Conservative Enlightenment and Democratic Revolutions: The American and French Cases in...

THIS LECTURE IS DESIGNED AS AN EXPERIMENT IN resynthesis rather than deconstruction. It is conventional for both the modern and the post-modern to assume that the dead weight of some tradition or paradigm is controlling our minds and that its burden has as our first move to be cast aside. This assumption is often justified, and we do often find ourselves under just such a necessity. But the assumption may itself become a convention, and when it does we are obliged to begin every intellectual exercise with the construction of a straw man; if there is no Old Man of the Sea we are called on to invent him. This can be tiresome and time-wasting; I have myself been cast as Old Man because someone was needed to play the part, often enough to know that it can be a nuisance. But a more important consideration is that if we regard every complex pattern of interpretation, established because it has necessarily taken time to build it up, as no more than an encumbrance to be demolished, we may end by impoverishing ourselves rather than enriching our resources of speech and written language.

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Government and Opposition. – 1989. – Vol. 24, № 1. – P. 81–105.