Conservatism

A Rediscovery

Yoram Hazony

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781684511105
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Libertà politica

The idea that American conservatism is identical to "classical" liberalism—widely held since the 1960s—is seriously mistaken. The award-winning political theorist Yoram Hazony argues that the best hope for Western democracy is a return to the empiricist, religious, and nationalist traditions of America and Britain—the conservative traditions that brought greatness to the English-speaking nations and became the model for national freedom for the entire world. Conservatism: A Rediscovery explains how Anglo-American conservatism became a distinctive alternative to divine-right monarchy, Puritan theocracy, and liberal revolution. After tracing the tradition from the Wars of the Roses to Burke and across the Atlantic to the American Federalists and Lincoln, Hazony describes the rise and fall of Enlightenment liberalism after World War II and the present-day debates between neoconservatives and national conservatives over how to respond to liberalism and the woke left. Going where no political thinker has gone in decades, Hazony provides a fresh theoretical foundation for conservatism. Rejecting the liberalism of Hayek, Strauss, and the "fusionists" of the 1960s, and drawing on decades of personal experience in the conservative movement, he argues that a revival of authentic Anglo-American conservatism is possible in the twenty-first century.

PART ONE History

CHAPTER I The English Conservative Tradition

1. What Is Conservatism?

A conservative is a traditionalist, a person who works to recover, restore, and build up the traditions of his forefathers and to pass them on to future generations. Political conservatism is a political standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time. This means that political conservatism is not, like liberalism or Marxism, a universal theory, which claims to prescribe the true politics for every nation, at every time and place in history. There can be a political conservatism in Germany or Russia, in China or Arabia, and the conservatives of these nations may be very different in their views from those that we find in the English-speaking countries. And this is as it should be. For while there are certainly principles of human nature that are true of all men, and therefore natural laws that prescribe what is good for every human society, nevertheless, these principles and laws are the subject of unending controversy. This is because the great variety of human experience, and the weakness of the operations of the human mind that are used to generalize from this experience, are such as to produce endless variation in the ways we describe man’s nature and the laws that are conducive to his good. In these matters, each nation and tribe tends to believe that it knows what is best, in keeping with its own experience and its own unique way of understanding things. And so the conservatives of each nation and tribe will have views of their own, which will be similar to the views of conservatives from another nation or tribe only in a limited degree.

My concern in Chapters 1–2 of this book is not, therefore, to say anything about the generality of mankind, or to attempt to construct some kind of universal conservative theory. Rather, I would like to understand the emergence and principles of a single conservative worldview, that of the Anglo-American conservative tradition. This tradition is important to the English-speaking peoples because it is the key to understanding what made these nations powerful and successful, both in political affairs and in almost every other matter. And it is important to other nations that have been influenced by the British and the Americans in various ways.

The emergence of a distinctive Anglo-American conservative tradition can be identified with the words and deeds of a series of towering political and intellectual figures, among whom we can include Sir John Fortescue, Richard Hooker, Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, Edward Hyde (Earl of Clarendon), Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Temple, Jonathan Swift, William Murray (Lord Mansfield), Sir William Blackstone, Josiah Tucker, and Edmund Burke in Britain; and George Washington, John Jay, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton in America. Living in different periods, these individuals nevertheless shared common ideas and principles and saw themselves as part of a common tradition of English, and later Anglo-American, constitutionalism. Scots such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson and French-speakers such as Montesquieu and Vattel obviously contributed much to this tradition as well.¹

A political-traditionalist outlook of this kind was regarded as commonplace in both England and America up until the French Revolution, and only came to be referred to as “conservative” during the nineteenth century, as it lost ground first to liberalism and then to Marxism. Because the word conservative dates from this time of decline, it is often wrongly asserted that those who defended the Anglo-American tradition in the period after the French Revolution—men such as Burke, Adams, and Hamilton—were the “first conservatives.”² But one has to view history in a peculiar and distorted way to see these men as having founded the tradition they were defending. In fact, neither the principles they upheld nor the arguments with which they defended them were new. They inherited their ideas from earlier thinkers and political figures such as Fortescue, Hooker, Coke, Selden, Hale, and Blackstone. These men, the intellectual and political forefathers of Burke, Adams, and Hamilton, are conservatives in the same way that John Locke is a liberal. In their day, the term was not yet in use, but the ideas it designates are easily recognizable in their writings, their speeches, and their deeds.

