Were academics and intellectuals ever conservative?
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Bootes Void
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« on: July 30, 2021, 12:50:14 PM »
« edited: July 30, 2021, 01:31:36 PM by Bootes Void »

It seems like since WW2( or WW1 for that matter ), most of the academia,universities and the intellectual class are very much aligned with the left. Has there ever been a case of this being the opposite when academics were conservative, maybe in the 1800s
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #1 on: July 30, 2021, 01:56:48 PM »

Everything depends on the society in question at the time in question, right down to the meaning of such words as 'conservative' or 'Left'.
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Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #2 on: July 30, 2021, 03:37:45 PM »

Everything depends on the society in question at the time in question, right down to the meaning of such words as 'conservative' or 'Left'.

This, though academics have generally tended to the left of the political culture because socialism overvalues intelligence and knowledge, which is bound to appeal to academics.
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Person Man
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« Reply #3 on: July 30, 2021, 04:55:36 PM »

Everything depends on the society in question at the time in question, right down to the meaning of such words as 'conservative' or 'Left'.

This, though academics have generally tended to the left of the political culture because socialism overvalues intelligence and knowledge, which is bound to appeal to academics.

What about before “socialism”? Say before the 1820s.
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buritobr
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« Reply #4 on: July 30, 2021, 08:12:28 PM »

In 2010, Dilma Rousseff (PT) was elected president of Brazil.

Datafolha conducted a survey in the University of São Paulo (USP), the best ranked university in Brazil. The majority of the professors supported José Serra (PSDB), the majority of the students supported Marina Silva (PV) and the majority of the non-professor employees supported Dilma Rousseff (PT). So, most of the professors and students voted on the right of the country.
The survey found these numbers because the medical sciences and the engineering colleges are huge. In the Philosophy, Literature and Social Sciences College (FFLCH) of the University of São Paulo, Dilma Rousseff was the favorite of professors and students, and Plinio Sampaio (PSOL) performed much better than he did in the country.

I didn't see polls in 2018, but I believed the large majority of professors and students of USP voted for Fernando Haddad (PT). University professors can vote on the right of the country if they vote for PSDB, but they don't vote for Bolsonaro.
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dead0man
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« Reply #5 on: August 01, 2021, 10:58:00 AM »

academics in the "hard" sciences were apolitical until the last few decades.  Academics in the "money" degrees still often are conservative, though not as much as in years past.  At least as far as I can tell.
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Cassius
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« Reply #6 on: August 02, 2021, 07:03:05 AM »

As far as I’m aware academics in most Western countries used (at least prior to the War) to tend towards the right as Universities were still (largely) the preserve of wealthy elites. In the British context, until the 20th century Oxford and Cambridge were both pretty right leaning (partly reflecting their origins as very religious and even more elitist establishments) and as per my understanding German universities were pretty conservative as late as the interwar years.

I assume the dramatic shift to the left post-1945 has been driven by a combination of expanded access for students from non-elite backgrounds; the establishment of new subjects with a fairly left-leaning bent (sociology, women’s studies et al) and the increasing influence of left-leaning ideas on old ones (history et al); and the general dominance of liberal and left-leaning ideas in wider public culture that has prevailed since the War.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #7 on: August 02, 2021, 08:06:49 AM »
« Edited: August 03, 2021, 06:02:24 PM by Filuwaúrdjan »

In the British context, until the 20th century Oxford and Cambridge were both pretty right leaning (partly reflecting their origins as very religious and even more elitist establishments)

There is still a particular type of academic conservative (and usually Conservative though not as reliably as was once the case) that you only find at those two institutions. And, of course, stronger in some colleges than others.

Quote
and as per my understanding German universities were pretty conservative as late as the interwar years.

The politics of German academia is an interesting historical subject. Although a lot of the important foundational figures were conservatives (Ranke for instance), as it developed in the early and mid 19th century it became a stronghold of liberalism and German Nationalism, and at the time the two were very much compatible. As the century wore on and German Unification progressed, a large number of liberals swung rightwards as the general nationalist ideology that they were also followers of did and nationalist political movements of the extreme-right that had no direct link with liberalism that was a default feature of earlier generations of nationalists began to emerge. These were both well-represented in academia, but so was the older liberal tradition and so, despite deliberate discrimination, were socialist elements. The careers of Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich von Treitschke make for an interesting and revealing contrast, particularly as both also pursued parallel political careers.

