https://americanaffairsjournal.

org/2020/02/american-restoration-edmund-burke-and-the-american-
constitution/

American Restoration: Edmund Burke and the American Constitution

by Ofir Haivry
In mid-July 230 years ago, the people of England received a startling piece
of news. They learned that on the previous day, July 14, 1789, a mob of
angry Frenchmen had stormed the Bastille prison, thus toppling one of the
prominent symbols of the Old Regime. It was now clear to all: the growing
unrest in France during the previous months had finally reached a boiling
point. It had become a revolution.

The first reaction by the majority of the British elite was to view this as great
news. This attitude was shared by notorious radicals like Thomas Paine as
well as by establishment figures like the Prime Minister William Pitt the
Younger. To them, it seemed that the French had finally woken up and cast
off their tired, decrepit, and mildly oppressive regime. The road was now
open for progress, and surely French politics would soon become quite
similar to Britain’s, only with better food.

About three weeks later, letters written by Thomas Jefferson, then the
American ambassador to France, arrived from across the Atlantic and broke
the same news to the United States, eliciting broadly similar reactions. As he
sat down in Paris to have breakfast—served by one of his black slaves
brought over from Virginia—Jefferson, with his supreme self-delusion, must
have felt satisfied that the sun of liberty was now shining on both shores of
the Atlantic. Apparently he even hoped that the developments in France
might encourage Americans to amend the constitution they had recently
adopted while he was away in Paris, and which to him was too similar to the
tired, decrepit, and mildly oppressive English one. He had in mind various
brilliant amendments, like his proposal to James Madison that “Every
constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.”
This idea, he was sure, “will be an instance the more of our taking reason for
our guide, instead of English precedent, the habit of which fetters us with all
the political heresies of a nation equally remarkable for its early excitement
from some errors, and long slumbering under others.”
But there was one figure who received the news of the revolution with
disgust and alarm. Edmund Burke, for almost three decades one of the most
prominent voices for liberty on both sides of the Atlantic, came very early on
to regard the revolution in France not as the dawn of a new age of freedom,
but as the very opposite, the false lights of a hellish pit opening. It was to
him a mortal danger to the liberties that a centuries-old constitutional
tradition had successfully established in Britain and in the United States.
Most of all, as Burke explained in his Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), he was worried that English radicals—like Richard Price, Joseph
Priestley, and Thomas Paine—were disseminating the claim that anything
worthwhile in the British constitution was actually founded on social contract
theories like those of Locke and Hobbes. These ideas, apparently refined by
the likes of Voltaire and Rousseau into the republican constitution of France,
were said to represent the “new conquering empire of light and reason.”
According to this radical interpretation, the new American Constitution was
also founded on these rationalist ideas, and it was now high time for Britain
to also conform its tired, decrepit, and mildly oppressive constitution to the
enlightened and improved principles emanating from France.

Burke spent the remaining years of his life (he died in 1797) forcefully
arguing against this view. He argued tirelessly that the English constitution
rested on ideas completely distinct from the “social contract” and the
universal “rights of man.” Moreover, when he addressed the new
Constitution that the Americans had just adopted, Burke insisted that it too
followed the ideas and traditions of English constitutionalism.

The men who actually wrote the American Constitution in the main agreed
with Burke. His account of the U.S. Constitution and its relationship to the
English one would have been easily recognized by Britons and Americans at
the time and for many more generations. In the United States it would have
been self-evident to President Washington, Secretary of the Treasury
Hamilton, and Associate Justice Story, just as it would have been 140 years
later to President, Secretary of War, and Chief Justice Taft. Similarly, in the
UK, prime ministers such as Canning, Wellington, and Disraeli held the very
same views, as of course did Winston Churchill.

Today, however, most Americans find these views strangely unfamiliar. Even
graduates of prestigious law schools are for the most part puzzled. They
seem oblivious to the fact that it was once widely accepted, on both sides of
the Atlantic, that the American Constitution was a version of the British one.
These Americans try to explain that people like Hamilton, Disraeli, and Taft,
who explicitly argued for this view of the constitution, were either
misinformed or else had some ulterior motives for maintaining the
dependence of the U.S. Constitution on English traditions. Granted, all agree
that there are some residual cosmetic similarities and procedural borrowings
from Britain. But essentially, so I am repeatedly and categorically told, the
U.S. Constitution is in the main the result of the Enlightenment ideas of
Locke and Hobbes about natural rights.

