CONSERVATISM

Conservatives hold that the aim of political arrangements is to make a society good, that a society is good if those living in it can make good lives for themselves, and that good lives are satisfying for oneself and beneficial for others. The political arrangements that make such lives possible are discovered by historical reflection, which discloses various enduring traditions. People participate in them because they conceive of good lives in terms of the beliefs, values, and practices these traditions provide. Conservatism is not an uncritical defense of all traditions but only ones that have endured because people have found participation in them satisfying and beneficial. The justification or criticism of traditions, therefore, is based on their success or failure in fostering good lives. Conservatism has different versions depending on the views held about history, values, the relation between individuals and their society, and between human nature and evil. Conservatives agree that these are the pivotal political topics and that political arrangements should be based on the views held about them, but they disagree about what these views should be.

History

Conservatives believe that the starting points of political thought should be the prevailing political arrangements, rather than a hypothetical contract, a theory about an ideal society, a conception of the common good for all of humanity, or some basic value that always overrides any other value that may conflict with it. Some conservatives, however, believe that it is not a coincidence that certain political arrangements have been historically conducive or detrimental to good lives. They hold that there is a metaphysical explanation of their success or failure: the existence of a moral order in reality. Lives are good if they conform to this moral order and bad if they do not, and the same is true of political arrangements. These conservatives recognize that there are serious disputes about whether the order is (a) hierarchical—having The Good at its pinnacle, as supposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, (b) providential, embodied in natural law, as held in the thirteenth century by Saint Thomas Aquinas and his many followers since then, or (c) an unfolding of the dialectic of clashing forces culminating in the final unity of reason and action, as claimed by Georg W. F. Hegel in nineteenth-century Germany. They nevertheless all assume that there is a moral order. Their task is to find out what it is, or, if it has already been revealed in some canonical text, to find out how it should be interpreted. Disputes about these matters are taken to show only the infirmity of human understanding or motivation, not that the existence of the moral order is doubtful.

The historical record of societies whose political arrangements have been based on a supposed moral order, however, is most alarming. They have tended to indoctrinate unwilling or uninformed people, leaving them no opportunity for choice. Such societies have not been freer of misery than less dogmatic ones. But they have added the misery peculiar to themselves of recognizing authorities who have claimed privileged access to the true and the good and thought that only human shortcomings stand in the way of good lives. This was taken by them to justify coercion, silencing dissenters, and indoctrinating the rest. Many conservatives, such as Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and Michael Oakeshott in the twentieth, have rejected this approach to politics because of its grave dangers.

Other conservatives, such as the Frenchman Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), deny that the right political arrangements can be justified by reason. It makes no difference to them whether the proffered reasons are metaphysical, scientific, or historical. They believe that all reasons are ultimately based on assumptions accepted on faith. Their rejection of reason as a guide, however, leaves them with the problem of deciding what political arrangements they ought to favor. The solution they have offered is to be guided by their faith and perpetuate existing arrangements because familiarity makes them safer than untried alternatives.

The problems of this approach are as evident from the historical record as those of the preceding one. Faith breeds dogmatism, persecution of those who hold other faiths or none at all, and it provides no justification for regarding political arrangements based on one faith as better than contrary ones based on other faiths. Moreover, the perpetuation of political arrangements on account of their familiarity makes their improvement virtually impossible because even flawed familiar ones will be judged preferable to dangerous unfamiliar possibilities.

An alternative to relying on a moral order or on faith is the fallibilism of the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century, the Scottish David Hume in the eighteenth century, and, closer to our times, George Santayana (1863–1952) and Oakeshott. They do not deny that there may be a moral order, only that reliable knowledge of it can be had. They find the historical evidence testifying to humans' fallibility much more convincing than the success of efforts to overcome it. They think that the claims of revelation, canonical texts, or putative eternal verities stand in need of persuasive evidence. But the available evidence is as questionable as the claims based on it. Fallibilists believe that it is far more prudent to look to the historical record of various political arrangements than to endeavor to justify or criticize them by relying on metaphysical speculations or faith, either of which is more dubious than the historical record.