Where does the tradition of Anglo-American conservatism begin? Any date one chooses will be somewhat arbitrary. Even the earliest surviving English legal compilations, dating from the twelfth century, are recognizable as forerunners of this conservative tradition. But I will begin on what seems indisputable ground—with the writings of Sir John Fortescue, which date from the late fifteenth century. Fortescue occupies a position in the Anglo-American conservative tradition somewhat analogous to Locke’s in the later liberal tradition: Although not the founder of this tradition, he is nonetheless its first truly outstanding expositor, and the model in light of which the entire subsequent tradition developed.

2. John Fortescue and the Birth of Anglo-American Conservatism

The civil war now known as the Wars of the Roses consumed England’s leadership and wealth for more than thirty years, until it was finally brought to an end by the rise of Henry VII and the House of Tudor in 1485. Sir John Fortescue had served for almost two decades as chief justice of the King’s Bench, the English Supreme Court, when he was deposed, together with the royal family, in 1461. Thereafter, he went into exile with the court of the young prince Edward of Lancaster, the “Red Rose” claimant to the English throne, who had escaped to France to avoid capture by the “White Rose” King Edward IV of York. Fortescue appears to have been named chancellor, or prime minister, of this government in exile.

While in France, Fortescue composed several treatises on the constitution and laws of England, whose purpose was to explain why the English form of government, now threatened with extinction, was worthy of preservation by a new generation whose memory of its splendor was fast receding. Foremost among these works was a small book entitled In Praise of the Laws of England. Although it is often mischaracterized as a work on law, anyone picking this book up will immediately recognize it as an early great work of English political philosophy. Far from being a sterile rehearsal of existing law, it is written in dialogue form—between the chancellor of England and the young prince he is educating so that he may wisely rule his realm—and offers a theorist’s explanation of the reasons for regarding the English constitution as the best model of political government known to man. (Those who have been taught that it was Montesquieu who first argued that, of all constitutions, the English constitution is the one best suited for human freedom may be surprised to find that this argument is given clear and compelling expression by Fortescue nearly three hundred years earlier, in a work with which Montesquieu was probably familiar.)

Fortescue wrote in the decades before the Reformation and was a firm Catholic. But every page of his work breathes the spirit of English nationalism—the belief that through long centuries of experience, and thanks to a powerful ongoing identification with Hebrew Scripture, the English had succeeded in creating a form of government more conducive to human freedom and flourishing than any other known to man. According to Fortescue, the English constitution provides for what he calls “political and royal government,” by which he means that English kings do not rule by their own authority alone (that is, “royal government”), but together with the representatives of the nation in Parliament and in the courts (that is, “political government”). In other words, the powers of the English king are limited by the traditional laws of the English nation in the same way—as Fortescue emphasizes—that the powers of the Jewish king in the Mosaic constitution in Deuteronomy are limited by the traditional laws of the Israelite nation.³ This is in contrast with the Holy Roman Empire and with France, which were governed by Roman law, and therefore by the maxim that “what pleases the prince has the force of law,” thus allowing absolute government.⁴ Among other things, the English law is described as providing for the people’s representatives, rather than the king, to determine the laws of the realm and to approve requests from the king for taxes.⁵

In addition to this discussion of what later tradition would call the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances, Fortescue also devotes extended discussion to the guarantee of due process under law, which he explores in his discussion of the superior protections afforded to the individual under the English system of trial by jury, with its rejection of torture in judicial proceedings.⁶ Crucially, Fortescue consistently connects the character of a nation’s laws and their protection of private property to economic prosperity, arguing that limited government bolsters such prosperity, while an absolute government leads the people to destitution and ruin. In another of his writings, The Difference Between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy (also known as The Governance of England, ca. 1471), he starkly contrasted the well-fed and healthy English population living under their limited government with the French, whose government was constantly confiscating their property and quartering armies in their towns—at the residents’ expense—by unilateral order of the king. The result of such arbitrary taxation and quartering is, as Fortescue writes, that the French people have been “so impoverished and destroyed that they may hardly live…. Truly, they live in the most extreme poverty and misery, and yet they dwell in one of the most fertile parts of the world.”⁷

