Something that irks me, and which I have only slowly realized over time, is the close association that seems to exist between classical liberal neo-conservatism and the liberal arts tradition. It took me a surprisingly long time to notice this (having been immersed...

...in liberal education for practically my entire life), but recently the ideological ferment that permeates liberal arts and "Great Books" schools has revealed itself to me as being quite out of harmony with the real substance of the perennial philosophical tradition.

How is it, for example, that the divine Plato, the proponent of a total state which regulates every aspect of the lives of its citizens has ever been co-opted as a protagonist in the Whiggish history of ideas that have shaped "Western Civilization"?

How is it that Aristotle has been invoked as the defender of 18th century versions of human rights and liberties? Indeed, worst of all, how is it that Thomas Aquinas is the 'First Whig,' and that the same concept of natural law which Thomas elucidated is that which appears...

...in the declaration of independence, or the writings of Thomas Jefferson?

Of course, there is a long and pernicious history behind this association. The Renaissance and Early Modernity featured many attempts to rehabilitate the ancients for ends foreign to antiquity.

It was not difficult for the heroes of ancient myth, such as Achilles and Odysseus and Aeneas, to be harnessed as archetypes for the ultra-liberal Nietzschean ideology of the ubermensch, the self-making man, the free man, the central figure of the modern Revolutions.

These sorts of readings are anachronistic, however, and neglected the greater world (social, cosmological, and metaphysical) which contextualized and conditioned these heroic figures. Macintyre is actually quite good for recovering the moral significance of these figures, e.g...

...in "After Virtue," ch.10-12, and "Whose Justice," the first several chapters, where the heroism of ancient societies is dislodged from the individualistic interpretation given to it by modernity and re-configured within the greater social and cosmological order.

In Catholic circles, I think an important task for integralists is to publicly dislodge the true classical tradition from its association with classical liberalism, its individualistic morality, and its Whiggish history of "Western Civilization." Those are modern constructs...

...which are not part of the greater human tradition which we ought, if we really cared about tradition and "conservatism," to be conserving.