A few days ago, my comments about Judge Bork elicited a reply from Steven Dillard. In it, he made comments about libertarianism which led me to write this post about what the right definition of “conservative” is. That post, in turn, inspired a hasty reply by Paul at Political Spectrum. I can’t tell whether he disagrees with my definition or not, but he seems to cling to the misapprehension that libertarianism is a variety, or some relative, of conservatism: “For some time libertarians and conservatives made common cause against the liberal welfare state and communism,” he writes. “This loose coalition, though always somewhat contentious, began to fracture upon the ascendency [sic] of Ronald Reagan, and it seems to have been completely obliterated with the breakup of the Soviet Union.” He notes, however, that this coalition always had a serious problem: “[t]here is a profound schism as to the role of the state in society that quite frankly cannot be breeched [sic].”
This is true, but it is not surprising if we keep our eye on principles. When we keep those in mind we see that the alliance of libertarians with conservatives against the welfare state and other things, is purely instrumental, and the idea of a stable “fusion,” as advocated by Frank Meyer in his In Defense of Freedom, is chimerical.
Libertarianism, as I have said before, is a variety of liberalism, not of conservatism. It is an old variety of liberalism (hence the synonymous term “classical liberalism”). As John Dewey explained in his brilliant essay The Future of Liberalism, 22 J. Phil. 225 (1935), reprinted in New Deal Thought 28 (H. Zinn ed., 1966), this older liberalism “emphasi[zed]...individuality and liberty,” and was “directed against restrictions placed by...the political state, upon freedom of economic enterprise” as well as other freedoms. More modern liberalism took upon itself not only the eradication of restrictions placed by the political state, but the eradication of social “restrictions” as well, like poverty or ignorance or histories of discrimination. Some liberals thus became drawn toward the redistributionist state, but it would be wrong to assume (as many do) that these liberals were primarily collectivists. They were not; they believed that that the regulatory welfare state was necessary to liberate individuals to reach their full potentials. As Jacob Bronowski put it, describing the philosophy of William Blake (who lived at the time that the older liberalism was transforming into modern redistributionary liberalism), “society thwarts the fulfillment of man…[thus] [m]an must be set free, to make his good.” J. Bronowski, William Blake And The Age of Revolution 180-81 (Harper, 1969) (1965).
These two varieties of liberalism have come to detest each other so much that we are prone to overlooking what they have in common: an overriding concern with liberating individuals to reach their fulfillment. Even John Dewey—a totalitarian who believed that the government should “extend[ ] to all the areas and ways of living, [and ensure that] the powers of individuals shall not be merely released from mechanical external constraint but shall be fed, sustained and directed.” John Dewey, Liberalism And Social Action 31 (Capricorn Books 1963) (1935)—believed that the purpose of this intervention was to liberate the individual. While I consider his notion perverse, that was at least his stated goal.
Conservatism, by contrast, is not concerned with liberating the individual, but with maintaining Society. In its purest variety, conservatism regards individuals as creatures of Society only, as truly belonging to Society. Even their sexual lives are to be regulated in the interest of the state. (Thomas West, to cite one startling example, suggests that, in its role as protector of Society, government should distribute women to men equally to ensure that some men don’t monopolize the attention of more women than they “deserve.”) Individualism is their primary target, because their political goal is, in Karl Popper’s phrase, “[t]he state which is free from the evil of change and corruption…the arrested state,” 1 Karl Popper, The Open Society And Its Enemies 21 (5th ed. 1966), and individualism is highly corrosive to that.
Once we see these two positions, we can see their later confusions more clearly. Modern liberalism, by seeking greater and greater redistribution, lost sight of its individualist basis, and joined with more overtly collectivist philosophies inspired by Hegel and others, at the turn of this century. Thus the term “liberal” came to be attached to some people whose primary concern is solely with the health of a Society, rather than with any particular individual. Some people, for example, call Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. a liberal, even though nothing could be more absurd!
Conservatism, meanwhile, resisted upstart socialists because of their attempt to remake society from the ground up, in a more “rationalistic” manner. In the 1920s, one extreme variety of conservatism, now known as fascism, came to dominate one side of the political spectrum, as socialism dominated the other. This confuses people today who have a hard time telling the two apart, only because they fail to see that these sides represented, respectively, “traditionalism” and concern for the health of Society on one hand, and “modernism” and the emphasis on liberating individuals on the other hand. But Paul Johnson explains it well; in describing the Weimar Republic, he discusses what he calls “the East-West division,” which is “one of the central themes of modern times.”
The principal characteristic of the pre-war German regime of princes, generals and landowners, the law-professors who endowed it with academic legitimacy, and the Lutheran pastors who gave it moral authority, was illiberalism. This ruling caste hated the West with passionate loathing, both for its liberal ideas and for the gross materialism and lack of spirituality which (in their view) those ideas embodied…. These Easterners drew a fundamental distinction between “civilization,” which they defined as rootless, cosmopolitan, immoral, un-German, Western, materialistic and racially defiled; and “culture,” which was pure, national, German, spiritual, and authentic….
The Left intelligentsia often sought deliberately to incite “right thinking” Germany to fury. They had been smothered so long beneath the conventional wisdom of army, church, court and academia; now it was the turn of outsiders who had, in a curious and quite unprecedented way, become the insiders of Weimar society. In the Weltbühne, the smartest and most telling of the new journals, sexual freedom and pacifism were exalted, the army, the state, the university, the Church and, above all, the comfortable, industrious middle classes, were savaged and ridiculed…. This cultural trench warfare…merciless in spite, animosity and cruelty, was calculated to arouse the atavism of the Easterners.
Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from The Twenties to The Eighties 111-15 (1983). Sound familiar?
The bottom line is this: conservatism—real, honest to God conservatism—is primarily concerned with Society (and I capitalize this for a reason). Individual lives are to be governed in a manner that is best suited to Social health. Conservatism therefore places a high value on the “right” of each person to join in the collective choice as to how to govern the lives of other people.
Liberalism, on the other hand, in its antique variety called libertarianism, is primarily concerned with allowing individuals to flourish on their own without the interference of their neighbors or their government. It holds that society is only a group of individuals. John Locke put the libertarian project well when he said that
the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom…. [L]iberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law; and is not, as [conservatives often claim], “a liberty for every man to do what he lists.” For who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him? But a liberty to dispose and order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.
And, of course, in its modern version, liberalism is made up of believers in the welfare state who see it as necessary to free people from social restraints, so that they can liberate themselves—in Clinton’s common phrase, to give people the tools they need to make the most of themselves—as well as other groups beyond the scope of the present inquiry.
I hope this clears up the confusion. Libertarianism is not conservatism, and has little—in a philosophical sense—in common with it. We happen to agree on certain things, but those are largely coincidental.
And I hope that it clears up why I say that so many people who consider themselves conservatives are really moderate libertarians. Most of these folks are people who believe in the principles of the Declaration and the political philosophy of the American founders—a philosophy which is classical liberalism, a.k.a., libertarianism, not genuine conservatism.
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