Fallibilism, however, does not commit conservatives to the denial that it is possible to adduce reasons for or against political arrangements. What they deny is that good reasons must be universal and timeless. They reject the fideistic repudiation of reason, accept the importance and desirability of being as reasonable as possible, and claim that political arrangements should be based on the historical evidence available for them. Fallibilists want political arrangements to be firmly rooted in the experiences of the people who are subject to them. Since these experiences are inevitably historical, it is to their history that these conservatives look for evidence. Thus they avoid basing political arrangements on metaphysical speculation about what lies beyond experience and suspecting reasonable evaluations because of a global distrust of reason.

It seems, then, that the most defensible conservative belief about history is the fallibilist one. There is a presumption in favor of the enduring political arrangements of a society because their endurance is prima facie reason for supposing that they foster satisfying and beneficial lives. In the absence of contrary reasons, the enduring political arrangements ought to be maintained. It is possible, of course, that the arrangements have endured because of coercion or manipulation. If the case for change is based on cogent evidence that the arrangements have endured for reasons other than fostering good lives, then it should be seriously considered. But if the case is inspired merely by metaphysical, contractarian, fideistic, or utopian speculations, then much stronger reasons are needed before they could mount a reasonable challenge to political arrangements that have stood the test of time and attracted the allegiance of many people.

Values

Commitment to political arrangements that make good lives possible requires a view about what makes lives good. But there are countless valued activities, obligations, virtues, and satisfactions, countless ways of combining them and evaluating their respective importance, and so there seem to be countless ways in which lives can be good. Conservatives, therefore, must have a view about the diversity of values because the arguments for or against particular political arrangements depend on it. The problem is that there are three incompatible views about the diversity of values: absolutist, relativist, and pluralist.

Absolutists believe that the diversity of values is apparent, not real. They concede that there are many values, but they think that there is a universal standard that can be used to rank them. This standard may be a highest value, such as Plato's Good; the tranquility of ancient Greek and Roman Stoics; the love of God postulated by Saint Augustine, the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo; or the idea of general happiness advanced by nineteenth-century English Utilitarians. Other values, then, can be ranked on the basis of their contribution to the realization of the highest value. Or the standard may be a principle, like the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, the Golden Rule of the New Testament, or the categorical imperative formulated by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century. If a choice needs to be made among different values, the principle will determine which ought to take precedence. Contemporary absolutists—for instance, the English John Finnis, the American Germain Grisez, and the German-American Eric Voegelin—argue that some political arrangements are preferable to others because they conform more closely to the universal standard than the alternatives. However, the candidates for a universal standard are also numerous and face the same problems as the values whose diversity is supposed to be diminished by them. Absolutists acknowledge this problem and explain it in terms of human shortcomings that prevent people from recognizing the true standard. The history of religious wars, persecutions, and tyrannies, aiming to rectify human shortcomings, testifies to the dangers inherent in this explanation.

Relativism is opposed to absolutism. Relativists regard the diversity of values as real: There are many values; many ways of combining and ranking them; and there is no universal standard that could be appealed to in resolving disputes about them. A good society, however, requires some consensus about values, and political arrangements should reflect this consensus. If the consensus changes, the arrangements should change as well. According to relativists, then, what counts as a value and how important it is depends on the consensus of a society. A value is what is valued in a particular context; all values, therefore, are context-dependent.

Values and the political arrangements that reflect them can be reasonably justified or criticized, but, relativists believe, the reasons that can be given for or against them count as reasons only within the context of a society. Since reasons ultimately rest on the prevailing consensus, they will not and are not meant to persuade outsiders. The ultimate appeal of relativists is to point at their arrangements and say: This is what we do here. If relativism takes a conservative form, as in Burke, or in the nineteenth-century Germans Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm Dilthey, it often results in the romantic celebration of national identity, of the spirit of a people and an age, of the shared landscape, historical milestones, ceremonies, stylistic conventions, manners, and rituals that unite a society.

