The Political Spectrum

What is conservatism?  If we look at a dictionary – a dictionary of the social sciences, to be precise, they offer this:

As a political philosophy, conservatism is usually credited to the English social theorist and politician Edmund Burke, who developed a strong critique of abstract social theories, the perfectibility of man, and radical social engineering in response to the French Revolution.  Modern usage, however, refers to a wide range of political tendencies and positions that have little connection to Burke’s principles, although his work continues to inform an important tradition of conservative thought.  Perhaps the key point of divergence is Burke’s rejection of nostalgia for the past and, consequently, of conservative utopianism rooted in forms of tradition.  Instead Burke took a progressive view of society as the product of accumulated customs and practices, which connect institutions, laws, and behavior in an organic whole.  This slow, mostly undirected process, Burke argued, was the product of collected wisdom far greater than that of individual social thinkers.  – Dictionary of the Social Sciences, edited by Craig Calhoun, (New York: Oxford University Press: 2002)

And so it begins with Burke.  Actually, in a larger sense it begins with the French Revolution.  After all, the now traditional delineation of the right-left political spectrum dates to the post-revolutionary period as members of the Assembly sat from left-to-right, from the most radical of revolutionaries to the most ardent of reactionaries.  

But it may go back even further, about another decade, to the American Revolution.  While Burke penned his masterpiece against the French Revolution, it is noteworthy that Burke largely sympathized with the Americans (if he did not exactly fully support them.  After all, he was a British patriot).  

In many ways the two revolutions represent competing philosophies.  The American brand was a “conservative” revolution in that the revolutionaries did not throw off the existing social order, but instead fought for their independence from rule by the crown.  The French brand, on the other hand, was very much a social revolution based on the abstract ideals of the Enlightenment and, to an even larger degree, those of Jean Jacques Rousseau.  

Burke was no mere reactionary.  In fact he was a member of the Whig party, and in some respects very much was a liberal in the classical sense.  What Burke disliked about the French Revolution was its embrace of abstract principles.  “But I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it strands stripped of every relation, in all nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.”* (7) And thus the French revolutionaries’ talk of liberty was not to be praised blindly for liberty, though a noble goal, is not always to be praised.  “Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty?  Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights?” (7)  Unchained liberty was no virtue if it was not grounded.  

Again, Burke was no mere reactionary.  He celebrated change, for a “state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.  Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.” (19)  But while change is inevitable, change for the sake of change, and change without respect for tradition is folly.  A respect for the accumulated wisdom of the ages is a necessary ingredient for the state.  For “by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.” (30)

Individual reason is not enough, and in the same vein a society that disregards its roots is a society with no historical memory.  “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” (76)  Moreover, “by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society, hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation – and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers.  By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken.  No one generation could link with the other.  Men would become little better than flies of a summer. (83; emphasis mine)

He rejects the Rousseauean – and Jeffersonian – notion that each generation is independent of the other.  He describes history as a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.  Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society . . .” (85)

But veneration of tradition was not merely rooted in the desire to defend the past.  Burke had in mind the idea of a moral imagination.  History is made of symbols – symbols that are in turn transmuted to the people of the current age that gives them a sense of who they are.  And Burke fears that the French revolutionaries embraced an ideal that damaged this essential moral imagination.  “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.  All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.” (67)  There is so much more to quote on this subject, but one more will suffice.  When we have rejected the symbols of the past, we are left with a cold-hearted, mechanistic philosophy.  “Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth.  On the principles of this mechanistic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.” (68)  Those who wish to replace these public affections can replace them with nothing.

This is not the whole of Burkean philosophy.   He disdains attempts to “level,” for they always fail to equalize.  (43)  There is a natural aristocracy that is most fit to lead (though this is by no means a hereditary aristocracy).  There are simply those who have talents that should be recognized and appreciated. All societies at all times have these individuals, and attempts to make all equal will be ultimately unsuccessful because you are perverting the natural order.
And such is a nutshell explication of Burkean classical conservatism.  I have written much longer than I had hoped for a blog post, but at the same time I have not nearly done justice to the full thrust of Burke’s philosophy.  And it is a philosophy more than an ideology, an important distinction to remember later.

And how conservative is this conservatism?  In many ways, less so than the word conservative would have you believe.  But more on that in days to come.

*- all references to Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, edited by J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).  Burke of course was writing in 1790.