Conservatism in Relation to Perennial Political Wisdom
My Theory of Conservatism, Involving Reflections on a Harvey Mansfield Essay
I write a lot, and have had three or four book-projects develop to a certain point, and then become dropped by myself, because…well, maybe it is some character flaw of mine, but there has usually seemed a good reason.
Any-how, in the course of one of these now-shelved projects, titled “Democracy-Rescue in America,” I hit upon an interesting way of thinking about conservatism. I wrote this up a couple of years ago, and the recent Glenn Ellmers essay which I discussed below, reminded me of its value.
The heart of my idea is a three-term schema, one spurred by trying to think about a) how the democratic-say-emphasizing populist-conservatism needed in our day ought to be understood as a style of conservatism proper, and b) the fact, made apparent to me by a Harvey Mansfield essay from 2007, “A Plea for Constitutional Conservatism,”1 that conservatism itself was but an aspect of something larger. For that Mansfield essay taught me that “conservatism” was a word of fairly recent coinage, first popping-up around the time of the French Revolution, and that this meant that conservatism only made sense in relation to the new sort of republicanism of the American and French revolutions.
What is more, some of my own studies of ancient republicanism-in-decline, both the Greek and the Roman cases, seemed to confirm this—in author after author, I had noticed no Greek or Latin correlate to “conservatism” being used to describe a party or persuasion involved in the various political debates and conflicts. E.g., in the Latin political vocabulary, neither the classic divide of Rome’s republicans into the optimates and the populares, nor the more-complicated divide that eventually emerged between the stick-with-republicanism coalition and the Ceasarists, could be readily matched to our conservatives v. progressivists one.
Without further set-up, here is what I wrote:
Fragments on “Populist Conservatism”
…so a basic reason why my preferred term, “populist-conservative,” is the better one for Americans to use than “populist,” is that it is truer to existing facts. Another benefit is that it does not characterize the movement according to the intuitions of one man, which the label “Trumpist” does.
A final benefit is that, given its novelty, it lends itself to our developing a richer sense of how it is to be understood as we move forward. …we should understand populist-conservatism as one of several possible emphases or styles that conservatism can take, depending on the needs of the times.
A Threefold Understanding of Sound Political Philosophy
My proposal will become clearer if we think about what conservatism is, and how it is situated in the longer story of human politics. For the sake of doing this work, we will analyze passages of a classic essay, Harvey Mansfield’s “A Plea for Constitutional Conservatism,” and, I will offer a schema of my own that places three key terms, namely, perennial political wisdom, conservatism, and populist-conservatism, in relation to one another. This schema regards the first as the master set of correct political ideas, the second as a subset of them, and the third as a further subset.
MASTER SET OF IDEAS: PERENNIAL POLITICAL WISDOM, E.g., ARISTOTLE, MONTESQUIEU, TOCQUEVILLE, STRAUSS
(Subset: Conservatism) (E.g, Burke, Tocqueville, Churchill, Buckley, Reagan)
[Sub-subset: Populist-Conservatism] [E.g., Anton, Ellmers, moi, Trump, DeSantis]
There are various ways we can profitably play with this schema, and would it not be profitable to insist too strongly on where the various exemplars belong in it—notice, for example, that I cannot resist placing Tocqueville into two of the sets. What we most need to see is that populist-conservatism is best understood as a possible type of conservatism. Conservatism itself turns out not to be the ruling category, but is a major type or part of the larger political wisdom. The conservative type gets called forth by a major era of human history. Perennial political wisdom, which knows what is best to do in any era, is the governing category.
Perennial Political Wisdom
Perennial political wisdom can be thought of as the God’s-eye judgment of political matters, which for humans, exists to the degree that perfectly-thought-through political philosophy is arrived at. When asked, and when fully informed of the relevant factors, the man or woman arrived at this wisdom can provide the correct judgment of what justice and prudence require for any particular society. Of course, political wisdom is not easily learned, so that the knowers of it in any given era might be very few. Moreover, wise persons are seldom asked to guide actual political leaders, even wise persons fall into vice/sin, and actually, full information about the possibly-relevant factors is never available to any human; finally, if a God who cares about human things exists, such as the one of the Bible whom I believe in, then He has knowledge of the human situation that not even the greatest political philosopher somehow granted all possible human knowledge could have, for there might be unexpectable aspects of God’s plan.
