Roger Scruton's Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition is an attempt to understand the division between liberalism and conservatism in the modern secular era.
Prehistory
Scruton begins by stating that "Modern conservatism is a product of the Enlightenment" even though the ideas go back to Aristotle. Modern conservatism has to deal with a new situation,
the emergence of the nation state, the loss of a unifying religion, and the growth of the 'great society' composed of millions of cooperating strangers under a single rule of law.
Scruton sees three forms of human society in the modern era, tribal, religious, and political. He suggests that
conservatism arose as an attempt to hold on to the values of kinship and religion in communities that were being reorganized by a purely political law.
For him it is the differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution that created a division between conservatism and liberalism.
In the runup to the division Scruton proposes Richard Hooker and Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594ish) as justifying "a compromise between church and state."
Then came Hobbes and Leviathan (1651) to suggest that humans would contract among themselves to get out of the "war of all against all... [where life is] 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.'"
Then came James Harrington and The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) proposing that "republican government in an essentially capitalist society... would be the most stable political system."
Then came John Locke and Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690) with the human understanding of natural law as "an inner sense of our rights." Thus the need for government as a contract, a "social compact" "to accept the curtailments of their rights in exchange for the benefits and security of society." A separation of powers would be a good way to protect the social compact.
Then came Montesquieu and his Spirit of the Laws (1734) and a definition of he separation of powers -- "the executive, the legislative and the judicial -- and that the spheres should be separated as far as possible in order to guarantee the liberties of the subject."
But with William Blackstone and his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) comes the idea of humans "subject to institutions and traditions that contain within them a precious inheritance of wisdom" as set out in the English common law as "solutions, tested by time and custom, to the problems of social conflict and the needs of orderly government."
David Hume in his History of England (1744) attacked the idea of the social contract, writing that "most people [are] inevitably constrained by... ties to stay where they are, whatever the government". He "believed that politics... could be deduced from the study of human nature."
But Samuel Johnson, of the Dictionary of the English Language (1755), believed in orthodoxy, "the exact expression of moral truths... understood and acted upon by all".
Scruton proposes that after these thinkers, a division appeared:
Liberals saw political order as issuing from individual liberty; conservatives saw individual liberty issuing from political order... The question of which comes first, liberty or order, was to divide liberals from conservatives for the next two hundred years.
The Birth of Philosophical Conservatism
The difference between the American and French Revolutions had to do with
the greater influence, in the American case, of conservative ways of thinking, compared with the romantic individualism, the desire to pull down the old order and to make everything anew, that inspired the revolutionaries in France.
A major influence in the US was Thomas Jefferson and his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) expounding a theoretical basis for the US Constitution. Then the Federalist Papers (1787-8) applied Locke, Harrington, Montesquieu to the American situation. While liberal, they also raised the conservative question about safeguarding liberty against the growth of government.
Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776) expressed a vision central to conservatism. He saw the foundation of human community in "mutual sympathy of sentiments" conscious of ourselves as agents but also as objects of judgement. In Wealth of Nations Smith "provided the first serious defence of the market economy from philosophical principles." The division of labor is the "true cause of economic progress" in part through the operation of an "invisible hand." Market prices are not just prices by "a distillation of social knowledge" by which each of us responds "to the desires and needs of every other."
The French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen" was impeccably liberal. But the American Bill of Rights was marked by the culture of the common law, "an attempt to protect the ancient rights and privileges of the people, as defined and discovered by the law." Edmund Burke saw this in his predictions in Reflections on the Recent Revolution in France (1790) which he said was imposed on the people from above by "a literary cabal."
Against this he developed a complex, unsystematic but highly illuminating account of custom, tradition, and civil association... [recognizing] that freedom is always in jeopardy and must be protected by the law.
It is in the "little platoons" of society that traditions form that are forms of knowledge, residues of trial and error and their resulting social solutions, "answers that have been discovered to enduring questions." As opposed to the "a priori principles of the revolutionaries" derived from abstract reason.
For Scruton, Smith and Burke attempted to describe social membership that put "duty and responsibility... at the heart of the social order." Thomas Paine in Rights of Man (1791-2) put "the rights of the individual [as] the sole source of political legitimacy."
