Brian Leiter continues his regular and often amusing smack-downs of Right Wing Intellectual Puffery. But Leiter also writes "I strongly suspect that if he weren't the canonical opponent of the French Revolution, even Burke would not be much read anymore (in a century that included David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, why would anyone even notice Burke except for his conservatism?)." Hmm...Burke wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Burke was quite courageous in advocating free trade with the Irish on principled grounds (even though he went against the perceived financial interests of his voters) and Catholic emancipation in England.
One smaller observation: De Maistre slips through the cracks of Leiter's analysis. (He is mentioned in the original list, and then disappears.) Isaiah Berlin has done nice work to show how interesting Maistre is. In fact, these essays helped draw me into the history of philosophy as a vocation.
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