ABSTRACT
Civilised conservatism avoids the ideological trap by working and re-working a national tradition. It follows that modern conservatism is a conservatism which is above all else conscious of the need to explain and justify itself. Charles Maurras hates everything German and so he is no Hegelian, but he does his best to do for French conservatism what Hegel had earlier done for German conservatism and what Michael Oakeshott later did for British. Monarchism is Maurras’s way of being radical without being fascist or Marxist. Maurras is a radical because he is a thoroughgoing reactionary who wants to reverse what his liberal, socialist and Marxist enemies would call the natural development of a modern society and polity. Maurras was ahead of his time in doubting the necessity of the whole progressive scenario. He does not see why a society should not be, in the language of the progressives, incompletely modern.