Conservatism in Germany and France
Immanuel Kant was a liberal and "made the freely choosing individual into the very center of his world view". But Kant's individual acts "through duty, not desire", and Kant's philosophy "makes no special place for customs and traditions".
Georg W.F. Hegel regarded Kant's "abstract right" as problematic and "without reference to the history or particularity of human relations". "From the confrontation between abstract right and concrete morality the sphere of ethical life emerges." Abstract freedom "is only available in the context of a tradition-governed social order".
But Hegel also influenced Marx. Hegel accepted the French Revolution as "a coming to consciousness of the deep undercurrents of history" and thus, for Marx the idea that "everything can be changed utterly".
Hegel also developed a paradoxical narrative of slavery. For sure, it is the master that commands labor. But it is the slave that actually changes the world. Thus:
The history of freedom survives in the very nature of freedom, and it is a history of bondage.
Then Hegel goes on to see "the tension and conflict between... the family and civil society... and the resolution of this conflict in the state". But Hegel understood that it is a mistake to compare the power of the state to the power of civil associations.
Hegel's vision of an "inevitable march of history form each epoch to the next" has encouraged "the revolution fetish of the Marxists."
Then Scruton proceeds to Tocqueville, Chateaubriand and Maistre.
Maistre wrote that "constitutions are not made, but found" as the American Constitution made "explicit a spirit already present in the Anglo-American common law". And Maistre mourning the passing of the French monarchy and its Christian Catholicism.
Chateaubriand showed, in Génie du Christianisme "that conservatism was a kind of aesthetic and spiritual renewal -- a way out of the dreary orthodoxies of revolutionary egalitarianism."
Tocqueville saw that the culture of equality destroys the faith in the social order and confines individuals "within the solitude of their hearts" unless the "little platoons" recreate "long-standing and genial hierarchies." In The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856) Tocqueville argued that revolutions do not prompt change but are a response to change.
Cultural Conservatism
With industrialization and overseas trade Britain was transformed as a new "working class" appeared in the cities. Within decades the working class had created a culture and identity and demanded Parliamentary representation. Social theories explaining this movement came together in the socialist movement so that by 1900
it was no longer against liberalism that conservatism was defining itself, but against socialism, and in particular against the socialist conception of the state.
And British conservative writers began to focus on culture, and the place of Christianity in civil society, while the left was inspired to propose far-reaching programs for human government. In France, Fourier and Saint-Simon proposed a "society reorganized from top to bottom on socialist principles" Comte invented a secular religion, Positivism, to practice these ideas. In Britain, Bentham and the utilitarians with Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) inspired James Mill and John Stuart Mill in a politics promoting general happiness.
Opposed to morality and law as "mathematical puzzles, to be solved by calculation" were a whole movement of cultural conservatives: Britons from Coleridge to Ruskin to Matthew Arnold to T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis and the Southern Agrarians" in the US.
Coleridge felt that "enlightened rationalism... ignored the instinctive relations between people that form the true bond of society". It was important for a learned class to mediate this division. John Ruskin was a "high priest of the aesthetic way of life" and helped found the National Trust.
If Ruskin was a cultural mourner, Matthew Arnold proposed that people should "find from their own resources... the way to maintain the inner order" needed for life. Culture provides "the social knowledge that we need" with or without religious faith. And culture was "essential for the right direction of political power". For Arnold education was about character, "introducing the student to 'the best that has been thought and said'".
The man that got the working class the vote, Disraeli, in Sybil, of the Two Nations (1945) of the need to unite the classes into "one nation,"
But should conservatism focus on politics or on preservation of the past through cultural production? T.S. Eliot promoted that idea in his poetry created a cultural context to revalue "high culture as [a] spiritual resource" as in "Bach, Michelangelo, Tolstoy and Shakespeare", proposing that "in every sphere tradition is a process of continuous adaptation of the old to the new and the new to the old." Socialist George Bernard Shaw thought the cultural conservatives to be "nostalgic cranks" but Eliot and Chesterton and C.S. Lewis remain.