Like later conservatives, Fortescue does not believe that either Scripture or human reason can provide a system of laws suitable for all nations. We do find him drawing frequently on the Mosaic constitution and the biblical “Four Books of Kings” (I–II Samuel and I–II Kings) to assist in understanding the political order and the English constitution. Nevertheless, Fortescue emphasizes that the laws of each realm reflect the historic experience and character of each nation, just as the English common law is in accord with England’s historic experience. Thus, for example, Fortescue argued that a nation that is self-disciplined and accustomed to obeying the laws voluntarily rather than by coercion is one that can productively take part in determining the way it is governed. This, Fortescue proposed, was true of the people of England, while the French, who were of undisciplined character, could be governed only by the harsh and arbitrary rule of absolute royal government. On the other hand, Fortescue also insisted, again in keeping with biblical precedent and later conservative tradition, that this kind of national character was not set in stone, and that such traits could be gradually improved or worsened over time.⁸

Fortescue was eventually permitted to return to England, but his loyalty to the defeated House of Lancaster meant that he never returned to power. He was to be chancellor of England only in his philosophical dialogue in In Praise of the Laws of England. His book, however, went on to become one of the most influential works of political thought in history. With the accession of Henry Tudor VII to the throne, it became a kind of Tudor manifesto circulating in a small number of copies. First printed in the reign of Henry VIII, Fortescue’s In Praise of the Laws of England spoke in a resounding voice to that period of heightened nationalist sentiment, in which English traditions, now inextricably identified with Protestantism, were pitted against the threat of invasion by Spanish-Catholic forces aligned with the Holy Roman Emperor.⁹ In this environment, Fortescue was quickly recognized as England’s most important political theorist, paving the way for him to be read by centuries of law students in both England and America and by educated persons wherever the broader Anglo-American conservative tradition struck root.

3. Richard Hooker and Protestant Conservatism

In the 1530s, King Henry VIII led his people in what became the first modern movement for national independence. Regarding themselves as restoring England’s ancient freedom, Henry and his advisers cut the ties that bound the English government to the pan-European bureaucracy of the pope and the German emperor, established the king as the head of the Church of England, translated the Bible into English, and dissolved the monasteries that were seen as hotbeds of papist sentiment.¹⁰ Henry’s campaign for English independence was followed by aggressive Protestant reforms under the brief rule of his son Edward VI; and then by a desperate attempt to lead the country back into Europe’s Catholic political and religious order by Henry’s daughter Mary, whose husband, Philip II of Spain, regarded himself as divinely appointed to return England to obedience.

The stability, strength, and cohesion of Britain as an independent, Protestant nation was secured during the forty-five-year reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, who ascended to the throne in 1558. It was Elizabeth who eventually defeated Philip’s armada and attained a religious “settlement” that established the Anglican church, while tolerating Catholics and Protestant dissenters as long as they remained discreet in their practices. Yet Elizabeth’s remarkable achievements were threatened by Protestant radicals, who chafed at her willingness to offer Catholics a degree of accommodation and at her nationalist religious policies which stubbornly refused to conform the Church of England to internationally accepted standards for what reformation should look like.

It was under these conditions that Richard Hooker, a minister to the English legal profession as master of the Temple Church until 1591, took it upon himself to present a theoretical framework for the independent national state that had emerged in England under the Tudors, while at the same time seeking to limit the autocratic tendencies that accompanied their struggles to secure the nation against foreign invasion and internal dissolution. The result was one of the most remarkable works of modern political theory, his eight-volume Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Among its achievements was its theory of political conservatism, which defended a vision of national particularism within the context of the effort to secure general political, religious, and moral norms.

In disputing the radical proposals of his Puritan opponents, Hooker argued that almost any order is better than no order at all, and that the burden of proof was on those who proposed to abandon existing custom. Moreover, it is not enough to show that a proposed reform would be better in the abstract, because real human beings respond poorly to sudden social and legal changes. As Hooker wrote: “When the people see things suddenly discarded, annulled, and rejected that long custom had made into matters of second nature, they are bewildered, and begin to doubt whether anything is in itself naturally good or evil, rather than being simply whatever men choose to call it at any given moment…. Thus, whenever we change any law, in the eyes of the people it cannot help but impair and weaken the force that makes all laws effectual.”¹¹ He therefore concludes, “If the newer laws are only slightly more beneficial, we should generally conclude that to endure a minor sore is better than to attempt a dangerous remedy.”¹²

But of course, the political order Hooker sought to defend—an independent nation and an independent church—was itself the product of the dramatic changes undertaken during H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: Is Conservative Revival Possible?
• Part One: History
• Part Two: Philosophy
• Part Three: Current Affairs
• Part Four: Personal
• Conclusion: On Being a Conservative Person
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright