[This is the Epilogue to Murphey’s book Modern Social and Political Philosophies: Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism.]
I am now perhaps somewhat more than half way through the intellectual journey I set out upon at the beginning of my book Understanding the Modern Predicament. The hoped-for destination is an interpretive understanding of the “modern predicament” in which Western civilization (and through it, all of civilization) finds itself.
In Understand the Modern Predicament, I talked about the predicament directly, placing it in the broadest possible setting. The description of this setting took into account the fact that man is still very immature, cosmically speaking, and also that modern civilization has from its inception been existentially unsettled. With those factors as a backdrop, I went into considerable detail about one of the most important dynamic aspects of the modern age: the division that has existed without our culture between the “alienated intellectual” and the “bourgeois middle class.” It was both to illustrate this alienation and to talk about some of the main events for their own sakes that I then devoted the concluding chapters to tracing the effects of the alienation in a series of historic episodes, such as in nineteenth century Russia and in the rise of Nazism.
Unless that book were to become quite long, I had to defer my discussion of some of the main consequences of that division. One of the most important consequences has consisted of a complex existential fact of monumental proportions: that several competing ideologies – which I like to think of as “systems of interpretation” or as “systems for mediating social reality” – have come into being as systematic, massively integrated ways by which people understand themselves and society. These ideologies have to be considered on their merits; but they also need to be understood as major causal agents in their own right. They carry men and events very powerfully in their grip. In my opinion, we cannot understand the modern age without comprehending both what these ideologies perceive and why they perceive society as they do.
One of the ideologies I have discussed in the present book has been “Burkean conservatism.” This was the system of interpretation that in the main prevailed for well over two thousand years. It saw great value in a tightly-knit, organic society that had a strong focus on religion and was structured by a hierarchy of social classes. At the end of the Middle Ages, this was challenged by classical liberalism, which expressed a philosophy of individual liberty. I have analyzed both of these ideologies in the present book with the dual objectives of understanding them as gigantic mental constructs and of evaluating them on their merits. During that process, it has been no secret, of course, that my own preferences are strongly classical liberal.
It is worth noting the sort of classical liberalism I envision. It does not see individual liberty as occurring in a vacuum. I embrace many aspects of what could be seen as an “organic society” as part of the institutional, cultural, moral, intellectual prerequisites for a free society. Much “libertarianism,” as it has been formulated during the past half-century, has favored a radical individualism that fails, for the most part, to take those prerequisites into account. I am not a part of that school.
In my next two books, I will want to complete my review of the remaining major systems: the Left, modern liberalism (an American adaptation of the Left), and the New Left. The worldviews they express are vitally influential in the world today. The very fact of their presence is a major existential fact about modern civilization. And yet they are dynamic and tenuous, each reflecting or reacting to a coalition of interests that has dominated an age, but that may or may not hold together in the future.
Alexander
Pope wrote that “the proper study of Mankind is