Requisite variety

Wednesday, 31st March 2010

Quarterly Essay 37: What’s Right? The Future Of Conservatism In Australia
by Waleed Aly
Black Inc, $19.95,
pp. 144, ISBN 9781863954662

Waleed Aly is an unlikely pick for an essay on the future of conservatism. Still, one wishes him well. It would be thrilling to see him bust out as a red-blooded conservative.

Not in this essay. Aly traces the roots of conservatism to Edmund Burke and the French Revolution, only to use his reading of conservative history to malign its recent political development.

This approach might convince some readers (certainly his writing is nimble enough), but he starts awkwardly, rehashing Andrew Kenny’s attack (The Spectator, 5 February 2005) on the meaninglessness of the Left/Right divide. He then drops Kenny’s thesis altogether. He never properly recovers a focus. Is he writing about conservatism or ‘the Right’?

This confusion encourages him to overstate his claims. About the French Revolution we learn, for instance, that it was ‘a revolt against the aristocracy’ and that at ‘different times, the Left included socialists’. Revolutionary communards advocating common property in 1791 could have been proto-Marxists, of course, but Aly’s socialists are anachronistic.

Further, he fails to point out that, alongside aristocrats, the revolutionaries targeted wealthy members of the Third Estate and persecuted Catholics. They also murdered King Louis XVI. At the very least, these facts go to understanding a sentiment that still regularly inspires conservatives. Seeing such institutions molested certainly fed into what Aly, after Oakeshott, calls the conservative ‘disposition’ — an ‘emotional disposition’ in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s phrase, long considered key to understanding the ‘nature and the promptness of [Burke’s] response to the events in France’. Aly leaves these rich threads undisturbed.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page