Does Conservatism allow liberty?

Modern Age is to be warmly congratulated for its articles on "Conservatism and Freedom" in the Fall, 1960 issue. Certainly, there is no more important intellectual task than launching a dialogue toward a synthesis of the two most important intellectual currents on the American "Right" today: the conservative and the libertarian. Modern Age can make, and has begun to make, a notable contribution toward that dialogue. As a libertarian, I have been aware for some time of the importance, not only of converting authoritarian conservatives to the cause of freedom, but also of convincing the libertarians of the great importance of recognizing the existence of an objective moral order. As both Messrs. Meyer and Evans point out, there can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle. In concentrating on the ends of choice, the conservative, by neglecting the conditions of choice, loses that very morality of conduct with which he is so concerned. And the libertarian, by concentrating only on the means, or conditions, of choice and ignoring the ends, throws away an essential moral defense of his own position.

I was particularly impressed by Frank Meyer’s admirable article. I pass over reluctantly the temptation to quote extensively from his essay. I don't think there is anyone in the "conservative" camp who has as great an understanding of, or sympathy with, the libertarian, or "classical liberal" tradition. In contrast to Mr. [M. Stanton] Evans, for example, who chides the libertarian for believing that liberty is the highest moral end for man, Meyer sees that the best libertarians have realized, with Lord Acton, that liberty is the highest political end, i.e., the highest end that is proper for government, the organized arm of coercion, to achieve. I am a devoted adherent of a large part of the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophical tradition; but one part of that tradition has been politically disastrous for the West: the Greek notion that the State is somehow the most important ethical institution in society, and that therefore what is good for men to pursue is automatically good for the State to pursue. There, I believe, is the critical error of the authoritarian conservative creed, of the old-style "natural law" tradition before its proper corrective in the individualist, natural rights variant of that tradition as coined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Here, perhaps, is the gravest failure of the Meyer and Evans articles: the failure to distinguish, in discussing classical liberalism, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century versions of that creed. Their strictures apply, and properly so, to the nineteenth century version, which, admittedly, is much more common today: Benthamite, utilitarian. even positivistic – a version particularly prevalent among neo-classical economists. It is this wing of liberalism that has been remiss in recognizing objective moral values. The older seventeenth and eighteenth century version, however, was quite different: it believed staunchly in an objective moral order of natural laws, discoverable by man's reason; and, as part of that moral order, it discovered the importance of individualism and the natural rights of person and property as the proper political end. It therefore worked, though often unwittingly, within the Thomist natural law tradition of the West, adding a full libertarianism to that tradition. Whether or not the older libertarians were Christians theologically, they were certainly Christians philosophically. Neither Meyer nor Evans, therefore, do proper justice to those libertarians of the Enlightenment who have, in a sense, already anticipated our dialogue and our synthesis.

Aside from this general caveat, I have only a few minor criticisms of Mr. Meyer's article. Meyer recognizes the primacy of reason, and realizes that simple reliance on tradition is an impossible task. Because of the infinite number of historical traditions handed down to us, we must select and choose; and our only weapon in this selection is our reason. And yet, despite his basic recognition of the primacy of reason, Meyer leans too far over on the "conservative" side of this dialogue by emphasizing that reason must operate "within tradition," and not in any sort of "ideological hubris... ignoring the accumulated wisdom of mankind." Now when Mr. Meyer recognizes that the conservatives must employ reason to select between true and false traditions, he has placed himself above and not within tradition, and necessarily so. A man cannot be within something, and yet judge it from all outside standard. Here I think Meyer has fallen for what is essentially a straw man version of the libertarian, rationalist creed. Every intelligent rationalist recognizes the great value of studying past thinkers and past accumulations of knowledge: for no man is omniscient, and therefore it is an enormous time saver and gain in efficiency, knowledge and clarity, to build on the best writings of the past, instead of trying to spin out all the laws of the universe de novo, which is to act as a savage with no inherited record of civilization to help a man on his path to knowledge and wisdom, While modern historicists and relativists scoff at such accumulated wisdom, certainly no genuine rationalist libertarian will do so. But to say this does not give up the supremacy of reason – quite the contrary.

