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watts

naphta's profile

naphta joined 1 year, 2 months ago.

naphta does not claim to be anyone.

Naphta is the moniker of John Marshall, an agrarian and traditionalist writer/blogger who is fond of the work of French Counter-Enlightenment writers (Bonald, Maistre) and the Prussian Hamann, the French Catholic Reactionaries (e.g. Chateaubriand), and other Traditionalists such as Belloc, Burke, and Tocqueville. Also a reader of the Southern Agrarians, Wendell Berry, as well as Tolkien and other semi-luddites. Further, I am interested in the work of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. In economics, I tend to value the work of the critics of the Austrian and Manchester liberals -such as that of Swiss economist Wilhelm Ropke- while still suporting in principle the need for a market as free as the requirements of moral order will permit. Such a moral order would take a regulatory approach to "social property" such as indispensable natural resources, as well as the right of the culture to be protected from violent social and economic forces that undermine stability and social unity.

I am also attracted to the work of the religious traditionalists and critics of modernity such as the the philosophers of the Perennial school Rene Guenon, and Frithjof Schuon, as well as the Russian "intentionalist" G.I. Gurdjieff.

I write a much-neglected blog at www.oldorder.com that is traditionalist in tone, and I have written poetry in the modernist tone for 20 years.

I am currently working on a book that details the history of traditionalism in Europe and America, and explores the Western Church's historic positions on the traditional conceptions of race, class, guild, and caste.

I am 41 years old, a husband for 20 years and the father of three boys. I am an autodidact, following in the mode of Henry Hazlitt whose only pedigree was the facility of his mind.