However, if on the basis of such glimpsed difficulties and obstacles, we were to say that it is futile for humans to seek out the lesser degrees they might obtain of the perennial political wisdom, we would be giving up on the existence—or at least with respect to human action--of real justice and practical wisdom. We would be consigning all the pesky dialogues of Socrates, and all the detailed tomes of the historians, to the flames.
As a longtime student of classical political philosophy, I hold that Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aristotle, and to a lesser extent various writers such as Cicero and Plutarch, made successful efforts to learn much of what can be about political wisdom. And contrary to those who deny that they discovered any truths about politics which would not be made invalid by later developments of history, I hold that some perennial political truths exist. With Leo Strauss, I hold that historicism is errant, and often leads to disaster. I see certain later sages, especially Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Strauss, and to a lesser extent Aquinas, ‘Publius,’ Solzhenitsyn, Raymond Aron, and a number of Strauss-influenced scholars of our age, including Wilson Carey McWilliams, Peter Augustine Lawler, Pierre Manent, Mary Nichols, Harvey Mansfield, James Ceaser, and Michael Anton2 as also knowing these truths and how best to apply them to newer developments, and thus being in broad harmony with the earlier sages.
I judge the cases of other later sages like Dante, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Locke, Hume, and Burke, whose harmony with the perennial wisdom is more partial, to be more complicated; finally, the cases of the clearly historicist thinkers, such as those of Rousseau, Hegel, Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Croly, Kojéve, Rorty, and the most blood-stained one of Marx, are far more out of harmony with the earlier sages, and lead us into fundamental questions about the very possibility of wisdom.
One truth the perennial political wisdom always recognized is that certain peoples and societies were incapable of republican government, with some of them so estranged from the practice of virtue that they were incapable of being governed by any regime besides monarchy or tyranny.3 This incapacity could not be regarded as permanent, but neither was it something easily altered. Thus, the upholder of political wisdom had to be willing and able to defend monarchy in such circumstances, and even had to be open to the possibility that such circumstances might prove to be the most common kind over the long-run of civilized history.
To speak more specifically, following the fall of the Roman republic, the wise man had to be open to the possibility that a return to the practice of republican liberty was not foreseeable, and not be pushed for, lest even worst government than that of the Caesars, or the anarchy of continual civil war, result. This may be most vividly understood by reading Leo Strauss’s fresh summary of the old theory of “Caesarism,” and by meditating upon Plutarch, who despite preferring to dwell upon the statesmanship of the past republican era (he lived 46-120 A.D.), indicated that the action of the Caesars to end that era was likely necessary, and advised his fellow Greek subjects of the Roman empire against any thoughts of revolt or resistance.4
Conservatism, Rightly Understood
So how do the conservatives fit into this larger story? What is a conservative?
There is one common usage of “conservative,” namely, the “person who seeks to conserve an existing system” that provides us next to no guidance.5 We saw this, for example, in the late 1980s, when a number of Western journalists began labelling the communist hardliners of the Gorbachev-era USSR as “conservatives,” even though they held diametrically opposite views from the (necessarily) anti-communist conservatives of America or Western Europe. If conservatism is understood in this way, the Loyalist opponents of the American Revolution were “conservatives,” just as much as the die-hard defenders of Roman republicanism like Brutus and Cassius were. It would not matter that two of the key American republicans, Patrick Henry and George Washington, took direct inspiration from one of those old-time Roman republicans, Cato the Younger, who famously committed suicide rather than submit to Julius Caesar, for by this twisted situational logic of what constitutes conservatism, it was only the ancient republican who was the conservative. Similarly, Pharoah was a conservative. So were the defenders of the Venetian oligarchy of the late 1700s, which rested upon a hereditary system so rigid that Madison said we should refuse to call it republican.(Federalist 39) Moses and Madison, by this logic, were anti-conservative!
