3.

Leo XIII
Fraternité (a) Rerum Novarum
i. Revolution
ii. Causes
1. Conservatism...s iii. Dangers
iv. Private property
2. Edmund Burke v. Class cooperation
vi. Mutual duties
(a) Major works
vii. Charity
(b) Reflections viii. The common good
i. Chivalry
ii. Love
4. Friedrich Nietzsche
iii. Fealty
(a) Major works
iv. Propriety
v. Religious virtue (b) The Greek State
vi. Tradition i. Labour
vii. The silent majority ii. Slavery
viii. Prejudice iii. The State instinct
iv. Pathologies
v. War

5. Conservatism today
Conservatives, of course, wish to conserve; yet, what exactly?
Historically, there have been many forms of conservatism:

Psychological conservatism (opposition to change)

Political conservatism (given institutions must be maintained)
Legal conservatism (new laws must be passed cautiously and within a
well-established constitutional framework)
Fiscal conservatism (State interference by taxation must be minimal or
non-existent)
Religious conservatism (the roles and values of given religious
institutions must not be threatened)
Moral conservatism (given values and moral codes must be kept)
Social conservatism (given praxes and habits must be kept)

Some authors have reasoned why some forms may be just right...
Edmund B
urke

1729-1797
 Major Works of Edmund Burke

• A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756

• A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, 1757
• Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770
• On American Taxation, 1774
• On Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation With America, 1775
• Speech on a plan for the better Security of the Independence of Parliament
and Economic Reform, 1780
• Speech on Mr. Fox's India Bill, 1784
• Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
(aka Reflections on the French Revolution)
• Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 1791
• Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791
• Collected Works, 1792
• Letter on a Regicide Peace, 1796
• Thoughts on the French Affairs, 1797
 Reflections on the Revolution in France
• I. Against greedy petty hedonism
(§§ 126, 128)
• But the age of chivalry is gone. That of
sophisters, economists, and calculators,
has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is
extinguished for ever. Never, never more
shall we behold that generous loyalty to
rank and sex, that proud submission, that
dignified obedience, that subordination of
the heart, which kept alive, even in
servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted
freedom
• All the decent drapery of life is to be
rudely torn off
Parsifal
N.B. Do ideals become lofty only after people stop believing in them?
The economy lies behind
all of them: does it make
them valueless per se?

Are economic
considerations the one
and only, or the main,
source of value?
• II. Love of the Fatherland (§§ 129-30)
• On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the
offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and
which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste
and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own
terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find
in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to
them from his own private interests. In the groves of their
academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the
gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the
part of the commonwealth… so as to create in us love,
veneration, admiration, or attachment… To make us love
our country, our country ought to be lovely

N.B. Not economic interest but love.

 • III. Feudal ties of loyalty (§ 131)
• When the old feudal and
chivalrous spirit of fealty, which,
by freeing kings from fear, freed
both kings and subjects from the
precautions of tyranny, shall be
extinct in the minds of men, plots
and assassinations will be
anticipated by preventive murder
and preventive confiscation...
Kings will be tyrants from
policy, when subjects are rebels
from principle

King Aragorn, fictional but useful (J.R.R.

Tolkien being a conservative intellectual) N.B. Solemn pledges vs. formal contracts.
 • IV. Propriety (§ 133)
• All the good things which
are connected with manners
and with civilization, have,
in this European world of
ours, depended for ages
upon two principles; and
were indeed the result of
both combined; I mean the
spirit of a gentleman…

The US Uniform Code of Military Justice still

expects officers to avoid “
Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman
”
N.B. Are official guidelines for good governance an attempt to make gentlemen out of corporations?
 V. Religious virtues
(§ 133)
• …and the spirit of
religion. The nobility
and the clergy, the one
by profession, the other
by patronage, kept
learning in existence,
even in the midst of
arms and confusions

N.B. What are the social implications of de facto atheism, i.e. no fear of God,
no Christian conscience, no Sunday schooling… ?
Piero della Francesca, San Girolamo e un benefattore, 1451
• VI. The present stands upon the past (§§ 134-5)
• If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are
always willing to owe to ancient manners, so do other
interests which we value full as much as they are worth.
Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of
our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but
creatures; are themselves but effects, which as first causes,
we choose to worship. They certainly grew under the same
shade in which learning flourished. They too may decay
with their natural protecting principles... Their liberty is not
liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their
humanity is savage and brutal
• Cf. Baruchello 2011
• VII. The Silent Majority
(§ 143) 
• Because half a dozen grasshoppers
under a fern make the field ring with
their importunate chink, whilst
thousands of great cattle, reposed
beneath the shadow of the British
oak, chew the cud and are silent,
pray do not imagine that those who
make the noise are the only
inhabitants of the field; that, of
course, they are many in number; or
that, after all, they are other than the
little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping,
though loud and troublesome, insects
of the hour

Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)

• VIII. Moral education of the individual (§ 144-5)
• In England we have not yet been completely
embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel
within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred
sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the
active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of
all liberal and manly morals... We fear God; we
look up with awe to kings; with affection to
parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with
reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility...
Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not
a series of unconnected acts. Through just
prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature
 Leo XIII was the
256th Pope in the
history of the
Catholic Church,
and the first to be
filmed

In many ways, Leo

XIII’s social doctrine
exemplifies all, and
informs much, of
20th-century Christian
democracy , which
influenced political life
in Southern and
Continental Europe,
as well as in Latin
America and other
parts of the Globe

Pope Leo XIII 1810-1903

 Rerum Novarum (1891)
• I. The revolutionary Zeitgeist (§ 1)
• That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has
long been disturbing the nations of the world,
should have passed beyond the sphere of politics
and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere
of practical economics is not surprising. The
elements of the conflict now raging are
unmistakable, in the vast expansion of
industrial pursuits and the marvelous
discoveries of science; in the changed
relations between masters and workmen; in
the enormous fortunes of some few individuals,
and the utter poverty of the masses; in the
increased self-reliance and closer mutual
combination of the working classes; as also,
finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy
Anonymous,
Capital and
Labour, 1843
    
• II. The causes of the Zeitgeist (§ 3)
 
• In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general
agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found
      
      quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so
unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the
ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the
last century, and no other protective organization took
their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the
ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass
that working men have been surrendered, isolated and
helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the
greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been
increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than
once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a
different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by
covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that
the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are
concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a
small number of very rich men have been able to lay
upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke
little better than that of slavery itself
The booming economy of India, 2005
The booming economy of China, 2009
• III. The dangers of revolution (§ 4)
• To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working
on the poor man's envy of the rich, are striving to
do away with private property, and contend
that individual possessions should become the
common property of all, to be administered by the
State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by
thus transferring property from private individuals
to the community, the present mischievous state of
things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each
citizen will then get his fair share of whatever
there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so
clearly powerless to end the controversy that were
they carried into effect the working man himself
would be among the first to suffer. They are,
moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would
rob the lawful possessor, distort the
functions of the State, and create utter
confusion in the community
Julian Story, Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, 1893
Human bones in a “killing field” in Cambodia, 2004
• IV. The Right to Private Property (§ 6)
• [E]very man has by nature the right to possess
property as his own. This is one of the chief points of
distinction between man and the animal creation, for the
brute... is governed by two main instincts... One of these
instincts is self-preservation, the other the propagation of
the species... But with man it is wholly different. He
possesses, on the one hand, the full perfection of the
animal being, and hence enjoys at least as much as the
rest of the animal kind, the fruition of things material. But
animal nature, however perfect, is far from representing
the human being in its completeness... It is the mind, or
reason, which is the predominant element in us who are
human creatures... And on this very account -- that man
alone among the animal creation is endowed with
reason -- it must be within his right to possess things
not merely for temporary and momentary use, as