Relativism may seem to avoid the dangers of dogmatism and repression that threaten absolutism, but it is, in fact, equally prone to them. That the values of a society are not thought to be binding outside of it does not mean that the values of other societies will be regarded tolerantly. Because the world is full of people and societies whose values are inimical to the relativist's, there is good reason to guard jealously the relativist's values. Furthermore, if the justification of the values of a society is the prevailing consensus, then any political arrangement becomes justifiable, provided a sufficiently large consensus favors it. Slavery, female circumcision, the maltreatment of minorities, child prostitution, the mutilation of criminals, blood feuds, bribery, and any other noxious political arrangement may be exempted from censure on the grounds that it happens to be valued in its context.

These pitfalls of absolutism and relativism make them unreliable guides to the evaluation of political arrangements. It is with relief, then, that some conservatives in the last and present century—for instance, Oakeshott, Gordon Graham, and John Kekes—have turned to pluralism as an alternative to these flawed views. Pluralists are in partial agreement and disagreement with both absolutists and relativists. According to pluralists, there is a universal standard, but it applies only to values that must be protected by all political arrangements if they are to foster good lives. This standard is universal and minimal. It is possible to establish with reference to it some values required by all good lives, but not all the values that may make lives good. This leads to recognizing some political arrangements as necessary and to allowing a generous plurality of possible political arrangements beyond the necessary minimum. The standard accommodates part of the universalism of absolutism and part of the contextualism of relativism.

The source of pluralism's standard is human nature. To understand human nature sufficiently for the purposes of this standard does not require scientific research or commitment to some metaphysical belief or to natural law. It is enough for it to concentrate on normal people in a commonsensical way. It will then become obvious that good lives depend on the satisfaction of basic physiological, psychological, and social needs such as nutrition, shelter, rest, companionship, self-respect, the hope for a good or better life, the division of labor, justice, predictability in human affairs, and so forth. The satisfaction of these basic needs is a universal requirement of all good lives, whatever may be their social context. If the political arrangements of a society foster their satisfaction, it is reasonable to support them; if they hinder their satisfaction, it is reasonable to reform them.

If absolutists merely asserted and relativists merely denied this requirement, then the former would be right and the latter wrong. But both go beyond this point: absolutists hold that all the values that make lives good are to be evaluated by a universal standard and relativists deny that there is any universal standard at all. Pluralists think that the minimum requirements of human nature set a universal standard, but beyond it there is a plurality of values, of ways of ranking them, and of good lives that embody these values and rankings. According to pluralists, then, the political arrangements of a society ought to protect minimum requirements of good lives and foster a plurality of values beyond the minimum.

The combination of pluralism and conservatism provides two important possibilities. The first is the justification of political arrangements that protect the minimum requirements and the criticism of political arrangements that violate them. This possibility sets the goal of political action and makes possible reasonable comparisons among different societies on the basis of how well they protect the conditions on which all good lives depend. This version of conservatism avoids the objection to relativism that it sanctions any political arrangement so long as a large consensus supports it. The second is that the best guide to the political arrangements a society ought to have beyond the minimum is the history of the society because it is most likely to provide the evidence for or against the prevailing political arrangements. This second possibility avoids the dangers of dogmatism and repression that beset absolutism.

The political arrangements favored by this version of conservatism are based on a familiar list of values: justice, freedom, the rule of law, order, legal and political equality, prosperity, peace, civility, happiness, and so forth. There is likely to be a significant overlap among the lists conservatives, liberals, and socialists may draw up. But there will also be a significant difference: conservatives are genuine pluralists, whereas the liberal and socialists are not. Liberals and socialists are committed to regarding some of these values as more important than the others. What makes them liberals or socialists is their claim that when the values they favor conflict with others on the list, then the favored ones should prevail. If they did not claim this, they would cease to be liberals or socialists. Conservatives reject this approach. Their concern is to protect the whole system of these values. This sometimes requires favoring a particular value over another, sometimes the reverse. Conservative pluralists hold this to be true of all values. They differ from liberals and socialists in refusing to make an a priori commitment to resolving conflicts in favor of any particular value in the prevailing system of values.