The general crisis of the Weimar Republic caused radicalisation and polarisation much as in the rest of society. Initially academia was the main recruiting ground for the new DDP, but that bubble soon burst with many of its academic and intellectual supporters swinging to the Left with many of those that remained then proceeding on the long march rightwards that was gloomily typical of many liberals during the period. The more right-wing element in academia became increasingly fierce and rejected the legitimacy of the new political system entirely, but they were outstripped in terms of radicalism by large parts of the student body who became some of the most enthusiastic followers of the new NSDAP. About the period of Nazi rule there's not much worth saying, except that, strangely, academics known to have left-wing political views were often allowed to continue to teach but, importantly, in stunted and constrained manner and under if not constant supervision then the fear of it, and the fear of what denunciation meant. An interesting figure with respect to both periods is Werner Sombart, though he wasn't exactly a typical one.

Postwar West German academia was a curiosity in political terms because there were a lot of academics with conservative views (often acquired as a reaction to the political upheavals and horrors of the first half of the century) who were also SPD voters and often members. They tended to take a 'send in the tanks, do we still have tanks?' view as to student radicals. This phenomenon was strongest in the humanities, particularly in History and Literature. These people contrasted very strongly with more radical elements, prominent from the 1960s, who, thanks to the strange two-party system created and facilitated by the pressures of the Cold War, were also SPD voters and often members. The rehabilitated and 'denazified' pre-war right-wing elements tended at first to support the FDP if the latter term was somewhat justified and various small right-wing parties if not: soon they coalesced around the CDU as the big tent grew. This fact is not entirely unrelated to the emergence of the curious phenomenon noted earlier. As to the politics of Postwar East German academia there really isn't anything worth saying at all.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #8 on: August 03, 2021, 12:33:53 AM »

I doubt monarchy ever had much appeal to academics/intellectuals.
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Alben Barkley
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« Reply #9 on: August 04, 2021, 11:09:49 AM »

I remember some poll from 1936 showed FDR’s worst group was, like, Ivy League college students.
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progressive85
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« Reply #10 on: August 05, 2021, 10:11:44 AM »

Most of my college professors that had a political ideology were on the right.

I just don't buy that everyone in academia and the "intelligentsia" is liberal.  Maybe supportive of some things like LGBTQ rights.  But that doesn't necessarily mean they are all socialists.

There are a ton of conservative intellectuals.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #11 on: August 06, 2021, 04:01:04 PM »

This is obviously a "simply phrased" question, so I will try to give a similarly "simple," broad-strokes answer.  I am no expert on this, by any means, but I have read some interesting tidbits here and there.

I recently watched a great YouTube video that phrased (IMO) left wing and right wing thinking pretty perfectly (again, in a very general sense):

Conservatives have historically defend hierarchy, and this leads to them celebrating people who can succeed within a system that fits what they view as the natural order.  Whether that's supporting a monarch because monarchy is the natural, God-ordained way of governing or supporting free market capitalism because those who succeed under it are simply doing what it takes to become rich in the best economic system yet shown to man, conservatives like order and stability.  (This of course doesn't mean conservatives cannot support reform or change, but they will often take a more measured approach than left wingers and prefer to retain more elements of the old system ... "conservatives resist change" is a very problematic way to look at political history, IMO.)  Intellectuals don't exactly thrive in this way of thinking.  Their value to society is not overly "concrete," instead offering the more abstract value of their minds and all the great ideas they could fix society if only they would be given the right power/platform.  We think of "intellects" as some well-to-do Harvard professor who votes Democratic because he or she is just so smart and GOP = dumb dumb, but for much of history they were struggling to get by and spent their time in cafes telling their other intellectual friends their ideas.  Such a person is not likely to support a system that has led to them being lower class and sitting in a café with enough to complain about in the first place!

Yes, the GOP cleaned up with well-educated people in the 1930s or whatever, but being a college graduate was something largely restricted to rich, White Protestants at the time ... and those people were conservative for other reasons.  I think this quote from H.P. Lovecraft - spoken at a time where looking at an electoral map might make you envision the Democrats as a coalition of yokels and ~populists~ if you were an average Atlas poster - illustrates that there has always been a very intellectually elitist strain in the Democratic Party (going back to Jefferson, quite obviously):

"As for the Republicans - how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."
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Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #12 on: August 06, 2021, 04:29:52 PM »

This is obviously a "simply phrased" question, so I will try to give a similarly "simple," broad-strokes answer.  I am no expert on this, by any means, but I have read some interesting tidbits here and there.

I recently watched a great YouTube video that phrased (IMO) left wing and right wing thinking pretty perfectly (again, in a very general sense):

Conservatives have historically defend hierarchy, and this leads to them celebrating people who can succeed within a system that fits what they view as the natural order.  Whether that's supporting a monarch because monarchy is the natural, God-ordained way of governing or supporting free market capitalism because those who succeed under it are simply doing what it takes to become rich in the best economic system yet shown to man, conservatives like order and stability.  (This of course doesn't mean conservatives cannot support reform or change, but they will often take a more measured approach than left wingers and prefer to retain more elements of the old system ... "conservatives resist change" is a very problematic way to look at political history, IMO.)  Intellectuals don't exactly thrive in this way of thinking.  Their value to society is not overly "concrete," instead offering the more abstract value of their minds and all the great ideas they could fix society if only they would be given the right power/platform.  We think of "intellects" as some well-to-do Harvard professor who votes Democratic because he or she is just so smart and GOP = dumb dumb, but for much of history they were struggling to get by and spent their time in cafes telling their other intellectual friends their ideas.  Such a person is not likely to support a system that has led to them being lower class and sitting in a café with enough to complain about in the first place!

