What is Conservatism? The Moral Imagination Part I

One of our most popular episodes has been the one we did on Socialism. We thought that the word "Conservative" has lost some of its meaning today, so we decided to address the essence of what some have called "Paleo-conservativism" in distinction to "Neo-Conservativism." Hodges and Vowell discuss the essences of Edmund Burke's "moral imagination" which he pits against the "idyllic imagination" found in the works of Rousseau, and lived out in the bloodbath of the French Revolution and the following Reign of Terror. The four points of the moral imagination that Hodges recounts are: the view that man is basically fallen, that life is tragic, that mankind needs a view of community that transcends our own generation, and that society requires a common belief about religion. This episode covers the first two, while the latter two are included in the next episode.