Glad it helped James. There are currently 111 A level Politics videos on the channel that will hopefully be good revision aids for you. If you haven’t already subscribed please do as you’ll get notifications as I add more
I find much of truly Conservative philosophy to be fundamentally rooted in a cynical and realistic view of human nature with its different forms being different conceptual takes on how to properly address the fundamentally self-motivated nature of human beings.
@@kiwimaddog2024 You're saying that cynicism is false consciousness? Nature is evil. Evil is the norm. The fact that good exists at all in a world as cold, brutal, and uncaring as ours is incredible. We should not expect goodness as being the norm because it isn't.
I would, though he's not as good a fit as Burke. I use Hobbes and Burke for traditional, Oakeshott for One Nation and Rand and Nozick for New Right. I'm not convinced they chosen the best possible set of thinkers but we have to work with the thinkers they give us
@@AlanHistoryNerd The proposition that Hobbes was conservative seems to me to be based largely on a false syllogism: conservatives have a negative view about humanity - Hobbes had a negative view about humanity - therefore Hobbes was a conservative. There are plenty (see eg John Gray the political philosopher) who would say that Hobbes was a liberal and it is certainly true that he wrote about and supported "liberal" ideas such as individualism and equality of opportunity. And like other liberals he had a "scheme" for bringing such objectives about - in his case a social contract between the people and their sovereign to give them the security they needed to realise their freedom. The lesson, I think, is to be very careful in assigning labels.Conservatism is notoriously difficult to define and much of what it upholds, especially in economics, overlaps with liberal thinking. Most people would probably regard Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as the epitome of conservative politicians yet their economic policies were liberal (or Neo-liberal) as was their general emphasis on freedom. And Ayn Rand may have supported Goldwater but seems to me one of the least conservative people ever to have lived.
@@HampsteadOwl while this all may be true, the exam board gives us Rand and Hobbes as conservative key thinkers so we have to say they are conservatives
That's true but that's primarily because the modern left has been more influenced by classically conservative philosophy than the modern right. The modern right instead is much more of a reinterpretation of classically liberal philosophy that the classical conservatives were reacting against.
