/lit/ - Literature

>Although the democracies emerged triumphant following the cataclysm of the Second World War, in many ways it remained a Pyrrhic victory. For, especially in Europe, the conflagration’s primary site, the war dealt a mortal blow to the eighteenth century’s assumptions about the necessary correlation between truth, reason, and progress. It was the first war in which civilian casualties outnumbered those among combatants, and it left an unfathomable fifty million dead in its wake. How, indeed, could such faith be maintained in the face of death camps, carpet bombing, and the specter of nuclear annihilation, all of which had emerged from the heart of the West? Followed by the traumas of the Cold War and
decolonization, these events provided detractors of the Enlightenment with a new and compelling animus. During the 1960s a new generation of vociferous critics of democracy emerged, above all in France. There, the intellectual “event” of the postwar period was the rehabilitation of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Discredited in Germany owing to the taint of fascism, they emerged as the maîtres penseurs for poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard. In this way, Counter-Enlightenment views that, heretofore, had been the exclusive
preserve of the European right came to permeate the standpoint of the postmodern left. Whereas the left’s previous targets had been social inequality and class injustice, the postmodernists, inspired by Nietzsche and Heidegger, adopted a neo-Spenglerian standpoint of “total critique.” They aimed their sights unremittingly at “reason,” “humanism,” “modernity”—at the same targets that, for decades, had been privileged objects of scorn and derision among proponents of the counterrevolutionary right.

anyone else on /lit/ read this? thoughts?

Controversial opinion here, but I feel that the heirs to traditional conservative thinking in the 20th century aren't paleocons, but post-modernists and other self-declared leftists.

They are the ones who inherited the aim of re-politicizing contemporary discussions of politics with a sense that conflict is an inevitable part of public life and an unavoidable factor in all political decision making, who pronounced the historicity of humanity and all its endeavors. It's not a novel thinking either, many liberal intellectuals, like Richard Wolin and Alan Sokal, have remarked the influence that such post-modernist thinkers took from traditional conservatism, which they cluelessly call "fascism", since they don't know any better.

Even the economical criticism of capitalism that have motivated leftists for the whole 20th century is taken from the writings of Adam Muller and his conservative criticism of liberal economics in the XIXth century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Müller

>His position in political economy is defined by his strong opposition to Adam Smith's system of materialistic-liberal (so-called classical) political economy, or the so-called industry system. He censures Smith as presenting a one-sidedly material and individualistic conception of society, and as being too exclusively English in his views. Müller is thus also an adversary of free trade. In contrast with the economical individualism of Adam Smith, he emphasizes the ethical element in national economy, the duty of the state toward the individual, and the religious basis which is also necessary in this field. Müller's importance in the history of political economy is acknowledged even by the opponents of his religious and political point of view. His reaction against Adam Smith, says Roscher (Geschichte der National-Ökonomik, p. 763), "is not blind or hostile, but is important, and often truly helpful." Some of his ideas, freed from much of their alloy, are reproduced in the writings of the historical school of German economists.

>The reactionary and feudalistic thought in Müller's writings, which agreed so little with the spirit of the times, prevented his political ideas from exerting a more notable and lasting influence on his age, while their religious character prevented them from being justly appreciated. However, Müller's teachings had long-term effects in that they were taken up again by 20th century theorists of corporatism and the corporate state, for example Othmar Spann (Der wahre Staat. Vorlesungen über Abbruch und Neubau der Gesellschaft, Vienna, 1921).

Even the so famous criticism of the objectivity of science by post-modernists is in line with traditional conservative thinking. Such conservatives were always dubious of "reason" because they held that all science was shaped by human values and contingencies prevalent at any given period of time.
Cont