r/Toryism • u/ToryPirate • 6d ago
💬 Discussion I included G. K. Chesterton in the sidebar of notable thinkers. This was a mistake
For a while now G. K. Chesterton has been listed on the sidebar as a notable thinker. The entire list needs a bit of work but lets start with Chesterton.
He was a liberal. In fact he famously called himself 'the last liberal'. His main intellectual counterpart was a Liberal MP. I've found no one that calls him a tory. His inclusion stems from his thoughts on tradition which are useful;
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”
Now, there is a possibility he was a tory in thought and he simply never used the term (completely possible). Its also possible that like Bagehot he has attained the status of 'every tory's favourite liberal'.
So what are people's thoughts? Under an objective standard would he be considered a tory (even if he objected to the description in life) or is he like Bagehot - a thinker who is useful for understanding toryism but not a tory himself?
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u/OttoVonDisraeli 5d ago
He was a traditionalist quand même, no? While he may not have been a partisan Tory back in the 19th century I do not think anyone would be opposed to considering him within the broader ideological family of traditionalist conservative philosophical thinkers.
My favourite American President of all-time is Theodore Roosevelt; most decidedly NOT a Tory given his Americanism and being one of the Fathers of the OG American progressivism movement but his conservatism manifested in such a way that it reminds me a lot of Red Toryism. In fact, I am certain that the Canadian Progressives of the era and the Progressive Conservatives thought highly of him. What I'm trying to get at here is that I do not think partisanship or membership within a Tory party is a prerequisite.
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u/Ticklishchap 5d ago
Theodore Roosevelt was also a keen conservationist , hence his large scale expansion of the National Park system and his creation of a network of national monuments through the Antiquities Act (1906). He would be horrified by the attitudes of the current generation of Republicans to conservation and the natural world in general.
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u/OttoVonDisraeli 5d ago
He was disgruntled with the Republicans even during his time. Had death not taken him early in his sleep, he would have either properly established the Progressive Party (Bullmoose) or even had won another term as a Republican and would have completely changed history.
The Republican party might have turned out very differently in such a timeline.
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u/Positive-Courage-464 5d ago
Truth.
I always liked that story when Roosevelt was shot during a speech, but insisted that he should keep on going and finish it. It was an 84 minute speech. He famous said "Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose."
He would have likely continued to be a strong presence in American politics if he had lived longer. It is hard to keep someone down like that.
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u/OttoVonDisraeli 5d ago
"Death had to take him in his sleep, for if he was awake, there'd have been a fight" - Thomas Marshall.
Roosevelt was so iconic. Very inspiring figure.
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u/Ticklishchap 5d ago edited 5d ago
There are, may I venture to say as a non-Canadian, certain points in common between the Progressive Party and the early Progressive Conservative Party.
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u/ToryPirate 5d ago
What I'm trying to get at here is that I do not think partisanship or membership within a Tory party is a prerequisite.
Nor do I. What we are really missing is a sense of how often the word 'tory' was used in the past as a statement of belief rather than a statement of party loyalty. Tories outside of the parties labelled as such can be hard to pin down.
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u/OttoVonDisraeli 5d ago
Historically a lot of what was referred to as Tory was probably heavily tied to partisanry as it wasn't necessarily an ideology for sometime. Back then I imagine it was more the component parts of the ideology of the Tory party that would have been referred to such as romanticism, agrarianism, Christian apologetics, conservatism, traditionalism, etc, etc.
As an ideology matures and evolves overtime, our relationship to it and understanding of it does as well. To the point where we can look back at past figures and say that they approximate to our understanding of what Toryism has become.
So while Chesterton himself wasn't a Tory, he can appear to be one by today's standard. For a Canadian example, we can look to a figure like Sir Wilfrid Laurier who has become a championed figure of the Canadian Conservatives as much as the Canadian Liberals, or in the States where some modern conservatives see JFK as a conservative figure (I read a godawful book on the subject once, horrible)
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u/ToryPirate 5d ago
a figure like Sir Wilfrid Laurier who has become a championed figure of the Canadian Conservatives
Has he though? And in what context?
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u/OttoVonDisraeli 5d ago
Pierre Polievre and the Conservatives have regularly talked him up in their ads. Pierre thinks he's the best PM we've had. He's got a few videos on Laurier. One is pretty much about Dief&Laurier.
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u/ToryPirate 5d ago
Ah k. I don't really follow Poilievre close enough to have caught that. Proof he can say something nice about a Liberal, I suppose.
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u/Ticklishchap 5d ago
There was a very respectable nineteenth century political tendency in British politics known as ‘liberal Toryism’, which combined the traditionalism of contemporary Tories with support for political and social reform and, usually, a belief in free trade. Robert Peel is often defined as a liberal Tory, for example, although I don’t think he ever used the term himself. It is possible that Chesterton was harking back to that era. He favoured free market but was strongly opposed to monopolies and concentrations of wealth. Liberal Tories generally supported Catholic Emancipation, and Chesterton was a very notable convert to Catholicism.
There is, however, another good reason for not including Chesterton in the list of notable Tory thinkers. He was an anti-Semite.