Conservatism and nobility

This may not go over too well on a site called "free republic" but here goes. As I look out across the political landscape I notice a correlation: the more egalitarian our society, the more problems we have.

In America we call 'Conservative' what would be radically Liberal in old Europe, the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution. Don't confuse this with the socialists (Democrats) running around calling themselves liberals, they've stolen the word. Liberal is derived from liberty, which is connected to ideas of egalitarianism, certainly a radical concept 250 years ago. I see a progression from the egalitarian idealogy of the French revolution to the social leveling and statist ideas of the socialist and the Marxist. When our primary goal becomes equality in defiance of the simple fact that not all people are equal we must resort to force to lift up some and repress others and the mechanism of the state maintains the monopoly on force. Yes, there I've said it not all people are equal - that's a fact of human nature - some are smarter, stronger, more talented etc than others and trying to treat everyone like they have the same abilities is ridicoulous. The classic dissertation on the madness of egalitarian philsophy is Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" and it truly is one of the founding documents of conservative thought. I think it is time for us to re-evalute this radical egalitarian philsophy and judge it by it's fruits.

I'd be interested how you came to the conclusion that most Freepers are egalitarians.

Of course, being Americans, we're not big on blood aristocracy; that is not part of the American tradition (though some of us despise Tony Blair for his destruction of the House of Lords--blood aristocracy being a big part of the British tradition). But I don't see how you can accuse the average Freeper of being a leveller.

well said

The argument for monarchy as a basis for a conservative-libertarian political system was put forward very recently by Hans Hermann-Hoppe in _Democracy, The God That Failed_. Although I am not a monarchist or Integrist myself, I am familiar with their line of thinking, and had many interesting discussions with them years ago on the alt.revolution.counter USENET board. I hope you'll stick around and share your perspective.

I am becoming one, I'd be interested in reading that book or paper you cited. The book by the author I posted is free online and I intend to work thru that over the next couple of weeks, have to take it in small doses, reading a book online gives me headaches lol.

I suppose I saw a great many of the libertarian bent on FR so I figured there would be little audience for a discussion of monarchy here and there is little serious discussion of the topic in America.

All I've been able to find is one kook that thinks he's decended from the house of David and a "Royalist Party of America" site that has very little on it and they seem more interested in the ineffectual constitutional-monarchies of old Europe.

I been thinking alot about it the last few weeks and I just wonder if this republican experiment has run it's course. As we slide towards the sewer morally and either socialism or facism economically I wonder if it isn't time for a paradigm shift. Historically conservatives have opposed expanding sufferage and Burke wrote extensively about the notion of a 'natural aristocracy'. I believe a strong monarchy could balance a parliament elected by property owners only and maintain a continuity of culture and nationalism. Of course the big problem is how you would even start one, America has no monarchial tradition, no royalty period. One of the signficant advantages of monarchy is you have individuals literally born to rule, groomed for it all their lives and not constrained by a 4 or 8 year term in office to create a 'legacy'.

Neal Boortz said it best a couple of weeks ago (I don't think hes really a libertarian, seems much more conservative than anything else)"50% of the people in this country are two stupid to be free" and that's really true, sad but true. Of course theres the old axiom that a democracy can only survive until a majority discovers it can vote itself goodies from the public treasury. We are fast approaching that here in America and most of Western Europe is already past that point.

I believe the key is to limit the power of government in general.

Any government has no business in the charity business period that should be the purview of private organizations and religious groups exclusively.

No government has the any business in educating, it becomes only a tool of propoganda to maintain it's own power. The market will solve that issue private schools, religious schools would spring up if the government stopped stealing my money and feeding it down the black hole of public schools.

Federalism is a dead concept, perhaps it was necessary when the Constitution was written and it took days or weeks to communicate between states but that is no longer an issue. Remove the concept of states and you remove the need to 'regulate interstate commerce', the single most abused clause in the current Constitution.

I'm not sure we even need a written Constitution, England has never had one. A return to Common law would allow for far more flexibility. No Supreme Court period, that body started violating the current Constitution and set itself up as an unaccountable oligarchy 11 years after it was written.

Ideas? feedback?

American conservatives are not egalitarian, nor do they praise mediocrity, but neither are they ultramontane, and certainly they would repudiate the kind of hereditary nobility Prof. Corrêa de Oliveira fawns before in this lecture (Imperial and Royal Highness, Archduchess Monica of Austria; your Grace, Duke of Maqueda...Sir Roberto de Mattei and My Lord Marquis Coda Nunziante).

