Conservatism
Samuel Huntington’s take
I think it will be helpful for us to start a thread on the meaning of conservatism. Are there a set of core ideological commitments that connect conservatives in different places and generations? Where and how do libertarians fit in? I’ll start us off with an outline of Samuel Huntington’s 1957 article, “Conservatism as an Ideology.”
Huntington argues that conservatism is “that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter. The essence of conservatism is the passionate affirmation of the value of existing institutions.”
Huntington assumes that challenges to existing institutions will come in the form of rational, ideological arguments. For instance, consider the following: Within each person, as a result of their autonomy, inheres an intrinsic and incomparable worth. Humans are thus moral equals. In light of this status, and the capacity for autonomy on which it is based, each person ought to be free to pursue his own conception of the good life. We can keep this argument going and if we’re in the right place and time, we can reach a conclusion like: the monarchy and feudal system must be destroyed and replaced with a rights-respecting democracy.
In response to such a “direct and immediate” challenge, Huntington argues that conservatives will roll out the essential elements of their creed, as first explicated by Edmund Burke: man is a religious animal, and religion is the core of civil society; society is the organic product of slow historical growth; man is a creature of instinct and emotion as well as reason; the community is superior to the individual; men are unequal, except in the ultimate moral sense; and a presumption exists in favor of settled schemes of government against an untried project. These are the ideological tools for an “articulate, systematic, theoretical resistance to change.” In response to liberal democrats, aristocratic or monarchical conservatives might argue that the monarchy has a divine right; the democrats’ atomistic vision of society places the individual above religion and community; their radical vision might backfire, whereas the monarchy is tried and true, etc.
Huntington argues that there is no universal, comprehensive conservatism. It offers a flexible ideological structure that can be used to protect any institution, from the hierarchical and inegalitarian society which conservatives defended in the nineteenth century, to the classically liberal state and its promotion of individualism and free markets, defended before WWI, to the welfare state, defended in the 1950s. Huntington contends that the “New Conservative” mix of social moralism and economic liberalism is not in fact conservative, since at the time he published his piece they were more concerned with criticizing and changing existing institutions than protecting them. If in the ensuing decades they successfully installed their vision of a proper society and used conservative arguments to defend them, Huntington would still argue that their belief system does not serve as “accurate description of conservatism as a political philosophy.” In a sense for Huntington, there is no conservative political philosophy, or at least not one with substantive ideals; it is a “positional” ideology used to counteract other ideologies and movements that call for change. Conservatism is simply ideational armor that is picked up from time to time throughout history and placed on the body of an institutional structure to safeguard it from invading radicals.
A major criticism of Huntington’s view is that many groups that self-identify as conservative don’t share those Burkean commitments (e.g. most Republicans don’t base their political beliefs on religion). It seems unfair for Huntington to just stipulate that conservatives must share those values. And we like to believe that rather than simply a reactive ideology, conservatives uphold some clear political-philosophical beliefs and principles. More to come.
-Jake
Related posts:
- Populism and the future of conservatism
- Strains of modern conservatism
- Mt. Vernon Statement
- Is social conservatism a new religion?
- My professor voted for McCain
ShareComments
2 Responses to “Conservatism”
Leave a Reply
[...] Partyers oppose not all government programs, but just new government programs? Earlier this week, Jake quoted Samuel Huntington describing conservatism as a “system of ideas employed to justify any [...]
[...] Before I provide independent analysis of what contemporary American conservativism might mean, it will be helpful to continue our foray into the more pure academic debates and look at Oxford political theorist Michael Freeden’s criticism of the Samuel Huntington paper I outlined last week. [...]