In Germany Johann Gottfried von Herder is the most notable cultural conservative. He was not persuaded by his teacher, Kant, that "guided by the light of reason" we moderns will adopt a "universal moral law". Herder proposed a division between Civilization and its rational calculation and Culture that unites humans in "mutual attachment... language, custom, folk tales, and folk religion." Thus the Brother Grimm and their folk tales (1812). Herder led in 1848 to German nationalism as a shared identity in a single nation state.
In the US cultural conservatism was divided between northern writers like Thoreau who idealized the wilderness in Walden (1854) and the Southern Agrarians led by John Crowe Ransom who advocated "the culture of the soil" and its vocation. Although anathematized as "futile nostalgia" South Agrarianism produced Allen Tate, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Robert Penn Warren, and latterly with Wendell Berry and Allan C. Carlson.
Leo Strauss, a refugee from Nazism, brought an academic conservatism to America, was opposed to "historicism", proposing instead a "trans-historical perspective" judging ideas by their validity. "Straussian" has come to mean "conservative, constitutionalist, and rooted in deep readings of the classics." Straussians obtained influential positions in the the administration of George W. Bush.
Although cultural conservatism attempts to lift conservatism from politics into literature it still has to deal with the political cultural world view of the left, especially when politics dominates everything, including the classrooom.
The Impact of Socialism
After World War I, the cultural conservatism of the organic society was dead. In Austria they mourned, with Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities. Where was the meaning in the inner life when only the "I" remains?
But apart from the mourning, conservatism became no longer a brake to classical liberalism, but a response to the welfare state and its "gargantuan schemes for a 'just' society" based on a "managerial state", the "true defender of liberty" against systems ranging from bureaucracy to murderous tyranny. In this transformation, "the word 'liberal'" changed from classical liberalism of limited government to left-liberalism helping the underprivileged, minorities, and socially excluded groups.
Friedrich von Hayek in his Road to Serfdom (1944) set out the divide between conservatism and the welfare state and, although insisting he was not a conservative, became a hero to conservatives. He went on to write a clarion call against the left in A Constitution of Liberty (1961).
The center of Hayek's thought is the idea of a spontaneous order, guided by the price system and the common law that both respond to changes rather than planning and statute law that attempt to anticipate and control.
[T]he socialist plan [on the other hand] conscripts every institution and even language to its purpose.
In Rationalism and Politics (1962) Michael Oakeshott points to
the damage done when politics is directed from above towards a goal... The result is inevitably the destruction of compromise and free association[.]
Oakeshott also argued against "ideology" that justifies "the believer in taking charge of the future." E.g., Marxist revolution, the fascist corporate state, and the Nazi philosophy of race. It reduces politics to war: "you are either with us or against us". In On Human Conduct (1975) he argued a theory of 'civil association', against socialist and left-liberal theories that "saw civil society as subservient to... the state." Thus he was opposed to the state managing everything from the economy to poverty, land use, labor law.
As a professor at the London School of Economics Oakeshott built up "a network of sympathetic students and colleagues" that withered away later.
In the United States resistance to the managerial state -- as in New Deal -- is represented by James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers.
Originally a leftist, Burnham ended the 1930s defending capitalism against "New Dealism." In The Managerial Revolution (1941) he "accused socialism of the faults that the Marxists had attributed to capitalism." It created a "managerial elite." In The Struggle for the World (1947) he outlined a strategy for the Cold War, and in Suicide of the West (1964) "he provided conservatives with the language and vision to confront... communism". And he ridiculed the liberal culture of "moral equivalence".
Whittaker Chambers was a Soviet spy before and during World War II that eventually turned in his fellow spies. In Witness (1952) he wrote about it, and how it infects the soul as a disease.
In France the poet Charles Péguy led a Catholic revival against the defeat of the Franco-Prussian war and decades of secularism. It was Péguy that led to the canonization of Joan of Arc in 1920.
After World War I French intellectual life was polarized between the Catholic revival and Marxism. The conservative side was represented by Jean Giono, Gustave Thibon, and Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa. Thus Poulenc's opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957). In The Need for Roots (1949) Simone Weil argued for cultural conservatism as a state of mind. Starting out as a secular and Marxist Jew she became a mystical Christian.