My only other quarrel with Mr. Meyer is his fondness for the term "tension" to describe the proper balance between freedom and value; tension implies a precariousness and an underlying contradiction which I don't think exist. Properly developed, the relationship between freedom and ethics is a peaceful and cohesive harmony, a harmony of a unified natural law, rather than a precarious tension. In the political sphere, that harmony comes about through the confinement of the coercive arm of society to the defense of individual rights of property.

With Mr. Evans, on the other hand, my differences are much more serious. I have already mentioned his confusion of political ends with general moral ends. He also erects a false dichotomy in believing that the libertarian wants freedom because he believes man is naturally good and should therefore be turned loose, while the conservative wants freedom because he realizes that men can be bad, and therefore wants to limit potentialities or evil in society. This, too, is a straw man. Rousseau believed that man is naturally good, corrupted by his institutions; but only a few libertarians in the past have believed this, and I myself have yet to meet a libertarian who holds to such a puerile absurdity. All libertarians whom I have met believe, as all sensible men do, that man is a mixture or good and evil: that he is capable or both types of actions, given his free will to choose. The libertarian wants, simply, to create such institutions in society that will maximize the channels, the inducements, for doing good, and to minimize the opportunities to do bad. We want freedom from the State because the State is the only legal, and by far the most powerful, channel for committing evil in society; and because, having freedom, man can exercise his opportunity to perform good actions. The positive and the negative, the freeing of the good and the checking of the bad, are two sides to the same libertarian coin. The same applies, incidentally, to the much abused "philosophical anarchist" variant of the libertarian creed: no philosophical anarchist worth his salt believes any longer in man's "natural goodness." Viewing the State as the legal engine for crime and evil, he wishes to abolish it, and to substitute various other forms of defense of the property rights of the individual. The real question that the anarchist poses, and that no one has really tried to answer, is this: is the State the only, or the most efficient, possible instrument for defending the rights of person and property in society?

We come now to Mr. Evans' apotheosis of James Madison and the Constitution. Belonging roughly to the Jeffersonian wing of the inner debate of the Founding Fathers, I regard Madison as a weak trimmer and fuzzy compromiser, rather than a sagacious combiner. Without the unnecessary Madisonian concessions to the profoundly statist programs and conceptions of Hamilton, the Constitution would have been a far more libertarian and a far more lasting instrument than it has proved to be. But there is more involved here: for Mr. Evans, despite the black record of the present century, persists in believing that the American Constitution has succeeded gloriously in its mission. From any libertarian, or even conservative, point of view, it has failed and failed abysmally; for let us never forget that every one of the despotic incursions on man's rights in this century, before, during and after the New Deal, have received the official stamp of Constitutional blessing. The Constitution has been stretched a very long way. If Mr. Evans should reply that these tyrannical acts have been really, and in the strict sense, unconstitutional, I would hasten to agree.

But that is my whole point: that the instruments set up by the Constitution – in particular, the erection of a monopoly Supreme Court with the final power to decide what is Constitutional – embody a fatal flaw in any constitutional attempt to limit the State. In short, when you give the State itself the final power to interpret the very instrument that is supposed to limit the State, you will inevitably find the Constitution being stretched and distorted, until it becomes merely a means of lending an unjustified aura of prestige to the State's despotic actions.

Calhoun, one of the great political thinkers in American history, went to the heart of the matter when he criticized the common reliance on a written constitution restricting government power:

"...It is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the powers of government. without investing those for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance, will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. Being the party in possession of the government, they will, from the same constitution of man which makes government necessary to protect society, be in favor of the powers granted by the constitution and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit them. ..of what possible avail could the strict construction of the minor party be, against the liberal interpretation of the major, when the one would have all the powers of the government to carry its construction into effect and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing its construction...."1

The Constitution, in short, was a noble attempt to solve the problem of restricting government to its proper sphere; but it was a noble attempt that failed, and therefore we must begin to search for more stringent and effective measures.