Individuals and Society

Good lives must be satisfying and beneficial, but these requirements often conflict because satisfying lives may not be beneficial and beneficial lives may not be satisfying. This raises the question of which requirement should be dominant, and it has far-reaching political consequences how it is answered. Some twentieth-century conservatives—for instance, Friedrich von Hayek, Shirley Letwin, and Robert Nozick—favor individual autonomy over social authority. Their position is virtually indistinguishable from classical liberalism or libertarianism. Other conservatives—such as James Fitzjames Stephen in nineteenth-century England, Voegelin, and the twentieth-century English thinker Roger Scruton—think that social authority should prevail over individual autonomy, if they conflict. As before, there is an intermediate view between these two extremes, namely, that of twentieth-century traditionalist conservatives, represented, among others, by Oakeshott, the American Edward Shils, and Kekes.

Conservatives who stress autonomy at the expense of authority face two serious problems. First, they assume that good lives must be autonomous and cannot involve the recognition of some form of authority over oneself. If this were so, no military or devoutly religious life, no life in static, traditional, hierarchical societies, no life that involves the subordination of individual will and judgment to what is regarded as a higher purpose could be good. This would require regarding of the vast majority of lives outside of modern Western societies as bad. The mistake involved is to slide from the reasonable view that autonomous lives may be good to the unreasonable view that a life cannot be good unless it is autonomous. Second, if a good society is one that fosters good lives, then the precedence of autonomy over authority cannot be right, since autonomous lives may be frustrated or harmful. It is obvious that social authority must prevail over the autonomy of fanatics, criminals, fools, and so on.

The problems of authoritarianism are no less serious. There is no guarantee that if social authority prevails over individual autonomy, the resulting lives will be satisfying. Lives cannot be pronounced satisfying by some authority. Whether they actually are satisfying must ultimately be judged by the individuals themselves. Their judgments, of course, may be influenced by social authority. But no matter how strong that influence is, it cannot override the judgment of individuals in finding what satisfies them. As the lamentable historical record shows, however, this has not prevented countless religious and ideological authorities from stigmatizing individuals who reject their prescriptions as heretics, pagans, maladjusted, or sinful. The result is a repressive society whose dogmatism is reinforced by specious moralizing.

How, then, is the question to be answered? There is no need to insist that either individual autonomy or social authority should systematically prevail over the other. Both are necessary for good lives, but neither is sufficient. Instead of engaging in futile arguments about their comparative importance, it is far more illuminating to understand that they are interdependent aspects of the same underlying activity of individuals trying to make good lives for themselves. The connecting link between them is tradition.

A tradition is a set of customary beliefs and practices that have endured from the past to the present and attracted the allegiance of people so that they wish to perpetuate it. Traditions may be religious, horticultural, scientific, political, stylistic, moral, aesthetic, commercial, medical, legal, military, educational, architectural, and so on. They permeate human lives. When individuals aim at a good life, part of what they are doing is deciding which traditions they should participate in. They may make conscious, deliberate, clear-cut yes-or-no choices, or they may unconsciously, unreflectively fall in with familiar patterns, or they may be at various points in between. The bulk of the activities of individuals concerned with living in ways that strike them as good is composed of participation in the various traditions of their society.

Participation involves the exercise of autonomy. Individuals choose and judge; their wills are engaged; they learn from the past and plan for the future. But they do so in the frameworks of various traditions that authoritatively provide them with a range of choices, with matters that are left to their judgments, and with standards that within a tradition determine what choices and judgments are reasonable or unreasonable. Their exercise of autonomy is the individual aspect of their conformity to their tradition's authority, which is the social aspect of what they doing. They act autonomously by following the authoritative patterns of the traditions to which they feel allegiance. When a Catholic goes to confession, a violinist gives a concert, or a football player scores a touchdown, then the individual and the social, the autonomous and the authoritative, the traditional pattern of doing it and an individual doing it are inextricably mixed. To understand what is going on in terms of individual autonomy is as one-sided as it is to do so in terms of social authority. Both play an essential role, and understanding what is going on requires understanding both the roles they play. Traditionalism rests on this understanding, and it is the political response to it to maintain political arrangements that foster participation in the various traditions that have endured in a society.