No American conservative that I know who quarrel with the professor that "(1) there must be limits to inequality, and (2) there must be limits to equality." Totally non-controversial.

It's the ultramontane and monarchist flavor to professor's lecture that would cause most American conservatives to reject his message, not his views on the unequal distribution of gifts and abilities across the human population.

over here

The problem isn't at the top of the pyramid, it is at the foundation. We already have a ruling elite.

I think the fastest and most effective way to cure the majority of America's problems is to nullify citizenship by birth. Citizenship should be earned by some form of civil service. For example 4+ years of military service or a certain amount of lifetime paid taxes or for example, a young doctor could work for a few years in a remote town to gain citizenship. The numbers could be adjusted for inflation but the basic principles would have to be codified in an Amendment so that politicians couldn't easily create loopholes.

Of course, such an amendment would anihilate the democrat party so we can probably assume it will never happen. We are much more likely to get a monarch than a responsible form of government. In fact, at 30, I almost expect to see a democrat attempt to seize total power within my lifetime. Not that republicans are immune to corruption and evil, but at this juncture, the democrats are the closest thing to a totalitarian movement our country has ever seen.

"Tradition" is a dusty old thing, unworthy of allegiance on its own. That is why Russell Kirk avoided the word when discussing the adherence to the tried and true, the slowly developed and perfected.

Instead he spoke of "custom, convention and continuity." Tradition alone is lonely and somewhat works against healthy change and growth "necessary for our own preservation" as I recall Burke claiming.

The problem for Aristocracy is that it generally understood as hereditary aristocracy and that appears to be the way that the author has formulated his proposal.

Burke and most other conservatives that followed in his wake as true "old whigs" were never the friends of arbitrary power, especially as protected by privilege outside the rule of law.

The only "aristocracy" that Burke and his followers as conservatives can be said to hold dear is a "natural aristocracy", or what Americans call a meritocracy. Even that is a fluid group, held together by prudence alone in American Conservatism.

As a man of his times, Burke saw the House of Lords and the prerogatives of peerage as necessary. But that was for his time and his country, not for ours. When he studied our written constitution as opposed to the new one of France and the unwritten on of Britain in formulating an argument for the new Canadian Constitution, he didn't lump it in and condemn it with the French experiment. He accepted it as consistant with Liberty and so should we.

His support of natural aristocracy and how he distinguishes it is best described in a lengthy essay by Paul Elmer More where he quotes Burke in full:

And we must note, in the first place, that to Burke, as to Plato, it never occurred to think that society, even under the most lawless anarchy, could exist without leaders. "Power," he knew, "of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish." He knew too, and declared, that in the end he who made himself master of the army would overbear all other influences; but meanwhile he beheld the State of France under the sway of demagogues who were preparing the people for a carnival of blood and cruelty, and all his eloquence was exerted, and with extraordinary effect, to avert from his own country this plague of revolution. The philosophes, who had prepared the dogmas of popular flattery for the mouth of a Marat and a Robespierre, had intensified in him the natural British distrust of all application of abstract reasoning to government and the affairs of life; and he felt a profound aversion for those who would "lay down metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences," and would then "limit logic by despotism." Being thus debarred from belief in a true philosophy by his experience of the false, yet having himself a mind that grasped at general principles, he turned to "the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it." In that "discipline of nature" he looked for the genuine guidance of society, and one of the memorable passages of his works is that in which he describes the character of those who, themselves under this control, should be for others "men of light and leading":
A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the State, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found;--to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity, and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences;--to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man;--to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind;--to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous art;--to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice--these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

