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The True Joseph de Maistre
AURELIAN CRAIUTU
A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre, by Owen Bradley, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. xxi + 273 pp.
WHAT ROLE CAN philosophical conservatism play in a post-Cold War world, in a time when old political ideologies are being challenged by new social and political developments and when political scientists speak, with greater confidence than ever before, about the alleged obsolescence of right and left? Owen Bradley's A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre challenges us to rethink these issues and invites us to join him on an interesting foray into the history of modern political thought. Bradley's book offers a new and original interpretation of Joseph de Maistre's political and philosophical writings and contributes to rethinking the historical and modern import of philosophical conservatism.
Commonly repudiated or ignored by political scientists, Maistre (1753-1821) has never had a good press in the English-speaking world, despite the fact that he wrote several first-rate books in political philosophy, including Considerations on France (originally translated into English by Richard Lebrun in 1974 and reedited by Cambridge University Press in 1994) and Saint Petersburg Dialogues, or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence (trans. Richard Lebrun, Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993).1
In the eyes of contemporary political theorists Maistre appears as a deeply puzzling and disturbing figure. His ideas on society and politics and the critique of the French Revolution put forward in Considerations never got the credit they deserved-the book is rarely, if ever, read in survey courses in modern political thought-while Edmund Burke's Reelections were always praised for having predicted the violent and tragic episodes of the Revolution. The few political theorists who have ventured into Maistre's territory have usually interpreted him either as a shrewd apostle of violence or as a precursor of twentieth-century Fascism by means of a strange reductio ad Hitleram. The late Isaiah Berlin significantly contributed to advancing this dark and wild image of Maistre, even if he correctly understood that Maistre's ideas were much bolder, more interesting, and more original than the theories and views of his contemporaries. In his eighty-three-- page essay "Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism" written more than...