- 1 David Marquand, The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe (Princeton, Princeton University Pr (...)
- 2 E. H. H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001).
1As post-Cold War jubilation subsided, a melancholy feature of western culture during the first two decades of the twenty first century was a spate of “End Times” literature illustrated by, for example, David Marquand’s The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe (2011), Slavoj Zizek’s Living in the End Times (2011), and Stephen Hopgood’s The End Times of Human Rights (2013).1 In the case of conservatism, this gloomy literature had in fact been anticipated over two decades earlier by John Gray and David Willetts in a volume entitled Is Conservatism Dead? (1997) Five years later E. H. H. Green had voiced similar misgivings, observing that ‘As the Conservative Century came to an end, it seemed that even if the Conservative party had survived, Conservatism had not’.2 Since then, conservative gloom has deepened still further. The main reasons may be found in a recent body of political journalism and academic literature analyzing the current state of conservatism in the UK, the unifying theme of which is the loss of any distinctively conservative identity due to the final destruction of traditional conservative values. This destruction has been attributed to various developments.
- 3 Sunday Telegraph, 16 January 2022.
- 4 Daily Telegraph, 4 April 2022.
2For Janet Daly, the destruction is due above all to the promotion by the British government of a culture of fear intended to justify inhumane Covid-19 lockdown measures which amounted to nothing less than “the mass house arrest of the population”. These measures, which ignored scientific advice that most people who contracted Covid-19 would not become seriously ill, transformed the virus into a national emergency by “constantly escalating terror”, with the result that the traditional conservative emphasis on individual responsibility was sacrificed to a sense of communal identity necessary, the government maintained, in order to preserve the National Health Service. Between them, the “promulgation of fear and the [call for] the creation of a new [self-sacrificial] moral order [to support the NHS]” created a spiritually enfeebled population vulnerable to endless political manipulation by executive powers not subject to parliamentary approval. The fact that government concerns were genuine, Daly concluded, should not obscure the extraordinary change in the national political culture wrought by the Conservative government’s lockdown policies.3 The precise nature of the impact of those policies was sardonically summarized a few months later by another disillusioned conservative correspondent who remarked that “After 12 years in office, the Tories have gone from trying to fix the state to trying to fix us, so we’ll be less of a shivery, fat burden on the bureaucrats”. The policy of the conservative government, Tim Stanley continued, amounts to suggesting that “it would be helpful if we could stop existing at all. The NHS would look good on paper if no one used it, and we’d have a zero percent failure rate in schools if no one ever sat an exam”.4
- 5 Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2022
- 6 Ibid.
3In perhaps the most disillusioned terms of all, yet another conservative commentator attributed the end times of conservatism to the disastrous adoption of “three despicable myths” which doom Britain to “eternal mediocrity”. Surrender to this mediocrity is evident, Sherelle Jacobs maintains, in the apparent resignation of the British to “enduring the highest tax burden for decades, and meekly accepting a state that only ever becomes larger and more intrusive”.5 The first myth that has reduced conservatism to this wretched condition, Jacobs holds, is the fatalistic view that “an ageing population inevitably heralds an ever-growing welfare state”. This myth not only ignores the fact that many older people are quite capable of continuing working and remaining independent but also contributes to discouraging politicians from suggesting a restructuring of the NHS on a contributory financial basis. The second myth is that the ever-growing state can be funded solely by adopting the strategy of taxing the rich, regardless of the adverse impact on investment of measures such as the windfall tax on oil and gas firms imposed in May 2022 – a measure, Jacobs observes, which marked the adoption of the second myth by a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer. The final myth, which is “potentially the most dangerous”, is the assumption that the challenges facing Western societies “are so huge and complex that they can only be addressed through a combination of collective sacrifice and state intervention’ which requires that ‘the selfish interests of the individual must be [constantly] overridden…”.6
- 7 Catherine Marshall, Political Deference in a Democratic Age: British Politics and the Constitution (...)
4Amongst academic authors, an echo of end times pessimism about the future of contemporary conservatism in the UK in particular can be heard in, for example. Catherine Marshall’s scholarly account of the gradual undermining of one of the most fundamental assumptions upon which conservative thinkers were formerly able to rely in constructing a viable identity.7 Marshall focuses on what is in effect the “end time” of the tradition of deference which she makes a persuasive case for having played a central role in Whig and Conservative constitutional history since the eighteenth century.
- 8 Ibid, p. 290. Original italics.
5Central to Marshall’s argument is the claim that a specifically English kind of deference gradually evolved from tradition-based voluntary deference under the Whig constitution, to the rational deference of the nineteenth century middle class, and thereafter to the continuing rational deference of the democratic age. In a narrative covering twentieth century British conservatism, Marshall concludes that the attempt of Mrs. Thatcher and conservative traditionalists like Roger Scruton, Maurice Cowling and John Casey to reconnect conservatism to deferential Victorian values was a failure, with the result that the challenge now confronting conservatives committed to constitutionalism in Britain “is to artificially recreate English rational deference to the new [post Bagehot] constitution….”.8 Professor Marshall acknowledged that this challenge will undoubtedly be “trying”, but (rather optimistically) hoped that that some of the younger members of the royal family might contintue to enjoy a limited degree of ‘rational deference’ amid the broader tendency to reduce them to objects of a celebrity cult.
