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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Royal Hubris

The US Founders had a conflict with the monarchy and royalist.

Back when I was researching the US Founders I decided that, to understand the Founder's side of the conflict, I also needed to read articles supporting the royalist perspective. (Please Note, the Tories and Royalists were the first American Conservatives. They fought against the US Founders.)

Apparently, the royalty of old saw their kings, queens and lords as monuments of virtue who had an ancient covenant with God. Royalists saw the the king (i.e., the state) as the fountain from which the bounties of the kingdom flowed outward to the people.

The royalty had great contempt for the serfs who they they saw as needy, greedy subjects who weighed upon the resources of the kingdom.

In feudalism, the king was the central legal authority. This authority was imposed on the local level through a hierarchy of Lords and Ladies.

Most people in feudalism were serfs. Serfs worked long hours toiling away for their lords upon whom they were dependent for food and low quality health care. Most serfs had what Sutherland Institute would call "conservative values."

There was a growing middle class. The middle class owned property and had a small amount of autonomy. Classical liberal thinkers latched on to the idea that property rights and ownership were key to prosperity.

The American Revolution was inspired by classical liberal thought. They created a limited government set on protecting property rights.

The royalists (aka the conservatives) did not disappear. They simply spat venom at the liberal US Founders who they saw as treasonous vermin.

The Hanoverian Kings of England were German. The Hanoverian Kings funded German Universities. German scholars, like Hegel, wrote philosophies sympathetic to the Germany Royalty (who just happened to rule England).

Hegel was a Conservative who adored Napoleon and wanted a restoration of a top-down empire or monarchy. Hegel spoke how the Germanic people the chosen of the World Spirit to lead a new world order and other nonsense.

Hegel was fascinated with sublation. Sublation is the tendency of words to change meaning with time. Often words would turn into their opposite. The arch-conservative Hegel hated the Classical Liberalism of the US Founders and wrote a number of arguments that turned freedom into slavery and slavery freedom.

The Young Hegelian (Feuerbach, Marx, etc.) took Hegel's dialectics and reframed the ideals of the monarchy as new, left wing and revolutionary.

Through the process of sublation, Hegel and Marx managed to make the monarchy appear to millions as radical and egalitarian.

Interestingly, the radical left seems to have kept the same intellectual hubris of the monarchy.

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