Two final comments on the conceptions of conservatism and classical liberalism, In the first place, I do not like the term "conservative," nor does any other libertarian. This term stands in the way of a constructive synthesis, for it implies not only the "natural conservatism" mentioned by Frank Meyer – the blind and tropistic defense of whatever status quo happens to exist – but also, more seriously, it carries with it the conservative position of the nineteenth century, when conservatism was born. For nineteenth century Conservatism, far from criticizing the Benthamites from the old natural rights point of view, was essentially a reaction against all that liberalism stood for: in particular, individual freedom, and the economic freedom that produced capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. The Conservative Party of Prussia, the first effective conservative grouping, was expressly formed to defend the institution of serfdom threatened by the rising influence of freedom and free enterprise. The irrationalist, organicist, and étatist biases of Conservatism all fed and influenced the supposedly anticonservative socialists of the nineteenth century. Even today, there is in the concept of "conservatism" an atmosphere redolent of Throne-and-Altar which has no place in any desirable "Rightist" synthesis, To put it bluntly and concretely, I would say to the conservatives, we libertarians will give up Bentham if you will give up the Crown of St. Stephen,

And, lastly, having indicated the neglected strengths of the classical liberal tradition, I must indicate some of the weaknesses of that tradition, even in its enormously superior eighteenth century version. The chief defects of Enlightenment liberalism, I believe, are these: an inordinate passion for democracy, and an inordinate hatred for institutional religion, particularly for the Roman Catholic Church. The true liberal should place foremost, in judging government, the policies that that government pursues; who runs the government is of secondary, purely instrumental importance, Of course, all other things being equal, it would be nice to have democratic voting ratify libertarian policies, but this is of minor importance. Democracy is simply a process, and once elevated into an end-in-itself, it becomes a potentially mighty engine for mass tyranny and popular collectivism. Furthermore, democracy, by encouraging the idea of equal voting by all men, grants the vote before it is properly earned and therefore fosters an excessive and dangerous egalitarian tendency in society.

The intense hatred of the Enlightenment for the Catholic Church was a tragic thing; for it severed, on both sides, two traditions which really had a great deal in common, and set these two mighty forces at almost permanent odds. This hatred pushed the Enlightenment liberals into numerous and grave anti-libertarian measures to oppress the Church: confiscation of church property, outlawing of monasteries and the Jesuit order, nationalization of the Church, and, perhaps the gravest of all, the erection of a system of public schools. For the establishment of public schools makes the grand concession, the concession that education of the young, one of the most important functions of society, is properly to be conducted by the coercive State. And if schools, why not other educational media, why not radio and television and newspapers, and why not, indeed, every other social good and service? The very existence of the public school – even if Americanism groups see to it that its textbooks are not tainted with socialism – cries aloud to its little charges the virtue and sanctity of government ownership and operation, and therefore, of socialism.

The libertarian, then, in building upon the older classical liberal tradition, must not only abandon utilitarianism and positivism: he must also abandon that tendency toward a worship of democracy and an unreasoning hatred of Catholicism that led him, among other flaws, to the erection of a vast incubus of statism and tyranny, the public school. And in doing so, he will also take a long step forward toward that very synthesis of the Right-wing Weltanschauung that we all recognize as so important in the present-day world.

John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition On Government (The Liberal Arts Press, 1953), pp. 25 ff. Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the founder of modern libertarianism and the dean of the Austrian School of economics, was the author of The Ethics of Liberty and For a New Liberty and many other books and articles. He was also academic vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies, and the editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

A good essay, containing much with which I can agree. However, Mr. Rothbard appears to construct a few straw men of his own, like here:

the Greek notion that the State is somehow the most important ethical institution in society, and that therefore what is good for men to pursue is automatically good for the State to pursue.