6Even if rational deference survives, the nature of the conservatism it permits – beyond the survival of the British monarchy – is not clear. Two recent works which shed light on this question are to be welcomed.
- 9 Edmund Neill, Conservatism (London, Polity, 2021).
- 10 Ibid., p. 4.
- 11 Ibid.
7The first is a remarkable feat of compressed scholarship by Edmund Neill in Conservatism, in which he has provided a lucid introduction to the principal varieties of conservative thought since the French revolution. 9The analytical skill with which Neill identifies and dissects those varieties, on the one hand, and his sensitivity to their historical context, on the other, has yielded a book that will be found equally illuminating by scholars and laymen. Neill’s main concern is to adopt an inclusive definition of conservatism which avoids “ignoring or excluding types of conservatism (or facets of conservative arguments) that do not fit well with [the exclusionary] approach”.10 An “exclusionary” approach, Neill acknowledges, can be useful if the aim is to produce normative arguments in favour of a certain type of conservatism, but “as a more analytic, descriptive approach, which aims to delineate the richness and complexity of tradition of conservative thought, it leaves much to be desired”.11 Where then is a satisfactory inclusivist characterization of conservatism to be found?
- 12 Samuel Huntington, ‘Conservatism as an Ideology’, American Political Science Review 51:2, (1957), p (...)
- 13 Edmund Neill, Conservatism, p. 5.
8Neill considers three possible historical approaches all of which have the merit of avoiding the temptation to identify conservatism in a static way by defining it in terms of a fixed list of objectives, but nevertheless fail to meet his inclusivist requirement. The first is the approach adopted by Samuel Huntington, who characterizes conservatism simply as a reactive mode of thought which seeks “to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter”.12 In this case, the historical flexibility of Huntington’s ‘dispositional’ definition results in arbitrary inclusions and exclusions. As Neill notes, the definition not only means that totalitarian states such as Soviet Russia are included under the conservative label but also that fairly radical forms of conservatism like the Thatcherite revival are excluded from it. In short, despite Huntington’s “formal admission of the historically variable nature of conservatism, … such [a] definition ultimately remains too formal to do justice to the way in which conservatism substantively develops, historically speaking”.13
- 14 Samuel Huntington, ‘Conservatism as an Ideology’, p. 5. The reference to Oakeshott is to Michael Oa (...)
9A second kind of historical definition is represented by Michael Oakeshott’s characterization of a conservative as one who seeks to “pursue the intimations” immanent in a society’s tradition, rather than to impose independently premeditated rationalist visions upon it. Neill objects once again, however, to the exclusionary nature of this definition in so far as it rests upon a particular conception of evolutionary change biased towards what Oakeshott terms “present laughter to utopian bliss”.14
- 15 Edmund Neill, Conservatism, p. 9. The quotation is from Karl Mannheim Conservatism: A Contribution (...)
- 16 Edmund Neill, Conservatism, p. 10.
10The third method of analysing conservatism historically considered by Neill is that of Karl Mannheim, for whom “conservatism must be regarded as a peculiarly modern response to sociological changes (ultimately initiated by the industrial revolution) which pose a challenge to traditional social structures and modes of political thinking”.15 Although Neill regards Mannheim’s definition of conservatism as a specifically modern phenomenon as more promising than those which seek to identify conservatism with a backward-looking nostalgia or with a single natural, hegemonic tradition’, he criticizes it on the ground that Mannheim’s focus on conservatism’s historical origins means that his approach lacks “a full account of how conservatism develops, and in particular of what provides it with lasting coherence as it has evolved…from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century”.16
- 17 Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1 (...)
- 18 Edmund Neill, Conservatism, p. 11.
11The problem remains, then, of finding a way to combine an analytical and historical approach to conservatism which provides the inclusive definition Neill seeks. For a solution he turns to Michael Freeden’s study of the structure of political ideologies in Freeden’s Ideologies and Political Theory (1996).17 For Freeden, Neill writes, an ideology is “a sophisticated and flexible way of understanding political life, which exhibits not only a certain degree of systematization of ideas, but also an ability to adapt…to changing historical and political circumstances”.18 More generally, ideologies for Freeden
are not crudely organized around one particular concept, but instead, have a conceptually complex internal structure. While they will have some stable “core” concepts, which remain fairly constant, they also have “adjacent” and “peripheral” concepts, whose relationship with each other and with the core changes over time, as their relative importance alters. Indeed, in some cases, even concepts that have previously been at the core of an ideology may cease to be so and become adjacent concepts instead.
