[This is Chapter One of Murphey’s book Modern Social and Political Philosophies: Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism.]
Chapter 1
MEANINGS OF “CONSERVATIVE”
The type of conservatism that dominated Western civilization for over two thousand years – a conservatism of aristocracy, hierarchy and the organic state and church, all buttressed by authority and tradition – has only recently lost its hold. It is significant that such classical liberals as John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden saw it as the principal enemy until as late as the middle of the nineteenth century.
The roots of this conservatism go so deeply into the Middle Ages and even into Roman history that it is a mistake to take any labeling seriously that ascribes to it the name of just one man. In common with many others, I will be calling it “Burkean Conservatism,” naming it after the British statesman Edmund Burke who articulated its principles so forcefully in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. But this labeling is only a convenience to help differentiate this conservatism from some other. As a philosophy and a way of life, it held sway for thousands of years before Burke.
Before I begin my discussion of this major form of conservatism, it will be helpful to clarify some of the differing uses of the word “conservative.” What are its diverse meanings? And what, if anything, do they have in common?
The classical liberal as a “conservative.” The thread that runs through all of the meanings of the word “conservative” is that in one way or another the person seeks either to defend an existing state of things or to return to one that he perceives as having existed earlier. This means that the applications of “conservative” are as varied as the situations in which there is something to defend. The result is that widely divergent views are often labeled “conservative.”
One of the ironies of history is that classical liberalism, which over a couple of centuries was the main enemy of hierarchical society, is now counted among the types of conservatism. For the most part, classical liberalism remains at odds with almost every aspect of a hierarchical, organic view of society. They are political allies today by virtue of their common opposition to the egalitarian Left. Frank Meyer favored a "fusionist" position that would build on the common ground between classical liberalism and Burkean conservatism, but there would have to be substantial accommodation on the part of each philosophy to make that possible.
Just the same, the alignments of the past century have caused the common thread of meaning in the word "conservative” to apply to classical liberalism. The proponent of bourgeois society, limited government, the Rule of Law and the free market was a radical in the age of aristocracy, but even without any change of position on his part he necessarily became a defender of an existing order after many of his principles were accepted by society and came under attack from the newly burgeoning Left.
This is readily apparent when we look back on Russian history. The classical liberal was the reformer in the eighteenth century; and it was a classical liberal tutor who influenced the young Tsar Alexander I in favor of a reformist worldview. The Decembrist uprising in 1825 was classical liberal in inspiration. But after the rise of the socialist revolutionary intelligentsia a few years later, the classical liberal seemed mild by comparison. He supported the Tsar Alexander II in that Tsar's epoch of "Great Reforms" and supported the eventual establishment of constitutional monarchy following the Revolution of 1905. He stood far back from the onrushing totalitarian Left. The result was that he took on the hue of moderation and conservatism.
Much the same can be said about
classical liberals within the French Revolution. That upheaval was not nearly so radical at the beginning as it ultimately became. The
initial revolution was moderate, bourgeois and classical liberal, as witness
the first constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It was radical
only in relation to the precepts of the Age of Kings and to the many
carry-overs from feudalism. It was neither blood-thirsty nor given to leveling
or nihilism. (It is significant that it
was precisely this moderate revolution that Burke denounced in his Reflections
on the Revolution in France. He would have had much more to be inflamed
about if he had waited four years.) The first elections under the new
constitution shifted the Revolution into less moderate hands. Things became
more extreme thereafter, culminating in the Terror of 1793. Such a classical
liberal as Thomas Paine, over from
On the continent of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, classical liberals had substantially less faith in the newly emerging common man than did, for example, John Bright in England or Andrew Jackson in the United States. They often championed "enlightened despotism," a benevolent, liberalized monarchy. Needless to say, such thinkers would look conservative in the face of socialism.
In England, classical.liberalism appeared innovative and constructive during the period up to 1850 during which, according to Herbert Spencer, society felt it a positive value to take off encumbrances to trade and individual freedom.2 But it began to look conservative when the prevailing outlook changed and classical liberalism had to oppose an unending string of measures designed "for the public good." What to one generation seemed radical seemed conservative to the next. The difference lay in having aristocracy as its primary antagonist until about 1850, and thereafter Fabian socialism.
At the present time, we think of classical liberalism in the Unted States as a leading form of "conservatism." But this isn't what it was looked upon up to the time of the Democratic Party's loss to the new Republican Party in 1860. Paine and Madison and Jefferson and Jackson had been "liberals," one of the main reform elements in the society. The unfortunate struggle over slavery and union spelled the end of principled classical liberalism as a major force in the political life of the country. It sank the Democratic Party, in effect, for many years - and when that party emerged under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt many years later it was hardly recognizable. The classical liberalism that has existed since 1860 has been a philosophy of opposition to the Welfare State. In this period of over a century it has had to merge politically with other forms of conservatism and with the great non-philosophical middle class (whose values reflect it, but in other ways are not an altogether desirable vehicle for it). As modified, it has taken its place as the standard-bearer against the New Deal and its successors. Consequently, it is called "conservative." Even without modification or adaptation, this label would fit it, since classical liberalism in any form will defend its values against the modern Left.
