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Features“Carlyle was not a conservative,” wrote Simon Heffer in his excellent biography of Thomas Carlyle, Moral Desperado (1995). “What he saw of the socio-political system in the mid-nineteenth century he despised, and saw no point in conserving.” That is true, but the fact that Heffer had to say it suggests the existence of other reasonable interpretations: one wouldn’t say, for example, that Nietzsche wasn’t a conservative. Richard Reeves, by contrast, in his recent and highly competent biography of John Stuart Mill, repeatedly and without explanation calls Carlyle a “conservative,” presumably for no other reason than that Carlyle’s views diverged sharply from those of the “liberal” Mill. Indeed, the question of whether Carlyle was a conservative, a liberal, a proto-socialist, a nationalist reactionary, or something else again—that is, the question of h ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 28 February 2010, on page 16 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Carlyle-the-wise-4387
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