12It is with Freeden’s methodology in mind that Neill proceeds to examine conservatism, his point of departure being Freeden’s identification of two core conservative concepts as especially fundamental. The first is a commitment to the cautious management of historical change. This approach is often defended by the claim that only such change is in accordance with tradition, which is in turn often identified as embodying a “natural” or “organic” social order. The second conservative core concept is an emphasis on the extremely limited power of human will to create social and political institutions. Freeden’s typology is further refined by the addition, inter alia, of a group of concepts like freedom and rationality, the meaning of which varies according to the ideological opponent to which conservatism is responding, but which nevertheless enjoy a consistent meaning in conservative thought because they remain “adjacent”, in Freeden’s terminology, to the two main core concepts.
13Neill’s survey of the development of conservatism during the past two centuries in Britain, France, and the United States – the countries with which he is mainly concerned – unites historical scholarship with acute political insights. His successful deployment of this combination is especially evident in perhaps the most illuminating chapter of the book, which is the final one on the changing fortunes of conservatism from the 1960s to the present. The new challenges Neill identifies range from the end of the post-war economic golden age of the 1950s and 1960s in Western Europe and the United States, following the massive increase of oil prices in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Not only did inflation and unemployment rise sharply in most Western economies, but declining economic growth threatened the financial viability of post-war welfare state commitments. Government manipulation of the money supply, it transpired, no longer guaranteed that governments could control inflation and unemployment in every situation, as Keynes had assumed. A still further challenge confronting conservatives was the advent of a younger, relatively prosperous and university educated generation hostile to traditional hierarchies and institutions. Foremost among their progressive values were demands for greater individual freedom, especially in the spheres of gender and sexuality; for greater female equality; for racial equality; and for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
14How then did conservatives respond to the new challenges that arose from the 1960s onwards? Neill identifies five principal responses, dealing deftly with their varying degrees of complexity. The first and most important, Neill observes, was the “New Right” – so important, indeed, that the other four conservative responses he distinguishes can be defined to some extent in terms of their different reactions to New Right conservatism. What complicates matters still further, however, is that, far from being a homogenous body of doctrine, the New Right itself contained disparate and potentially conflicting concerns. At one extreme were wholesale moral and religious attacks on the permissive society of the kind particularly influential in the USA. At the other extreme were demands to liberalize the market and cut back the post-war welfare state, partly on the moral ground that it undermined personal responsibility but also on the economic ground that it had reduced productivity and been accompanied by monetarist policies which fuelled inflation.
- 19 Ibid., p. 119.
- 20 Richard Viguerie The Establishment vs. The People (Chicago, Regnery Gateway, 1983).
15Neill provides admirably incisive portraits of leading representatives of the different strands in New Right thought, including Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, Lord Coleraine, F. A. Hayek and the American evangelist Jerry Falwell. He also identifies significant differences between the New Right in Britain and the United States, where conservative commentators like William F. Buckley made “opposition to communism… an absolute bedrock of New Right conservatism”.19 In addition, opposition to the permissive society was more intense in the USA, as was concern with issues of race. Of especial interest today, however, is Neill’s identification of the greater prominence of populism in the USA New Right during the 1970s and 1980s. It is true, Neill observes, that Margaret Thatcher’s appeal to the lower middle class and unionized working class had a populist dimension in the UK, in so far as Thatcher posed as an “outsider”, but various forms of anti-elitist populism were much more fundamental in the USA. A comprehensive version of US populism, which Neill credits with being the “fully-fledged” statement of the position, was provided by Richard Viguerie in 1983, in The Establishment vs. the People.20 In it, Viguerie
- 21 Edmund Neill, Conservatism, p. 124.
offered a full-scale denunciation of big government, big business, the educational and legal establishments, and traditional media outlets. [He] castigated big business for doing corrupt deals with government to prevent genuine market competition, attacked the National Education Association for failing to respect parents’ desire for the “basics”, and denounced the legal profession for its obscurantism and failure to provide ordinary citizens with genuine justice (among many other charges).21
- 22 Quoted by Edmund Neill, Conservatism, p. 125.
16The second conservative response identified by Neill is “traditionalism”, which was particularly influential in Britain. Leading advocates of traditionalism there were Maurice Cowling, John Casey, Edward Norman, Roger Scruton and Peregrine Worsthorne. For traditionalists, the primary challenge facing conservatism was the decline of traditional moral values brought about by liberalism itself, rather than the promotion of a free market and individualist values. Nevertheless this decline, traditionalists like Peregrine Worsthorne maintained, had been intensified by Thatcherite and Reaganite versions of New Right doctrine. Neill conveys the core of traditionalist concern by an apt quotation from a 1978 article by Worsthorne entitled Too much freedom. In Worsthorne’s words, the real problem haunting most ordinary people in Britain was “neither…a totalitarian state nor… Big Brother, but [the prospect] of ordinary people being allowed to run wild”. What worried ordinary people, in short, was “crime, violence, disorder in schools, promiscuity, idleness, pornography, football hooliganism, vandalism and urban terrorism”.22
17Unfortunately for traditionalists, the kind of organic, cultivated and morally motivated society they dreamed of was exactly the kind of society which did not appeal very much to many ordinary people. This was perhaps even more true of ordinary people in the USA, where Louis Hartz argued in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) that a genuinely conservative American tradition was impossible due to the lack in American history of a feudal aristocracy and a class-conscious working class. The result, Harz maintained, was that the USA could only be a liberal society. Despite Russell Kirk’s counter claim on behalf of an authentic American conservative tradition in The Conservative Mind (1953), Hartz’s sceptical view, as Neill notes, tended to dominate debate in the immediate post-war decades.
