The much smaller pond of intellectual debate here is almost completely dominated by various species of social democrat. There is some market liberalism about but that’s about it. The only saving grace is that the general public has a deep (and wholly understandable) anti-intellectualism (…that the social ‘democrat’ elites always bemoan, often to the point of outright class hatred…) that makes them largely immune. At least from frontal attack.

Of course over time the social democrat pond does manage to leak into the public policy tank via various rusty bureaucratic pipes.

Well Mr Stove can add one additional Australian to those you have read some Russell Kirk. I haven’t read as much as he has, but I have read, “The Conservative Mind” (7th rev. ed.).

This Australian ignorance of Conservative writers and thinkers doesn’t just apply to Russel Kirk. In a number of personal conversations I’ve had to explain who Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Southern Agrarians, and the American Old Right are.

Really? This argues for an even more depressing cultural future than the recently-issued statistics about white America’s imminent minority status suggest.

I should have thought that quite apart from the content of Kirk’s thought, the sheer majesty and elegance of Kirk’s prose at its best would be enough to ensure his survival (among thinking readers, that is. No-one is suggesting that he will ever enjoy Da Vinci Code-sized sales figures).

Except by those who fetishize originality per se, an author cannot be disposed of by being called “a second-hand trader in ideas”. This description could at least as well be applied to C. S. Lewis, say, and is just as incapable (rightly) of impairing Lewis’s fame.

Gibbon and Macaulay continue to be read – in spite of the former’s comically inadequate understanding of religious faith and the latter’s often strident Whiggishness – because, fundamentally, they could use the English language much better than can most people. I cannot speak for Voegelin, but I suspect that what is true of Gibbon and Macaulay is equally true of Kirk. (At least within the United States. Alas, I do not know of any Australians – apart from myself – who have ever read more than five pages of Kirk’s output; nor do I know of any Englishmen in that category. Perhaps this ignorance explains the dreadful susceptibility of both peoples to armed neocon cant.)

I come down on the side of putting Kirk in the same category because he too has a school of followers, though the Kirkians are less academic than Voegelinians or Straussians. But for each of these groups, the disciples are dedicated enough to keep the master’s works in circulation, regardless of what happens to the conservative movement or what trends develop in the academy.

You can’t seriously mean this. Kirk, it seems to me, very squarely falls in the Meyer-Kendall category. He was an interesting writer for his time, but none of what he wrote will be read a few decades from now. His life was more interesting than his writings. He was a typical “second-hand trader in ideas.”

Strauss and Voegelin are not taken seriously at all in the academy. I’ve never read much Voegelin, but I quite liked Strauss as a student. To the extent that he promotes careful reading, he is a plus, of course, but at the end of the day his writings suffer because what he seems to be hiding is the secret that he has nothing to hide. In any case, he refused to make “arguments” so is of no use to the argument-oriented academic philosophers. They may be liberals, but at least they argue — that’s why Oakeshott is still read, and will probably continue to be read for quite a while.

I agree with you on Nisbet.

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