REACTIONARIES, THEN AND NOW

Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) was a fierce member of the Counter-Enlightenment and is a precursor of much that we find in modern American conservatism. Like many conservatives, he thought there were plenty of enemies:

The enemies of the social order, whom Maistre calls 'la secte', are a very interesting collection of men. They are, for him, Jansenists and Calvinists, and all Protestants in general; lawyers, metaphysicians, journalists, writers, Jews, American revolutionaries, intellectuals, scientists, critics; in short, the intelligentsia, and everything which belongs to it. This list — of liberals, of all kinds of critics, of all kinds of people who believe in some sort of abstract truth, of people who do not accept the dogmatic premisses of society — was compiled almost for the first time by Maistre, and by now it is familiar. It has been the stock-in-trade of every violently reactionary, Fascist movement of our day.

But of all these Maistre hates scientists the most. They are the people who have the least capacity for understanding life, and for government, and he warned the Tsar of Russia, in extremely solemn tones, not to commit the fatal blunder of allowing the arts and the sciences to dominate the country. ¹

Today we find the same aversion to science in the Intelligent Design Creationism movement and the downplaying of man-made global warming. We don't have Maistre's aversion to Protestants, as the melding of the Southern Baptists and the GOP has demonstrated, but de Maistre's anti-Semitism can be traced through to T. S. Eliot and Ann Coulter.

¹Freedom and its betrayal : six enemies of human liberty by Isaiah Berlin ; edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton, N.J. : Chichester : Princeton University Press, 2002. Page 147.