18The third response examined is what Neill terms the “Post-New Right” conservatism represented by such advocates as David Willetts, John Gray and Jesse Norman. Their principal concern was that despite New Right opposition to interventionist, centralized government, the later Thatcher governments had actually promoted it. According to Post-New Right critics, Thatcherism’s centralizing tendencies could not be countered without first acknowledging the superficiality of Thatcherite social and economic philosophy itself. Both Gray and Norman agreed, Neill observes, that the superficiality lay in the Thatcherite tendency “to conceptualize human beings as rational, ahistorical, self-interested individuals, intent only on mazimizing their own pleasure, [which] had inevitably led to a neglect of civil society institutions”.23 Whether much could be done to remedy this situation by breaking with what Gray termed ‘free-market fundamentalism’ was naturally a matter for disagreement. During intervening decades the pessimistic view of the future of the intermediate institutions vital to civil society appears to have triumphed.
19The fourth response of conservatives to the challenges of the 1970s and 1980s identified by Neill involves the disparate members of the “neo-conservative” movement that flourished more especially in the United States. Although sympathetic to capitalism, neo-conservatives were conscious of its socially divisive implications and accepted the need for a basic welfare state. Their moral perspective, however, was tolerant, rejecting as it did the “moral majority” tendency to subordinate freedom to religious fervour. Neo-conservatives accordingly tended to favour the separation of church and state. Above all, Neill emphasizes that what characterized neo-conservatism in the USA was the primacy given to Cold War foreign policy issues. Neo-conservatives insisted on the reassertion of the United States as leader of the free world and objected in particular to compromising that leadership by policies such as détente with the Soviet Union. In practice, however, neo-conservatives were willing to support autocracies if democracy was impossible, provided that the autocracies opposed communism.
20The final conservative response examined by Neill is “populist conservatism”, which has become increasingly important in European and American politics in the present century. As Neill remarks, however, not only has populism proved difficult to define but its compatibility with conservatism has also been controversial. He opts for a simple definition of populism as the claim to be vigorously upholding “the interests of ‘ordinary people’ against a corrupt ‘elite” or “establishment”, rightly adding that populism of this kind is not a novel development. In the US, for example, it may be traced back to President Andrew Jackson and, at the turn of the twentieth century, to William Jennings Bryan’s presidential campaign on behalf of farmers against big business corporations. In the present century, however, the need to clarify the precise relationship between populism and conservatism became pressing due to the electoral success of figures “such as Donald Trump in the USA; Victor Orban in Hungary; Nigel Farage’s ‘Brexit’ campaign in Britain, and to some extent Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Beppe Grillo in Italy”.24 The essential difference is that more moderate forms of conservatism have preserved a commitment to constitutionalism and the rule of law, whereas populism favours a “personalist” style of politics in which “the people” is assumed to possess an undifferentiated unity best expressed through the will of a populist leader whose policy proposals override constitutionalism, the rule of law and the institutions of civil association because they are deemed to require no other legitimation beyond the populist’s claim that they are the only true expression of the genuine “will of the people”. As Neill remarks, the populist conception of the unitary people is profoundly hostile to democratic pluralism, resulting as it does in the identification of out groups held to threaten national unity and popular unity.
21Despite the upsurge of populism in recent decades Neill ends his masterly overview of conservatism on an optimistic note. ‘What we can reasonably conclude,’ he writes, “… is that prophecies concerning the demise of conservatism are much more likely to appear in the near future than the event itself… The formula of managing chance cautiously, arguing that human conduct is best understood as part of an “extra-human” order, and providing symbiotic opposites to progressive concepts in order to rebut them, has proved extremely durable. Conservatism, at least for the foreseeable future, is here to stay”.25
22Perhaps Neill’s optimism is justified. His inclusive approach, however, leaves unanswered the question of precisely what kind of conservatism is likely to survive in practice. What kind, in particular, can accommodate the potentially conflicting requirements of constitutional democracy, an elaborate welfare system, a degree of market freedom, cultural pluralism and, not least, leaders who tend to place personal careers and the interest of party before the requirements of the national situation? Can such a conservatism remain in any sense a principled conservatism, concerned for the ideal of civil association and the rule of law, constitutional checks and balances, a division between public and private life which sets limits to state intervention, and a system of education which promotes a sense of community as well as individual self-realization? Or will it be a purely pragmatic conservatism, devoted only to electoral success? If a future conservatism is to avoid the latter fate then it is necessary to know what might properly be expected of it. Fortunately, an impressive theoretical response to this question has recently been provided by Ferenc Horcher in A Political Philosophy of Conservatism: Prudence, Moderation and Tradition.
