Abstract

Two conflicting contemporary social philosophies, neoconservatism and social ecology, are examined. Their connections to the broader Western political tradition are analyzed, but they are mostly interpreted as divergent understandings of the cultural and systemic turmoil of the 1960s. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the social and political prescriptions of neo-conservatism threaten to accelerate contemporary trends of ecological disruption and political authoritarianism. ;Neo-conservatism is described and explained and its major proponents are identified. It is understood in this dissertation as an intellectual and political attempt to relegitimate and reinvigorate the traditions, practices, institutions, and authorities of Western technological civilization, as organized under American democratic capitalism in the late twentieth century. Neo-conservatives argue that American democratic capitalism suffered a crisis of legitimacy, mostly as a result of the cultural and political radicalism of an anti-bourgeois counterculture that captured the imagination of a powerful new knowledge class in American society in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1980s have witnessed a concerted effort by neo-conservatives, allied with other conservative social interests, to delegitimate the 1960s cultural and political legacy, and to infuse American bourgeois orthodoxy with new moral vigor