The English conservative tradition
The English conservative tradition
Reflections on Chapter 1 of Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery
Chapter 1 discusses the “English conservative tradition,” expounded by men such as John Fortescue, Richard Hooker, John Selden, and Edmund Burke. In Chapter 2 (the subject of the next two months’ reflections), Hazony will explore how this tradition leapt the pond and took root in America.
Conservatism as anti-theory
“Political conservatism,” says Hazony, is “a political standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time” (p.1). Contrast this with “universal theories” like liberalism or Marxism, which seek “to prescribe the true politics for every nation, at every time and place in history,” and supply the basis for imperial expansionism.
Hazony refers to liberalism and Marxism as universal “theories” of society and government. But he never refers to conservatism as a theory, rather as a “political standpoint,” a “worldview.” What’s the significance of the distinction?
Politics in 4D
Political conservatism is grounded in historical empiricism: what is true cannot be known through abstract principles of reason, but must be gathered through experience. This has both spatial and temporal dimensions. Spatially speaking, the knowledge necessary for good government is spread across the human family, and different individuals, tribes, and nations bring different perspectives to bear on the question. Temporally speaking, individual human lives are short, and none of us can possibly acquire the knowledge necessary for good government within our lifetimes. So we look to the past: what worked, what didn’t?
Here, Burke offers us a striking space-time metaphor (pp.25-26): a nation is “an idea of continuity” extending not only “in numbers and in space” but also “in time”: “A nation is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people which disclose themselves only in a long space of time.”
Hazony contrasts the historical empiricism of English conservatives like Selden and Burke with the abstract rationalism of liberals like Locke and Rousseau. How significant is this contrast? After all, conservatives aren’t moral relativists. Even they would agree that historical experience will, at some point, disclose universal truths. Once those truths are learned, can’t we declare them as such and insist that other nations live by them, even if they haven’t discovered these truths for themselves? Take, for instance, freedom of speech, the freedom of religious belief and practice, or racial equality. Aren’t these universal goods that experience has shown to be necessary to a healthy, prosperous society? Or are these just, in Selden’s words, particularistic traditions that “wea[r] the mask of nature” and “come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind” when in fact they're not (p.16)?
We’re all Lockeans now
Hazony offers a devastating critique of Lockean liberalism (one he elaborates in his other book, Virtues of Nationalism, hereafter VoN). Hazony argues that Locke's “axioms” about the individualistic “state of nature” and the role of “consent” are not empirically grounded, are not actually true, and would make historical empirical inquiry unnecessary—they’re a “fairy tale,” to use the phrase in VoN. Hazony lays at the feet of Locke and Rousseau the barbarism wrought by the French Revolution. And other conservative thinkers have argued that Locke’s ideas sowed the seeds of modernity—moral relativism, antipathy to constraint, evisceration of family and religious authority, obsession with “autonomy.” Many, for example, draw a straight line from John Locke to Justice Kennedy’s infamous line in the now-defunct Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
But is this critique fair? Didn’t America's founding generation equally venerate Locke? Why didn’t Locke’s ideas here produce the same barbaric excesses as in France? And don’t modernity’s ills have more proximate causes, like Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Reich? So argues Carl Trueman in Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and he pegs Rousseau, not Locke, as the early culprit.
Locke has been something of a punching bag for internecine conservative debates for over a half-century. To grossly oversimplify, the debate pits Catholic integralists like Patrick Deneen (“Why Liberalism Failed”) against Protestant defenders of America’s founding like Thomas West, with Jewish thinkers on either side (e.g., contrast Hazony’s critique with Fania Oz-Salzberger’s sympathetic portrayal in “The Political Thought of John Locke and the Significance of Political Hebraism”). For overviews of the debates, see here and here, if you want to dive deeper.