The same absurd results emerge if we try to define conservatism across the ages by linking it to a disposition to only make changes gradually. We’re much better off if we seek to define conservatism according to its political principles. Doing this, we can admit significant differences in the policy platforms of the conservatives of say, 1970s America versus those of 1930s Britain, but we expect to find them sharing a number of core principles. Little, of course, could be more fundamental than the type of regime a political movement seeks to maintain, and we cannot avoid noticing that these two sets of conservatives shared a bedrock commitment to liberal constitutional democracy. The Churchill of the 30s and the Reagan of the 70s have at least that much in common, although we must further highlight that what distinguished their commitment to liberal constitutional democracy from that of their non-conservative political opponents was a certain mode of defending it, that stemmed from a special way of understanding it. The following from Mansfield captures this well:
…liberalism needs sensible defenders who are aware of its vulnerabilities, who understand its principles and are ready to use prudence in applying them. These sensible defenders are mainly conservatives because most liberals are so devoted to liberal principles that they overlook the weaknesses of those principles. A liberal typically pursues liberal principles regardless of the common good… …Liberalism will never outgrow its need for prudence.
Mansfield is mainly using the term “liberalism” here to mean capital-L Liberalism, the broad Locke-like political philosophy that established liberal democracy. Conservatism’s mode of defending liberal democracy, then, involves moderating it, by way of a) better understanding liberalism’s principles, including their weak-points, and b) by remaining more in touch with classic (i.e., perennial) political prudence.
We will remain mired in confusion, however, if we think that defense is simply one of conservatism’s possible modes, such that there might also be a conservative defense of tyranny, monarchy, and oligarchy. Conservatism must rather be defined by its having, whatever other principles it has, a bottom-line dedication to liberal democracy. For we should be decisively influenced here by the fact the terms “conservative” and “conservatism” only begin to get used, initially in English and French(“conservateur” and “conservatisme”), in the late 1700s. I know this goes against all the writers of our era who label various figures of pre-1700s times as “conservatives,” but if we were sending a letter back in time to someone like Plutarch, and wanted to mention “conservatism,” we would have no single term from classic Greek (or Latin) that would suffice to accurately translate it. Here’s Mansfield from the aforementioned essay on this fact and what follows from it:
Conservatism is a correlate of liberalism; it follows upon liberalism; it is liberalism’s little brother. “Conservatism” began to be heard as a political term only after the French Revolution when it was provoked by the manifest excesses of the Revolution into the opposition.
Thus, conservatism is best thought of as a distinct, time-bound approach to the application of the perennial political wisdom. It correlates to the era of modern democracy, to times in which calls to replace modern liberal democracy with another sort of regime are judged to be irresponsible. Yes, liberal democracy has weak-points, and encourages certain kinds of excesses, but the key idea here is that the only realistically achievable alternative to it in post-1789 modern societies, i.e., those nations which have arrived at what Tocqueville called a “democratic social state,” is despotism, whether in classic strong-man form or in a new highly administrative kind which Tocqueville linked to his (terrifying-enough) idea of “soft despotism” and which may also be linked to the all-too-actualizable phenomenon of totalitarianism. Thus, while it is the case that the expounder of perennial political wisdom, such as Aristotle or Montesquieu, was willing to lay out, for use in certain circumstances, a mode of monarchy-defense, oligarchy-defense, and perhaps even—though scholars dispute this—tyranny-defense, the subset of perennial political wisdom called conservatism is unwilling to do so.
That is, the conservative agrees with the Liberal that liberal democracy is the standard—liberal democracies must be maintained where they exist, and sought after where they do not. There are three exceptions which help us understand this rule. First, the conservative or the Liberal may support constitutional monarchy as the best form for a particular nation, so long as liberal rights are defended, and so long as a gradual move toward a more democratic government is pledged and underway. Second, the conservative or the Liberal may support a temporary strong-man as a way of rescuing a liberal democracy from a fall into despotism or civil war. Third, the conservative or Liberal may support, for a nation which is not yet capable of instituting liberal democracy, a longer-term autocrat or series of autocrats committed to gradually reshaping its society and culture in a direction that will make it eventually capable of liberal democracy—one term for this promoted by a prominent progressivist liberal (Fareed Zakaria) is liberalizing autocrat. The conservative or Liberal would thus be willing say that a nation, let us say, Iraq, “is not ready for liberal democracy.” However, they would hesitate to pronounce that it will never be ready for it.