Yes, the GOP cleaned up with well-educated people in the 1930s or whatever, but being a college graduate was something largely restricted to rich, White Protestants at the time ... and those people were conservative for other reasons.  I think this quote from H.P. Lovecraft - spoken at a time where looking at an electoral map might make you envision the Democrats as a coalition of yokels and ~populists~ if you were an average Atlas poster - illustrates that there has always been a very intellectually elitist strain in the Democratic Party (going back to Jefferson, quite obviously):

"As for the Republicans - how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."

Excellent post; thanks for this. I think that intellectuals have tended to the left (good definition above) because, IMO, left wing or simply "change"-minded ideas which tend to come from the left implicitly assume that human nature can almost be redesigned; that there are rationally discoverable flaws which we can get rid of by changing the political order. Naturally intellectuals will like this - they are the ones to discover these flaws. The one academic who comes to mind who eschewed this was Hayek - his big idea was effectively that we don't know very much. Not a coincidence he was a rather solitary figure in the intellectual world. Wink
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Paul Weller
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« Reply #13 on: August 06, 2021, 07:12:34 PM »
« Edited: August 07, 2021, 12:19:29 PM by HenryWallaceVP »

Academics are not known to agree on much in general, never mind politics, so I doubt that at any point in any society there was an intellectual consensus on a matter as contentious as political philosophy. There certainly wasn't in 19th century America. In Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition there is a whole chapter just about Calhoun, "The Marx of the Master Class", but there is also one on the socialist-sympathizing abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Along with these two figures that Hofstadter devotes chapters to, there were many more slavery apologists and opponents who upheld either the conservative or liberal position on the issue, respectively. One area where I do think intellectuals on the left clearly led over those on the right, though, was in journalism. Among the most esteemed papers of the time, the New-York Tribune, The Atlantic, and The Nation were all founded in the liberal-radical tradition of the Republican Party.

In his post RINO Tom mentions an intellectually elitist strain in the Democratic Party, which I suppose did exist. Wealthy Democratic plantation owners like Calhoun and James Henry Hammond were indeed elites, and their arguments in defense of slavery and against "Mudsills" were quite explicitly elitist, and right-wing. But there was also undoubtedly an intellectually elitist strain in the Republican Party, one which could be said to correspond to today's "liberal elites". These were the upper middle class, Yankee Republicans who read the Tribune and joined groups like the National Liberal League, which worked side by side with congressional Republicans to defend secularism and liberal Protestantism. Jumping forward to the early 20th century, if anyone deserves the "liberal elite" label, it is the two progressive Republican intellectuals Herbert Croly and Nicholas Murray Butler. The Calhoun/Hammond tradition of Democratic intellectual elitism, meanwhile, was continued by the Dunning School reactionaries. Eventually, of course, these two intellectual traditions switched parties.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #14 on: August 06, 2021, 07:28:46 PM »

^ Of courseeeeeee, lol.
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Statilius the Epicurean
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« Reply #15 on: August 06, 2021, 09:24:50 PM »
« Edited: August 06, 2021, 09:45:09 PM by Statilius the Epicurean »

The original Academy was fairly conservative with regards to Athenian democracy of the period. Most ancient philosophers were elitist in that since they believed the end of life was virtue, political rule should be by the virtuous and not the many. Although someone like Aristotle (though he had to flee Athens in the anti-Macedonian revolt after the death of Alexander) says he could practically settle for a mixed polity of moderate democracy.

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Agonized-Statism
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« Reply #16 on: August 07, 2021, 09:17:42 AM »
« Edited: August 07, 2021, 09:22:44 AM by Anaphoric-Statism »

I doubt monarchy ever had much appeal to academics/intellectuals.

Before the Enlightenment, maybe. IIRC, many European monarchs became patrons of academic associations like the UK's Royal Society in a somewhat successful attempt to earn their support. That era where you needed the monarchy to sponsor your academic pursuits ended when the monarchies failed to exert control over the unregulated environment of intellectual networking found in the coffeehouses. In China and Japan, up until the 20th century, everyone agreed on the need for an imperial family and limited political change to levels below the emperor, so that could be a more recent instance of monarchist intellectuals.

