--gradually took over effective control from the legal owners of the largest corporations--the stockholders, who increasingly had no understanding of how to run the companies they legally owned. The managers effected a revolution in which control of a company became separated from legal ownership of a company, and in which they became the new dominant economic class. The replacement of the individually owned company by the corporation as the dominant force in the economy, along with the takeover of de facto ownership of the corporations from the stockholders by the managers, resulted in the replacement of capitalism by a new economic form that is neither capitalist (because legal ownership no longer entails economic control) nor socialist (because there is no expropriation of capital by the state or by the people). At the same time, a parallel development occurred within government in the emergence of a professional civil service. These governmental managers had become necessary in an executive branch where there was an increasing distance between "legal ownership" (by the voters and their representatives in Congress) and "administrative control" (by the new civil service, the product of the efforts of "reformers" who sought to eliminate graft and patronage). As the corporate managers assumed control from the stockholders and were no longer responsible to them, so the governmental managers assumed control from the voters and their representatives and were no longer responsible to them. These two groups of managers became allies, and eventually together formed the new ruling class of managerial society. After all, they fulfilled similar functions in their respective spheres; many were capable of moving back and forth between the two spheres; and they shared a common background of training and culture. This commonality of background has been reinforced by the development of a third distinct group in the managerial ruling class. Alongside corporate managers and governmental managers have arisen cultural managers who administer mass cultural institutions such as the universities, the mass media, and the realm of law. Although the cultural managers were historically the last managerial group to emerge, they are in a way the most important of the three branches of the ruling class. This is because cultural managers are the ones who establish the terms of "acceptable" political and social discussion. They control the institutions wherein the ruling class receives its training and credentials, and so can ensure that new recruits to the ruling class will have the same understanding and attitude. And they control the institutions of public discourse, and so can disseminate propaganda designed to legitimate the new ruling class and to derogate its opponents. The most important reason for the alliance of the corporations and the government bureaucracies (and, later, the institutions of mass culture) is that they shared the same enemies. All three groups were opposed to capitalist society--the corporate managers because they had seized power from the individual owners who wished to control the companies they owned; the governmental managers because they had seized power from the constitutionally elected representatives who were supposed to supervise them and defend the rights of property; and the cultural managers because they had seized power from that host of institutions wherein the understanding of and attitude toward society as a whole and in its parts was instilled in its members and defended from corruption. The managerial class is in opposition to "bourgeois society," whose elements are the individual ownership and control of companies, constitutionally limited government that protects property rights, and the web of capitalist and pre-capitalist cultural and social institutions that allow these to flourish. It seeks to destroy "bourgeois society" by replacing the individual capitalist with the transnational corporation, the "rule of law" with the mass state, and the variety of social and cultural institutions (the family, the church, regional and ethnic groups, and so on) with a uniform and centralized "culture." What is today called "liberalism" is the ideology of the managerial class, its weapon of words in its efforts to secure its recently won dominion over society. Why conservatism is currently a defeated position In its more recent incarnations, conservatism has (for better or worse) been allied with the "bourgeois society" that the managerial revolution has overthrown. It defended the property rights of the individual capitalist, and to a certain extent endorsed the individual capitalist as one who was capable of being responsive to the local needs of the community in which he lived. It defended the form of government that had been set up in the Constitution, with its firm limitations upon centralized power and its protection of the rights of property. And it defended the social and cultural institutions that made these economic and political institutions possible, particularly the pre-capitalist ones (since they put a restraint upon the tendencies of capitalism mentioned above). With the defeat of "bourgeois culture" by the new managerial elite of the corporations and the mass state, conservatism lost power as a social and political force, since it no longer had a significant social and political basis that it represented. This is not to say that conservatism has vanished entirely from society. There are still many social institutions, especially those with pre-capitalist origins, to which people belong and are loyal--the family, religion, and the larger part of everyday social life--and which are in their nature conservative. There is still much in present-day society that is traditional, even though it may not be explicitly understood and embraced as such. But while the presence of this predominantly traditional and instinctively conservative portion of present-day society still exerts its influence and ensures