Burke’s View of the American Constitution

As for Burke, I find it widely claimed that he never really expressed an
opinion about the U.S. Constitution. In fact, although Burke certainly did not
say or write very much on American affairs after the end of the War of
American Independence in 1783, he did say and write enough both before
and after this date to make the following points clear:

(1) He insisted that his positions about Americans and their government
were consistent throughout his career, including after the passing of the new
Constitution.

(2) He stressed that like all good constitutions, the American one reflected
national character and history—certainly not any abstract “rights of man.”

(3) He claimed that in fact the U.S. Constitution of 1787 was a version of the
English constitution, which Americans “as well adapted to their
circumstances as they could.”

Thus, Burke’s understanding is absolutely opposed to the now fashionable

claims that the U.S. Constitution is based on abstract Lockean principles,
epitomized by the Declaration of Independence. Burke never explicitly
referred to the Declaration when discussing American constitutional ideas (if
anything, in a speech from 1791 he seems to strongly censure its language),
and he clearly regards 1787 as completing a restoration of the Anglo-
American constitutional tradition in the United States.

This understanding of the Constitution is not only important as a matter of

historical study. It is also the only interpretation that can effectively oppose
mounting attempts to revise the Constitution in accordance with speculative
liberal theories. For a Lockean interpretation, based on a priori natural
rights, necessarily leads one to regard the Constitution as a mere tool for
delivering these rights. It is a kind of liberal originalism that slowly chips
away at the intrinsic authority of the Constitution in favor of the abstract
principles that it is alleged to express. Such an interpretation inevitably
opens the door for claims that those parts of the Constitution colliding with
abstract Lockean principles should be done away with. In fact, this is exactly
what is being proposed today, from Lockeans on the left and right. On the
left, four Democratic senators have introduced a constitutional amendment
to abolish the Electoral College. On the right, prominent figures publish
pieces almost daily asserting that the goal of the Constitution is to create a
framework for liberal ideals to flourish.

Burke’s View of America’s Relationship to Britain

In one of his very first speeches in parliament, the “Speech on Declaratory
Resolutions” delivered on February 3, 1766, and dealing with the right of the
British government to tax the American colonists, Burke presented some of
the principal ideas about the English in America, ideas he would uphold
throughout his long career.

Among many other points he made in that speech, Burke argued that
America’s distance from Britain (taking months for information to travel back
and forth) meant that, practically, the colonies could never fully “coalesce”
and become an integral part of Britain’s working constitution: “We have
nothing therefore for it, but to let them carry across the ocean into the
woods and desarts [sic] of America the images of the British constitution;
the Penates [images of Roman family gods] of an Englishman, to be his
Comfort in his Exile, and to be the pledges of his fidelity and to give him an
interest in his Dependency on this Country.”
In essence, Burke was arguing that geographic realities meant America
could not become an integral part of British government, and thus the
English colonists would have for the most part to govern themselves,
according to the “images of the British constitution,” which they had carried
with them “across the ocean.” A decade before the war of independence,
Burke believed that the best Britain could do was to restrain her power, and
let Americans by and large govern themselves with a version of the English
constitution, hoping that by such a mode of government the colonists would
develop a voluntary dependence and loyalty to the mother country. (This
was the model which, after the American experience, Britain eventually
adopted in governing Canada, Australia, and New-Zealand, allowing them
indeed to voluntarily adhere to their mother country, long after having
become independent.)

Eight years later, in June 1774, Burke delivered in Parliament a prominent

speech on the Canada Bill, which was intended to regulate the borders of
that province (recently won from France) with the American colonies. A mere
two years before U.S. independence, Burke focused in this speech on the
constitutional aspects of the proposed border line, stressing that every care
must be taken to ensure that none of the English in America live under the
rule of the “despotic” laws of France, as were still used at that time in
British-ruled Quebec. He clarified that

[t]he reason why I feel so anxious is, that the line proposed is not a line of
geographical distinction merely; it is not a line between New York and some
other English settlement; it is not a question whether you shall receive
English law and English government upon the side of New York, or whether
you shall receive a more advantageous government upon the side of
Connecticut; or whether you are restrained upon the side of New Jersey. In
all these you still find English laws, English customs, English juries, and
English assemblies, wherever you go. But this is a line which is to separate a
man from the right of an Englishman.

