The conservatives who want to undo the Enlightenment

A post-liberal world would be an awful lot like the pre-liberal world

The Thinker getting smashed.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Conservative thought in America is becoming more radical. Which means that it's reverting to the form it often took in other times — in Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, in reaction to the liberalism of the Enlightenment.

Unlike the tamer conservatism of the postwar decades, today's conservative critics don't locate the source of their discontent within the liberal tradition — with the Progressive movement or the New Deal, for example, or the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s. Instead, the most influential and cogent conservatives of the present — among them Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, and Sohrab Ahmari of The New York Post — take aim at the liberal tradition itself and suggest that our problems stem from errors that have marked it from the beginning.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.