Corey Robin’s visit to the CSMCH was an opportunity for us to learn more about his ideas during his lecture, but also for him to contribute to the intellectual life of the Centre. He did this in two ways: first, in person during a graduate and early-career workshop on the morning of his lecture; and, second, by inspiring a group of students to get together and talk about the history of conservative politics in a session of the CSMCH Discussion Group.
The workshop was organised by me – Emile Chabal – and steering committee member, Mathias Thaler, from Social and Political Sciences. It consisted of very short presentations by pre-selected Edinburgh PhD students and early-career scholars, including Louis Fletcher, Benedikt Buechel, Masa Mrolvje, Jill Poeggel and Gisli Vogler. The presentations were followed by comments from Corey and other people in the room. The participants were overwhelmingly from political science, but the topics ranged widely, from the work of international relations theorist Quincy Wright to the political value of disappointment.
Over the course of three hours, Corey offered valuable encouragement and criticism. Everyone – especially me! – learned a lot, both about Corey’s wide-ranging expertise across a bewildering array of subjects, and also the excellent work being done by scholars in the university.
By the time the CSMCH Discussion Group met to talk about conservatism, Corey had already left Edinburgh. But his ideas were still hard at work amongst our students. Rory Scothorne, who led the discussion group, had this to say about the spirited exchanges during the session:
Our discussion group explored Robin’s work in the context of recent and ongoing developments within conservatism beyond Donald Trump, many of which – like him – have moved rapidly from the fringes to the mainstream of the tradition in recent years. Reviewing Robin’s talk, we were able to clarify some areas of uncertainty around his thesis with reference to his book.
For instance, if Robin is offering a ‘History of an Idea’ version of conservatism, he risks falling foul of the definitional problems associated with the former: the potential anachronism of projecting a ‘conservatism’ of principles, worked out and formalised, from one era into another and vice versa without the wider contexts that give those principles meaning. This, it was suggested, is not the nature of Robin’s outlook, which should be understood more as an effort to trace the mobilising ‘spirit’ of a changing and adaptive conservative tradition: it is in this sense a sort of ‘anthropological’ or social-psychological history of the inspiration behind those movements and ideas throughout history which today are seen to have produced a distinctive and self-identifying conservative political outlook. Robin’s point is both that conservative ideas are remarkably discontinuous, and that their mobilising spirit is relatively continuous.
We explored two other efforts to divine similar ideological undercurrents in present-day articulations of conservatism: first, via William Davies’ analysis of Tory support for Brexit. This identifies a possible ‘coherent’ justification for Brexit within an enduring conservative fondness for the clarifying and invigorating virtues of pain, as a means of avoiding ‘moral hazard’: just as welfare cuts are justified as a means of persuading unemployed people to ‘get on their bike’ and find work, so too can Brexit be viewed as a means of finding out what the British people ‘are really made of’ in the face of crisis. Yet Davies suggests that this may be too generous: leading pro-Brexit figures like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are ready-made politicians for the ‘attention economy,’ their self-consciously distinctive ideological perspectives largely subordinate to a system that makes publicity – and thus distinctiveness – a route to power for its own sake.
A similar analysis can be extrapolated from Angela Nagle’s essay on the young men of the alt-right movement. Nagle outlines divisions within the alt-right between, on the one hand, those who may indeed hold far-right views, but ‘ironically’ deploy neo-Nazi, violently misogynistic and white supremacist tropes on web forums in pursuit of the attention which accrues from effective ‘trolling’; and those who are increasingly open about their more deeply held and programmatised far-right views.
The collision of these two worlds in high-profile rallies and marches last year prompted considerable anguish within the alt-right over just how seriously its ideological statements should be taken, but it also connects to a common concern of intellectual historians: what is the conservative speaker doing when they speak? Is the sneering conservative ‘outsider’ – William F. Buckley comes to mind – articulating a programmatic political alternative, to be pursued in the present, or merely exploiting and revelling in the status which the cultural field tends to grant to the figure of the ‘stranger’?
These are not questions exclusive to the right, and much of our discussion focused on the extent to which Robin might understate the porosity of boundaries between left and right. It was suggested that this might be a product of Robin’s embeddedness within the deep-rooted political binary between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ that characterises American political culture; European politics displays far more ambiguous interpenetrations of left and right: both ideologically, in the thought of figures like Georges Sorel and Hendrik De Man, and politically, such as the ‘Historic Compromise’ between the Italian Communist and Christian Democratic Parties in the 1970s.
With any luck, this is just the beginning of a much wider – and extremely important – conversation about the shape of politics in the contemporary world!
— Emile