When I was doing the primary research for my 2019 book with Peter Boghossian, How to Have Impossible Conversations, I took the time to read a fascinating volume from the Harvard Negotiations Project called Difficult Conversations (Peter and I chose the title for our book before we knew of this book’s existence).
“It seems difficult to define the theory of selfhood that produces Libertarians. They’re ultimately realists, in the strict sense, who also want to define themselves. It isn’t fair to call them a Rebellious Self, though it is clear why one might want to. The closest I have arrived at is a spin from a sad and ugly side of internet culture that I don’t want to apply to them with its full connotative capacity: Selves Going Their Own Way. Individualist Self almost catches this vibe in a more generous way, but it’s also too generous, particularly in that it’s also by default unfair to the Liberals, who share this value with them but (only) slightly differently.”
A compelling essay, James. I'm going to suggest an adjustment to your model from a European historical perspective, which is that the intermediate step between conservatism and conservative utopia is monarchy, rather than fascism.
It's long been the position of Marxist critics that conservatives are cryptofacist, or one step away from tyranny. In fact, fascism and national socialism were extremely disruptive to the conservative order, leaving both Italy and the German empire defeated. The tension between the German aristocracy and the upstart National Socialists nearly cost Hitler his life, of course, as Tom Cruise depicted.
And the Nazi aesthetic embraced both an imagined Nordic past and high modernity, for example in the Autobahn, DAF and Leistungkampf programmes which were anything but traditional, placing workers' rights, progress and speed at the centre of national life.
For the same reason, I reject horseshoe theory, as it posits that fascism and communism are polar opposites which somehow ended up looking rather similar, without explaining why.
I would argue that the 'third position' is an attempt at dialectical synthesis supposedly resolving the tension between workers and capital identified by Marx. It is therefore a challenge to Bolshevism from within socialism which emphasises the importance of class unity within a nation, over the dictatorship of the international proletariat which the Bolsheviks claimed to have implemented.
I was in a local museum which had an original newspaper front page on display announcing the death of Hitler. His short-lived replacement as head of the Third Reich said that Germany would continue the fight against Bolshevism. Not Russia, the Soviet Union, the Allies or the USA, but Bolshevism specifically. That was a very precise identification of the ideological enemy.
“It seems difficult to define the theory of selfhood that produces Libertarians. They’re ultimately realists, in the strict sense, who also want to define themselves. It isn’t fair to call them a Rebellious Self, though it is clear why one might want to. The closest I have arrived at is a spin from a sad and ugly side of internet culture that I don’t want to apply to them with its full connotative capacity: Selves Going Their Own Way. Individualist Self almost catches this vibe in a more generous way, but it’s also too generous, particularly in that it’s also by default unfair to the Liberals, who share this value with them but (only) slightly differently.”
Just call Libertarians a Selfish Self.
A compelling essay, James. I'm going to suggest an adjustment to your model from a European historical perspective, which is that the intermediate step between conservatism and conservative utopia is monarchy, rather than fascism.
It's long been the position of Marxist critics that conservatives are cryptofacist, or one step away from tyranny. In fact, fascism and national socialism were extremely disruptive to the conservative order, leaving both Italy and the German empire defeated. The tension between the German aristocracy and the upstart National Socialists nearly cost Hitler his life, of course, as Tom Cruise depicted.
And the Nazi aesthetic embraced both an imagined Nordic past and high modernity, for example in the Autobahn, DAF and Leistungkampf programmes which were anything but traditional, placing workers' rights, progress and speed at the centre of national life.
For the same reason, I reject horseshoe theory, as it posits that fascism and communism are polar opposites which somehow ended up looking rather similar, without explaining why.
I would argue that the 'third position' is an attempt at dialectical synthesis supposedly resolving the tension between workers and capital identified by Marx. It is therefore a challenge to Bolshevism from within socialism which emphasises the importance of class unity within a nation, over the dictatorship of the international proletariat which the Bolsheviks claimed to have implemented.
I was in a local museum which had an original newspaper front page on display announcing the death of Hitler. His short-lived replacement as head of the Third Reich said that Germany would continue the fight against Bolshevism. Not Russia, the Soviet Union, the Allies or the USA, but Bolshevism specifically. That was a very precise identification of the ideological enemy.