I’ll take practical realism over ideology any day.

Again, great stuff, and I’m looking forward to your next posts on this subject.

Thanx.

I sorta’ figured.

I’ve allowed enjoyed reading Burke, but from my particular interest in the moral/political/philosophical role of the aesthetic.

Very nice reflection!!

I am aware of de Maistre and Burke. My own personal feeling is that Burke would have some significant disagreements over the necessity of constitutional order. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has some very good passages on it in Leftism Revisited (which is sadly hard to get a hold of – his comparisons of socialist and progressive thought is really outstanding).

Burke was certainly read long after his death, including the more inaccessibile works such as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

Do read de Maistre. Seriously. I find myself at once attracted to his position, and yet find elements of it extremely dangerous. It was through his reading of Burke he was to come to his own political and theological position. His conservatism is not that of the 21st century America, although as I have said, there is something in common with the two so it is not entirely different. Yet, he wouldn’t recognize 21st century American conservatives as conservative, and I don’t think Burke would either. That, of course, says something is lost in the conversion from Burke to now. What is it?

I know that, for one, in the field of literay studies Burke has always been a cetnral figure it its accounts of the wider intellectual history. His conception of the sublime, as the most obvious example, has been continually engaged by English students as they’ve attempt to come to terms with what is being apropriated and challenged in many great literary works from the middle 18th century to the early 19th century.