Edmund Fawcett’s books on the history of liberalism and conservatism take as their fundamental difference their stances toward social change. In Fawcett’s essay, he wrote,
Liberalism responded to a novel condition of societies, energised by capitalism and shaken by revolution in which populations were growing fast and where, for better or worse, material and ethical change was now ceaseless.
One might say that the liberal disposition is to embrace and manage social change. The conservative disposition is to resist and reverse social change.
In the essay on liberalism, Fawcett wrote,
Four ideas in particular seem to have guided liberals through their history.
The first is that the clash of interests and beliefs in society is inescapable. Social harmony, the nostalgic dream of conservatives and the brotherly hope of socialists, is neither achievable nor desirable – because harmony stifles creativity and blocks initiative. Meanwhile conflict, if tamed and put to use as competition in a stable political order, could bear fruit as argument, experiment and exchange.
Secondly, human power is not to be trusted. . .
Progress for the better is both possible and desirable. . .
Finally, the framework of public life has to show everyone civic respect, whatever they believe and whoever they are.
Fawcett argues that neither conservatives nor radicals can accept these ideas. Conservatives believe that traditional societies were harmonious in the past. Radicals believe that harmony can be achieved in the future through socialism.
Regarding power, Fawcett says that conservatives urge that we submit to authority, and radicals believe that they must take power, at least until the revolution has created the new utopia.
Conservatives have doubts about progress, and radicals see progress as something that they must direct.
Conservatives have resisted giving equal rights to everyone, and radicals believe that some people’s rights (the privileged) must be reduced in order to give others the rights they deserve.
A few more thoughts:
1. Fawcett’s definition of liberalism is capacious. It can include economic liberty. But it also includes “taming” the market, which seems to be the point of his essay.
2. The difference between merely embracing change and managing change is a major divide between libertarians and others. The Cato Institute’s Human Progress embraces change. The idea of managing change is implicit in the Obama slogan “hope and change,” in Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State, and in the Communist idea of a “vanguard” leading the proletariat.
3. In his latest book, on conservatism, Fawcett takes the view that conservatism is stupid and backward. Conservatives are always saying that change will have terrible results, and yet things work out. Conservatives opposed integration and civil rights, and those worked out. They opposed feminism, and that worked out. Etc.
A conservative would say that liberals’ memory is selective. They have forgotten that they once embraced eugenics as a way to achieve social progress. They have forgotten that Prohibition backfired. They have forgotten that they once said of the Soviet Union “I have seen the future and it works.” They have forgotten their support for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. They have overlooked the decline of living standards and freedom in Cuba.
Looking ahead, it may be too early to tell about the effects of some changes. The warnings about the adverse effects of affirmative action seem to me to be accurate, but the left wants to double down on it. Same with the decline of religion, the traditional family, and child-bearing. We have not seen the dire consequences of deficit spending yet, but that does not mean that we will escape dire consequences.
Perhaps if you read his books, you will find that when Fawcett gets into specific intellectual histories he is even-handed. But in his overall characterization of the two sides he is not. Instead, he comes very close to defining any positive feature of society as liberal and any bad idea for social arrangements as conservative.
Like many political terms, the meaning of the world “liberalism” is being contested. There used to be much more of a consensus that it meant maximizing liberty as both the root of the word and the traditional usage would suggest. Not that it ever was easy to get agreement on which policies maximize liberty.
Then as William F. Buckley led a movement against the direction of social change, he and Ronald Reagan began to explicitly define liberalism as what they were opposed to.
Republicans increasingly used the word “liberal” as a derogatory epithet while winning elections and so many Democrats made the dubious decision to rebrand themselves as “progressives” since “liberal” had begun to acquire the stink of defeat. Most were unaware of the checkered past the historical Progressive movement had and liked the idea that it sounded like being in favor of progress especially since liberty was going out of fashion as a brand.
Meanwhile many libertarians had been mostly ignored all along while describing themselves as “classical liberals” and claiming that both left and right had come to abuse the term “liberal.”
It’s usually pointless to argue against the conventional meaning of a word because language is convention all the way down. But in this case, the convention is far from settled right now. My sympathies are with the libertarians in this framing.
Maximizing liberty will always result in more change than any genuine conservative is comfortable with and more inequality than any genuine leftist is comfortable with.
And it will require more tolerance than either is comfortable with.
From Reagan’s 1965 autobiography:
“It’s a curious thing: I talked on this theme of big government during six years of the Eisenhower administration and was accepted as presenting a nonpartisan viewpoint. The same speech delivered after January 20, 1961, brought down thunders of wrath on my head, the charge that my speech was a partisan political attack, an expression of right wing extremism. My erstwhile associates in organized labor at the top level of the AFL-CIO assail me as a ‘strident voice of the right wing lunatic fringe.’ Sadly I have come to realize that a great many so-called liberals aren’t liberal–they will defend to the death your right to agree with them.”