other living things do, but to have and to hold them in
stable and permanent possession; he must have not only
things that perish in the use, but those also which, though
they have been reduced into use, continue for further use
in after time
• V. Class cooperation (§ 17, 19)
• It must be first of all recognized that the condition of
things inherent in human affairs must be borne with,
for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead
level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but
all striving against nature is in vain. There
naturally exist among mankind manifold differences
of the most important kind; people differ in capacity,
skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a
necessary result of unequal condition. Such
unequality is far from being disadvantageous
either to individuals or to the community... to
maintain the balance of the body politic. Each
needs the other: capital cannot do without labor,
nor labor without capital
A 17th-century representation of the Leviathan, as discussed by British monarchist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
• VI. Mutual duties (§ 20, 22)
• Of these duties, the following bind the proletarian and the
worker: fully and faithfully to perform the work which has
been freely and equitably agreed upon; never to injure the
property, nor to outrage the person, of an employer; never
to resort to violence in defending their own cause, nor to
engage in riot or disorder; and to have nothing to do with
men of evil principles, who work upon the people with
artful promises of great results, and excite foolish hopes
which usually end in useless regrets and grievous loss.
The following duties bind the wealthy owner and the
employer: not to look upon their work people as their
bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a
person ennobled by Christian character… to misuse
men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or
to value them solely for their physical powers -- that is
truly shameful and inhuman… to exercise pressure upon
the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to
gather one's profit out of the need of another, is
condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud
any one of wages that are his due is a great crime
which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven
Wages and productivity in the US, Office for Social Justice, 2005
• VII. Charity (§ 22)
• Therefore, those whom fortune favors are warned that
riches do not bring freedom from sorrow and are of no
avail for eternal happiness, but rather are obstacles; that
the rich should tremble at the threatenings of Jesus Christ
-- threatenings so unwonted in the mouth of our Lord --
and that a most strict account must be given to the
Supreme Judge for all we possess... Private ownership, as
we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise
that right, especially as members of society, is not only
lawful, but absolutely necessary... How must one's
possessions be used? -- the Church replies without
hesitation in he words of the same holy Doctor: "Man
should not consider his material possessions as his own,
but as common to all, so as to share them without
hesitation when others are in need... when what
necessity demands has been supplied, and one's
standing fairly taken thought for, it becomes a duty
to give to the indigent out of what remains over. "Of
that which remaineth, give alms." It is duty, not of justice
(save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity -- a duty
not enforced by human law
 Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2007
Should the rich’s tennis courts be built before money is given to improve the poor’s sanitation?
The medieval enclosures opposed by Thomas More (1478-1535) and the
Dissolution of the Monasteries that Henry VIII launched after More’s
execution were historical examples of socially destructive profit-driven
policies, which the Church of Rome had not forgotten (More himself being
canonised in 1935 by Pius XI, who issued Quadragesimo Anno in 1931).
According to this streak of conservatism,
the economy is not about profit, but
humanity. Today, many Christian
churches promote CSR, debt relief and
sustainable development initiatives
• VIII. The Common Good (§ 32)
• The foremost duty, therefore, of the rulers of
the State should be to make sure that the
laws and institutions, the general character
and administration of the commonwealth,
shall be such as of themselves to realize
public well-being and private prosperity...
since it is the province of the
commonwealth to serve the common
good. And the more that is done for the
benefit of the working classes by the general
laws of the country, the less need will there
be to seek for special means to relieve them
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegoria del buon governo, 1339 (detail: the Town)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Allegoria del buon G.K. Chesterton
governo, 1339 (detail: Justice: retributive (1874-1936)
and distributive. They are the two
classical notions of justice, to which have
been added later, amonst others,
restorative justice and procedural justice)