But what about the person who goes a step further, in fact two steps further, and says something like the following? “It is not just tribal-society peoples, Muslim peoples, crime-ridden peoples, below-a-certain-level-of-GDP peoples, or cursed-with-a-history-like-Russia’s peoples, who would for all foreseeable time be better off under non-democratic government, but all peoples.”6 Such a person could not be spoken of as a Liberal, nor as a conservative.
In sum, while we will always talk about things like a “conservative” style of investing or baseball strategy, when we talk of the political creed that is “conservatism,” we must not understand it in terms of a disposition to be pessimistic, authority-friendly, or gradualist. It is a set of political principles, and centered around a conviction that in modern times liberal democracy must be sought and maintained wherever it can be, working alongside an understanding that certain truths from the pre-modern and perennial wisdom are needed to maintain it.
This is why it is no contradiction to observe that a man like George Washington was a conservative, and, a republican revolutionary. He was both of these in the 1770s, when committing revolution, and both of these in 1790s, when seeking to better consolidate the American republic by usually siding with Hamilton and the “Federalists” against Jefferson and the “Republicans.” He never held that Revolution was good for its own sake; but likewise, he never held that previous oaths of allegiance to Britain’s regime, a mixed-regime with inherited aristocratic statuses, should keep a people who seemed capable of establishing a rights-respecting republic from attempting to.
Yes, in most instances, conservatism’s continued adherence to perennial wisdom—wisdom the Liberal forgets or dismisses as retrograde—encourages a gradualist approach. But we must not let certain giants, such as Burke, give us the impression that caution is the essence of conservativism. Washington did not commit himself to conserve the British colonial order he was raised under, nor to only support gradual attempts to move away from it; and if, God forbid, the legally-appointed authorities of our present American order keep daring to develop (i.e., to corrupt) our system in an oligarchic direction, and keep succeeding, we conservatives will at some point have to undertake revolution against them. There would be nothing gradualist or cautious about that, once the decision was made and the die cast. Another way of saying all this, then, is that conservatism’s opposition to modern forms of despotism (they nearly always present themselves as democratic) is total. The reason it is so categorically for liberal democracy, is because it has a clear view of what the only alternatives to it in our social circumstances are.
Conservatism v. Reactionary Monarchism
Such is the degree of clarity I believe my schema can provide. Mansfield does highlight the fact, however, that there has long been confusion about those who seem to straddle the categories of the conservative and the reactionary:
Was conservatism to be the alternative to liberal revolution or was it to supply the defects of that revolution so as to make it work? And there were the opponents of the revolution usually called reactionaries but still conservatives who wanted to return to the old regime and therefore supported monarchy and religion, the throne and the altar. But there were also conservative liberals such as Benjamin Constant, Francois Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville who accepted the revolution while blaming its excesses.7
Mansfield uses this initial terminological ambiguity to help him argue that conservatism is always is torn between different purposes.
…Here, at the origin of conservatism, we see its fundamental dilemma: Is it the alternative to liberalism or does it make liberalism work better than it would on its own?
