Aesthetic Origins: Peter Viereck and the Imaginative Sources of PoliticsJay Patrick Starliper While it is gaining in academic prominence, discussion of the imagination is too often neglected. Society is dangerously unaware of the intimate relationship between culture and politics, ethics and aesthetics. Challenging this, Jay Patrick Starliper examines the imagination through the lens of the work of Peter Viereck and other likeminded thinkers. The result is a philosophical deconstruction that demonstrates why books are bullets.In 1941, before Nazi barbarism was public knowledge, a young Peter Viereck published Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler. In it, Viereck attacked the diabolical spiritual foundations of National Socialism. He made the ostensibly absurd claim that a certain shade of romanticism was the ethical foundation of a German revolt against decency. According to Viereck, Nazism was the culmination of over a century and a half of bad culture, the result of an idyllic imagination. Starliper warns that the same diseased imagination that culminated in gas chambers and guillotines is subtly affecting the way millions of people view the world today and that, without the inspiration of an elevated aesthetic, civilization will not survive.In the spirit of Edmund Burke and Irving Babbitt, Viereck's insight into the ethical and political force of aesthetics provides a much needed critique of contemporary civilization. |
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... abstract, diffuse, and private as to place no tangible limits on economic or political freedom beyond the requirement to respect the freedom of others. Lacking substantive economic, social, or political effect, the “objective moral ...
... abstract, diffuse, and private as to place no tangible limits on economic or political freedom beyond the requirement to respect the freedom of others. Lacking substantive economic, social, or political effect, the “objective moral ...
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... abstract, ahistorical theorizing. By favoring methods that sharply limited the range of observation and explanation, the students of politics “externalized” and reduced the subject matter. An older type of investigation had proceeded ...
... abstract, ahistorical theorizing. By favoring methods that sharply limited the range of observation and explanation, the students of politics “externalized” and reduced the subject matter. An older type of investigation had proceeded ...
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... abstract, too thin to resist the totalitarian storm, being not deep-rooted by history but blueprinted from above by well-meaning intellectuals. It lacked the roots and time-tested traditions of British liberty.” 5 Viereck's “humanist ...
... abstract, too thin to resist the totalitarian storm, being not deep-rooted by history but blueprinted from above by well-meaning intellectuals. It lacked the roots and time-tested traditions of British liberty.” 5 Viereck's “humanist ...
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... abstract demagogic appeals. “To organize society for economic production means to organize it according to some system or other, some credo, whether just or unjust, rational or irrational; and this means some kinds of values,” Viereck ...
... abstract demagogic appeals. “To organize society for economic production means to organize it according to some system or other, some credo, whether just or unjust, rational or irrational; and this means some kinds of values,” Viereck ...
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... abstract embodiments of order that distort human experience and inspire reductionist or positivist standards that impede ethical action.15 “ So much pious intoning about ' values ' rings hollow , " Viereck affirms . " The real ...
... abstract embodiments of order that distort human experience and inspire reductionist or positivist standards that impede ethical action.15 “ So much pious intoning about ' values ' rings hollow , " Viereck affirms . " The real ...
Contents
Arbitrary Caprice | |
The Crux of Civilization | |
Ahistorical Rationality and Human Nature | |
Will and the Ethical Imperative of Inner Action | |
The Moral Imagination | |
The DreamNexus | |
An Imaginative Conservatism | |
The Standardless Threat to Liberty | |
The Unadjusted Incarnation of Order | |
Epilogue Strict Wildness a Love That Transfigures | |
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Aesthetic Origins: Peter Viereck and the Imaginative Sources of Politics Jay Patrick Starliper No preview available - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
abstract aesthetic American American conservatism archetypes aristocracy artists Babbitt beauty Burke cash-nexus Claes G concrete conservatism conservative creative culture decent Democracy and Leadership dream-nexus economic Edmund Burke emotional ethical action ethical content ethical standards ethos existence existential experiential German German romanticism Germany's happiness healthy Hitler human condition human experience human nature ideas important indispensable individual inner check insight inspired intellectual intuitive Irving Babbitt Jahn Kirk lack legitimate liberal liberty living mass mass-man means Metapolitics moral absolutes moral imagination National Review Nazi Nazism neoconservatism Nietzsche overadjusted particular Paul Elmer person Peter Viereck philosophical Plato poetry political positivistic preserve psychological public imagination quality of imagination reality reason restraint Revolution romantic rootless roots Russell Kirk sense society soul spiritual stereotypes symbols tradition truth unadjusted understanding universal unwritten constitution values viable Viereck affirms Viereck avers Viereck believed Viereck refers Voegelin Volk Wagner Wagnerian