Chesterbelloc’s distributism

Hilaire Belloc
(1870-1953)

Cooperative movements were theorised as a truly

Christian form of economic organisation based
upon private property and actively supported in
practice by the Catholic Church all over the world
Friedrich Niet
zsche

1844-1900
 Major Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

Young Friedrich Nietzsche in military uniform

1873-1885
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
Untimely Meditations:
I: David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer
1861-1872 II: On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
III: Schopenhauer as Educator
Homer and Classical Philology IV: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
The Greek Woman Human, All Too Human
On Music and Words Mixed Opinions and Maxims
The Dionysian Worldview The Wanderer and His Shadow
The Dawn
Socrates and Greek Tragedy Idylls From Messina
On the Future of Our Educational The Gay Science
Institutions Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books:
I: On the Pathos of Truth 1886-1888
II: Thoughts on the Future of Our Beyond Good and Evil
Educational Institutions On the Genealogy of Morals
III: The Greek State The Case of Wagner
IV: The Relationship of Schopenhauer's Twilight of the Idols
Nietzsche contra Wagner
Philosophy to a German Culture Dionysus-Dithyrambs
V: Homer's Contest The Antichrist
The Birth of Tragedy Ecce Homo
• The Greek State *
• I. The shameful nature of labour (§ 1)
• We moderns have an advantage over the Greeks in two
ideas, which are given as it were as a compensation to a
world behaving thoroughly slavishly and yet at the same
time anxiously eschewing the word "slave": we talk of the
"dignity of man" and of the "dignity of labor." Everybody
worries in order miserably to perpetuate a miserable
existence; this awful need compels man to consuming
labor; he (or, more exactly, the human intellect) seduced
by the "will" now occasionally marvels at labor as
something dignified. However, in order that labor might
have a claim on titles of honor, it would be necessary
above all, that existence itself, to which labor after all is
only a painful means, should have more dignity and
value than it appears to have had, up to the present, to
serious philosophies and religions. What else may we find
in the labor-need of all the millions but the impulse to
exist at any price, the same all-powerful impulse by
which stunted plants stretch their roots through
earthless rocks!
• *Presented in 1872 to Cosima Wagner as part of Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, published posthumously
Cornelis van Haarlem Copenhagen, Titanomachia, 1588 – According to G.B. Vico (1668-1744), ancient myths tell the social history of ancient peoples.
• II. Labour as Slavery (§§ 5-6)
• Now we have the general idea to which are to be
subordinated the feelings which the Greek had with
regard to labor and slavery. Both were considered by
them as a necessary disgrace, of which one feels
ashamed, as a disgrace and as a necessity at the same
time... In order that there may be a broad, deep, and
fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous
majority must, in the service of a minority be
slavishly subjected to life's struggle, to a greater
degree than their own wants necessitate […].
Accordingly we must accept this cruel sounding truth,
that slavery is of the essence of culture; a truth of
course, which leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of
existence. This truth is the vulture, that gnaws at the liver
of the Promethean promoter of Culture. The misery of
toiling men must still increase in order to make the
production of the world of art possible to a small number
of Olympian men. Here is to be found the source of that
secret wrath nourished by Communists and Socialists of
all times, and also by their feebler descendants, the white
race of the " Liberals," not only against the arts, but also
against classical antiquity...
Sothern China’s Foxconn suicides (Jan.-Nov. 2010, 18 attempts, 14 deaths) exemplify
today’s slavery for the sake of civilisation, which hi-tech gadgets stylishly embody (cf. also
ca. 63 suicides at France Télécom 2008-11)
• III. The Nation-State as an End – Yes! (§§ 7)

• Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility nature,

in order to arrive at society, forges for herself the cruel
tool of the state—namely, that conqueror with the iron
hand, who is nothing else than the objectification of
the instinct indicated. By the indefinable greatness and
power of such conquerors the spectator feels, that they
are only the means of an intention manifesting itself
through them and yet hiding itself from them... In face of
the political world of the Hellenes, I will not hide those
phenomena of the present in which I believe I discern
dangerous atrophies of the political sphere equally
critical for art and society.
Creating Prussian Germany: The Battle of Grunwald, 1226
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821): a modern iron conqueror embodying the State instinct or, as Hegel said, “history on horseback”
• IV. The Nation-State as a Means – No! (§ 11)

• If there should exist men, who as it were through birth are placed
outside the national- and state-instincts, who consequently have
to esteem the state only insofar as they conceive that it coincides
with their own interest, then such men will necessarily imagine as
the ultimate political aim the most undisturbed collateral existence
of great political communities possible, in which they might be
permitted to pursue their own purposes without restriction… … In
order now to attain, through the medium of the state the highest
furtherance of their selfish aims, it is above all necessary, that the
state be wholly freed from those awfully incalculable war-
convulsions so that it may be used rationally; and thereby they
strive with all their might for a condition of things in which war
is an impossibility… those truly international homeless money-
hermits… who, with their natural lack of the state-instinct,
have learned to abuse politics as a means of the Exchange, and
state and society as an apparatus for their own enrichment… in
the service of a selfish stateless money-aristocracy.
For Nietzsche, to use the State for one’s own selfish desires is a sign of corruption.
• V. War (§ 11)
• One will have to pardon my
occasionally chanting a
Paean on war… First of all…
as is said in the beginning of
the Iliad, he [Apollo] lets fly
his arrow on the mules and
dogs [Iliad: I, 47-52]. Then
he strikes the men
themselves, and everywhere
pyres break into flames. Be
it then pronounced that war
is just as much a necessity
for the state as the slave is
for society, and who can
avoid this verdict if he
honestly asks himself about
the causes of the never-
equalled Greek art-
perfection?
N.B. Nietzsche served in the Prussian army in 1865 and then
tried to join the University of Basel Red Cross unit in 1870-1. Apollo Parnopios
 David Cameron (b.1966)
Paul Wolfowitz (b.1943)

Leo Strauss (1899-1973) Queen

Elizabeth II of
England
(b.1926)
Michael Ledeen (b.1941)

Julius
Evola
(1898-
1974)

Contemporary conservatism has

often mixed elements coming from
the three traditions discussed
hereby as well as from liberalism
Angela Merkel (b.1954)
(esp. In economics), socialism
(e.g. Trotskysm) and the fascist
experience (esp. Italian)