that society will not yet explode into atoms, there is no doubt that this remnant has received and continues to receive fearsome blows from the managerial elite. This is in part due to the nature of these institutions. The greater part of their virtue lies in their implicit character, and they cannot easily defend themselves from an attack that is explicitly and self-consciously anti-traditional. This is obviously not to say that they are indefensible, for otherwise there would be only an antiquarian point to this essay. But it is to say that it requires a determined effort of the intellect to make apparent the transcendent basis of traditional institutions, institutions in which this basis is normally (and rightly) only implicit. For the traditional society to safeguard itself, it requires an institution, itself traditionally rooted, whose special role is to recognize and defend the knowledge of the transcendent order that the tradition embodies. And the most effective way of undermining and destroying a tradition is to undermine and destroy these guardians. This is what the managerial society has done to conservatives as an organized political force, both by undermining the economic and political power of its bourgeois allies and by using the power of mass cultural institutions to change the terms of "acceptable" public discussion. The latter is as important as the former, since to the extent that the conservative wants to get a public hearing at all costs he will adjust the presentation of his position, very often to such an extent that it loses most or all of its critical force. The only "conservative" group of significance in the present political arena is the "neoconservative" faction, which seeks to use the powers of the mass state for the defeat of communism and the establishment of the United States as the dominant force in global politics. This, despite the fact that the mass state is the greatest enemy of liberty at home, as the recent expeditions of the FBI and the BATF have demonstrated. The technocratic dangers of populism For "paleoconservatives" to regain an effective voice in society, it must discover an effective basis in society for whose interests it can be the spokesman. No one has perceived this more clearly than the journalist Samuel Francis, who has popularized the theory of the managerial revolution in paleoconservative circles. He sees the nascent populist movement as the most likely candidate for representing the interests of those he calls "Middle American Radicals." He also recognizes that the enemy lies not merely in Big Government. Conservatives must be opposed not only to the managerial class that rules in the "Federal" bureaucracy, but also to the managerial class that rules in the transnational corporations and the managerial class that rules in the cultural institutions of the universities, the mass media, and the legal profession. However, Francis' prescriptions for political strategy cannot but give the thoughtful paleoconservative pause. He concludes an essay in the October 1997 issue of the paleoconservative journal Chronicles with the following remark: To dismantle the imperial presidency and send Caesar's legions home would merely be to knock the weapon from the hands of the foe, but it would not necessarily mean the destruction of the foe himself. To accomplish that ultimate end, yet another new elite must displace the one that has used the presidency to put itself in power, and it is likely that any new elite that does so will forge its own spearhead of revolution from the same weapon of presidential power. ("Caesar's Column," p. 26) Here it is unclear whether Francis seeks to replace the present managerial elite with another, equally managerial but populist elite that will act for ends more congenial to Francis and (one presumes) "Middle Americans;" or whether he seeks to overthrow the managerial society as such and replace it with another society more expressive of the interests of "Middle Americans" as formulated in terms of conservative principles. This ambiguity pervades Francis' work, and apparently Francis does not see it as a problem. Yet it is a problem, since one cannot achieve conservative ends by unconservative means, at least not if one takes those conservative ends seriously. To the extent that Francis thinks that the establishment of a conservative society is merely a matter of getting the right people into places of power (by any means necessary?) and that the managerial structures of power are neutral instruments to this end, he expresses a technocratic view of social and cultural institutions more typical of the managerial society that Francis opposes than of any recognizably conservative society. Accompanying this ambiguity over the nature of the new regime is an ambiguity over the character of Middle American Radicals (MARs). This second ambiguity is prominent in Francis' latest book, a collection of essays from Chronicles entitled Revolution from the Middle. In the introduction to this book, he gives a thumbnail description of MARs as possessing a "combination of culturally conservative moral and social beliefs with support for economically liberal policies such as Medicare, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and economic nationalism and protectionism." (p. 12) And in the suggestively titled "The Middle American Proletariat," he writes: The end of the bourgeois order in the middle of the century transformed the American middle class from a bourgeois Mittelstand to a post-bourgeois proletariat. As political scientist Andrew Hacker desribes this "new middle class," it is considerably larger than the old and hence is "unwilling and unable to adhere to rules tailored for a quite different group of individuals in quite different settings." It differs from the old middle class also in its high degree of transiency and mobility, its "national" rather than local character, and its lack of property. While the new middle class glories in its affluence