Conservative Critics of Political Utopia
210 pages
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Conservative Critics of Political Utopia , livre ebook

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210 pages
Français

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The 19th and 20th centuries were fundamentally influenced by different ideologies. Some of them were more dangerous than others, but a conservative tradition - although adapting to the continuously changing conditions - consistently refused each artificial intellectual construction. For some, the distance conservative thinkers have kept from those ideological structures appears purely reactionary but for others it is a proof of credibility and authenticity. Transforming society, putting an end to the past and attempting to proclaim a new, golden era are heresies and utopian proposals to conservatives. In our book, researchers from the catholic universities of Lisbon and Budapest present several different portraits of authors from Burke to Maritain, from Donoso Cortés to Chantal Delsol. Together, they offer a series of intellectual spotlights, which might enlighten the intellectual evolution of a person - and community - oriented conservative tradition in its endless fight against the too often tragic and sinister political utopia.

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Publié par
Date de parution 26 février 2020
Nombre de lectures 1
EAN13 9782140143779
Langue Français
Poids de l'ouvrage 6 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0800€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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MÁTÉ BOTOS
Conservative Critics of Political Utopia
The 19th and 20th centuries were fundamentally
influEdited by enced by different ideologies. Some of them were more
dangerous than others, but a conservative tradition – MÁTÉ BOTOS
although adapting to the continuously changing
conditions – consistently refused each artificial intellectual
construction. For some, the distance conservative
thinkers have kept from those ideological structures appears
purely reactionary but for others it is a proof of
credibility and authenticity. Transforming society, putting an
end to the past and attempting to proclaim a new, golden
era are heresies and utopian proposals to conservatives.
In our book, researchers of the catholic universities of
Lisbon and Budapest present several different portraits
of authors from Burke to Maritain, from Donoso
CorConservative Critics tés to Chantal Delsol. Together, they offer a series of
intellectual spotlights, which might enlighten the
intelof Political Utopialectual evolution of a person- and community-oriented
conservative tradition in its endless fight against the too
often tragic and sinister political utopia.
ISBN 978-2-343-17254-5
ISBN 978-2-343-17254-5
9 782343 172545
BortosMate_Conservative CriticsofPoliticalUtopia.indd 1,3 2019.10.22. 14:12:16
19 EuroConservative Critics
of Political Utopia
Conservative_critics_of_politikai_utopia.indb 1 2019.10.21. 11:59:58Conservative_critics_of_politikai_utopia.indb 2 2019.10.21. 11:59:58Conservative Critics
of Political Utopia
Edited by
MÁTÉ BOTOS
Conservative_critics_of_politikai_utopia.indb 3 2019.10.21. 11:59:58A kötet megjelenését a Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem támogatta.
© Szerzők, 2019
© L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2019
ISBN 978-2-343-17254-5
A kiadásért felel a L’Harmattan Kiadó igazgatója.
A kiadó kötetei megrendelhetők, illetve kedvezménnyel megvásárolhatók:
L’Harmattan Könyvesbolt
1053 Budapest, Kossuth L. u. 14–16.
Tel.: +36-1-267-5979
harmattan@harmattan.hu
www.harmattan.hu
webshop.harmattan.hu
Conservative_critics_of_politikai_utopia.indb 4 2019.10.21. 11:59:58Conservative Critics of Political Utopia
From the earliest times of Christianity, political theorists were faced with
the classical temptation of the utopia. Meanwhile, thorough the centuries,
they refused the vision of perfect societies because of a realistic
understanding of human nature. There has been a general belief that despite
the eternal quest for the City of God, man simply cannot declare that he
is about to establish a divine society without fear, injustice, exploitation,
abuse, usurpation, and so forth. Catholic Doctrine has always rejected
those ideas as heresies, whether voiced by the Cathars, the Lollards, the
Waldensians, the Hussites, or others. It has always been something less to
do with dogmatic heresy than with human nature and, consequently,
human society.
But after the spread of Protestantism, the political theories on the
perfect society did not appear as heresies anymore but as philosophical
concepts. The philosophical writings of this kind are considered as the
forerunners of the modern utopias – sometimes dystopias – and from the
Enlightenment on, those constructions could even see their
implementation. The Age of Revolutions, from the end of the 18th century, invented
terror, modern democracy, egalitarianism, and many other novelties. The
whole 19th century was a battlefeld of ideologies, among them the sur -
viving theory of totalitarianism – Marxist communism being a
representative – and the beginning of the 20th century the totalitarian states could
even subsist. Utopias became horrifc political realities. The demise of the
