...says Mark Lilla, as though these were exclusive possibilities. He mentions as examples of conservatives constituting the "tradition" (drawing on another professor's reading list) the following: "Burke, Maistre, Hayek, Buckley, Ayn Rand, Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom," and then asks: "answer honestly, dear reader of The Chronicle Review: How many of these authors have you yourself read?" Here's my answer: Burke, Hayek, Buckley, Rand, Kristol, and Bloom. Buckley, Rand, Kristol and Bloom are intellectual lightweights and dilettantes (surely Mark Lilla knows this?), and I would think conservative intellectuals would be embarrassed to claim them for their "tradition." Burke and Hayek are entirely different, though I strongly suspect that if he weren't the canonical opponent of the French Revolution, even Burke would not be much read anymore (in a century that included David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, why would anyone even notice Burke except for his conservatism?). Hayek is a different case, both a bit "pathological" (think of the paranoid weirdness that runs through The Road to Serfdom) and a thinker with genuine ideas, some of which (e.g., the effectiveness of markets in recording information about what people want) are now "conventional wisdom" even on the left (there are several Hayekian moments in G.A. Cohen's last work, Why Not Socialism?) But Hayek is no Burkean conservative, nor are his intellectual heirs: indeed, Burkean conservatives can only bemoan the way markets destroy traditional practices and cultures, whereas Hayekians think they are essential to human freedom.
So in a way, Lilla's list is telling that there's really no "there there": philosophical hacks (and hacks in totally different ways!) like Bloom and Rand, journalists like Buckley and Kristol, traditionalists like Burke, and free market radicals like Hayek do not a "tradition" make. That people like Lilla get journalistic mileage out of lumping them altogether is just an artifact of the pathologies of American society, where reactionary political and moral views proliferate, with the result that even some intellectuals apparently feel the need to prove their bona fides to the dominant culture by showing that their milieu, the universities, has room for "diversity" of opinion. But universities aren't mainly about opinions, they are about the discovery and dissemination of knowledge, and since almost everything Bachmann and Santorum and Gingrich and their ilk profess is based on demonstrable ignorance and falsehood, it should find no place in the universities, even if popular "conservatism" takes this nonsense seriously. By contrast, the "conservative" work that has some intellectual content, whether Burke or Smith or Hayek, is widely taught and studied and debated in universities, as it should be. There is no need to invent a fake "conservative tradition" to justify that.
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