- 26 Ferenc Horcher, A Political Philosophy of Conservatism: Prudence, Moderation and Tradition (London, (...)
- 27 Ibid., pp. 8-9.
- 28 Ibid., p. 9.
23Far from adopting the inclusive approach to conservatism favoured by Neill, Horcher identifies the core of conservatism with the tradition of thought about practical wisdom inaugurated by Aristotle, who identified practical wisdom with the virtue of phronesis. Subsequently, Cicero identified it with prudentia. Since the virtue of prudence “has not often featured as the main hero of [political] theory”, Horcher observes, the recent “boom in political realism…initiated by [Bernard] Williams and [Raymond] Geuss’ is to be commended for the renewed relevance it has given to the kind of conservatism he defends.26 Only this kind of conservatism, Horcher maintains, can answer the simple question of ‘how to act properly in politics.” It does so by drawing on the Aristotelian-Ciceronian concept of a proper political act, which “is connected to decorum, and through it to the Greek concept of prepon”.27 Horcher illustrates what he believes these concepts mean in practice for the conservative interpretation of appropriate political action by relating them to the tradition of “conservative republicanism” which characterized the early modern history of “the Dutch Republic in its golden age”. This historical treatment of conservatism, Horcher argues, demonstrates that “the proper operation of personal and communal prudence…has both historically well-defined examples and a well-established explanatory mechanism. In other words, to find the proper act in politics is to see and understand past examples, to confront the moment and to have strategy for how to proceed in the future”.28
24Although Horcher makes a persuasive philosophical case for assigning a central position to practical wisdom in conservative philosophy, his attempt to flesh the concept out historically by linking it to the kind of politics practised in the Dutch Republic creates a major difficulty. This is that the relevance of early Dutch Republican history for sound republican practice is more questionable than he allows. Against fellow admirers of the Dutch Republic like Huizinga whom he enlists in his support may be set, for example, the caustic comments of two American Founding Fathers, Hamilton and Jefferson, in The Federalist No. XX. What characterized the actual political practice of the Dutch Republic, they wrote, was “Imbecility in the government; discord among the provinces; foreign influences and indignities; a precarious existence in peace, and peculiar calamities in war”. It had long ago been remarked by Grotius, the Founding Fathers added, “that nothing but the hatred of his countrymen to the house of Austria kept them from being ruined by the vices of their constitution”. The history of the Dutch Republic, then, appears to provide a conservative republican philosophy with, at best, only controversial support.
25If we attempt to build on Horcher’s stimulating portrait of what a realist conservative philosophy involves by detaching it from the history of the Dutch Republic and relocating it instead in the more relevant historical context created by the emergence of modern mass liberal democracies, what is the outcome? It will be suggested that such a philosophy has three main component parts. The first concerns the nature of the political itself. The second concerns the nature of practical wisdom, on which Horcher rightly focuses attention. The third component concerns major challenges which the culture and politics of contemporary mass liberal democracies pose to the core commitment of moderate conservatism to the ideal of constitutional government. It is necessary to say a little about each component in turn.
- 29 The English translation was published by MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., in 1988.
- 30 See for example Bernard Williams, ‘Realism and moralism in political theory’, in In the Beginning w (...)
- 31 Michael Freeden, ‘What Should the ‘Political’ in Political Theory Explore?’, The Journal of Politic (...)
26The first component of a realist conservatism is a rejection of the predominantly moralistic tendency of political theory during the past two centuries and to acknowledge the autonomy of the political without, however, adopting a crude reductionism which equates the political with mere power. Although this task has already been touched on in connection with Horcher’s quest for a conservative political realism, it will be instructive to approach it from the perspective of a thinker whom he chose not to consider. This is Reinhardt Koselleck. In 1959, Koselleck published a book called Critique and Crisis in which he argued that the dominant tendency of political theory since the Enlightenment has been to subsume the political under the moral.29 Since then, other thinkers30 have echoed Koselleck’s contention, and have described recent liberal political theory in particular as a ‘flight from the political’.31 The first challenge confronting contemporary conservative political theory, then, is to end the flight from the political by rescuing the concept of the political. But how is this to be done?