Nazi and Fascist states in 1945 and the Communist empire in 1992,
however, did not result in the disqualifcation of political utopias, but rather
in their second fourishment. Conservatives, as they did in the late 18th
century, are constantly formulating the refutation of political utopias,
mostly for the same reasons as the Catholic Church has done: because of
their irreconcilability with traditional defnitions of man in Christian
anthropology. The present volume is dedicated to those political thinkers
of the last two centuries who refused the legitimacy of political utopias.
Conservative_critics_of_politikai_utopia.indb 5 2019.10.21. 11:59:58Conservative Critics of Political Utopia
6
Last, but not least, I would express my gratitude to professors João Carlos
Espada and János Jany who have made possible the two workshop and
also initiated the edition of the present volume. I am also thankful to each
and every of the authors for their contributions, and also hope that their
work was nothing but the frst step in the co-operation of both catholic
universities, the Portuguese and the Hungarian one.
Máté Botos
Estoril-Budapest
2018
Conservative_critics_of_politikai_utopia.indb 6 2019.10.21. 11:59:58Conservative utopias
Tamás Nyirkos
Department of Political Sciences, Institute of International Relations and
Political Sciences, Pázmány Péter Catholic University
Although the difculties of giving an exact defnition of conservatism
are well known, at least so much is routinely admitted that one of its
defning elements is anti-utopianism: a hostility to any abstract theoret -
ical attempt to give a blueprint for a future society, especially for a perfect
one. It should therefore be somewhat odd to point out that among a
signifcant number of conservatives – moreover, among the frst conser -
vatives who ever called themselves such – there has been a strong
inclination to utopia, and such inclinations have remained tempting for some
of their more recent heirs as well.
This paper deals primarily with those early French conservatives who
were more frequently called “counterrevolutionaries”: Louis de Bonald
and his Theory of Political and Religious Power in Civil Society (1796); the
perhaps less known Pierre-Simon Ballanche and his Town of Expiations
(started in 1832, but never actually completed, which is characteristic of
most of his writings); François de Chateaubriand from his Genius of
Christianity to his Memoires (between 1802 and 1846); while also adding
a few remarks on the most famous member of the camp, who may have
been least suspected of, but still not entirely immune to, utopianism,
Joseph de Maistre.
First, I will explain briefy why Bonald may be considered the con -
ceptual founding father of conservatism; then I will turn to his defnition
of conservation to show how this defnition has led – in the face of rev -
olutionary utopias – to outline his own, rival vision; to which I will add
a few similar examples from Ballanche, Chateaubriand, and Maistre. The
conclusion will then return to the possibility of distinguishing between
this sort of utopian conservatism and a supposedly more “genuine,”
non-utopian one.
Conservative_critics_of_politikai_utopia.indb 7 2019.10.21. 11:59:58Conservative utopias
8
*
It is important to note that the counterrevolutionaries in France had been
self-professedly “conservative” decades before the term “conservatism”
came into use elsewhere. As Nicholas Davidson wrote in the 1992 edition
of Louis de Bonald’s On Divorce, it was Bonald who “appears to have
1given the conservative movement its very name.” The main reference of
Davidson is to the baptism of the leading royalist journal of the
Restoration era, Le Conservateur (1818), which actually translates as “conservative”
in English. The journal was founded by the Baron de Vitrolles, but it is
true that the name itself was inspired by Bonald and Chateaubriand; what
is even more important, however, is that more than two decades earlier,
Bonald had already attempted to defne conservation as a political term.
The most relevant passage in this regard is found in his seminal work,
the 1796 Théorie de pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile,
demon2tré par la raisonnement et par l’histoire. While this three-volume, almost
1,500-page work certainly did not have any serious impact at the time of
its publication (not only because most of its copies were confscated by
the French authorities, but also because Bonald would acknowledge later
on that it was too difcult to read, yet despite Chateaubriand’s eforts to
persuade him to make an abridged version, not even the original work
was republished until 1843), its signifcance is beyond question. Bonald
himself thought it contained all his ideas in germs, which – if one refers
to germs only – is essentially true.
The opening argument of the book compares “constituted” and
“non-constituted” societies, where being constituted is synonymous with
being organically grown, while non-constituted refers to the artifcially
constructed socio-political institutions of the French Revolution. It is in
this context that Bonald’s peculiar concept of constitution also becomes
tantamount to conservation, since non-constituted (inorganically
established, or philos

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