and ability to consume whatever managerial capitalism sets before it, it conspicuously lacks the material independence of the old middle class and the authority, security, and liberty that independence yields.... Alienated from the nation's past by its size and rootlessness, it retains only a fragmented memory of and identity with the historic national experience. Lacking the autonomy of the bourgeois middle class, it is unable to formulate a new identity that would offer resistance to the emerging transnational elite and its allies in the underclass. "In fact," writes Mr. Hacker, "the new middle class has many attributes in common with the traditional conception of a proletariat." (pp.54-55) This is a strange group of people for a conservative to pin his hopes upon! And indeed one does find in the book under discussion the occasional qualm about whether MARs can develop enough independence of mind and spirit to do the job Francis thrusts upon them. By and large, though, he thinks that this mass of people will be able to bring about a political and social revolution, should the opportunity present itself. Yet it remains unclear whether such a revolution could reasonably be called conservative. If it could, it would require the development of grassroots institutions (and not just political ones) that would be recognizably traditional and constitute a veritable counterculture in mortal opposition to managerial society. But this would require recognizing that MARs are probably not as radical as all that as they stand, and Francis is understandably reluctant to say so. But if MARs are fine just as they are, then the "revolution from the middle" is apparently nothing more than a revolt that does not seriously challenge the managerial society but rather changes who gets to run the mechanisms of administration. The middle-class proletariat may be conceivably better off in economic terms, but it would still be a proletariat. The Machiavellian heresy in conservatism This technocratic tendency in Francis' though is a consequence (though probably not a necessary consequence) of the method of political analysis he employs. Francis bases his analysis of the current political situation on Burnham's theory of the managerial revolution. Burnham devised this theory while a Marxist (albeit an extremely unorthodox one). Even after becoming a conservative, Burnham retained a Machiavellian approach to political matters. On this approach, political theories and positions tend to be reduced to the status of ideologies useful to this or that social group. Burnham abstracts from the truth or falsity of political theories and focusses on the "material" forces that makes them successful or unsuccessful. He accordingly expresses contempt for those "idealists" who think that political theories are somehow capable of enforcing themselves upon human beings without recourse to the "material" basis. Francis shares Burnham's contempt for those "idealists" in the paleoconservative camp, whom he calls "beautiful losers" in his collection of essays bearing that title. And to a certain extent his contempt is justified. Paleoconservatives have often focussed on arguing for the truth of the conservative position against the "liberal" ideology of the managerial elite at the expense of devising means of making the conservative position an effective force in society. And they have often formulated the conservative position in terms that make them ineffective to this end, whether by making them unappealing to those to whom they could potentially appeal or by making them the instruments of bad political judgments. By taking a more "realistic" approach, by focussing on the "material" basis of the conservative and "liberal" positions and discovering whose interests they serve, Burnham and Francis have undoubtedly done a great service for paleoconservatives. But while the Machiavellian perspective has its place within conservatism, it cannot substitute for the principles that are distinctive of conservatism. Any critique worth its salt has both a destructive and a productive aspect, and it is the productive aspect that is the more important, since it is what gives direction and force to the destructive aspect and prevents it from being merely destructive. As effective as the Machiavellian perspective undoubtedly is for the destructive moment of a critique, it is seriously defective as the productive moment of a properly conservative critique. This is because the Machiavellian approach abstracts from the truth or falsity of the political theories and positions it considers, and it consequently abstracts from the goodness or badness of those positions. But conservative principles are not simply descriptive of certain sorts of social and political arrangements, but are prescriptive of a way of life that is good and conducive to happiness. The first principle that Kirk enumerates--the affirmation of a transcendent order to which human beings, severally and together, are to adequate themselves--is absolutely essential to conservatism, since it is the more-than-human basis for the evaluations made by the conservative. Whatever the practical failings of the paleoconservatives Francis holds in contempt, they never lost sight of the necessity of regarding conservative principles as having an ethical (and, ultimately, metaphysical) significance rather than a merely instrumental significance, and they never forgot the necessity of affirming the truth and goodness of these principles rather than treating them as merely useful means of seizing power. Francis seems all too willing to treat conservative principles as an effective means of inducing "Middle American Radicals" to fall in line behind a new set of administrators, and one has to wonder how much respect he really accords either conservative principles or the "Middle American Radicals" to whom his populist formulation of them is supposed to appeal. The conservative as revolutionary The conservative cannot agree with