Traditions may be vicious, destructive, stultifying, nay-saying, and thus detrimental to good lives. Part of the purpose of political arrangements is to draw distinctions among traditions that are unacceptable (like slavery), suspect but tolerable (like pornography), and worthy of encouragement (like university education). Traditions that violate minimum requirements of good lives should be prohibited. Traditions that have shown themselves to make questionable contributions to good lives should be tolerated but not encouraged. Traditions whose record testifies to their importance for good lives should be cherished.

The obvious question is who should decide which tradition is which and how that decision should be made. Traditionalist conservatives say that the decision should be made by those who are legitimately empowered to do so through the political arrangements of their society and they should make the decisions by reflecting on the historical record of the tradition in question. From this three corollaries follow. First, those who are empowered to make the decisions ought to be able to view the prevailing political arrangements from a historical perspective. The process works well if it empowers people who are not ill-educated, preoccupied with some single issue, inexperienced, or have qualifications that lie in some other field of endeavor. Traditionalist conservatives are clearly not populists. Second, a society that proceeds in this manner is pluralistic because it fosters a plurality of traditions. It does so because it sees as the justification of its political arrangements that they foster good lives, and fostering them depends on fostering the traditions participation in which may make lives good. Third, the society is tolerant because it is committed to having as many traditions as possible. Its political arrangements place the burden of proof on those who wish to proscribe a tradition. If a tradition has endured, if it has the allegiance of enough people to perpetuate it, then there is a prima facie case for it. That case may be, and often is, defeated, but the initial presumption is in its favor.

This outlook leads traditionalists to favor limited government. They do not think that the purpose of its political arrangements is to impose a conception of a good life. The political arrangements of a limited government interfere as little as possible with the traditions that flourish among people subject to it. The purpose of its arrangements is to enable people to live as they please, not to force them to live in a particular way. One of the most important ways of accomplishing this is to have a wide plurality of traditions as a bulwark between individuals and the government that has power over them. Traditionalist conservatives thus believe that a good society should have political arrangements that balance the claims of individual autonomy and social authority. This balance is maintained by the mediation of the traditions of a society that make autonomy possible and provide many of the forms it might take.

Human Nature and Evil

Conservatives tend to take a dim view of progress. They are not so foolish as to deny that great advances in pure and applied science have changed human lives for the better. But they have also changed them for the worse. Advances have been both beneficial and harmful. They have certainly enlarged the stock of human possibilities, but the possibilities are for both good and evil, and new possibilities are seldom without new evils. Evil is an obstacle to the betterment of the human condition. Unjust war, genocide, tyranny, torture, terrorism, the drug trade, concentration camps, racism, the murder of religious and political opponents, easily avoidable epidemics and starvation are some familiar and widespread evils. If evil is understood as serious unjustified harm caused by human beings, then the conservative view is that the prevalence of evil is a permanent condition that cannot be significantly altered.

The prevalence of evil reflects not just a human propensity but also a contingency that influences what propensities people have and develop. The propensity for evil is itself a manifestation of deeper, more pervasive influences, which operate through genetic inheritance, environmental factors, the crimes, accidents, pieces of good or bad fortune, the historical period, society, family, and so on. The same contingency also affects people because others, whom they love, depend on, and with whom their lives are intertwined in other ways, are as subject to it as they are themselves.

Pessimistic conservatives, such as Thomas Hobbes in seventeenth-century England and Niccolo Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florence, think that the prevalence of evil reveals that human nature is basically evil. Optimistic conservatives, such as Hume and Oakeshott, reject pessimism because they think that the right sort of political arrangements will make evil less prevalent. Opposed to both are realistic conservatives—for example, Montaigne, Stephen, and Santayana—who hold that whether the balance of good and evil propensities and their realization by people tilts one way or another is a contingent matter over which individuals and their political arrangements have insufficient control.