He stressed that, “The government of France is good—all government is

good—but, compared with the English government, that of France is
slavery.”
Burke pointed out that, naturally, constitutional arrangements in the colonies
differ somewhat from the mother country, due to local circumstances. Yet,
he asserted, laws from various origins can be “grafted” upon an existing
constitutional framework, with the decisive element for the effect of this
grafting being the basis of that constitution. So that, “with a French basis,
there is not one good thing that you can introduce. With an English basis,
there is not one bad thing that you can introduce.”

The Debate over the French Revolution

By early 1791, two years after the fall of the Bastille, the rattle and hum of
the French revolution was well under way. But with its worst excesses, like
the beheading of the king and queen and the reign of terror, still in the
future, Burke was as yet unsuccessful in swaying the bulk of British public
opinion against it. The British government, headed by the younger Pitt was
increasingly suspicious, but cautiously avoided controversy and did not wish
to provoke the new revolutionary government in France. The majority in
Parliament were still either favorable to the revolution or only mildly critical
of it, with barely a handful sharing the ferocity of Burke’s opposition.
Meanwhile, there was a flurry of pamphlets discussing events in France, with
the vast majority favoring the revolution, and many explicitly castigating
Burke’s Reflections.

Prominent among these was Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which appeared
in March 1791. The book, which Paine dedicated to George Washington, had
been written explicitly to rebut Burke’s Reflections (a second part, published
in February 1792 would be directed against Burke’s Appeal). In his book,
Paine had a chapter on constitutions, where he commended the new
American one as a social contract arising from a blank-slate state of nature,
built on reason and natural rights: “the case and circumstances of America
present themselves as in the beginning of a world.” He contrasted this with
his view of Britain, sneering that “no such thing as a constitution exists in
England” but rather only “mouldy parchments” from 1688 which cannot bind
later generations, and he furthermore exclaimed that “the bill of rights is
more properly a bill of wrongs, and of insult.” The name of Paine’s book thus
became an easy reference for rationalist Lockean theories for those who
supported the French revolution in English-speaking countries. About a
month after it appeared in London, a copy of Paine’s book was received and
read by Jefferson, now serving as secretary of state in George Washington’s
administration. Jefferson approved of Paine’s support for the French
revolution and his reading of the American Constitution as reflecting the
same ideals. He sent a note to the Philadelphia publisher of the American
edition expressing his pleasure “that something is at length to be publicly
said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.” The
“heresies” he mentioned referred to the ideas of John Adams, Alexander
Hamilton, and others whom he dubbed “monarchists” because of their
interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as a version of the English one. The
publisher added most of the note as a “prefix” to the American edition of
Rights of Man. Jefferson, who possibly did not intend it for publication, and
certainly did not foresee the backlash his comments would produce, felt
compelled to write letters of justification to Washington and Adams. In his
Letter to George Washington (May 8, 1791), Jefferson argued that

Paine’s answer to Burke’s pamphlet begins to produce some squibs in our

public papers. In Fenno’s paper [The Gazette of the United States] they are
Burkites, in the others Painites. One of Fenno’s was evidently from the
author of the discourses on Davila [this was actually John Adams]. I am
afraid the indiscretion of a printer has committed me with my friend Mr.
Adams, for whom, as one of the most honest and disinterested men alive, I
have a cordial esteem, increased by long habits of concurrence in opinion in
the days of his republicanism: and even since his apostacy to hereditary
monarchy and nobility, tho’ we differ, we differ as friends should do.

Obviously, at this point the Burke-Paine constitutional debate in Britain was

regarded by Americans as directly relevant to their own constitution.

