Traditionalist Conservatism Page

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Introduction

Welcome to the Traditionalist Conservatism Page!

This page presents materials I accumulated that are related in one way or another to traditionalist conservatism, an outlook described in my Conservatism FAQ and developed in the materials on this site. If you want, there is a spoken introduction to the issues (requiring RealPlayer).

The collection was intended to be comprehensive—more a bibliography than a recommended reading list—and covers tendencies from the American Old Republic to the European New Right, from Catholic traditionalism to neo-Sufism, on out to the anarchist and fascist fringes.

Most of the materials were accumulated some time ago, and I haven’t kept the collection fully up to date although I try to get rid of dead links now and then. There seems less demand and perhaps less need for this kind of collection than there was at one time.

The key for inclusion was that the item deals with a dimension of human life that the utopian liberal rationalism now dominant finds hard to digest. Some materials are neither traditionalist or conservative but nonetheless, in their own way, bring into focus the impossibility of a rationalized social order and the need for tradition and a transcendent reference point.

No one could possibly agree with everything here, and inclusion does not mean agreement. I assume adult readers. I hope you find some of the materials interesting and useful, and if you do the issues presented can be discussed in our forum. Your participation is welcome.

The various aspects of the topic—political, cultural, moral and religious—are hard to separate, but I attempt to distinguish categories:

Political and Social Conservatism

High Culture

Traditionalist conservatives usually think of politics as an aspect of culture, and so recognize the mutual relevance of the two. So here are things relating more particularly to literary, philosophical, and artistic culture:

Religion

Some have argued that a non-religious conservatism is possible, but it is hard to think of conservatives, other than a few comfortably-situated intellectuals, who decisively reject a moral order transcending mankind, or the necessity of beliefs and institutions that give that order authority in social life. So here are resources relating to traditional religious orthodoxy of one sort or another, some with a political slant:

General:

Roman Catholic:

Eastern Orthodox:

Traditionalism seems more clearly constitutive of Eastern Orthodoxy than other branches of Christianity.

Protestant:

Protestantism often has an uneasy relation to traditionalism. Nonetheless, it is not monolithic and one should distinguish cases:

  • Contra Mundum, a journal of religion and society from a conservative Reform perspective. The site also has hundreds of other files, including lists of publications and organizations, back issues of a defunct magazine called Antithesis with a lot of Reconstructionist and Libertarian associations, and the essays of Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher.
  • Christianity & Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen. An online book contrasting modernism and supernaturalism.
  • Concerned Methodists Homepage.

Jewish

Muslim:

Christianity, Conservatism, and the Polity:

Counterrevolutionary and activist

Distributism and Related

Traditionalist conservatism emphasizes the local and particular, and wants to make economics part of social life. The natural consequence is an inclination toward distributism in economics.

Particularism

Secession

Neo-Confederate and Southern

Anti-Immigration and Related

Non-American

Monarchism

European New Right and related

Integral Traditionalist and Related

Libertarianism and related

In principle, libertarianism is at odds with conservatism and traditionalism. However, there is considerable practical overlap because all have a common enemy on present-day politically-correct managerial liberalism.

The biological connection

Modern thought radically separates subject and object. For that reason biology, which views man as a physically determined object, and liberal politics, which wants to view man as an unconditioned and autonomous subject, are perpetually at odds. The traditionalist conservative is inclined to let the two kill each other off and pick up the pieces with the aid of less radicalizing forms of thought, like Thomism. Here are some aspects of the confusion.