Not many, even among the wisest of our own generation, would fail to respond favourably to that glowing picture of nature's aristocrats, but when we come to the means by which Burke would ensure the existence and supremacy of such a class, it is different. Despite some tincture of the so-called "enlightenment," which few men of that age could entirely escape, Burke had a deep distrust of the restive, self-seeking nature of mankind, and as a restraint upon it he would magnify the passive as opposed to the active power of what is really the same human nature. This passive instinct he called "prejudice"--the unreasoning and unquestioning attachment to the family and "the little platoon we belong to in society," from which our affection, conincident~ always with a feeling of contented obligation, is gradually enlarged to take in the peculiar institutions of our country; "prejudice renders a man's virtues his habits, . . . through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his nature." Prejudice is thus the binding force which works from below upwards; the corresponding force which moves from above is "prescription"--the possession of rights and authority which have been confirmed by custom. In other words, Burke believed that the only practical way of ensuring a natural aristocracy was by the acceptance of a prescriptive oligarchy; in the long run and after account had been taken of all exceptions--and he was in no wise a blind worshipper of the Whig families which then governed England--he believed that the men of light and leading would already be found among, or by reason of their preeminence would be assumed into, the class of those whose views were broadened by the inherited possession of privilege and honours.
He so believed because it seemed to him that prejudice and prescription were in harmony with the methods of universal nature. Sudden change was abhorrent to him, and in every chapter of history he read that the only sound social development was that which corresponded to the slow and regular growth of a plant, deep-rooted in the soil and drawing its nourishment from ancient concealed sources. In such a plan prejudice was the ally of the powers of time, opposing to all visionary hopes a sense of duty to the solid existing reality and compelling upstart theory to prove itself by winning through long resistance. And with the force of time stood the kindred force of order and subordination personified in privilege. "A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together," would be Burke's standard of a statesman; "everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution." In passages of a singular elevation he combines the ideas of Hobbes on the social contract with those of Hooker on the sweep of divine universal law, harmonizing them with the newer conception of evolutionary growth. "Each contract of each particular State," he says, "is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place." And thus, too, "our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the State, in what we improve, we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete."
If we look below these ideas of prejudice and privilege, time and subordination, for their one animating principle, we shall find it, I think, in the dominance of the faculty of the imagination. Nor did this imaginative substructure lying beneath all of Burke's writings and speeches, from the early essay on the Sublime and Beautiful to his latest outpourings on the French Revolution, escape the animadversion of his enemies. Tom Paine made good use of this trait in The Rights of Man, which he issued as an answer to the Reflections. "The age of chivalry is gone," Burke had exclaimed at the close of his famous tirade on the fall of Marie Antoinette. "Now all is changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination .... " To this Paine retorted with terrible incision. Ridiculing the lamentation over the French Queen as a mere sentimental rhapsody, he catches up Burke's very words with malign cunning: "Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book, has he bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope in the most miserable of prisons. It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself. Nature has been kinder to Mr. Burke than he has been to her. He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird."
Now there is an element of truth in Paine's charge, but there is distortion also. To say that Burke had no thought for the oppressed and the miserable is a wanton slander, disproved by abundant passages in the very Reflections and by his whole career. "If it should come to the last extremity," he had once avowed in Parliament, with no fear of contradiction, "and to a contest of blood, God forbid! God forbid!--my part is taken; I would take my fate with the poor, and low, and feeble." But it is the fact nevertheless, construe it how one will, that in the ordinary course of things Burke's ideas of government were moulded and his sentiment towards life was coloured by the vivid industry of his imagination, and that he thought the world at large controlled by the same power. I doubt if analysis can reach a deeper distinction between the whole class of minds to which Burke belongs and that to which Paine belongs than is afforded by this difference in the range and texture of the imagination.

Now, we again see why Russell Kirk constantly harped upon the issue of a "moral imagination" and even used it in creating the title for his own autobiography, The Sword of the Imagination at the end of his life.

Burke and most other conservatives that followed in his wake as true "old whigs" were never the friends of arbitrary power, especially as protected by privilege outside the rule of law.

I defintely do not support arbitrary power, but I termed what was needed is a paradigm shift. Under republicanism power is legitimized by the consent of the governed - under a Christian monarchy power is legitimized by divine right. And who is to say which is the better justification? Certainly the history of governments in the world would be filled by the latter not the former, republicanism is largely new a scant 200-300 years old in any large scale implementation. I believe the two can be combined and balanced. What I believe is imperative is we do two things:

1) Severly restrict the powers of government in general. Government is really only good at one thing - restricting freedom. Put another way, government is good at the judicious use of force and that's it.Its influence should be restricted to those areas for which it is inherently needed - law enforcment and the military. Education, trade, public welfare, art, just to name a few - should be absolutely off limits, government of any kind is simply not any good at it.