27The initial step is to recognize that in order to incorporate the political into conservatism, it is necessary to acknowledge that the political cannot be theorized without using two very different vocabularies. One is indeed a vocabulary of power, while the second is a vocabulary of authority, law and obligation. The latter, which is fundamental for a constitutional form of conservatism, defines the relationship which constitutes citizens in terms of their mutual subscription to the rule of law. This vocabulary can be described, more generally, as concerned with legitimacy, rather than with the evaluation of policy solely in terms of efficacy or popularity. The distinction between the two kinds of political vocabulary, however, immediately poses the problem of countering the charge that the second kind is really epiphenomenal – dismissing it, that is, as a form of illusion or false consciousness which serves to veil power and domination. Perhaps the best answer to this problem was given by Claude Lefort in the course of his explanation of why radical ideologies like Marxism inevitably tend towards totalitarianism. They do so, Lefort argued, because they fail to understand that acknowledgement of the political requires acceptance of what he terms the “symbolic” nature of political discourse, by which he means the subjective language of self-interpretation fundamental to modern liberal democracies. Such acknowledgement is of course difficult or even impossible for versions of conservatism which claim to speak on behalf of a “natural” or objective order of political reality whose validity is claimed to be wholly independent of the subjective self-interpretation of its members. A relevant form, then, must come to terms with the characteristically liberal demand for the political legitimation of self-interpretation. As was said, however, to acknowledge this is only a first step towards doing justice to the complexity of the concept of the political. For a fuller analysis it is necessary to return to the work of Michael Freeden.
- 32 Ibid., p. 113.
- 33 Ibid., p. 123.
- 34 Ibid., p. 127.
28A complete analysis of the political, Freeden has claimed, would require nothing less than a new discipline he has described as “the political theory of politics”. The aim of this new discipline is to “reconnect political theory to the domain of politics” in order to avoid the widespread “flight from the political” that has characterized established schools of political thought.32 What then does the reconnection of theory to politics involve? It requires, Freeden maintains, incorporating into political theory at least three main features of the political. The first is the fact that the political is, in the light of past and present observation, “the site of durable dissent as a structural inevitability”.33 Liberal normative theorizing, which seeks an ideal rational consensus, is in consequence in danger of underplaying the structural aspect of dissent. This demands, in particular, negotiation between a plurality of decision-making centres outside the state structure. Once the centrality of negotiation to the study of the political is acknowledged, Freeden observes, the “focal area” of the “political theory of politics” is shifted away from the sphere that Rawls called political liberalism to the comprehensive doctrines Rawls banished from politics. In short, “One of the cores of the political - dissent and its attempted regulation through negotiation - is sited in the relationship between these so-called comprehensive doctrines”.34
- 35 Ibid., p. 116.
- 36 Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 1996), p. 2. Italics a (...)
- 37 Ibid., p. 3.
- 38 Margaret Canovan, ‘Crusaders, Sceptics and the nation’, in Journal of Political Ideologies 3 (3) (1 (...)
29The second feature is the ineliminable place of power in the political. Although the political cannot be reduced to power it must, Freeden insists, be acknowledged to be “a normal, indeed pivotal, political phenomenon and . . . a potential resource to be harnessed to the attainment of human and social ends”.35 To this, Margaret Canovan has added that what must not be forgotten, as it is too often forgotten by liberal thinkers, is the part played by power in establishing the existing liberal democracies they themselves seek to defend.36 As matters stand, she remarks, only conservative thinkers have resisted the tendency of liberal theorists to yearn for a politics purged of the unpalatable Machiavellian and Hobbesian side which is part of the historical order they themselves value.37 The result, Canovan writes, is that liberal political idealism “has a hole . . . where a theory of power ought to be”.38 Sound conservative philosophy must avoid creating such a hole. A similar message is found in Stuart Hampshire’s reflections in Innocence and Experience (1989), which he concluded with a qualified defence of Machiavelli.
- 39 Michael Freeden, ‘What Should the ‘Political’ in Political Theory Explore?’, p. 115.
30The third feature of the political emphasized by Freeden is the need to acknowledge the central place of decision-making, since this shapes the nature and limits of political rationality – a rationality, that is, which is not that of detached observers meditating on universally valid rational norms but one which reflects the participatory status of political actors as “decision-makers, option-rankers, dissent and conflict regulators, support mobilizers, and vision-creators”.39 The emphasis on decision-making directs attention in particular to the need to include as well the part played in political utterance by rhetoric, which should not automatically be dismissed as a purely manipulative one since it may also play the positive role of conveying weight to an issue and fostering agreement.
31The starting point for a conservative philosophy that claims to be realist, then, must be the incorporation of a concept of the political which acknowledges its complexities more systematically than has frequently been the case in progressive ideologies. Having made this incorporation, a conservative philosophy can no longer seek a privileged position above the political arena of the kind formerly provided in the Dutch Republic by the existence of an aristocratic hierarchical order. By tying his conception of conservative political philosophy historically to the Dutch Republic, Horcher neglects the fact that, in the language of postmodernism, there are now no supra-political metanarratives available for conservatism, with the result that every political position has now become in principle contestable.
