What Was Conservatism?
In search of Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre in the American past and present
Posting will be a little light the next three weeks, as I try to recuperate from an exhausting semester and election season, spend time with family, and do some traveling. I can only promise one post per week during the weeks of December 23, December 30, and January 6. I’ll be back to full 2x/week posting during the week of January 13, just as we approach the second presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. I hope everyone who reads this Substack knows how grateful I am for your support of my work and participation in this community. I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year.
My most engaged readers—those who pay for full access to my writing and regularly comment on my posts—often say that they wish they could take my courses at Penn. Or, in the case of the course on “The Reactionary Mind” that I recently mentioned cancelling due to under-enrollment, they will say they wished I could teach the course through Substack.
That isn’t going to happen, for various reasons. But I am happy to, and do, write posts from time to time in which I talk about what I’m teaching and what I’ve learned as a result.
I just finished teaching a first-year seminar titled “Conservatism in Theory and Practice,” and the experience was somewhat surprising. My views on the topic didn’t change dramatically, but they did change—and in an unexpected way. This is a post about precisely how my understanding shifted or evolved this semester, and why.
Conservatives and/or Reactionaries
The course began by examining two contrary hypotheses about conservatism that I hoped we would spend the remainder of the term subjecting to historical and empirical testing.
The first hypothesis, advanced by left-wing political theorist Corey Robin in his book The Reactionary Mind (yes, I stole his title for my now-cancelled course), posits that all conservatives, at bottom, are reactionaries or counterrevolutionaries. Human beings find themselves living in hierarchical societies in which some people have and control the bulk of the power and privileges. The left opposes this received order of things and fights for the emancipation of the lower orders, while the right fights this emancipatory demand in the name of defending the old order. The latter therefore reacts against the left and seeks to develop a wide range of arguments (libertarian, religious, moralistic, militaristic, imperialist, pragmatic, etc.) to uphold, maintain, or revert to “private regimes of power.”
Perhaps the most powerful and memorable passage in the book sketches an image of “philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists, and hacks” all seated around the same conservative/reactionary table: “Hobbes is next to Hayek, Burke across from Donald Trump, Nietzsche in between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.”
That, in a nutshell, is the first hypothesis—that this panoply of people and ideas are all, at bottom, identical in motives, anxieties, and ultimate aspirations.
The second (and more complex) hypothesis, meanwhile, was suggested in the scathingly critical review of Robin’s book published in the New York Review of Books by my teacher and friend Mark Lilla. In this review, Lilla argues that in his drive to lump together so many disparate figures and ideas, Robin flattens a number of crucial distinctions.
For one thing, liberals and conservatives have real, serious, and important disagreements about human nature and society. Conservatives follow Edmund Burke in holding that society is “metaphysically prior to the individuals in it.” Society is “a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and those obligations take priority over our rights.” Conservatives like Burke opposed the French Revolution because its hostility to “preexisting opinions and institutions” opened the door to a new, more vicious style of tyranny. They weren’t simply motivated by the desire to defend privileges for their own sake.
Classical liberals (like John Stuart Mill), by contrast, “give individuals priority over society…. They assume that societies are genuinely constructs of human freedom, that whatever we inherit from them, they can always be unmade or remade through free human action…. Liberals, like conservatives, recognize the need for constraints, but they believe they must come from principles that transcend particular societies and customs. Principles are the only legitimate constraints on our freedom.”
The disagreement between conservatives and liberals, for Lilla, is thus a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. And that dispute is very different than the one separating revolutionaries and reactionaries. The latter disagreement is over history. Both agree that history ruptured at a given point in the past (1789, 1917, 1968), but they disagree about whether it amounted to a Great Leap Forward for humanity or a catastrophic fall from a prior Golden Age. The latter—the genuine reactionaries—then end up dividing into two camps, with restorative reactionaries looking to return to a real or imagined lost past and redemptive reactionaries believing the revolution can’t be reversed. They therefore seek to provoke a new apocalypse to level the playing field so another reality can be built on the ruins of the old. Fascists are the most well-known example of the redemptive-reactionary outlook, and as Lilla notes, “there was nothing conservative about them.”
The Old Right
At the start of the semester, I was strongly predisposed to agree with Lilla. I still am, at least at the level of theory, where analytical and conceptual clarity is the paramount consideration. But in practice? There I’m no longer so sure. Which isn’t to say I’ve swung toward Robin’s view. On the contrary, I’m somewhat more inclined to think all such theoretical distinctions and disputes are pretty far removed from the messy reality of how ideas interact with the concrete world of politics.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Notes from the Middleground to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.