Francis that it is sufficient simply to seize control of the managerial structures of power from its current tenants. This seizure would leave these structures of power largely unaffected, and it is to these structures of power that the conservative is primarily opposed. The conservative must go further and overturn the managerial society, since it is the epitome of all that is unconservative and anti-conservative. In other words, the conservative must take on the role of a revolutionary, or more precisely of a counter-revolutionary. In the present situation, one is a revolutionary precisely to the extent that one is a conservative. But how can this be? Is not being a revolutionary incompatible with with being a conservative, since it involves innovative changes that can only be destructive? I do not think so. The conservative revolution certainly cannot take place simply by destroying the mangerial society. The anarchist may think that the destructive urge is necessarily creative, but the revolutionary conservative cannot agree with him. Nor can the conservative revolution simply create social and political institutions out of thin air. That would be innovation, since these institutions would have no roots in the history and practices of the people. However, the revolutionary conservative is not thereby left without resources, intellectual or material. For while the managerial revolution has defeated capitalist and pre-capitalist social, political, and cultural institutions, it has not yet extirpated them (though not for lack of trying). This is why I wrote that conservatism is a defeated force and not a spent one. There is life yet in the family, in the church, in all the associations made on the basis of region or ethnicity, in individually owned businesses tied to these, and in local governments. The revolutionary conservative must cherish these, encouraging them to flourish and to recover control of those social functions that have been stolen away from them by a managerial elite that has nothing but contempt for them. This will, in the nature of things, bring these local efforts at conservative change into conflict with the managerial elite. To resist the managerial elite, they must have some means of coordinating themselves so that they can constitute a common struggle against the elite and its institutions. In my view, these should be confederal and not centralized, and they should as much as possible operate outside the framework of managerial institutions. What is needed is not another mass political party, but institutions that as much as possible do without presently existing political parties. And of course, those involved need to have a clear view of the situation and of the conservative principles to be brought to bear in the situation. In other words, they must be statesmen. Above all, the conservative counterrevolution will come to nothing if it dispenses with its first and most basic principle, the affirmation of a transcendent order. There will be no liberation from the tyranny of the managers and their anti-traditional principles without what can only be called a religious vision. Transcendence must break in upon us, as it has broken in upon our ancestors, and grant us the knowledge by which we may live in accord with it. The conservative counterrevolution is in need of the gift from above by which traditional life may be renewed and restored. It cannot be forgotten that it will be a gift, and not something that we can manufacture for ourselves. Tradition is lifeless unless the knowledge of the transcendent order upon which it is founded is woven into the most basic understanding of the world as a whole; and this understanding, which is as mysterious and worthy of piety as what it knows, can never be fully grasped and mastered, let alone abstractly formulated and inculcated. The counterrevolutionary cannot fashion for himself the gift of tradition, but he can and should make himself ready to receive the gift. He can prepare himself for it. But how? Not primarily by allying himself with the "Religious Right." This is because, as Francis argues in the essay "Religious Wrong," the religion (or, better, religiosity) at work is neither the driving force behind the movement designated by this term, nor of sufficiently broad and penetrating vision to reveal fully what is wrong. Francis thinks that any religious perspective on current difficulties constitutes "false consciousness," but he is least persuasive when he most gives in to Marxist habits of thought. However, the religiosity of the "Religious Right" is worrisome to the counterrevolutionary, since it is to a large extent a form of religion that has evacuated itself of any reference to the transcendent. The counterrevolutionary conservative must rather look to the reappearance of religious life that is genuinely traditional. Here, as the case of the "Religious Right" illustrates, not any form of religion that comes down the pike can do. How can an authentically traditional form of religion be recognized, though? It can be recognized because we have knowledge of what it is and involves. The researches of the Traditionalist school of comparative religion, to which belongs such people as Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Julius Evola, and Mircea Eliade, have recovered for the counterrevolutionary an awareness of the world of Tradition and of the metaphysical principles toward which it was oriented. Whether it be through a revival of existing forms of religion through a return to their Traditional roots or through the revelation of Tradition in a new religious form, conservatism will be recovered as a dominant force in human life when traditional religious knowledge once again becomes real for the whole of society. (Written November 1, 1997; last revised September 23, 2000. Thanks to Jim Kalb for critical examination of this essay.) <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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