This imputes not only a category mistake to all of conservative thought, but it misrepresents history. Would, for instance, a religious conservative believe states to be the most important societal ethical institution, or the churches?

as part of that moral order, it discovered the importance of individualism and the natural rights of person and property as the proper political end.

I'm reading Brian Tierney's The Idea of Natural Rights which traces the right to person and property back to thirteenth century canon law and the fourteenth century Fraticelli controversy. But Tierney provokes an interesting question: how can an individual right be anything but subjective? It's always presented as an assertion "I have the right," for if one said "All men have the right," this would be not an individual right but a corporate one.

Now when Mr. Meyer recognizes that the conservatives must employ reason to select between true and false traditions, he has placed himself above and not within tradition, and necessarily so. A man cannot be within something, and yet judge it from all outside standard.

So how does reason, a human faculty molded by tradition, set itself above that which formed it? Extraordinary acts of discovery, I suppose; but then these discoveries are then themselves incorporated into a tradition.

We want freedom from the State because the State is the only legal, and by far the most powerful, channel for committing evil in society; and because, having freedom, man can exercise his opportunity to perform good actions.

Very nice words. But doesn't libertarianism similarly wish to create a legal, powerful arena for committing both good and evil? In other words, how can a libertarian single out the state for being a legal channel for doing evil(and good) when he simply wants to create another such channel, calling it by a different name?

The real question that the anarchist poses, and that no one has really tried to answer, is this: is the State the only, or the most efficient, possible instrument for defending the rights of person and property in society?

This has been answered, actually: mediating institutions can fulfil many, if not all of the functions of the State. Otherwise everything would implode during a revolution, when there is no effective state. I suppose only a scholar of comparative anarchy can speak about the efficiency of such periods.

it carries with it the conservative position of the nineteenth century, when conservatism was born.

Mr. Rothbard has declared Aristotelians and Thomists conservatives, yet wants to insist that conservativism was only born in the nineteenth century?

This hatred pushed the Enlightenment liberals into numerous and grave anti-libertarian measures to oppress the Church: confiscation of church property, outlawing of monasteries and the Jesuit order, nationalization of the Church, and, perhaps the gravest of all, the erection of a system of public schools.

Much as I agree with Rothbard's denunciation of liberal anti-clericalism, I suspect the two might be bosom buddies. The foundational myths of liberalism, the "state of nature" stories, depict society and government as purely human artifacts, entered into by the choices of autonomous individuals. For the liberal, Churches likewise fall into this category of alleged human artifacts. But for the believer, this is rank heresy. Not only is it Pelagian; try telling a Catholic that his church is the creation of mere men! (Especially this being Pentecost Sunday!)

I doubt this tension between liberalism and ecclesial Christianity inevitably turns to violence, though such contradictions, and others, no doubt exacerbate the differences.

This is an interesting find. Unfortunately, now we can all see that Rothbard's ideas lead to the stinking and festering hell of Rockwellism, but as it's generally unclear how to procede in the current political enviroment, Rothbard's views are still worth examining.

Off the top of my head, the natural law 16th and early 18th century classical liberalism that Rothbard praises does seem to be a commendable tradition. But it was so commendable because it had to prove itself against absolutism and dogmatism. It had to support much of the religious and ethical tradition of the day, because it was such a new outgrowth of that tradition and because it wanted to be accepted by a public that was still largely Christian. Free liberalism or libertarianism from such older ideas, and the risk is that is will go to hell. The question is whether our minds and society can support the ideology that Rothbard commends. It would be hard enough to keep libertarianism alive and predominant. To keep libertarianism on a natural law foundation and maintain its appeal to today's depraved tastes is probably too much to ask.

