What is Conservatism?

As I've noted more than once on this site, many people seem to get confused about what the terms "conservative" and "liberal" mean. People have a habit of defining them according to the current policies of the Republican and Democratic parties, instead of looking to see if those parties uphold prior-existing conservative and liberal principles. They get the order reversed, basically.

Timothy Sandefur explains the nature of conservatism as he sees it:

Conservatism, rightly understood, is a political philosophy characterized by the writings of, e.g., Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, and Robert Bork. It holds that the individual is essentially a communal being—a part of an organic social whole, whose personality is molded by the society in which he is born. He does not belong to himself, but rather belongs to society. His proper role is as an unselfish partner with his neighbors, and his family, and in service to his God and his society. Individualism, capitalism, atheism, science, are all disruptive tendencies, because they break the historical, traditional, predictable bonds that connect people to one another. The free market entices a woman to leave her family role, for instance, and go into the workplace. Individualism leads people to challenge the authority of the church or other social figures.

In Richard Weaver’s words, “capitalism cannot be conservative in the true sense as long as its reliance is upon industrialism, whose very nature is to unsettle any establishment and initiate the endless innovation of technological ‘progress.’” Quoted in Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver: A Life of The Mind 47 (1995). Science leads people astray from the church, and, as Leon Kass and his followers put it, makes man violate those traditional limits which define us as human. It is for this reason that conservatives have described themselves as “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’”

Conservatism is hostile to social-compact political theories as well. Social compact theories assume that individuals exist before society, that they take primacy over society. The idea of compact—which James Madison said was the essence of all free government—is important because it says that people come together to create government and therefore can give government no rights that they don’t already have. The compact theories therefore limit the power of the state by saying that people cannot use the state to do things which they, individually, have no right to do. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “What is true of every member of the society, individually, is true of them all collectively; since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of the individuals.”

But to a conservative, this is a dangerous notion (Nisbet called it “rationalism”), because it is too individualistic. I have no personal right to stop my neighbor’s wife from getting a job, or to stop my neighbor from having a sexual affair with another man in the privacy of his own home, so social compact theory would not permit me to interfere if they chose to do these things, which are disruptive to social traditions. That’s why Russell Kirk said that “Locke’s emphasis upon private freedom endangers that spiritual continuity which we call human society…. Locke has nothing to say about the Christian view of society as a bond between God and man, and among the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. There is no warmth in Locke, and no sense of consecration…. Utility, not love, is the motive of Locke’s individualism.” The Roots of American Order 287 (1991).

For the conservative, society is an organic entity, whose roots are veiled by obscure poetic terms like “consecration” which do not enable us to know precisely what the limits of the state are. (And conservatives label the attempts to be more precise as “dismal rationalism.”) Likewise, many moderate conservatives sometimes speak of “balancing” society and the individual, never coming down to precise terms as to what an individual may do, without having his neighbors interfere. Conservatives are therefore likewise hostile to the concept of natural rights. To them, rights are granted through social tradition, not out of some innate individualistic notion. Thus Weaver, Kirk, Bork, and others, have been unremittingly hostile to the idea that you have rights beyond those specified in the Constitution. (emphasis in original)

I both agree and disagree with Sandefur's analysis. I mostly agree, but I must quibble on one general issue. There are two ways to look at the concepts of liberalism and conservatism: as absolute terms and as relative terms. The above is a more absolute perspective, defining conservatism in a way that might be applied in any society and at any time. That's legitimate and, from that perspective, I think that it's quite correct: these do seem to be some of the core principles of social/political conservatism.

One can also take a relativistic perspective on liberalism and conservatism. I usually define conservatism broadly as the desire to "conserve" something — politically, economically, or socially. In the above, we see a desire to "conserve" traditional social, religious, and political power structures. In other contexts, what people are trying to "conserve" might differ. The political positions of "conservatives" and "liberals" can in this way differ from society to society, from age to age, depending upon the local and historical contexts.

I think that I might prefer to use the term "Conservative" with a capital-C for what Sandefur describes because it looks a lot more like a coherent political or philosophical position that can take a proper noun. The very general and at times variable "conservatism" that I describe seems better suited to the lowercase "c," describing a tendency that can occur in various contexts. In this way, many atheists who consider themselves "conservative" may be "socially conservative" or "economically conservative," but fewer would be Conservatives. I can see some confusion arising from this division of terms, but I'm not sure if that can be entirely avoided.

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