Does anyone have suggestions for reading in conservative philosophy?

i really enjoyed scruton's book on music.
that's not what you asked about, but i felt like saying anyway

Read Scruton's books about conservatism and Russell Kirk's books about the same. You should look into the French counter revolutionaries too, de Maistre, Bonald, Chateaubriand etc.

>>8389306

>Does anyone have suggestions for reading in conservative philosophy?

Yes. Read after ingesting a cupful of strychnine.

>>8389306
Mein Kampf
Decline of the West
Revolt against the Modern World
Ride the Tiger
The Bell Curve

In short, take the redpill

Scruton is the best living conservative thinker, and it is proper academic standard. Read as much of him as you can.

Scruton's 'critique' of chomsky is an embarrassment

I'd recommend The Meaning of Conservatism by Scruton (any Scruton books really, but this one is most relevant to the theme), Russel Kirk as someone else mentioned, Robert Nisbet's the Quest for Community (his book titled Conservatism is worth reading too, but this is the most important work), and Irving Babbit's Democracy and Leadership.

>>8389406

Chomsky is an embarrassment, especially when he fucked up over Pol Pot. He's the epitome of 'West bad, non-West good'.

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>Gramsci
>Lukacs

>"New Left"

Did he just pick out random names? I don't see how you can put a Leninist like Gramsci or a humanist like Lukacs on the same list as a neoliberal hedonist like Foucault.

>>8389435
Yeh, this is honestly about the level of the critique

>>8389505
>West bad, non-West good

But that's an accurate (albeit crude) summary of Chomsky and his opinions and that of his followers.

>>8389526
Chomsky just points out that America, at least after the death of Stalin, was the prime aggressor throughout the cold war and actively used every dirty tactic it could to achieve global hegemony and spread corporate liberalism. This of course is going to be offensive and contrary to the generally accepted interpretation of international affairs thought from your typical "Western" perspective but anyone who seriously unbiasedly studies history will be forced to come to these conclusions. You can take this as a good or bad thing but don't take the "human rights" and "democracy" bullshit seriously.

>>8389560

>You can take this as a good or bad thing but don't take the "human rights" and "democracy" bullshit seriously.

Chomsky takes this to be a bad thing, precisely on the basis of "human rights" and "democracy."

I, on the other hand, being free from such spooks, do not give a shit. To the victor go the spoils, survival of the fittest muhfukka.

>>8389526
Yeh, this is the laziness and refusal to engage in the actual work that Scruton does too. Chomsky has reasons which anyone would find reasonable if they were aware of them about why he focuses his criticisms on the west. If you don't know anything about something/someone's work apart from critiques from others and snippets here and there then fine, but don't act like you know what you're talking about when you write about them. Or do, and enjoy smug wrongness. I suppose that's much of what this board is about

>>8389560

>anyone who seriously unbiasedly studies history
>should ignore popular academic interpretations if they are western

lol so plebby. One can recognise the failings of america as a hegemon and at the same time acknowledge that there is some merit to the discourse of democracy and human rights. Anybody who completely rejects for instance that post WWII within the west there has been an increasingly robust respect for humans as humans and that in part this is a consequence of America's role as a global superpower is just retarded

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>>8389591
>there is some merit to the discourse of democracy and human rights
It's a pure fucking farce much worse than a joke. When George "democracy in the middle east" Bush tells Palestine to hold elections and Hamas wins then he proceeds to call them terrorists and illegitimate it shows America doesn't really want democracy... polls show if the Taliban were allowed to run in Afghanistan today in an open election they would win out right but they are forbidden by America.

Some good classic Chomsky:
http://www.ditext.com/chomsky/is.html
>To appreciate fully the range of these accomplishments, we may conduct a simple Gedankenexperiment along lines already suggested. Imagine that World War II had ended in a stalemate, with the Nazis driven from France and the Low Countries but remaining a major world power, intact among the ruins. Imagine that a stratum of dissenting intellectuals had emerged who criticized Hitler for his errors in attempting to wage a two-front war, destroying a valuable source of labor power with the death camps, reacting with too much brutality to the intolerable burdens placed on Germany at Versailles, and so on. How might they have proceeded to reinterpret the contemporary scene? Perhaps like this.
>First, they would have explained the historic need for German power to be resurrected, perhaps invoking Martin Heidegger's theory that Germany alone can defend the classic values of humanistic civilization from the barbarians of East and West, not to speak of the hordes of Asia and Africa. They might then have turned to the situation in what they would have called "occupied Europe"; say, France, calm and peaceful until the Anglo-American invasion of 1944 abetted by Communist-led terrorists within, and now under American occupation: Recall that Eisenhower had "supreme authority" and the "ultimate determination of where, when and how civil administration . . . shall be exercised by French citizens" under a directive from Roosevelt issued with Churchill's approval.38 They would have observed with horror that before and during this occupation the terrorists of the resistance carried out a great massacre of collaborators, amounting to a minimum of thirty to forty thousand murders within a few months, according to the assessment of the French historian of the resistance, Robert Aron, basing himself on a detailed analysis of the French gendarmerie, and amounting to no less than 7 million killed, according to the detailed studies of Pleyber-Grandjean, whom Aron calls a "victim of the Liberation."39
[continued]

>>8389627
>Appalled by these monstrous events, the German dissidents might even have produced a judgment not unlike that of the editor of the New Republic, who explained recently that " the American collapse [in Indochina] will read in history as among the ugliest of national crimes" (June n, 1977) -- not what the United States did, but its failure to persist, is criminal. Comparably, the Nazi failure to withstand the Anglo-American invasion -- a foreign invasion from abroad, not a general uprising within40 -- will read in history as the ugliest of crimes, as attested by the millions of helpless victims; we may assume that the "7 million victims" story would have prevailed within the domains of Nazi influence. Continuing, these analysts might have observed with dismay the terrible suffering of the people of France and England -- not to speak of Russia -- in the fierce winter of 1946-47, with production stagnating and the United States unwilling even to grant a loan except under conditions that reduce Britain to American vassalage, while the massive atrocities in Greece supervised by the conquerors (see Chapter 7) would have roused them to impotent rage. Perhaps, as moral men, they might have objected to an annual reenactment of the events at Auschwitz, as indecent, much as some Americans feebly protest the annual reenactment of the Hiroshima bombing, by the pilot of the Enola Gay, for example, in October 1977 in a Texas air show, before an audience of twenty thousand admiring spectators.41
>What we have witnessed in the United States and the West generally in the past few years is in some ways a grim parody, in the real world, of this invented nightmare. It has proceeded with little articulate protest -- again, a testimony to the effectiveness of the institutions of propaganda and ideology and the notable commitment of large segments of the intelligentsia to established power, even as they occasionally combat its excesses.42