Rothbard's mention of Aristotle and Aquinas leads one to ask what they would make of libertarianism. They would certainly approve of certain kinds of liberty, but one wonders if Aristotle or Acquinas might perhaps find that libertarians make what they consider to be means ends and ends means. Would individual freedom be an end for them or a means to the end of happiness or virtue? Would they find the state a means that may be directed to produce a good end? Some freedom is necessary for happiness and virtue. Slaves and the slavish are not happy and coerced virtue has less moral value, but it doesn't seem to follow logically and necessarily that more freedom is always better or that the state is therefore the enemy of happiness or virtue. Aristotle's preference for the middle way, makes one think that he would pursue a middle course between the absolute state and no state.

Certainly, too, Aristotle's belief that man was a social or political animal born to live in cities suggests that he might not entirely agree with Rothbard. I think part of the problem is that ideas of what is public and what is private change so much over centuries and millennia. Aristotle must have had little direct experience of a powerful centralized bureaucracy, though he could probably note some of its features in the non-Hellenic empires of his day, and none of large private corporations. A Greek might oppose the imposition of Persian or Egyptian despotism on his city or locale, and yet still favor the strong public institutions of his native city. This distinction between Hellenic polities and "Oriental despotism" was probably far more important to Aristotle than anything in Rothbard's categories, though to be sure Aristotle was deeply hurt and angered by Athenian democracy's condemnation of Socrates. I suspect Aristotle would have been far more a Madisonian than a Rothbardite.

The idea of freedom and virtue or ethics existing in harmony rather than in tension is an interesting one. Perhaps systematic philosophers like Aristotle or Aquinas might find much in that idea to approve of. For many of us who aren't philosophers it seems questionable. In the sheltered world of the system-maker everything can fit together well. But in the everyday world things are less clear. A philosopher may recognize that we need freedom to be happy or virtuous. It's the ideologue who takes and turns that into a political program. The philosophy may be eminently sensible, but since the ideology leads to the sulphrous burning pit of Rockwellism, one can only be skeptical.

embody a fatal flaw in any constitutional attempt to limit the State. In short, when you give the State itself the final power to interpret the very instrument that is supposed to limit the State, you will inevitably find the Constitution being stretched and distorted, until it becomes merely a means of lending an unjustified aura of prestige to the State's despotic actions.

This is not a flaw in ANY constitutional attempt to limit the State, just a flaw in the way we as a people have failed to follow the precepts of our own founding.

A constitution only works when the people as a whole have a societal agreement to preserve its spirit. Our Constitution was remarkably designed to have checks and balances within the national entity and at the same time retain residual sovereignty in the individual States that would serve as a check on the Federal government as a whole.

These checks and balances were put in place in the pursuit of LIBERTY. If the people were intent and focused on using the system to preserve that LIBERTY and be jealous of it then all would be well and the Constitution would function exactly as intended.

Unfortunately, the people are more concerned about what the government can do for them rather than Liberty. It became convenient for those holding non-majority positions to have a Supreme Court that could change the meaning of the Constitution on a dime rather than gain the necessary approval of the States and the people for a thoughtful change within the system. Whim and popular fad became reason enough for the Supreme Court to veer all over the place. Our system was designed to dampen whim and popular fad and we have short-circuited those protections.

On the other side, States Rights were used for the purposes of maintaining a majority oppression over a minority and preventing the Federal government from promoting LIBERTY. This was not the intended use of States Rights. They were intended to be used by the States to protect the LIBERTY of its citizens from Federal oppression. By using States Rights in this way it became popular whim that they should be destroyed, having no evidence of their Liberty protecting uses since the Alien and Sedition Acts. With the demise of States Rights the unchecked power of the central government to determine the limits of its own powers was unleashed. This is what the author decries about the current state of the system!

States Rights have been destroyed because a) they got in the way of the liberal whim, b) the conservative elements of society misused them for non-Liberty protecting goals.

This is all of our fault. It is our fault for not guarding our Liberty jealously. It is our fault for not guarding the Liberty of our neighbors jealously. It is the fault of our choosing convenience, fad, and popular whim over the slow and thoughtful processes laid down for changing our form of government slowly over time by Amendment. It is not the fault of our Constitution in any way. No Constitution ever made can protect the Liberty of those bound to give it away.

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