None of this means, though, that classical liberalism has anything more in common with the other forms of "conservatism" than it would have if it did not share that label with them. It is not conservative by temperament, although individual classical liberals can be; it was not a defender of monarchy; and it found the medieval worldview abhorrent.
Conservatism as a matter of temperament. We often hear it repeated that "a man should be a radical when he is twenty, a conservative when he is forty." This is a popularized summary of Emerson's famous discussion of the temperamental basis for conservatism in his lecture "The Conservative" in 1841. Emerson said:
There is always a certain meanness in the argument of Conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see a better fact. The castle which Conservatism is set to defend is the actual state of things, good and bad. The project of Innovation is the best possible state of things. Of course conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate: it must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet: whilst Innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations, Reform on his indisputable infinitude; Conservatism on circumstance, Liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame, the other to postpone all things to the man himself; Conservatism is debonair and social, Reform is individual and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer, in autumn and winter we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night. Reform is affirmative, Conservatism negative; Conservatism goes for comfort, Reform for truth.
The passage continues along the
same lines, concluding with Emerson's observation that "of these two
metaphysical antagonists . . . each is a
good half, but an impossible whole.”3
It is not surprising that it is most often this meaning of the word “conservative” that is meant in common usage (although usually the speaker is not able to separate it from the other, dissimilar types of conservatism that meld together in his mind). Friedrich Hayek used this meaning in The Constitution of Liberty when he included his chapter on “Why I am not a Conservative." As a classical liberal, he could not support simply a principle of resistance: "The decisive objection to any conservatism . . . is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance." Later he expressed the concern that "the common resistance to the collectivist tide should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the belief in integral freedom is based on an essentially forward-looking attitude and not on any nostalgic longing for the past or a romantic admiration for what has been."
In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand has a chapter entitle “Conservatism: An Obituary.” Her opposition to it there is not so much because it is just a temperamental conservatism as because American conservatism has not stood clearly in opposition to altruism and in favor of capitalism. She also attacks its premises when it speaks (as Burkean conservatism does) of religion, tradition and a belief in man's depravity.
I don't count myself as a temperamental conservative (nor as a Burkean). But before we leave this type, we should develop some empathy for why the human heart will often have a tendency toward memory, stability, the old ways. In the absence of such empathy we will have missed the important partial truths, at least, championed by temperamental conservatism.
When I was a young boy, I spent the summers with my parents and brother in a cabin at Palmer Lake, Colorado, a few miles north of Colorado Springs on the front range of the Rocky Mountains. There was an aspen grove about a half-mile from the cabin that contained, deep within the forest, a spring of clear mountain water. It was a special treat for us to pack some peanut-butter-and-chokecherry-jelly sandwiches and go down the path to the spring. The picnics there long ago have a special place in my memory .
Many years later a bulldozer swept all of that away. In the place of the aspen and the spring, five or six cheap frame houses were built. The ground is now often littered with trash and old tires. This greets the fisherman as he makes his way up the road toward the south canyon.
I wouldn't deny the legitimacy of the human emotion that regrets this change. And the feeling is not limited to matters that are so simple. People may in the same way regret a general social change from one way of life to another or from one set of institutions to another. The "temperamentally conservative" impulse certainly has its place in the human heart.
But I agree with Emerson that this
sentiment can only express half the truth. At least that is the case in a
progressing civilization. If a change of circumstances or institutions were
recognized by us to be an overall deterioration, of course, we would have to
give the sentiment even more weight.
Conservatism as the defense of monarchy. Monarchy and aristocracy were under attack in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The victory of the monarchies in the Napoleonic wars resulted in the temporary hegemony of monarchy under the Holy Alliance from Waterloo until 1848. It is natural in this context that the defenders of monarchy such as Metternich would be thought of as “conservatives." They were defending a pre-existing order.
It should be obvious how much this differs from either classical liberalism or temperamental conservatism, even though the reason a given individual defended monarchy might have been rooted in temperament. It is not even quite equivalent to "Burkean conservatism," since that conservatism is far more a philosophy, a set of values, than an attachment to a specific set of institutions, especially on the continent. I will be classifying Thomas Carlyle, for example, as a "Burkean conservative," but he was by no means happy with the aristocracy of his day.