That dialectical prod could mislead us if we do not notice that Mansfield never endorses a notion that conservatism provides a fundamental alternative to liberal democracy. The only putative “conservatives” who ever thought so were the monarchist reactionaries. So while admitting that there was some confusion in the initial period, with one aspect of it echoed in the longer pattern Mansfield highlights, we can confidently insist that no real conservatives call for the replacement of liberal democracy with an entirely different regime, i.e., one that is in essence monarchic, despotic, or aristocratic/oligarchic, and intended to remain so. To illustrate this distinction with the figure I would regard as the key example, we should regard Alexis de Tocqueville as a conservative, as he generally recommended something like an adjusted version of American democracy for his France, albeit with greater central authority, and with some remaining constitutional role for a royal family. By contrast, his political opponents, the “legitimists,” should not be called conservatives, as they called for a restoration of the old non-constitutional and Bourbon monarchy. His being in friendly dialogue with them does not alter his firmly-expressed conviction that they sought the impossible, as the era of equality was well-underway, driven by the arrival of the democratic social-state in Europe and America.8
So, to adjust Mansfield’s language slightly--and for the sake of better supporting his main points--, while conservatism does stand as a stark alternative to liberalism understood as pure theory, or liberal revolution, it does not regard itself as being or seeking an alternative to liberal democracy itself. Thus, it is always connected to an existing liberal or modern democracy (or at the least, to a call to eventually implement such a system in some nation); it always has a “brotherly” connection to Liberalism. There is flexibility here—while gladly accepting and submitting to constitutionalism, the wise conservative never agrees to bind himself and his society to a single conception of liberal democracy, and especially not to one that gets to be defined by dogmatic or progressivist Liberals. And he is non-dogmatic enough that he might even ditch the term “liberal democracy,” and run instead with the term suggested, but never explicitly called for, by Tocqueville’s writings: “modern democracy.”
But let us allow Mansfield to finish his thought:
We can put this in fewer words: Does conservatism go back or go slow? …If conservatism is the alternative to liberalism, it needs principles and goes back in history to find them. Going back is a revolution against the present, against the liberal status-quo; it is a counter-revolution. It brings turmoil, upset, and accusations of “extremism.”
…If on the other hand conservativism supplies the defects of liberalism and goes slow, it must forget principles and accommodate with liberalism. Conservatives of this sort may be called “responsible,” like George H.W. Bush and Robert Dole, and they are responsible because they take charge of a situation they do not care for but make the best of. For such conservatives, all ideas cause problems, including conservative ideas. The elder Bush spoke deprecatingly of the “vision thing” that he was alleged to lack.
There is much truth to this, but we must make a qualification. We should not accept that the many conservative leaders whom we might join Mansfield in characterizing as “responsible” are necessarily as hostile to ideas as Bush I’s comment would suggest. For if we think of a more flattering example of the responsible conservative, such as Winston Churchill, we are reminded that such leaders will often be “going back into history” for non-Liberal principles. That is, Mansfield does not emphasize as much as he should the fact that at most times most conservative leaders have combined such “going back” Before Liberalism, and such “going slow” that remains Within Liberalism.9
Conservatism in a (Supposedly) Post-Liberal Era
That said, and perhaps with Ellmers’ “monster-slayer” op-eds in mind, those of us who are populist-conservatives, and who thus sympathize with calls for a cultural, economic, and electoral-politics revolt against our present progressivist elites will appreciate much of Mansfields’s phrasing here; we know that some call us extremists, and we do think that the conservative style needed for our time must do more of the “going back” to consider pre-Liberal principles than was previously typical. …for example [these examples come from the original design of the book project] things like Aristotle’s account of good polis politics, McWilliams’s account of the Anti-Federalist case against the Constitution, and Lawler’s account of the Founders “building-better-than-they-knew” due to their being more classical and Christian than they knew. We are readier to shake things up with pre-liberal truths than the typical conservatives of the Reagan-up-to-Trump era were.
Moreover, one of the ways we should shake things up, is to place less emphasis on the very word and concept “liberalism.” What we conservatives have in fact been most dedicated to, and ought be all the more so now, is the defense of liberal democracy as a whole. We should stop overemphasizing, and thus seeming to be prioritizing, its liberal aspects. One way of suggesting this is to say that conservatism is dedicated to the perpetuation and prudent spread of modern democracy. And yet, unlike Patrick Deneen and his ilk, I think it absurd to try to abandon the term “liberalism,” that is, to present one’s political commitments as thoroughly “post-liberal.”
The Commitments Called for by Our Expected Situation
So I say the political commitments of good persons—I say nothing here of their religious and family commitments--should be three, in the following ascending order. First, you should be committed to populist-conservatism, the conservative program and rhetoric needed for our time. Second, you should be committed to conservatism, including its core commitment to defend modern/liberal democracy come hell or high-water. This is a more binding commitment than the first, and so if a time comes in which conservatism must again put emphasis on the benefits of free markets, or refrain from stirring-up demands for more democratic say, you should accept that shift. Third, you should be committed to the perennial political wisdom.