32A viable conservative philosophy, then, must inevitably accept a more deeply agonal concept of the political than was the case in the past, which means that consensus can only be achieved by a pragmatic, broad-church political framework capable of accommodating the diversity of perspectives inherent in the postmodern political arena. In practice, the most acute form of diversity facing conservatism is provided by multiculturalism, since this raises the issue of how best to defend the commitment of conservative constitutionalism to institutions whose claim to be genuinely representative may be challenged by significant sections of the population. Conservative appeals to national sentiment are likely to be unsuccessful. The result is a potential crisis of democratic legitimacy to which the Dutch Republic was not exposed.
33The second component of a realist conservatism, as Horcher made clear, is a concept of practical reason. Debate about the kind of reason manifested in political conduct extends back as far as Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s attempt to make an a priori philosophical vision of the ideal polis the appropriate standpoint from which to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Athenian city state. In its most sophisticated epistemological form the nature of practical reason has been reformulated by Michael Oakeshott, who rejects what he terms “independently premeditated” political ideals on the ground that they are merely abstract ‘abridgements’ of existing practice which can therefore never be rationally grounded guides to future action.
34The trouble about the epistemological theory of practical reason, however, is that it can only convict the political radical of bad theorizing, and not of political folly. In order to make good what really matters to the conservative thinker, which is the charge of folly, it is necessary to characterize practical reason in two different but related ways. One is by simply insisting on the fragility of all political order evident throughout history, but too easily forgotten in times of stability and prosperity until the day when it has been subverted and the threat of chaos re-emerges. The other is a minimalist intellectual strategy, most brilliantly exemplified by Hume, who defends prudence neither by appealing to history, nor by a sophisticated epistemology, nor by appealing to a pessimistic view of human nature. Instead, Hume defends prudence by simply insisting on the wisdom, in politics, of adopting a pretence. This is the pretence, Hume wrote, that “every man ought to be supposed a knave”. Political writers, Hume wrote,
- 40 ‘On the Independency of Parliament’, in Hume’s Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford, OUP, 1 (...)
have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. . . [Otherwise] we ought to look for nothing but faction, disorder, and tyranny from . . . government.40
35If we accept the wisdom of pretending everyone in politics is a knave, Hume writes that three politically beneficial results immediately follow. One is that our politics will automatically incorporate checks and balances on power. The second is that we will never be led to place excessive confidence in political leaders who say that they can be trusted, or who promise a new beginning that will transform the social order. The third is that, if we do act unwisely, we will accept that the responsibility may well be our own.
36Hume hastens to add that the pretence that everyone is a knave is not a fact but a pretence, and this pretence is only appropriate in political life: in other relationships, such as friendship, it would of course be shameful to assume that the other was a knave. In making that pretence in the political sphere, it need hardly be added, Hume has an ancient predecessor in Aesop, several of whose fables have as their theme the avoidance of folly by a practical wisdom based on suspicion. One of the best known is about the chickens who decide to trust the ultimate knave in the chicken world, which is the fox. The end of Aesop’s story is sad, with blood and feathers everywhere; but the moral is that the chickens have only their own folly to blame. They should have pretended that all foxes are knaves.
37It is worth reflecting at this point on what is perhaps the most powerful obstacle in the western cultural tradition to Hume’s conception of practical wisdom ever being widely adopted. In 1899 George Santayana published a play intended to convey the essence of his philosophy in dramatic form. It was called Lucifer and was subtitled A Theological Tragedy. He described it as “a philosophy conveyed in an image”. Since the philosophy is almost unique in seeking to establish conservatism on a materialist basis I will focus on the way in which Santayana tried to connect conservatism with materialism. This may best be brought out by examining Santayana’s account of the nature of the sin which led to Lucifer’s downfall. Santayana’s account completely rejects the orthodox Christian account derived from the Book of Genesis, which emphasizes Lucifer’s wickedness. Santayana advances instead the seemingly paradoxical claim that Lucifer’s sin came not from wickedness but from what seems at first sight to be the very nobility of his character. To Lucifer’s noble nature, only an absolutely good universe was acceptable: he could not, that is, tolerate imperfection or impurity. Accordingly, Lucifer could not tolerate a God responsible for creating a universe in which Lucifer himself saw only imperfection or impurity wherever he looked. He could not, that is, understand the limitations to which even God himself is subject, since they are inherent in all existence. Lucifer’s seemingly admirable quest for moral and spiritual purity thus conceals a hubris which, placing him at odds with creation, condemns him to live in eternal solitude, isolated forever on a mountain top.
38Returning for a moment to the language of Hume, what Santayana shows is that the most dangerous knaves of all are those who do not set out to deceive but are genuinely obsessed by their claim to offer a better, purer world purged of all evil. The more specifically conservative message to be learned from Santayana in particular, however, is that the conservative concept of practical wisdom must be located within a broader conception of the finitude and materiality of existence. It must be grounded, that is, on an acceptance that all goods are necessarily mixed, and that the radical quest for moral purity is therefore inevitably destructive.