On the thread topic, evidently, those whining about "leftist indoctrination" have never taken a college history class. The content is taught from a center-right liberal perspective, not from the left. All the standard anti-communist rhetoric is there.
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« Reply #17 on: August 07, 2021, 02:46:30 PM »

[Stares in Latin American]
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Paul Weller
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« Reply #18 on: August 09, 2021, 03:32:06 PM »
« Edited: August 09, 2021, 03:35:50 PM by HenryWallaceVP »

I doubt monarchy ever had much appeal to academics/intellectuals.

Before the Enlightenment, maybe. IIRC, many European monarchs became patrons of academic associations like the UK's Royal Society in a somewhat successful attempt to earn their support. That era where you needed the monarchy to sponsor your academic pursuits ended when the monarchies failed to exert control over the unregulated environment of intellectual networking found in the coffeehouses. In China and Japan, up until the 20th century, everyone agreed on the need for an imperial family and limited political change to levels below the emperor, so that could be a more recent instance of monarchist intellectuals.

On the thread topic, evidently, those whining about "leftist indoctrination" have never taken a college history class. The content is taught from a center-right liberal perspective, not from the left. All the standard anti-communist rhetoric is there.

Speaking of the Enlightenment and the Royal Society, my understanding of British politics in the 18th century is that most intellectuals tended to be Whigs, simply because to not be a Whig meant marginalization from centers of power like the Hanoverian court. Hume wrote how he had been "taught by experience, that the Whig party were in possession of bestowing all places, both in the state and in literature". However, individually many of the greatest politically involved intellectuals like Swift, Pope, and Dr. Johnson were Tories. Perhaps the reason they are so better remembered and esteemed than their Whig contemporaries is precisely because they were so few; their arguments therefore being the more unique and, arguably, more interesting.

It's also interesting to consider how "intellectual" was the appeal of the Whig and Tory parties to their supporters. During the "Rage of Party" (pre-proscription) period, I think the Whigs were clearly the party with a more intellectual appeal to voters. Supporters of the Bank of England, the Whig bourgeoisie used modern mercantilist economics to argue that the Bank would enrich the nation and help the war effort against France, a war being fought in defense of European liberties. They opposed discrimination against Dissenters and championed Lockean natural rights, and they abhorred the Tories' incitement of riotous mobs against nonconformists. The Tories, meanwhile, were generalized as the party of landed country gentlemen, ridiculed as backward and ignorant by the Whigs. They opposed the Bank of England because it threatened their interests and cared little for the cause of European liberty. On religion, they sought to curtail the rights of Dissenters and used mob violence to achieve their ends. Perhaps no one better personifies the lack of intellectualism in the Tory appeal than Henry Sacheverell, the lightning rod of English politics in these years, whose support was based entirely on common Anglican prejudice (as seen in the riots bearing his namesake).

During the Age of Walpole, there is a perceptible change in the intellectual appeal of the parties. The old issues and divisions that had existed during the Rage of Party years still existed, but they were rather less important as the Whigs fully controlled the instrument of government. Effectively blocked from regaining power by proscription, opposition to ministerial corruption became one of, if not the main, Tory issue. The greatest works of political philosophy in this period came from the pen of Tory leader Lord Bolingbroke, who brought together Tories and dissident Whigs in The Craftsman. These dissident Whigs were the intellectual backbone of the Whig party, men who truly believed in Whiggism and felt it had been betrayed by Walpolian corruption. Since Walpole was firmly ensconced in power, he no longer needed men to make the case for Whiggism, nor to adhere to its principles himself. More important were political operatives and hacks, such as the Duke of Newcastle, who could better sustain ministerial control. No wonder, then, that the more thoughtful among the Whigs decided to go into opposition with the Tories.

However, despite their more cerebral appeal under Bolingbroke, it is important to note that the Tories still clung to base Anglican bigotry like before. During the elections of 1754, one year after the passage of the Whig supported "Jew Bill", Tory candidates used slogans like "No Jews; Christianity and the Constitution" and accused the Whigs of "all sorts of impieties from Judaism down to Quakerism." The Whigs weren't above this sort of thing either but, being Whigs, their target was Catholicism: in 1747 they attacked a Tory candidate for his Irish heritage, accusing him of popery and noting how "these same Tories of ours are always on the Same Side with the French and the Papists." The point being, that no matter how intellectual the appeal of one or the other party was during the 18th century, they always relied on less enlightened sentiments.
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Storebought
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« Reply #19 on: August 26, 2021, 07:04:13 PM »

Van Orman Quine was famously conservative.
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« Reply #20 on: August 29, 2021, 01:46:23 AM »

Engineering schools traditionally tended conservative, though not as much as business. It wasnt until computer science took over that science/engineering became less conservative. Its liberal arts and humanities thats liberal.

There is a chicken and egg issue of course, since Rs werent so hostile to science before this era (and Ds, especially dixiecrats, had their own science averseness), and ideologies are often shaped by partisanship.
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