Buckley defined Conservatism through the metaphor of a man standing on the train tracks of history, yelling ‘stop!’. Scruton defined Conservatism as the stewardship of the beautiful, in a particular way of life. The intuition expressed in both definitions is sound. For Conservatism to mean anything, then it must include the preservation or conservation of something important. Scruton is closer to that mark than Buckley is, because he’s closer to a fundamental principle than Buckley is. But they both still miss the mark considerably because their focus is too much on present particulars, without reference to what makes those particulars important.
Here are some 20th century books that guided me away from contemporary American Liberalism (and its Germanic progressive bias), and contributed to my understanding of Conservatism as an evolving worldview. I will offer four philosophical, and four political suggestions:
Philosophical:
After Virtue (1984), Alasdair MacIntyre
- This book began my divorce with both Enlightenment modernism, and the English analytical tradition. MacIntyre makes a powerful case for Aristotelian ethics, and against the Germans, especially. I see virtue ethics (in whatever form) as core to any coherent conservative worldview. MacIntyre did not take the Aristotelian turn until very late in his life. This book was the testament to that turning. His ultimate vision is of a communitarian society, which I disagree with somewhat, but elements of it are essential (particularly, the relational element of society).
[The modern left] and I come from two very different Americas. The shorthand for these two Americas might be “liberal” and “conservative,” but this would indeed be a shorthand. These labels once signified something much less incendiary than they do today; they were opposing political orientations, but they shared a common national identity. One was conservative or liberal but within a fairly non-contentious cultural understanding of what it meant to be American. But since the 1960s, “liberal” and “conservative” have come to function almost like national identities in their own right. To be one or the other is not merely to lean left or right—toward “labor” or toward “business”—within a common national identity; it is to belong to a different vision of America altogether, a vision that seeks to supersede the opposing vision and to establish itself as the nation’s common identity. Today the Left and the Right don’t work within a shared understanding of the national purpose; nor do they seek such an understanding. Rather, each seeks to win out over the other and to define the nation by its own terms.
Traditionally, there are two great debates at the core of political philosophy. The first is what justifies political authority, and the second is what should be the form of the institution that assumes that authority. The first debate includes questions of fundamental justice. Issues like what the state owes to its subjects, and what the subjects owe to each other, are central to the debate. The second debate depends somewhat on the answer to the first, in that it seeks to answer how the duties, obligations, rights, and responsibilities of the first debate are to be enacted and enforced. Should offices be permanent or temporary? Should powers be segregated? Should it include democratic mechanisms? Who should be enfranchised? Should it be federated or centralized? Should it monopolize certain goods? And so forth.
“…[the general characteristics of the Conservative disposition] center upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön’, but Stay with me because I am attached to you.
…Although it distresses some American conservatives to be told this, American conservatism has little in common with European conservatism, which is descended from, and often is still tainted by, throne-and-altar, blood-and-soil nostalgia, irrationality, and tribalism. American conservatism has a clear mission: It is to conserve, by articulating and demonstrating the continuing pertinence of, the Founders’ thinking. The price of accuracy might by confusion, but this point must be made: American conservatives are the custodians of the classical liberal tradition.
