Is conservative modernism the way forward for the right?
One of the fascinating paradoxes of 20th-century literature is that the poets and critics who did the most to promote modernism rank among the greatest conservative men of letters. Even as they developed new modes and orders in art, they clung to the political and social norms of the English-speaking peoples. The most celebrated of these ‘conservative modernists’ was TS Eliot, an American transplant to London who once memorably described himself as a ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’.
But Eliot was not the only – nor even the first – member of this set of paradoxical men of letters. In addition to the author of The Waste Land, the critic Christos Hadjiyiannis has profiled other contributors to that world, from those well-known, such as Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford, to those largely forgotten, such as TE Hulme or Edward Storer. His most remarkable study of this intellectual cohort, Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900-1920, was originally published in 2018 but was reprinted this year in an affordable new paperback edition by Cambridge University Press.
Hadjiyiannis goes straight to the roots of modernist renewal: ‘As a movement that sought to overturn romanticism, classical modernism was actually full of nostalgia for a mythical past,’ he argues. ‘Writing at the beginning of a new century, Tory modernists all looked resolutely backwards.’ When the dominant forces of their time seemed to push toward chaos and disillusionment, conservative modernists attempted to rediscover principles for a humane order. His exploration of the history of their ideas shows that conservative movements can be capable of far more imagination than they manage today. In an age of demagoguery, ideology and AI slop, conservative modernism offers a serious, literate alternative to what passes for right-wing political and cultural activity on both sides of the Atlantic.
What was the political context for conservative modernism? After Victorian-era successes under Benjamin Disraeli, the Tory party fell into a period of decline. The Conservatives were simply incapable of competing with new modes of mass politics innovated by liberal and socialist opponents and lost 246 seats in the 1906 general election, in what Hadjiyiannis refers to as the ‘crisis’ of 1906. The new government embarked on an ambitious reform agenda, including David Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ and an act to restrict the authority of the House of Lords.
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