For the Love of the Bourgeois: A Comparative Analysis of Paul Gottfried's and Leo Strauss's Defenses of the Liberal Democratic West 1

• Published in: Political science reviewer Vol. 40; p. 82
• Main Author: Havers, Grant
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Wilmington Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc 01.01.2016
• Subjects: Comparative analysis; Conservatism; Hegemony; Historicism; Love; Social change; Teaching
• ISSN: 0091-3715

The Canadian Tory political philosopher George Grant once related the impossibility of conservatism to the ridiculous task of preserving tradition in the modern age of progress. How could conservatives protect their cherished institutions and customs in an age dedicated to technological and social transformation? Grant was particularly preoccupied with the survival of his own nation, whose existential impossibility mirrored the impossibility of conservatism as a whole. By the early 1960s, Grant contended in his most famous work, Lament for a Nation, that Canada had been inexorably drawn into the orbit of American liberal hegemony as its elites abandoned the last remnants of the old British conservatism that once defined the nation. It is Strauss's teaching on historicism in particular that attracted conservatives like Grant who anxiously witnessed the death of the way of life that predated the age of progress. In Strauss's eyes, this teaching must be absolutely uncompromising in its rejection of the modern tendency to equate all thought as historical and deny the eternal in turn.