Thus the perennial debate about the American constitution was already
perfectly formed in 1791: Paine and Jefferson asserted that the Constitution
resulted from rationalist ideals about “rights of man”; Burke, with Hamilton
and Adams, insisted that the American Constitution was not written on a
blank slate. Created by those whom Burke still sometimes referred to as “the
English in America,” the U.S. Constitution was, in his view, an integral
branch of an Anglo-American constitutional tradition.

Not incidentally, Burke’s ideas on the U.S. Constitution came to the fore
explicitly during the spring and summer of 1791, the time of his final and
public break with the pro-revolutionary, radical “New Whigs.” Essential to
Burke’s argument was that the American Constitution was a branch of the
English constitutional tradition, and that, as such, both were totally alien to
revolutionary French ideals.

For some time, Burke had been looking for the right occasion to raise these
issues explicitly in Parliament, in order to force an open showdown between
the opposing views, which most MPs were still attempting to avoid. He found
it in the debate about a Bill for Organizing the Government of Quebec (May
6–8, 1791), during which came several of Burke’s most important, if often
overlooked, pronunciations on this issue.

From the beginning of the debate, Burke swiftly directed it away from
procedural issues and towards a discussion of constitutional principles. He
argued that such a discussion was necessary because, “A body of rights,
commonly called the rights of man, imported from a neighboring country,
had been lately set up by some persons in this, as paramount to all other
rights. A principal article in this new code was ‘That all men are by nature
free, are equal in respect of rights, and continue so in society.’” It is not
superfluous to note the similarity of Burke’s formulation of these dangerous
principles that he rejected, not only to the recent language of the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but also to the American
Declaration of Independence.

Having rejected “the doctrine of the rights of man, which was never
preached any where without mischief,” Burke proposed that Parliament give
to the people of Canada the “best government that their local situation and
their connexion [sic] with this country would admit.” This would be best
served, he believed, by looking at other relevant constitutions, and “The
great examples to be considered, were the constitutions of America, of
France, and of Great Britain. To that of America great attention, no doubt,
was due, because it was of importance that the people of Canada should
have nothing to envy in the constitution of a country so near to their own.
Situation and circumstances were first to be considered.”

It is at this point that Burke presented his view of the new U.S. constitution:
The people of America had . . . formed a constitution as well adapted to their
circumstances as they could. But, compared with the French, they had a
certain quantity of phlegm, of old English good nature, that fitted them
better for a republican government. They had also a republican education;
their former internal government was republican, and the principles and
vices of it were restrained by the beneficence of an over-ruling monarchy in
this country. The formation of their constitution was preceded by a long war,
in the course of which, by military discipline, they had learned order,
submission to command, and a regard for great men. They had learned what
—if it was allowable in so enlightened an age as the present to allude to
antiquity—a king of Sparta had said was the great wisdom to be learned in
his country; to command and to obey. They were trained to government by
war, not by plots, murders, and assassinations. In the next place, they had
not the materials of monarchy or aristocracy among them. They did not,
however, set up the absurdity, that the nation should govern the nation;
that prince prettyman should govern prince prettyman: but formed their
government, as nearly as they could, according to the model of the British
constitution.

Later in this speech, he even went further, explicitly referring to the U.S.
constitution, as no less than an “imitation of the British constitution.” In
short, Burke not only regarded the new American constitution quite
favorably, but also as formed “according to the model of the British
constitution,” although “adapted to their circumstances” as well as possible.
How could a republican constitution in America be modeled after—indeed be
an “imitation” of—the British monarchy? First and foremost, to Burke and
most contemporaries, the English government was not simply a monarchy.
Rather it had developed into a mixed constitution, combining elements of
monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, counterbalancing each other’s
defects. Indeed, he believed that the English constitution had grafted the
virtues of republics upon the form of a monarchy.

As noted above, Burke stressed that he was not a principled enemy to

republics. He did believe, however, that republican governments were, in
effect, constitutionally unstable, if “they had not the materials of monarchy
or aristocracy among them.” This inherent republican instability created a
tilting towards democracy, that had to be counterbalanced, less it run wild
towards untested speculative theories, and government becomes one of
“plots, murders, and assassinations,” like what had happened in France.
Thus, Burke implied that even a republican constitution “adapted” in
structure from the English one, would still suffer from the unruly tendencies
inherent to republican governments.

