McManus: A Preview of My Forthcoming Book

“Neoliberal society and post-modern culture emerged together on the promise that they could provide greater economic prosperity and opportunities for self-development than any other social form.”

Introduction

“The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.”—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism.

This year is quite special for me. In addition to getting married, it should mark the publication of my first three books (fingers crossed). The first, Making Human Dignity Central to International Law, will be published with the University of Wales Press in October of 2019. The third is a monograph entitled The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism, which is intended for release at the end of this year to coincide with the beginning of the 2020 American election. In this short piece, I wanted to preview the second book, which I am releasing in conjunction with my co-authors David Hollands, Dylan De Jong, Erik Tate, Conrad Hamilton, and Borna Radnik. It is entitled What is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays on Our Hugely Tremendous Times and will be released through Zero Books. Our essays in the book draw from different theoretical positions and standpoints, and I, by no means, intend to speak for us all. My intention here is to provide a short overview of post-modern conservatism as I understand it, complementing similar efforts in other media. I will also conclude with a few arguments about potential political solutions to post-modern conservatism, which draw on the moral argument made in my book on human dignity and international law.

Why Did Post-Modern Conservatism Emerge?

My theoretical position is that the reaction to neoliberalism—what I call post-modern conservatism—emerged for a variety of interconnected reasons. First, I argue that different strains of conservative thought, particularly Burkean historicism and the de Maistrean irrationalism, were ripe for mutation into post-modern variants. While these strains of conservatism were not themselves post-modern, they relied on arguments and principles which could evolve into post-modern variants under the right social and cultural conditions. This point is more academic and has been elaborated upon here.