What do you get the traditionalist who has everything?

I can only speak for myself, but all I want for Christmas is the ability to talk about Joseph de Maistre in polite company.

Maistre has gotten a bad rap as a proto-fascist, none of which is deserved, and as a throne-and-altar absolutist, not all of which is. The best way to put it might be to say that there are conservatives today who could be characterized as throne-and-altar types, and Maistre would not necessarily have much good to say about any of them.

As to his off-putting zeal for the executioner's office, I would clarify that Georges Bataille wrote about blood and sacrifice because he thought they were sexy ideas; Maistre wrote about them because he believed that a society lacking a ritualized expression of its violent and sacrificial tendencies would inevitably come to express them in more destructive ways. For Maistre, the measure of a ritual sacrifice was how well it dampened and tamed mankind's natural bloodlust; he was less enthusiastic about suffering than I am.

Reading Owen Bradley's A Modern Maistre, I find myself wishing that he could find a place next to Burke in the conservative canon. For one thing, he often says in a sentence what took Burke much longer. On the importance of unwritten political habits over written law:

As there is something in music it is impossible to annotate, there is something in all governments it is impossible to write.

On symbolic authority, sounding very Wildean:

If it is our first duty to be just, our second is to appear so.

Another musical metaphor:

He who is still blind and dumb . . . like the uninitiated at the mysteries, or the unmusical at dances, not being yet pure and worthy of the pure truth but still discordant and disordered and material [I assume he means libertarians—CSB], must stand outside the divine choir. Plato thought it not lawful for the impure to touch the pure. Thence the prophecies and oracles are spoken in enigmas, and the mysteries are not exhibited uncontinently to all and sundry, but only after certain purifications and previous instructions.

But, more than that, he fused cosmopolitanism with traditionalism in a way that Burke never did. Many conservatives think that the advantage of living in traditional communities is that it gives its members a shared set of values and assumptions; traditional communities are good because they are, in important ways, homogenous. I've always thought the opposite: unchosen communities are better than chosen or contractual ones because they force us to put up with people we don't like. Maistre gets this*; I'm not sure Burke does.

I am pleased to note that Maistre's magnanimity toward a society's outliers extended even to people outside the community: "Unhappily, every stranger is an enemy when one has need of victims; this horrible public law is only too well known." Bradley explains:

He shows that the foreigner's threat to the in-group's fundamental values is not a fact but a representation produced by an overly zealous social order; the transition from difference to antagonism is not the work of the stranger.

Embedded in this analysis seems to be an inherent criticism of the identification of group unity with the good and of the newcomer with the bad or dangerous. Scapegoating, the victimization of difference, will be a primary object of Maistre's political criticism; it is always the result of a sacred economy gone haywire, whether it is a matter of the Aztecs or Marat.

I take it back: All I really want for Christmas is an end to the victimization of difference.

*Owen Bradley on Maistre and cosmopolitanism:

Baldensperger estimates the number of émigrés departing France between 1789 and 1797 and returning between 1797 and 1815 at 180,000, among them the majority of the previous French elite. These men and women, cosmopolitans in spite of themselves, developed "dispositions more docile to the diversity of the world" through contact with other national traditions whose untaintedness by the French Enlightenment, now blamed for the Revolution, impressed upon the émigrés the value of local customs and traditions, so-called superstitions and anachronisms. The very disarray of the émigrés in their new surroundings made their experience of cultural difference far more dramatic and often more fertile than that of the Napoleonic armies, bearers of a triumphant Enlightenment universalism...

Maistre himself emphasizes [this]: "I never think without admiration of that political whirlwind which has uprooted from their places thousands of men destined never to know one another, to make them swirl together like the chaff of the fields... We are painfully and justly pulverized; but, if miserable eyes like my own are worthy to glimpse divine secrets, we are only pulverized to be mixed."