Exploring the geographies of 20th Century conservative political thought.

Keywords: political geography, modernity, conservatism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 11

Abstract

Contemporary human geography tends to identify political conservatism with neoliberalism (Harvey 2005), populism (Casaglia et al. 2020), and ethnocentrism and racism (Schuermans 2013). More in general, conservatism is depicted as a negative backdrop against which to build the ‘progressive’ political agenda of the day (Springer 2021). However, this paper argues there is merit in analyzing ‘conservative’ intellectual traditions in their own terms, as epistemological and socio-political projects. It focuses on three among several ‘conservative’ intellectual traditions loosely grouped under the umbrella notion of ‘traditionalism.’ These intellectuals aimed at preserving pre-modern worldviews, notions of authority, and law against the onslaught of modernity in the United States, continental Europe, and part of the Muslim world. In so doing, it unveils the articulation between modernity, conceptualized as a world view based on enlightenment philosophy, positive science, industrialism, and mass democracy, and the place-specific sociopolitical institutions that pre-dated it, viewed in the eyes of the few who opposed it.
To achieve its goal, this presentation focuses on the 20th century, the period in which arguably modernity reached its peak. It compares how American traditionalists (Babbitt 1927, Kirk 1953), continental Europeans in the literature of the crisis (Spengler 1991, hemming et al 2017, Guenon 2001), and Khomeini’s philosophical work underpinning the Iranian revolution in 1979 (Khomeini 2015) conceptualized rights and sovereignty, the notion of work, , and the nature of knowledge. In so doing, it highlights the place-specific nature of the struggles leading to the diffusion of modernity within and without the western world.