Chapter Three: Authoritarian Conservatism
Jay M. Shafritz, American Government & Politics (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 418.
Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard, The Conservative Tradition in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 88–89.
Bill Schardt, “Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821): A Great and Virtuous Man?,” Newcastle Philosophy Society at http://www.newphilsoc.org.uk/Freedom/berlinday/a_great_and_virtuous_man.htm.
A brief biography of Joseph de Maistre and a Maistre home page administered by Richard Lebrun at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, is located at http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/history/links/maistre/maistre. html. Lebrun has written a full biography of this early conservative, Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988). This work is described by the publisher as follows: “The Joseph de Maistre revealed here is a more complex figure than either the bloody-minded apologist for conservatism portrayed by his liberal critics or the steadfast Church Father of his traditional Catholic admirers. Maistre was a scholarly magistrate in the tradition of Montesquieu, a man who had been open to the trends of his time but was profoundly shaken by the violence of the French Revolution. Appalled by the prospect of chaos, he used his rhetorical skills as a lawyer to defend monarchical institutions and traditional Catholicism. Lebrun argues that only with the opening of the family archives and the discoveries in recent studies are we able to appreciate Maistre’s struggles to understand the upheavals of his time, his doubts and hesitations, and his reasons for taking the public positions he chose.”
Peter Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1956), 11.
Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998) makes only two passing references to de Maistre; similarly, Russell Kirk makes two fleeting references to de Maistre in The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2001), and the way in which he first comes into the narrative, with no introduction whatsoever, gives one the feeling that he was edited out.
Dunn and Woodard, The Conservative Tradition in America, 89–90.
John W. Dean, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Little Brown, 2004), 132–36. This book spells out the unprecedented nature of the aggressive policies of the Bush/Cheney administration.
John Lyman, “Who Is Scooter Libby? The Guy Behind the Guy Behind the Guy,” Center for American Progress Web site (October 28, 2005) at http://www.americanprogress.org/sit/p.aspz? c=biJRJ8OVF&b=109719& printmode=1.
Michael C. Desch, “George ‘Wilson’ Bush: How the dark side of America’s Liberal Tradition drives us to global crusades in democracy’s name,” American Conservative (November 21, 2005), 24–25. Michael C. Desch is a Professor at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.
Melanie Scarborough, “The Security Pretext: An Examination of the Growth of Federal Police Agencies,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper No. 94 (June 29, 2005) at http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3828.
Norman Ornstein, “Checks and Balances? The President Has Few, if Any,” Roll Call (December 21, 2005) at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.23607/pub_detail.asp.
See Abraham H. Maslow, Maslow on Management (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 292. Maslow wrote in this classic, “The more grown people are, the worse authoritarian management will work, the less well people will function in the authoritarian situation, and the more they will hate it. What this means is that people who have experienced freedom can never really be content again with slavery, even though they made no protest about the slavery before they had the experience of freedom.”