Regarding America in particular, Burke remarked that on top of the English

framework of their constitution, the Americans also possessed three peculiar
features, which at least to some extent counterbalanced problematic
republican proclivities. All three of these features were part of what we
would describe as their national character.

The first feature was the manners and habits of the Americans. They were,
as Burke said, “of old English good nature” or “phlegmatic.” The second
feature was one that the English in America acquired in their new continent,
but it too was connected to England. This was that they “had also a
republican education” of a very special kind. In other words, during the first
150 years of their existence, while their self-rule was being regulated by the
British monarchy, the colonies had been imprinted with a “restrained”
republicanism.

The third feature was the newest one. During their long war of
independence, the former colonists “had learned order, submission to
command, and a regard for great men” so that they “were trained to
government.” By this training, Americans restrained their individualist
tendencies, and became used to voluntarily following the leadership of
“great men.”

For Burke, these three peculiar features of American national character,

blending English heritage with local circumstances, were crucial in enabling
the United States to become a viable republic. He therefore stressed that the
colonists had fought their war of independence “not to acquire absolute
speculative liberty, but to keep what they had under the English
constitution.” And in that, they had succeeded. The resulting American
Constitution he thus regarded as belonging, together with the English one
from which it had grown, to one type of constitution.
This Anglo-American type he opposed to another type, the revolutionary
“French constitution—a constitution founded on principles diametrically
opposite to ours, that could not assimilate with it in a single point; as
different from it as wisdom from folly, as vice from virtue, as the most
opposite extremes in nature—a constitution founded on what was called the
rights of man.” Such a constitution, Burke argued, had brought destruction
everywhere it had been introduced, from the French West Indian colonies to
France itself.

Only three months after the Quebec debates, Burke’s Appeal from the New
to the Old Whigs, appeared in August 1791. This was the last occasion on
which Burke substantively addressed the American government. In this
work, Burke again reiterated his opinion about the American war being a
defensive effort by the colonists, to protect their traditional English rights—in
effect, a restoration. He stressed that “on a supposition that the Americans
had rebelled merely in order to enlarge their liberty, Mr. Burke would have
thought very differently of the American cause.” But in his “large”
conversations with Americans including Franklin, “and his enquiries
extensive and diligent,” he could only find that America wanted “a security
to its ancient condition.”

Using the literary device of referring to himself in the third person, Burke
added that

he always firmly believed that they were purely on the defensive in that
rebellion. He considered the Americans as standing at that time, and in that
controversy, in the same relation to England as England had to King James
the Second in 1688. He believed that they had taken up arms from one
motive only; that is our attempting to tax them without their consent; to tax
them for the purposes of maintaining civil and military establishments. If this
attempt of ours could have been practically established, he thought with
them, that their assemblies would become totally useless; that under the
system of policy which was then pursued, the Americans could have no sort
of security for their laws or liberties, or for any part of them; and, that the
very circumstance of our freedom would have augmented the weight of their
slavery.
When we recall that the bulk of the Appeal is devoted to presenting the Old
Whig principles—according to which 1688 was not a Lockean radical new
order, but rather a defensive restoration of the traditional English
constitution after James II’s attempts to destroy it—we immediately see the
parallel Burke was drawing between two successful restorations of the
traditional constitutional order, the English Glorious Revolution and the
American Revolution. Explicitly positioning the American war of
independence, as their own version of 1688, in which “purely on the
defensive” they rebelled against an English government set on destroying
their constitutional traditions, the 1787 American constitution then became
the completion of this process, restoring to the Americans the security of
their traditional English laws and liberties.

Tradition or Tool?
In conclusion, Burke believed (1) that the Americans had an established
national character and political culture, both of which were based to a great
extent on English traditions; (2) that the Americans in 1776 rebelled in an
attempt to defend and restore these traditions, like the English in the
Glorious Revolution of 1688; and (3) that the 1787 American Constitution
was the completion of this restoration, a government the Americans
designed “as nearly as they could, according to the model of the British
constitution.” For Burke, then, Jefferson’s grumblings about Americans
following “English precedent,” which tied them to the political ideas of the
mother country were both true and desirable.