Like Simone Weil, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset "addressed the spiritual condition of our civilization, and sought the inner remedy to its decadence." This he achieved in popular books like Invertebrate Spain (1921), The Dehumanization of Art (1925), and The Revolt of the Masses (1930). In Revolt Ortega "expresses a certain disdain for the destructive activities of people no longer obedient to traditional moral and social order".
But all was swept away:
Not much remains of the society whose virtues Ortega lamented, just as not much remains of the Anglican peace evoked by Eliot, or the enracinement defended by Thibon and Weil. Nevertheless, cultural conservatism remains a significant intellectual movement.
Conservatism Now
Scruton rehearses the phases of modern conservatism.
[It] began as a defence of tradition against the calls for popular sovereignty; it became an appeal on behalf of religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress[.]
[Then it] has become the champion of Western civilization against its enemies... political correctness... and [Islamic] religious extremism[.]
After World War II everyone in intellectual life knew that conservatism was finished. So when Eric Blair wrote his satire of communism, Nineteen Eight-four (1949), he described himself as a socialist that disapproved of the "smelly little orthodoxies" on the left. He added "certain words to political language that have proved irreplaceable" including "Newspeak... thoughtcrime... doublethink". In Animal Farm (1945) he introduced the memorable phrase:
[A]ll animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
In essence, Orwell prophesied "the political correctness that has since invaded intellectual life in both Britain and America." Conservatives that draw attention to this -- Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (1987) are demonized with the pejorative du jour: "racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc." The question of how to push back against political correctness has become central in conservatism.
Despite the perils, "there was and is a real conservative intellectual class in Britain." It includes Michael Oakeshott at LSE, the Iraqi Jew Elie Kedourie and The Chatham House Version, and Other Middle Eastern Studies (1970). In Nationalism in Asia and Africa (1970) he regarded "ideological nationalism" as "a threat to law and order all across the modern world".
Hungarian-born Peter Bauer in Dissent on Development (1972) made "the conservative case against foreign aid... [for] rewarding governments for the impoverishment of their people".
Kenneth Minogue, from New Zealand, in The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (2010) argued that democratic values "undermine the culture of distinction and emulation on which a lasting civil society depends." His was one of several attacks on the welfare state inspired by Charles Murray and Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (1984).
These immigrants to Britain found it easier than natives to speak of what makes Britain a refuge "in a smouldering world. For natives, such thought courts "ridicule and ostracism from the left establishment."
Nevertheless, native dissidents existed, including Maurice Cowling of Peterhouse College, Cambridge. He was a champion of Anglican Christianity and regarded conservatism and other beliefs as "self-serving expedients". His magnum opus was Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (vol.3: 2001) and spoke "of the fragility and uniqueness of England" as the "chill winds of secularism swept across it".
Then there was T.E. Utley of the Telegraph, "journalists Colin Welch and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, the novelist Kinsley Amis and historian Paul Johnson". Johnson inaugurated a "class of freelance historians. It includes "Andrew Roberts, Nialll Ferguson and Jane Ridley.
Many of these were inspired by F.W. Maitland and his Constitutional History of England (1908) that began "a century-long attempt to reclaim English history for the conservative cause" arguing that
it is not the Enlightenment that had made individual liberty into the foundation of our political order, but the common law and parliamentary representation.
Maitland argued that limited government was implied in the common law and that "political conciliation" had been going on since medieval times. It was not the "response to economic forces" of Marxists theory.
America had an advantage over Britain in being "a place where you can confess to being a conservative without being socially ostracized." This is because of the federal constitution so that many things are left up to state legislatures, and there is a tradition of recapturing "powers from the federal constitution". Also, many "institutions and culture... are the product of civil association" as noticed and praised by Tocqueville in Democracy in America.
One effect of civil association is the liberal arts college. So, despite "the most vigorous fumigation from the left" something is always "taking root again in some dank and life-infested corner." Two personalities are outstanding: William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk.
Buckley was, for his generation, "the pre-eminent voice of American conservatism", synthesizing "cultural conservatism, economic liberalism, and anti-communism", beginning with an attack on the atheist university in God and Man at Yale (1951).
In 1955 he established National Review, which became and remains the most convinced and convincing of the many conservative journals that have arisen in America since the war.
Through the magazine and the TV show Firing Line Buckley sought to define a political movement based on ideas and providing a voice for the religious and social heritage of America.