And If the Conditions that Led Perennial Political Wisdom to Endorse Conservatism Cease?
That third and governing commitment means that you will recognize that there were times in which political creeds that must be opposed by every conservative, such as support for a monarchy, an oligarchy, a Sparta-like aristocracy, or even a Caesarist quasi-despotism, were legitimate. For those were, I am claiming, times before conservatism, that is, times before the politically wise came to understand that the only meaningful regime choice given the new social/intellectual conditions was that between modern democracy and some kind of modern despotism. To be sure, despotism, as well as widespread slavery, ought to be heartily condemned and fought tooth-and-nail in every age, but the person who bows to perennial political wisdom—as all persons should--is not obliged to retrospectively condemn the monarchist politics of say, Dante. He admits there were good reasons for that politics in Dante’s time. Even with respect to slavery, the respecter of political wisdom is not obliged to condemn a thinker like Plato for likely thinking that no polis could exist without the institution of slavery, nor those passages in the New Testament which, while in no way praising it and in fact undermining it, do not call for immediate efforts to abolish it. But as Lincoln demonstrated, the American conservative—that is, any American true to the real principles of their nation’s Founding--was obliged to work towards American slavery’s confinement, decrease, and eventual abolition.
That may seem to make conservatism, or the liberal democracy it seeks to defend, a higher and more authoritative commitment than that of perennial political wisdom. But that is not so. First of all, a close consideration of Aristotle’s conception of the very best regime reveals that it aims at goals a good deal higher than those which a liberal democracy can permit its laws to aim at.10 Second, perennial political wisdom is the final authority. Yes, it accepts that in those times in which conservatism is demanded of good persons, a regime of pure monarchy or an institution of slavery must be opposed. But it also knows is that it might be possible for such times to end.
Consider. If, God forbid, we were to arrive at the conclusion, forced to it by a succession of failures, that modern social conditions do not, in the long run, permit the survival of democratic-republican government, but can only bring us into more and more despotism, we would become morally obliged to work for the destruction of those conditions, and to return mankind to something akin to the socio-economic and educational conditions that held prior to the late 1700s. Our dialogues with thinkers who talk of “Bronze Age” values would at that point move out of their present mode of bemused and posturing “literary politics,” into urgent conversations about a real program to try destroy modern commerce, so as to force a return to simpler living conditions. I would hope that even in such an extremity, we would maintain our categorical hostility to slavery, but certainly, several non-democratic regime options would again become live and legitimate ones.
Do you find such talk surpassingly strange? Well, it is highly conditional. It would depend on Tocqueville being dead wrong on a central point, indeed, the culminating conclusion of Democracy in America, which is that a moderated-enough form of democracy, one not doomed to drive us into an ever-more totalitarian apparatus and miseducation, is possible, and we have enough freedom from fate for collective choice to keep choosing it. (And, I would add as an extension of Tocqueville’s thought, that after a season of veering into despotic democracy, we would still have enough such freedom to choose to return to the right path.)