2) The only way to achieve the above is to limit sufferage, as long as you allow the 'gimme' class to exercise political power - for which they are ill suited - you will quickly end up with government back in your face all day every day. Which brings me to the next posters point

think the fastest and most effective way to cure the majority of America's problems is to nullify citizenship by birth. Citizenship should be earned by some form of civil service

I don't think we need to eliminate citizenship since with that you run the risk of elminating basic civil rights - but sufferage yes. Ever see or read Starship Troopers? I found very interesting the idea of requiring some time of military service to earn the privelege of exercising political power. I go back and forth as to whether sufferage should be extended to property owners in general or just property owners that serve 2-4 years in the military as well.

I strongly believe in capitalism and private property in fact I would see a farther broader application of Hayekian economics than we currently enjoy. I would eliminate government powers such as eminient domain (too easily abused) and of course totally eliminate property taxes or any kind of income tax. The tax code is the single greatest source of power for the government, even more so than a military. I would argue a properly restricted government could easily operate on a national sales tax of no more than 7-10%.

I believe that such a severly limited government could be created with a strong monarchy as an executive branch and a proportional-representation, uni-cameral parliament as a legislative branch. I would make it very difficult to even pass any positive law.

I see no need for a formal judical branch, leave that to common law judges. You could even allow for the broader sufferage in the election of local judges operating on the principles of common law that you do for electing members of parliament.

I find it interesting that as we go about setting up a government in Iraq we are not setting it up like our own, it will have a President, Prime Minister and a proportional-representation Parliament, isn't that very telling? It's apparent to somebody that the system we have right here in the US in not that great. Theres also a fairly strong movement in Iraq for a constitutional monarchy, isn't that interesting? However if they go the way of Western Europe in instituting universal sufferage, they will quickly degenerate into one more socialist backwater.

Therein lies the problem in one simple equation:

universal sufferage = socialism

I don't see how it could go any other way.

Don't forget that at times of crisis, it's the hierarchies that come to the rescue of the democracy.

In WWII, for instance, there were the military, American industry and finance, that came to the rescue. None noted for extreme democratic tendencies.

Thanks for to the late Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn for this heads-up.

Kirk says, "original ideologues believed that they could discover a system of natural laws--which system, if conformed to , could become the foundation of universal harmony and contentment."

Kirk also finds others with the same view of the fraud of ideology:
"Kenneth Minogue, in his recent book Alien Powers: the Pure Theory of Ideology, uses the word 'to denote any doctrine which presents the hidden and saving truth about the world in the form of social analysis. It is a feature of all such doctrines to incorporate a general theory of the mistakes of everybody else.' That "hidden and saving truth' is a fraud--a complex of contrived falsifying "myths', disguised as history, about the society we have inherited."

As the old Whigs battled against arbitrary power and fought to establish the rule of law formulated by slow institutions reinforced by custom, convention and continuity in the 18th century, in the 20th our battle has been with Ideology.

The social analysis advanced in the article is fearfully close to that form of social analysis alleging to contain a hidden saving truth. But isn't it advanced to throw out, by a rational scheme, all our slowly and legitimately developed custom, convention and continuity to jump to some static point in history it alleges is "traditional?"

The House of Lords was the last check on the Socialist adjeda of Tony Blair.

What Corrêa de Oliveira seems to be arguing (and I'm only 1/2 way thru his other book Revolution and Counter-Revolution ) that all the departures from the kingdom of Christendom are illegitimite. That would include Burke's Angelican English monarchy :). He talks about the revolution as a continuing process from the 15th Century forward encompassing Protestism, Secularism, Republicanism, Socialism and finally Communism. I found his thoughts on human pride as a driving force intriguing:

A. Pride and Egalitarianism

The proud person, subject to another's authority, hates first of all the particular yoke that weighs upon him.

In a second stage, the proud man hates all authority in general and all yokes, and, even more, the very principle of authority considered in the abstract.

Because he hates all authority, he also hates superiority of any kind. And in all this there is a true hatred for God.25

This hatred for any inequality has gone so far as to drive high-ranking persons to risk and even lose their positions just to avoid accepting the superiority of somebody else.

There is more. In a height of virulence, pride could lead a person to fight for anarchy and to refuse the supreme power were it offered to him. This is because the simple existence of that power implicitly attests to the principle of authority, to which every man as such? the proud included can be subject.

Pride, then, can lead to the most radical and complete egalitarianism.

