The Traditionalist Right

The scandal of ignorance in the American academic community about just what the European Right is and means has been partially removed by The European Right, a study of rightist politics in ten countries edited by Professors Rogger and Weber. This anthology is largely the work of American scholars who share the presuppositions of Liberal democracy, who judge the European Right in terms more congenial to the Jacobin Goddess of Reason than to the Notre Dame she profaned by her presence. But I hasten to add that these words are not written in any spirit of contumacy or criticism. The authors of this book are good scholars and have done their job better than anyone had a right to expect from men whose basic philosophical commitments lie to the left of center.

This book ought to have been backed by conservative foundations and written by American conservative scholars. But the American Right has shown itself alarmingly naive in what often seems to be a principled rejection of any serious consideration of things politically conservative that take place outside the Anglo-Saxon diaspora of Western civilization. Very possibly a bridge between America and England might be found less in Burke than in the influence Chesterton and Belloc exercised on Southern Agrarianism in the early years of the century. English Distributism and Southern Agrarianism may not have constituted a true bridge but they were at least a pontoon thrown across the water. Belloc’s somewhat tenuous and sporadic relations with Action Française may supply a still further beachhead linking the Anglo-American and Latin worlds. Maurras’ reading of Vazquez de Mella, a reading that came too late to do him much good, suggests lifelines crossing the Pyrenees to the mind of traditionalist Catholic Spain, which in turn helped quicken the thought of Vogelsang and the Christian Social movement in Austria that ended in the murder of Dollfuss by Nazi thugs.

FW

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Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

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The scandal of ignorance in the American academic community about just what the European Right is and means has been partially removed by The European Right, a study of rightist politics in ten countries edited by Professors Rogger and Weber. This anthology is largely the work of American scholars who share the presuppositions of Liberal democracy, who judge the European Right in terms more congenial to the Jacobin Goddess of Reason than to the Notre Dame she profaned by her presence. But I hasten to add that these words are not written in any spirit of contumacy or criticism. The authors of this book are good scholars and have done their job better than anyone had a right to expect from men whose basic philosophical commitments lie to the left of center.

This book ought to have been backed by conservative foundations and written by American conservative scholars. But the American Right has shown itself alarmingly naive in what often seems to be a principled rejection of any serious consideration of things politically conservative that take place outside the Anglo-Saxon diaspora of Western civilization. Very possibly a bridge between America and England might be found less in Burke than in the influence Chesterton and Belloc exercised on Southern Agrarianism in the early years of the century. English Distributism and Southern Agrarianism may not have constituted a true bridge but they were at least a pontoon thrown across the water. Belloc’s somewhat tenuous and sporadic relations with Action Française may supply a still further beachhead linking the Anglo-American and Latin worlds. Maurras’ reading of Vazquez de Mella, a reading that came too late to do him much good, suggests lifelines crossing the Pyrenees to the mind of traditionalist Catholic Spain, which in turn helped quicken the thought of Vogelsang and the Christian Social movement in Austria that ended in the murder of Dollfuss by Nazi thugs.