/lit/ - Literature

>>22541136
he was refuted in the field of political theory by Ludwig Von Haller (pbuh)

On Nigel Carlsbad and Haller

Who is the most right wing thinker in history?

>>20524167
>>20524175
>The purpose of this essay is to vindicate the thesis that liberalism doesn’t exist. It is dead. Almost as dead as animal magnetism. Moreover, its death is by no means recent. I can’t prove a negative? Just watch me. I’m not suggesting anything new or groundbreaking — Paul Gottfried, Theodore J. Lowi, Walter Lippmann, James T. Kloppenberg, Panagiotis Kondylis and a host of others have made similar arguments, or in any case have revised liberalism into something unrecognizable from its origins. On a superficial level a lot of people will agree. Of course we don’t live in the bourgeois-liberal epoch. And just as they say this they will forget all about it momentarily after and proceed to bang on about “the free market,” “negative rights,” how the idea of civic equality inevitably led to trans rights, the “commodification” wrought by “neoliberal woke capital,” so on and so forth. Copious references to Alasdair MacIntyre, John Gray, Christopher Lasch and others will inevitably follow. Fat and greasy “Red Tory” military history buffs will start defending lockdowns in the name of the common good. They say it, but they don’t believe it. The people who are “left on economics, right on culture” and who lecture others on “materialist class analysis” are utterly divorced from present material conditions, and can’t help but see the Gilded Age everywhere they go. Remind them that the proletariat’s pensions and health benefits come from the asset portfolios of pension funds investing in public and private equity, and that therefore the proletariat’s class interests are just as tethered to capital markets as any fatcat, and there’s not much they can say. The utter erosion of the rule of law is widely acknowledged, yet people can’t put two and two together that this implies a demise of the liberal epoch. The facile attempt at pretending it is still with us by pointing to the widespread belief in equality is not unlike someone trying to argue that 18th-century Geneva was still Roman Catholic because people continued to pray to God.

>>19457072
https://carlsbad1819.wordpress.com/2021/08/25/karl-ludwig-von-haller-his-life-and-work/

Opposed to both these tendencies of liberalism, separated from them by the breadth of the heavens, was Carl Ludwig von Haller, the dreaded “restorer of political science.” The Bernese aristocrat had seen the power of the Swiss patricians collapse amid the storms of the Revolution, and subsequently, as an exile in Austrian service, had constructed the political system which was “to re-establish monarchy upon its true foundations, to overthrow the presumptuous revolutionary science of the godless eighteenth century, and to make the Catholic church shine with renewed effulgence.”

With the proud consciousness of his claim to rank as a universal historian, he announced his doctrine, first of all in Allgemeine Staatskunde (1808), and subsequently, from 1816 onwards, in Restauration der Staatswissenschaft. It seemed to him a wonderful dispensation of Providence that from him in particular, the born republican and Protestant, should proceed the anti-revolutionary doctrine of salvation. And indeed the sledge-hammer dialectical blows of his severe reasoning fell with crushing force upon the imaginative structures of the doctrine of natural rights. It was the incontrovertible demonstrations of this blustering naturalist which first shattered the belief in the state of nature, in the social contract, and in the innate sovereignty of the people, even in those circles of the uninstructed who were unable to follow the ideas of the historical school of law. Yet all that he advanced in place of this obsolete doctrine was a crude popularisation of the principles of patrimonial law upon which had been based the authority of the Bernese aristocracy. Just as in former days the rulers of Berne had treated the conquered subject lands of Aargau and Vaud simply as the property of their glorious republic, so Haller founded the state solely upon the right of the stronger. Land belongs to a prince, a corporation, or a church; upon this property of a suzerain lord, and under his protection, settlers appear; if the people should disappear, the state would still continue to exist in the person of the prince, who can readily find new subjects. Consequently the state resembles any other association based on civil law, differing from others only because it is more powerful and independent, and because its prince is “an owner, a man equipped with absolutely independent rights”; he rules the nation through the instrumentality of his personal servants, is entitled to regard (it is even his duty to regard) himself and his house as the principal aim for which the state exists, but he must resist the dispersion of his own property and must protect his subjects with his own soldiers.

>He never missed