What changed on January 20, 1961? Nothing that couldn’t be changed back when a different administration took over in 1968 or 1980.
Reagan continued: “The classic liberal used to be the man who believed the individual was, and should be forever, the master of his destiny. That is now the conservative position. The liberal used to believe in freedom under the law. He now takes the ancient feudal position that power is everything. He believes in a stronger and stronger central government, in the philosophy that control is better than freedom. The conservative now quotes Thomas Paine, a long-time refuge of the liberals: ‘Government is a necessary evil; let us have as little of it as possible.'”
“Fawcett takes the view that conservatism is stupid and backward.”
Awesome – I can add these adjectives to my personal list! As a conservative, I take a great deal of pleasure in being stupid and backwards.
BTW – continuing to adjudicate the civil rights debates from 60+ years ago is meaningless to me as a conservative born in the 1970s. But, for the record, the 1964 civil rights act garnered 80%+ Republican support vs. roughly 65% among Democrats.
And, gee whiz, I wonder what the libertarians were saying about civil rights legislation back in 1964? “Government enforced equal accommodation is a violation of property rights” is probably not too far off.
I think it is fair to say that in 1964, libertarians thought, “Governments should be absolutely prohibited from discriminating racially, individuals should be absolutely allowed (freedom of association and all that), that as aggregations of individuals most companies should be allowed to discriminate, but that those who operated with special government privileges (e.g., street car franchises) should not.”
This was similar to Constitutional Law at the time. The equal protection clause of the 14th amendment meant that governments couldn’t discriminate, so there was constant litigation over whether there was sufficient “state action” in things like a private parking garage whose land had been provided by a local program of “urban renewal”. The Supreme Court said it could not discriminate.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was based on the power of Congress to “regulate interstate commerce” and made the “state action” requirement superfluous.
Thanks, appreciate your reply. Did any libertarian say it better than Rand? Does she even count as a libertarian?
Separately, ASK should name names or stop calling conservatives the anti-integration and anti-civil rights movement. Sounds like revisionism to me, but I’m open to being proven incorrect.
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Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine — but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist’s freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist’s right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue — and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism.
Needless to say, if that “civil rights” bill is passed, it will be the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject.
https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/individual-rights/racism/
Several years ago, I reread Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. Yeah, it was actually written by Brent Bozell but Goldwater put his name on it and many of his supporters swore by it. It’s mostly a brief for freedom and limited government but the last chapter is jarring. He says the southern states have chosen segregation and the federal government should respect their choice.
What ?!?! The states haven’t chosen Jim Crow; their governments have. Running through the book is the truth that “the government” is not “the people”. Which is especially true when a large proportion of “the people” are prevented from voting. In any other situation, he would be decrying a government placing disabilities on a group of people and severely limiting their ability to change them.
Besides, segregation is a system that restricts people’s freedoms and property rights. Indeed, that is why the Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley (1917) declared unconstitutional laws that restrict whites to one geographic area and blacks to another. It interferes with freedom of contract.
To the extent that conservatism means, “Hey, let’s be careful about making changes. There are reasons for things to be the way they are.” To that extent, many conservatives were at least somewhat “anti-integration and anti-civil-rights”.
These terms don’t really serve as more than vague directions of affiliation. Anyone can dig down and try to define them, but that is largely a useless exercise because no one in the American political arena (with perhaps the single exception of Bernie Sanders) ever makes any attempt at clarifying and delineating these affiliations, or adhering to them in any meaningful way.
This is further complicated by the troubling trend of ever increasing levels of hyperbole in discussions of public policy. The gap between the realities of modern governance and the rhetoric on the campaign trails has continued to widen to the point where it is difficult to see any relationship whatsoever.
We don’t work at this stuff any more in a meaningful way, and political leaders seem to be discovering just how little accountability the process has on them. The theatrics are crushing the political philosophies.
Good points Tom except that I don’t think Bernie deserves any praise at all for clearly defining his affiliations.
If you press him on what “democratic socialism” really means he says it means Nordic style taxpayer funded social safety nets funded entirely with tax increases on the rich. The problem is that’s not how they do it there. They have market economies where people can get rich and government is funded with very high taxes on the middle class. Bernie’s appeal, such as it is, is that he seems to be genuinely unaware of this rather than transparently lying about it.
When Bill Mahar pressed him on why Vermont had arguably the most disastrous rollout of Obamacare in the country despite being the most “socialist” state, he replied that understanding such a state level question wasn’t relevant to his qualifications for the President since President wasn’t a state level position.