This radical and metaphysical egalitarianism has various aspects.

a. Equality between men and God. Pantheism, immanentism, and all esoteric forms of religion aim to place God and men on an equal footing and to invest the latter with divine properties. An atheist is an egalitarian who, to avoid the absurdity of affirming that man is God, commits the absurdity of declaring that God does not exist. Secularism is a form of atheism and, therefore, of egalitarianism. It affirms that it is impossible to be certain of the existence of God and, consequently, that man should act in the temporal realm as if God did not exist; in other words, he should act like a person who has dethroned God.

b. Equality in the ecclesiastical realm: the suppression of a priesthood endowed with the power of Orders, magisterium, and government, or at least of a priesthood with hierarchical degrees.

c. Equality among the different religions. All religious discrimination is to be disdained because it violates the fundamental equality of men. Therefore, the different religions must receive a rigorously equal treatment. To claim that only one religion is true to the exclusion of the others amounts to affirming superiority, contradicting evangelical meekness, and acting impolitically, since it closes the hearts of men against it.

d. Equality in the political realm: the elimination or at least the lessening of the inequality between the rulers and the ruled. Power comes not from God but from the masses; they command and the government must obey. Monarchy and aristocracy are to be proscribed as intrinsically evil regimes because they are antiegalitarian. Only democracy is legitimate, just, and evangelical.26

e. Equality in the structure of society: the suppression of classes, especially those perpetuated by heredity, and the extirpation of all aristocratic influence upon the direction of society and upon the general tone of culture and customs. The natural hierarchy constituted by the superiority of intellectual over manual work will disappear through the overcoming of the distinction between them.

f. The abolition of the intermediate bodies between the individual and the State, as well as of the privileges inherent in every social body. No matter how much the Revolution hates the absolutism of kings, it hates intermediate bodies and the medieval organic monarchies even more. This is because monarchic absolutism tends to put all subjects, even those of the highest standing, at a level of reciprocal equality in a lower station that foreshadows the annihilation of the individual and the anonymity that have reached their apex in the great urban concentrations of socialist societies. Among the intermediate groups to be abolished, the family ranks first. Until it manages to wipe it out, the Revolution tries to lower it, mutilate it, and vilify it in every way.

g. Economic equality. No one owns anything; everything belongs to the collectivity. Private property is abolished along with each person's right to the full fruits of his toil and to the choice of his profession.

h. Equality in the exterior aspects of existence. Variety easily leads to inequality of status. Therefore, variety in dress, housing, furniture, habits, and so on, is reduced as much as possible.

i. Equality of souls. Propaganda standardizes, so to speak, all souls, taking away their peculiarities and almost their own life. Even the psychological and attitudinaldifferences between the sexes tend to diminish as much as possible. Because of this, the people, essentially a great family of different but harmonious souls united by what is common to them, disappears. And the masses, with their great empty, collective, and enslaved soul, arise.27

j. Equality in all social relations: between grown-ups and youngsters, employers and employees, teachers and students, husband and wife, parents and children, etc.

k. Equality in the international order. The State is constituted by an independent people exercising full dominion over a territory. Sovereignty is, therefore, in public law, the image of property. Once we admit the idea of a people, whose characteristics distinguish it from other peoples, and the idea of sovereignty, we are perforce in the presence of inequalities: of capacity, virtue, number, and others. Once the idea of territory is admitted, we have quantitative and qualitative inequality among the various territorial spaces. This is why the Revolution, which is fundamentally egalitarian, dreams of merging all races, all peoples, and all states into a single race, people, and state.28

l. Equality among the different parts of the country. For the same reasons, and by analogous means, the Revolution tends to do away with any wholesome regionalism - whether political, cultural, or other - within countries today.

m. Egalitarianism and hatred for God. Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches29 that the diversity of creatures and their hierarchical gradation are good in themselves, for thus the perfections of the Creator shine more resplendently throughout creation. He says further that Providence instituted inequality among the angels30 as well as among men, both in the terrestrial Paradise and in this land of exile.31 For this reason, a universe of equal creatures would be a world in which the resemblance between creatures and the Creator would have been eliminated as much as possible. To hate in principle all inequality is, then, to place oneself metaphysically against the best elements of resemblance between the Creator and creation. It is to hate God.

n. The limits of inequality. Of course, one cannot conclude from this doctrinal explanation that inequality is always and necessarily a good.

All men are equal by nature and different only in their accidents. The rights they derive from the mere fact of being human are equal for all: the right to life, honor, sufficient living conditions (and therefore the right to work), property, the setting up of a family, and, above all, the knowledge and practice of the true religion. The inequalities that threaten these rights are contrary to the order of Providence. However, within these limits, the inequalities that arise from accidents such as virtue, talent, beauty, strength, family, tradition, and so forth, are just and according to the order of the universe.32

http://www.tfp.org/what_we_think/rcr_book_online/rcr_part1_chap7.html

As Pride was the nature of Original Sin, seeking to be "as God" this makes perfect sense to me.

I know Burke rejected the concept of Natural Law, I would beg to differ as would 2000 years of Catholic theology.

Thanks for your reply detailing in depth the thought background for the article's contentions. I will give it some thought.

Your concept of Burke as opposed to Natural Law, even the Natural Law in the schoolmens' sense, is incorrect. I will agree that prior to 1958 some scholars abhoring all conservatism, lumped his thought in with Utilitarians and dismissed it during the advance of modernity. This was pretty well debunked a Burke's position by Peter J. Stanlis in Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. In reprinting this 1958 work for wider distribution as Conservatism was being reunderstood in the last half of the twentieth century Russell Kirk wrote the foreward for the republication. He is a portion of that forward on the issue of Burke and Natural Law:

While the notion of Natural Law -- i.e., that moral and legal norms derive from the God-given nature of human beings -- is at the root of the Western tradition of political thought, the first half of the 20th century saw a determined attack on it. Today, the mention of Natural Law still causes extreme discomfort in liberal-dominated political and legal circles -- especially in public discussions of abortion, homosexuality and bioethics. But recent years have also seen an increasing interest in Natural Law theory. The time may be right, then, for a rediscovery of this rich tradition of moral and political thought -- and for its central place in the thought of conservatism's "Founding Father," Edmund Burke.
When Edmund Burke and the Natural Law was first published in 1958, it had long been thought that Burke was an enemy of the Natural Law, and a proponent of utilitarianism. But Peter J. Stanlis shows that, on the contrary, Burke was one of the most eloquent and profound defenders of Natural Law morality and politics in Western civilization. Indeed, Stanlis reveals, in every important political problem he encountered, in his economic principles, and in the great crisis of the French Revolution, Burke consistently appealed to the Natural Law and made it the basis of his political philosophy. Stanlis also explains why Burke, as an exponent of Natural Law or traditional "natural rights," was in the great classical tradition of Aristotle and Cicero and the Scholastic tradition of Thomas Aquinas. It was precisely for this reason, argues Stanlis, that Burke was opposed to the eighteenth-century revolutionary "rights of man" which derived from Hobbes, Locke, and the scientific rationalists of the seventeenth century.
In presenting a systematic exposition of Burke's acceptance of the Natural Law, Stanlis analyzes the relation between Natural Law and Burke's conception of the law of nations, of human nature, of Church and State, and of his principles of political prudence, prescription, and sovereignty. More relevant today than when it was first published, this book is mandatory reading for students of philosophy, political science, law, and history.
"Dr. Stanlis' book does more than any other study of this century to define Burke's position as a philosopher, relating the convictions of Burke to the great traditions of Christian and classical civilization. Indeed, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law is the first full-length endeavor to examine the philosophical postulates of that intellectual giant. . . . After more than a century in which Burke was confounded with the utilitarians, the real nature of his concept of natural law is being recognized." -- RUSSELL KIRK, from his Foreword

Kirk also had a fine lecture on Natural Law which Heritage keeps on line and I have found quite worthwhile.

Others may want to contributre before this becomes too narrow a discussion.

Doubtless, monarchy and nobility have their uses and justifications in the countries where they still exist, but we aren't one of them, and haven't been one for centuries. What we have to conserve is something very different. And even in societies with a titled nobility, expressions and examples of human excellence don't usually conform to the Peerage or the Almanac de Gotha.

Most people on Internet political sites are probably more often independent thinkers than their neighbors and -- if only to the slightest degree -- rebels and malcontents. We may very well acknowledge differences among mankind and honor true human excellence, but we -- even if we are very conservative -- we are probably reluctant to bow the knee before those who are supposed to know more or be better than the rest of us. So what I'm thinking, is yes, we do have different abilities and different levels of intelligence, but the way that human excellence makes itself known in our world will have to be very different from the way that it did a millennium or so ago.

For lack of time, I'm throwing out a link as my response. Here are two comments in print (on-line pdf) which I read a month ago that touch on some of these issues that split conservative claimaints to natural law today. link