From Empire to Shire: Rod Dreher’s Nostalgia for Middle-Earth
…and whom Dreher credits for the title, has himself been caught vacillating between the two notions of tradition. Identifying which notion is operative at any given moment gives us a better grasp of the weaknesses of the argument. As Jeffrey Stout argues in Democracy and Tradition, Yet once the ambiguity of the term “tradition” is made plain, it becomes obvious that the debate over the new traditionalism is best construed not as a debate between tr…
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