As I noted above, the Burkean view of the American Constitution, broadly

speaking , was dominant on both sides of the Atlantic until at least the
1930s, and it remained influential for most of the twentieth century. In the
last few decades, however, this interpretation of the Constitution has
virtually disappeared from view. Instead, the radical notions of Paine and
Jefferson, in which the Constitution is said to proceed mainly from abstract,
Lockean “rights of man,” are now embraced even by most of those who
describe themselves as conservatives.

This radical interpretation has repercussions that reach far beyond the realm
of historical inquiry. For, if the Lockean account is accepted as valid, then
the U.S. Constitution loses any intrinsic traditional value and becomes a
mere tool for advancing liberal principles. As such a tool, it cannot supply
any principled justification for the validity of things like the Electoral College,
the Second Amendment, or even the federal system.

The adoption of new, radical principles of government was exactly what

Burke warned about in his writings, as he put it in a biblically inspired
image: “He was an old man, and seeing what was attempted to be
introduced instead of the ancient temple of our constitution, could weep over
the foundation of the new” (Ezra 3:12). It is for this very reason, that it is
imperative upon us to reclaim and restore the true account of the
Constitution as following in the Anglo-American tradition. Otherwise, as
Burke assures us, it will succumb, sooner or later, to the radical theories of
the abstract “rights of man.”

This article is an American Affairs online exclusive, published February 17,

2020.
About the Author
Ofir Haivry is vice president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, distinguished
senior fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, and author of John Selden
and the Western Political Tradition (Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming).

ALSO BY OFIR HAIVRY

What Is Conservatism?

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/what-is-conservatism/

What Is Conservatism?
by Ofir Haivry and Yoram Hazony
The year 2016 marked a dramatic change of political course for the English-
speaking world, with Britain voting for independence from Europe and the
United States electing a president promising a revived American nationalism.
Critics see both events as representing a dangerous turn toward
“illiberalism” and deplore the apparent departure from “liberal principles” or
“liberal democracy,” themes that surfaced repeatedly in conservative
publications over the past year. Perhaps the most eloquent among the many
spokesmen for this view has been William Kristol, who, in a series of essays
in the Weekly Standard, has called for a new movement to arise “in defense
of liberal democracy.” In his eyes, the historic task of American
conservatism is “to preserve and strengthen American liberal democracy,”
and what is needed now is “a new conservatism based on old conservative—
and liberal—principles.” Meanwhile, the conservative flagship Commentary
published a cover story by the Wall Street Journal’s Sohrab Ahmari entitled
“Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis,” seeking to raise the alarm about the
dangers to liberalism posed by Brexit, Trump, and other phenomena.

These and similar examples demonstrate once again that more than a few
prominent conservatives in America and Britain today consider themselves
to be not only conservatives but also liberals at the same time. Or, to get to
the heart of the matter, they see conservatism as a branch or species of
liberalism—to their thinking, the “classical” and most authentic form of
liberalism. According to this view, the foundations of conservatism are to be
found, in significant measure, in the thought of the great liberal icon John
Locke and his followers. It is to this tradition, they say, that we must turn
for the political institutions—including the separation of powers, checks and
balances, and federalism—that secure the freedoms of religion, speech, and
the press; the right of private property; and due process under law. In other
words, if we want limited government and, ultimately, the American
Constitution, then there is only one way to go: Lockean liberalism provides
the theoretical basis for the ordered freedom that conservatives strive for,
and liberal democracy is the only vehicle for it.

Many of those who have been most outspoken on this point have been our
long-time friends. We admire and are grateful for their tireless efforts on
behalf of conservative causes, including some in which we have worked
together as partners. But we see this confusion of conservatism with
liberalism as historically and philosophically misguided. Anglo-American
conservatism is a distinct political tradition—one that predates Locke by
centuries. Its advocates fought for and successfully established most of the
freedoms that are now exclusively associated with Lockean liberalism,
although they did so on the basis of tenets very different from Locke’s.
Indeed, when Locke published his Two Treatises of Government in 1689,
offering the public a sweeping new rationale for the traditional freedoms
already known to Englishmen, most defenders of these freedoms were justly
appalled. They saw in this new doctrine not a friend to liberty but a product
of intellectual folly that would ultimately bring down the entire edifice of
freedom. Thus, liberalism and conservatism have been opposed political
positions in political theory since the day liberal theorizing first set foot in
England.