Buckley may be contrasted with Russian-born Ayn Rand, influenced by Nietzsche and Darwin. She was anti-Marxist and anti-religion. In The Virtue of Selfishness (1864) she argued for the most useful people exercising their skills and talents.
But we all depend on the success of these people, who created and material and moral space in which lesser beings can find their niche[.]
Rand's novels celebrate the Nietzschean Übermensch.
Conservatives went all-in for Barry Goldwater in the presidential election of 1964, and his defeat forced American conservatism into "rear-guard actions ever since." Buckley, in particular, has fought to oppose the Supreme Court's habit of "discovering" rights in the US Constitution such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
In this fight Robert Bork argued in The Tempting of America (1990) that
the duty of the judge is to construe the original intention of the Founders strictly, and not import interpretations that reflect the judge's own desires and prejudices[.]
Bork was a notable "critic of the decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), legalizing abortion" as a federal right.
Assisting Buckley in the founding of National Review was Russell Kirk. He attempted in The Conservative Mind (1953) "to define the conservative position as a comprehensive intellectual posture." According to Gerald Russello, Kirk's philosophy is founded upon:
- A belief in a transcendent order...
- An affection for the 'variety and mystery'of human existence;
- A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize 'natural' distinctions;
- A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
- A faith in custom... [and that] innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, [and] respect for... prudence.
That conservative thought has had an impact is evident in the need for John Rawls and
A Theory of Justice (1970) which justifies "soft socialism" based on "game theory, moral philosophy, and analytical metaphysics." It was libertarians like Robert Nozick that framed the response. In
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) he states that Rawls, defining justice in terms of distribution, "will always infringe on freedom... and 'justice preserving transfers'" of ordinary life.
In the 1970s the conservative and libertarian standpoints merged into a "New Right," partly as a response to the "New Left" of the 1960s. It was associated with the Reagan-Thatcher politics, a reaction against Soviet aggression, and Marxist attempts to take over the academy, and also a reaction to decades of soft socialist politics. It grew out of Chicago school economics, with Milton Friedman and his Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and James M. Buchanan at the University of Virginia and The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (1962) explaining the workings of democracy in economy terms, and describing the power-based "rent-seeking" behavior of bureaucracies to debunk the idea that the welfare state delivers "social justice".
But neo-liberalism is now associated with globalism that has caused alarm both on the left and on the right. Thus thinkers like Scruton developed a movement
to protect what matters, both from subversion by the socialist cult of equality and from dissolution under the impact of global forces, market forces included.
The movement was centered in the Salisbury Review under Roger Scruton's editorship. Defending national identity and tradition against "multiculturalism" it also linked in the 1980s with dissident movements in Eastern Europe. It defended British culture against mass migration, and specifically the growth of Islam that rejects "crucial aspects of the nation state", trying to educate children "into a secular order that their parents denounce as blasphemous."
[This] defined a new agenda for conservatism, and one that the Salisbury Review adopted as its own in the 1980s, with adverse affects on the careers of its writers and its editor.
The new movement "is no longer about market economics and free trade, but about the wider global agenda." Samual Huntingdon in The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (1996) predicted that the post cold war era would experience pushback from the Islamic world dealing with Western attitudes, technology, and secularization. But first the West has to regain confidence it itself and its spiritual inheritance. In other words, "cultural conservatism."
Similar points were made by Pierre Manent in La Situation de la France (2015) in response to Islamic terrorism and the murder of the staff of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. We have to find a place for Muslims in western society in the shared loyalty to the nation state. This goes against globalization and the European project to which the French elite is committed and has led to the invention of pejoratives like Islamophobia. There is a conflict between Sunni Islam, "that recognizes neither national boundaries or the rights of his opponents" and the western political community with its legal opposition man-made law, secular government, freedom of opinion, and representative institutions."
This national loyalty and attachment to the land we share is threatened by Islamist intransigence and by the Left for which the defense of our inheritance is racist or xenophobic.
Scruton concludes by saying that
My own view is that conservatism will be a necessary ingredient in any solution to the emerging problem of today, and that the tradition of thinking that I have outlined in this book should therefore be part of the education of all politicians everywhere.