Realistic conservatives do not think that the human condition is devoid of hope, but they have no illusions about the limited control a society has over its future. Their view is not that evil propensities are uncontrollable. Rather, human beings have both good and evil propensities and neither they nor societies can exercise sufficient control to make good propensities reliably prevail over evil ones. The right political arrangements help of course, just as the wrong ones make matters worse. But even under the best political arrangements a great deal of contingency remains and it places beyond human control much good and evil. The chief reason for this is that the efforts to control contingency are themselves subject to the very contingency they aim to control. And that, of course, is the fundamental reason why realistic conservatives doubt the possibility of significant improvement of the human condition.

Realistic conservatives do not believe that it is a matter of indifference what political arrangements are made. Political arrangements cannot guarantee the victory of good over evil, but they can influence how things go. Whether that is sufficient at a certain time and place is itself a contingent matter insufficiently within human control. The attitude that results from realizing this combines the acceptance of the fact that not even the best political arrangements guarantee good lives with the motivation to make political arrangements as good as possible.

This view accounts for another significant difference between conservative and liberal or socialist politics: the insistence of conservatives on the importance of political arrangements that hinder evil. This difference is a result of the conservative rejection of the optimistic belief, shared by liberals and socialists, that the prevalence of evil is the result merely of bad political arrangements, which tend to corrupt people, and if political arrangements were good, evil would be much less prevalent. Realistic conservatives reject this optimism. They do not think that evil is prevalent merely because of bad political arrangements. They ask why political arrangements are bad. And the answer must be that political arrangements are made by people, and they are bound to reflect the propensities of their makers. Bad political arrangements are ultimately traceable to evil human propensities. Since the propensities are subject to contingencies over which human control is insufficient, there is no guarantee that political arrangements can be made good. Nor that, if they were made good, they would be sufficient to hinder evil.

Conservatives insist, therefore, on the necessity and importance of political arrangements that hinder evil: moral education, the enforcement of morality, the treatment of people according to what they deserve, the importance of swift and severe punishment for serious crimes, and so on. They oppose the prevailing attitudes that lead to agonizing over the criminal and forgetting the crime, the absurd fiction of a fundamental moral equality between habitual evildoers and their victims, guaranteeing the same freedom and welfare-rights to good and evil people, and so forth. Conservatives think that the aim of justice is to uphold the rule of law that assures that people get what they deserve.

Political arrangements that are meant to hinder evil are liable to abuse. Conservatives know and care about the historical record that testifies to the dreadful things that have been done on the many occasions when such arrangements have gone wrong. The remedy, however, cannot be to refuse to make the arrangements; it must be to learn from history, and try hard to avoid their abuse. Conservatives know that in this respect, as in all others, contingency will be a permanent obstacle to success. But this is precisely the reason why political arrangements are necessary for hindering evil. Realistic conservatives face the worst and try to deny scope to it, rather than endeavor to build a Utopia on optimistic illusions.

Overview

The most reasonable version of conservatism is fallibilist, pluralist, traditionalist, and realist. It avoids metaphysical and fideistic dogmatism. It denies that the content of good lives is given by a system of absolute values; accepts that good lives have some universal albeit minimal, requirements; and holds that some, but not all, values are context-dependent. It recognizes that both individual autonomy and social authority are necessary for good lives, and resolves their conflicts by balancing their claims. It rejects both optimism based on utopian illusions and pessimism that registers only human corruption. It sees human nature as having both good and evil propensities and strives for political arrangements that foster the first and curb the second. Conservatism is a view of politics guided by history and aiming at the betterment of society within the limits set by the contingency of life and human imperfection.

See also Augustine, St.; Burke, Edmund; Dilthey, Wilhelm; Evil; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Herder, Johann Gottfried; Hobbes, Thomas; Human Nature; Hume, David; Kant, Immanuel; Liberalism; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Maistre, Comte Joseph de; Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de; Nozick, Robert; Oakeshott, Michael; Plato; Pluralism; Santayana, George; Social and Political Philosophy; Thomas Aquinas, St.; Value and Valuation.

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John Kekes (2005)