Miscellaneous meanings. In.the press, the the words “conservative” or “right wing” are used in widely varied contexts. In 1968 the Soviet Union sent tanks into Prague to crush the Dubcek government, which had been liberalizing Czechoslovakia. The press often referred to the Soviet Union and its Czechoslovakian supporters as "conservative Communists." This was conservatism only in the sense that it desired to maintain a status quo--in this case, the Soviet control over Czechoslovakia. The common thread of meaning was there to justify the label, but again we see how far the actual subject of it was removed from other people who in other contexts are also called "conservative.
The same is true when the press refers to “right wing forces in Saudi Arabia” or to “the conservative faction in Chile.” The actual content of the position isn't apparent to the reader unless he knows a lot more about the politics of the actual country involved. The "right wing forces" may prove to be some resurgent monarchists, or a clique of army colonels, or religious traditionalists, or (less probably in today's context) some classical liberals. About the only thing we know from the label is that they are not “left wing.” As we will see, “Left” has a more identifiable content in modern thought, notwithstanding the broad range of opinion housed even within it.
Burkean conservatism. :In my chapter on the Romans in Understanding the Modern Predicament I described the mos maiorum that existed during the Punic Wars and that almost all later Romans looked upon as ideal. This was a tightly knit society, organic, hierarchical, welded together by a powerful consensus. It was authoritarian and insulated - and bound because of the very importance of its insulation to shatter whenever it was subjected to outside ideas and to economic transition. It had a landed, not a commercial, economic base; and its social and political structure was aristocratic.
To the extent the Romans developed a political philosophy, the mos maiorum supplied it. It served at least as a standard by which to measure their later condition. The mos maiorum took on the quality of a worldview, a set of values.
Even though they were not identical, the values that were preferred by many Greek intellectuals were similar. I noted in my chapter on the Greeks that Plato, Xenophon, Tyrtaeus and later Plutarch preferred the militarily disciplined, organic Spartan system to the open society of Athens. Their preference is pertinent to the West's later intellectual history, since classical studies were central to the education of thinkers from the beginning of the Renaissance until the nineteenth century.
All of the outer forms of society changed as the West entered the Middle Ages. The life was different; the religion, polities and institutions were different. But the underlying principles bore a striking resemblance to those of the mos maiorum. They especially seem to as we look back to discover the sources for the social position that was articulated so well by Burkean conservative thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Middle Ages adopted the element of social hierarchy. The feudal structure and aristocracy are among the first characteristics to come to our minds about it. The specific structure looked very different from the Romans', but 'the principle was the same. In religion, the Roman Catholic Church towered over the Middle Ages. This was not identical to the old Roman "fear of the gods," but it was a similar sort of absorbing religious hegemony. The insularity of the Romans was replaced by the even greater mental authoritarianism of the Middle Ages. We recall how Galen's anatomy was revered as the final authority on anatomy for fourteen centuries even though, as it turned out, it was based on monkeys rather than people. The Roman virtues of gravitas, pietas and disciplina were replaced by Christian piety and the honor-oriented values of chivalry. The economic foundation of the small family farm in republican Rome gave way to the landed economic base of the manorial system; and neither the Roman nor the medieval economies were more than slightly commercial. Both social systems were tradition-bound. They revered the past and did not look forward eagerly to the progress and change of the future. Each impressed a strong control onto human will and appetite. And each adopted in its own way the strong state. Neither valued "individualism" for its own sake. The social systems were non-bourgeois, their thought anti-bourgeois.
With some exceptions, these values dominated Western civilization for over two thousand years. We tend to lose sight of that fact in the twentieth century, because after just a century we seem far removed from such values. But we should notice how profoundly they influenced later thinkers, who championed them against the on-rushing rationalism of classical liberalism and later of socialism.
I have said that the immensity of these influences make it misleading to give a philosophical expression of them such a name as "Burkean conservatism." It has been the value-system of many men, not just of Edmund Burke. Nor was the mild, balanced formulation given to it by such English thinkers as Burke, Johnson, Carlyle, Coleridge, Ruskin and Arnold the only direction this worldview took. It appears in another form in the far-flung mysticism and monarchism of the Romantic movement on the continent in the early nineteenth century - and in many of the blood-and-thunder anti-bourgeois expressions later. In this form, it has been one of the inputs into modern totalitarian ideology.
The anti-rationalist views that were expressed on the continent in the nineteenth century that I reviewed in my chapter on alienation in Understanding the Modern Predicament should be recalled to mind here as part of this discussion.
In Chapters 4 and 5 of the present book I will review the specific points that have been made by Burkean conservatism in its English and twentieth century American expressions. I hope that Chapters 2 and 3 will give the reader a strong feel for the individual authors. As is the case with all generic philosophies, the individual authors are not merely carbon copies of each other. The authors I have mentioned - Burke, Johnson, Carlyle, Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold - had their own personalities and approaches.
NOTES
1. Frederic Bastiat, The Law (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1964), pp. 52-53
2. Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State (Balt imore: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 70.
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson (Viking Press, 1946), pp. 91-92.
4. F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 398, 410.