It’s wild to imagine ourselves or our descendants ever arriving at a conclusion that modern democracy and its set of sustaining conditions is no longer something which good persons should support, nor an event I think likely, so permit me to sketch a more obviously plausible possibility, and one we could face in our lifetimes: the need to institute a kind of Caesarism. What if certain doomsayers of our day prove to be basically right, such that a leftist attempt to impose oligarchy-like despotism really happens, provoking a revolutionary counter-attack, and that the subsequent civil war results in anarchy? And what if, let us add, that due to that break-down of order, the conservatives in a “red-state” area of what once was the United States find they have the opportunity, or indeed the pressing need, to place a strong-man friendly to them in power? If his kind of rule is not something they only turn to as a temporary expedient, but if they begin to think there is no foreseeable way to responsibly return to regular democratic elections, then would this not become what political philosophers call Caesarism? Caesarism is a type of despotism, or at best a type of monarchy, that it is said to be justifiable to turn to in the event of a radical moral corruption of the citizenry, by which the citizenry has become no longer capable of practicing republican government, and is certain to bring about an extra-despotic kind of tyranny if this citizenry’s “democratic” authority is still obeyed.11
If we are open to imagining that possibility, then we should also pose this question to ourselves: could a future supporter of this “Caesarism in America” also claim to be a conservative? I don’t see how. In our time, Strauss-influenced conservatives like Michael Anton and myself try to warn our fellow citizens that if they do not follow conservative advice now, a time may come when Caesarist rule becomes the least-horrible of the very bad options before them. That does not make us Caesarists now, even though we do not promise that we will never become one. Admirable defenders of civilization such as Virgil and Plutarch, as well as the few church fathers who spoke of political matters, were after all Caesarists, at least by any final analysis of their political statements. Now maybe Anton and I would do the die-hard conservative/republican thing of crying “Give me democracy, or give me death!” if things ever arrived at such a pass. Or, maybe we would take up a duty to guide those who must live on after democracy’s fall, who would need to find their way into the best kind of life possible when the government is no longer a free one; acceptance of that duty would require, among other things, an acceptance of the Caesar. (That’s assuming Anton and I hadn’t already been executed, as there’s no telling whether a rightist Caesar would want our kind of intellectual around, and certainty that a leftist Caesar wouldn’t.) But regardless, if that ever became the situation, then it would no longer be the case that the good person would properly understand his highest political commitment, the one to perennial political wisdom, through the limits set by his secondary-level one of conservatism. That is, conservatism would have become irrelevant, except as a memory of a human possibility. For if modern democracy were to collapse in a way which made it look exceedingly difficult to revive, then we would be back to something like the situation of the seventeen centuries that ran from Caesar Augustus down to the American Founders.
The Immediate Conclusion
Ellmers is right in those two “monster slayer” op-eds: one can be a conservative, and in certain seasons, also be for radical change. As Washington once was. And as every open-eyed or “based” conservative ought to be today.
Available in this volume, and in a shortened net version here. What I judge to be highly complimentary thinking can be found in Daniel Mahoney’s The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order, though this book does not directly dialogue with Mansfield’s essay.
Not an exhaustive list--these were chosen due to an intention to feature aspects of their thought in the book project.
Aristotle, Politics, esp. III, chaps. 16-18.
Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, pp. 177-184; Plutarch, Marcus Brutus, 64, 108, Brutus and Dion Compared, 2; Hugh Liebert, Plutarch’s Politics: Between City and Empire, 22-38; cc. Dio Cassius, various places.
Unfortunately, one of our otherwise most-thoughtful guides to what a conservative is, Sir Roger Scruton, fell into using this definition at certain points. I believe the quoted words here were taken directly from a video he once did which I cannot locate now, but he said something close to them in 2:00-6:00 of this here.
I’m not endorsing these formulations; but they have various degrees of plausibility, and so I do not endorse demands to exclude those who make them from conservatism, let alone from academia.
This passage immediately follows the one quoted above; cc. Pierre Manent’s characterization of Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville as a second wave of liberals, and Daniel Mahoney’s characterization in the aforementioned book of Constant, Tocqueville, and Aron not as conservatives simply, nor as liberals simply, but as “conservative-minded liberals” or as “conservative liberals.”
Evidence for these claims is all over Tocqueville’s corpus—see esp. the section in DA just before the Three Races chapter; see also paragraphs 29-31, 58, 74-75 from DA’s intro.
We might also note that in this passage, Mansfield obfuscates the distinction, important to American political vocabulary, between the since-FDR small-l liberalism and the broader capital-L Liberalism; he thus permits his readers to forget the debate between those who regard the liberal theory of John Rawls as the proper heir to and realization of Locke, and those who regard it as a progressivist and historicism-infested betrayal of Locke. I am not sure if this was simply an oversight, or an intended feature of the passage.
Mary Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen, chap. 5.
Beyond the Strauss already cited, see Michael Anton, The Stakes, 341-51.
I appreciate you writing alot, Carl- this sort of insightful thinking out loud about the most serious matters helps the rest of us think them through too