Just to be clear, I agree on your points about Bernie. I only meant he was the only high profile politician I could think of that put any effort into defining and maintaining any political point of view that was consistent over time.
Well yeah, but my main point about Bernie was that kind of consistency isn’t necessarily a good thing. I’d prefer a willingness to correct mistakes to being consistently wrong.
I’m kind of getting tired of people positing broad, philosophical, almost platonist definitions of current political ideologies, and suggesting a clear, unbroken continuity across history of these singular ideologies. Our political ideologies are very much specific to their time and place. People have reasons (or at least purport to) beyond mere temperament for supporting or opposing a particular social change, and if they oppose it and lose, history brands them conservative, but does that really mean there’s some overarching pattern? Or are we just imposing a narrative from today backward on history? IMO, modern conservatism and modern liberalism are both basically post-WW2 ideologies. They’re obviously influenced by predecessor ideologies, but in much more complicated ways. The stories people tell about the geneaologies of their worldviews (e.g. Eric Foner’s history of liberalism, or the National Review’s waxing on about Edmunde Burke and Russell Kirk) mostly seem like mythologies to me.
Modern progressives, for example, would probably deny that prohibition or eugenics are part of their legacy, and impute them to the right, but the fact that major ideologies even a hundred years ago don’t make any sense relative to current political battle lines belies the overarching Manichean narrative being told.
+1
This is the most insightful comment I’ve seen on this website for a long time.
Fawcett’s 4 criteria of liberalism are idiosyncratic. And they don’t fit as antonyms to conservatism:
1. Clash of interests and outlooks in society. The notion that conservatives posit social harmony is a straw man.
2. Mistrust of power. Conservatives (who favor decentralization, private governance, etc.) probably emphasize this more than liberals. Another straw man.
3. Progress. Conservatives don’t say progress isn’t possible. They say it’s complicated. Mostly another straw man.
4. Civic respect. Conservatives tie respect to individual responsibility. (“My station and its duties.”) Mostly another straw man.
These typologies are frustrating. Not only do they erase nuance between attitudes about change but differences in types of change.
Let’s take just three important figures from the narrow window of history in which Fawcett is working: Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and Vaclev Havel.
At great violence to the great nuance of the great man, per haps the following summarizes Oakeshott’s attitude about change best:
“We consider ourselves to be free because no one in our society is allowed unlimited power. No leader, faction, party or ‘class’, no majority, no government, church, corporation, trade, or professional association or trade union. The secret of its freedom is that it is composed of a multitude of organisations in the constitution of the best of which is reproduced that diffusion of power which is characteristic of the whole.” So change is something evolutionary: voluntarily reproducing the best, discarding the rest.
The great Roger Scruton, although writing much consistent with Oakeshott, offers another take on change that differs radically from “liberal” attitudes:
“By living in a spirit of forgiveness we not only uphold the core value of citizenship but also find the path to social membership that we need. Happiness does not come from the pursuit of pleasure, nor is it guaranteed by freedom, it comes from sacrifice. That is the message of the christian religion and it is the message that is conveyed by all the memorable works of our culture. It is the message that has been lost in the noise of repudiation, but which it seems to me can be heard once again if we devote our energies to retrieving it. And in the christian tradition the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices vengeance and renounces thereby a part of himself for the sake of another.” This sort of change as forgiveness, however, is anathema to the liberal. The liberal demands that the sins of our forefathers never be forgiven and that only by perpetually litigating selected sins of the past can progress. The federal government will soon be in the hands of a party that rejects forgiveness and embraces hatred of the other. We will see how that works out.
And finally the great Vaclav Havel. an inspiring advocate of direct democracy, wrote:
“Consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim. For this reason the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.” So change is about individual choices and individual reflections, not mass indoctrination into specific ideologies as the next administration, liberals, and libertarians demand.
Without any more great men like these three still alive, it is tempting to surrender to the despairing notion that our national trajectory ends as Venezuela or North Korea. And that humanity will devolve into a species of bryophyte rather than retain the greatness of these men. In fact I would bet on it. But that doesn’t absolve the sentient from the moral obligation to resist.
“Liberalism is that principle of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all-powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the State over which it rules for those to live who neither think nor feel as it does, that is to say as do the stronger, the majority. Liberalism–it is well to recall this today–is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so acrobatic, so anti-natural. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.”
That was Jose Ortega Y Gasset.
Fawcett calls him “the right-wing Spanish thinker, Jose Ortega Y Gasset.”
Arnold, until reading your post, I didn’t know journalist E. Fawcett. His work seems a terrible choice to analyze intellectuals’ ideologies (as visions of social order) and irrelevant to understand politics (as competition for government power).