39The third component of a realist conservative philosophy is the ability to respond to what is perhaps the most acute challenge faced by contemporary liberal democracies. This is the imminent substantial fall in the general standard of living in the west following the Ukraine war. Although the increased energy price brought by the war is by no means the only source of this fall, it has brought the standard of living issue to the political forefront. The result, as a thoughtful commentator on the current (2022) contest for the leadership of the British Conservative party observed in The Times (13th. August 2022), is that the real issue in the election “is about something deeper [and] in the end more important” than who wins, which is the issue of “the limits of democracy as a system of government”. Is it even possible, Matthew Parris asked, “to win democratic consent to the proposition that most voters are going to get poorer” and that “services we rely on will deteriorate or be cut off…?”. In this situation, the fear must be that a Conservative party with an eye on its electoral future will tend to do little more than offer additional “free” benefits to the electorate rather that pursue painful major reforms to the state required by the national interest.
40In a broader perspective, Parris’s misgivings echoed the prophesy made long before by Tocqueville. Liberal democracy, Tocqueville wrote, was doomed to self-destruction by two adverse developments. The first was the fact that modern mass democracies are not primarily concerned with freedom. What mainly matters to them is equality, and they are happy to welcome arbitrary government provided that it is presented as having benign and well-intentioned objectives intended to promote equality. What makes this an historically unique situation, Tocqueville believed, is the seemingly paradoxical fact that one of the greatest dangers created by modern liberal democratic governments is their apparent niceness, in contrast with the nastiness associated with their non-democratic predecessors. What he described is now termed the “providential” state – a type of government, that is, which is underpinned by the widespread belief that nearly all of life’s principal problems have a political remedy. Needless to say, no such belief existed in the Dutch Republic admired by Horcher. The Republic was therefore free of the relentless pressure for endlessly increasing, and potentially arbitrary, government intervention characteristic of providential politics. It therefore escaped the constant tension with the ideal of the limited state to which conservatism has traditionally been committed – a tension now increased because providential intervention has been extended to the most intimate areas of life due to the “woke” conviction that identity politics must be empowered by legislative action.
41The second development Tocqueville believed would undermine constitutionalism and the rule of law in modern liberal democracies is the fact that modern mass culture is primarily a culture of intimacy in which the impersonal forms and procedures vital for constitutional democracy are viewed with suspicion, being thought of as masks for self-interest and concealed domination. The consequent pressure to submerge the public realm beneath the a-political realm of personal or intimate concerns is intensified by the advent of the mass media. The result – as Tocqueville foresaw – is a tendency for the public realm to disintegrate under pressure from various forms of so-called “identity politics” devoted to private concerns.
- 41 See Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Blackwell, Oxford, 1983).
42Since Tocqueville drew attention to the problem faced by a moderate form of conservatism in preserving the rule of law, civil association and limited politics in modern mass democracies, the problem has been intensified by the instrumental perspective on life characteristic of technologically advanced societies. In his late pessimistic essay on “The Tower of Babel” Oakeshott gave graphic expression to his fear that these societies have fallen so deeply under the influence of instrumental modes of thought that they have become almost completely indifferent to the non-instrumental basis of the rule of law. Instead of being conceived of as the bond uniting citizens in a civil association, law tends to become instead a tool valued only in so far as it promoted preferred policies.41 Echoing Tocqueville, Oakeshott maintained that the external signs of stability and prosperity displayed by the democracies should not obscure the fact that their loss of concern about non-instrumental conditions for constitutional legitimacy means that they are in effect on what Hayek termed the road to serfdom, having almost abandoned the ideal of civil association upon which the survival of individual freedom depends.
43What then of the future of conservatism? Although Edmund Neill may well be right to claim that conservatism will survive, the question which remains to be asked is what kind of conservatism would be likely to do so. Ferenc Horcher’s esteem for the conservative republicanism of the early Dutch Republic and its continuing relevance provides an optimistic answer. Although Horcher’s impressive study of practical wisdom may be set alongside Douglas Den Uyl’s exemplary volume on The Virtue of Prudence (Lang, 1991) as basic philosophical reading on this topic for both general readers and scholars, it is impossible to ignore the sceptical conservative thinkers who have painted the bleak picture outlined above. Unfortunately, this picture implies that the sort of conservatism likely to survive will be an unprincipled, purely pragmatic kind. We must hope that the sceptics are too pessimistic, whilst recognizing that unusually heavy burdens are now being placed on contemporary politicians who cling to conservative principles. Even if that hope is dashed, there is, finally, the consoling thought voiced by Tocqueville, that we may just be lucky enough to find that the elements of freedom and constitutional politics central to a principled conservatism survive despite the obstacles now confronting them. Tocqueville added, however, that even if constitutional principles do in fact survive, we should realize that we are standing on a slippery slope and owe more to good fortune than to conservative political wisdom.