Today’s confusion of conservative political thought with liberalism is in a way

understandable, however. In the great twentieth-century battles against
totalitarianism, conservatives and liberals were allies: They fought together,
along with the Communists, against Nazism. After 1945, conservatives and
liberals remained allies in the war against Communism. Over these many
decades of joint struggle, what had for centuries been a distinction of vital
importance was treated as if it were not terribly important, and in fact, it
was largely forgotten.

But since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, these circumstances have
changed. The challenges facing the Anglo-American tradition are now
coming from other directions entirely. Radical Islam, to name one such
challenge, is a menace that liberals, for reasons internal to their own view of
the political world, find difficult to regard as a threat and especially difficult
to oppose in an effective manner. But even more important is the challenge
arising from liberalism itself. It is now evident that liberal principles
contribute little or nothing to those institutions that were for centuries the
bedrock of the Anglo-American political order: nationalism, religious
tradition, the Bible as a source of political principles and wisdom, and the
family. Indeed, as liberalism has emerged victorious from the battles of the
last century, the logic of its doctrines has increasingly turned liberals against
all of these conservative institutions. On both of these fronts, the
conservative and liberal principles of the Anglo-American tradition are now
painfully at cross-purposes. The twentieth-century alliance between
conservatism and liberalism is proving increasingly difficult to maintain.

Among the effects of the long alliance between conservatism and liberalism
has been a tendency of political figures, journalists, and academics to slip
back and forth between conservative terms and ideas and liberal ones as if
they were interchangeable. And until recently, there seemed to be no great
harm in this. Now, however, it is becoming obvious that this lack of clarity is
crippling our ability to think about a host of issues, from immigration and
foreign wars to the content of the Constitution and the place of religion in
education and public life. In these and other areas, America, Britain, and
their allies can neither recognize the difficulties ahead nor develop
appropriate responses to them without a strong and intellectually capable
conservatism. But to have a strong and intellectually capable conservatism,
we must be able to see clearly what the Anglo-American conservative
tradition is and what it is about. And to do this, we have to disentangle it
from its old opponent—liberalism.

In this essay, we seek to clarify the historical and philosophical differences

between the two major Anglo-American political traditions, conservative and
liberal. We will begin by looking at some important events in the emergence
of Anglo-American conservatism and its conflict with liberalism. After that,
we will use these historical events as a basis for drawing some political
distinctions that will be highly relevant for our own political context.

Fortescue and the Birth of Anglo-American Conservatism

The emergence of the 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 individuals such as Sir John
Fortescue, Richard Hooker, Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale,
Sir William Temple, Jonathan Swift, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, John
Dickinson, and Alexander Hamilton. Men such as George Washington, John
Adams, and John Marshall, often hastily included among the liberals, would
also have placed themselves in this conservative tradition rather than with
its opponents, whom they knew all too well.

Living in very 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. A politically
traditionalist outlook of this kind was regarded as the mainstream in both
England and America up until the French Revolution and only came to be
called “conservative” during the nineteenth century, as it lost ground and
became one of two rival camps.
Because the name conservative dates from this time of decline, it is often
wrongly asserted that those who continued defending the Anglo-American
tradition after the revolution—men such as Burke and Hamilton—were the
“first conservatives.” 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 read them in the books of earlier thinkers
and political figures such as Fortescue, Coke, Selden, and Hale. These men,
the intellectual and political forefathers of Burke and Hamilton, are
conservatives in just the same way that John Locke is a liberal. The term
was not yet in use, but the ideas that 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 arguably
recognizable as forerunners of this conservative tradition. But we will not
make the case for this claim here. Instead, we will begin on what seems to
us indisputable ground—with the writings of Sir John Fortescue, which date
from the late fifteenth century. Fortescue (c. 1394–1479) occupies a position
in the Anglo-American conservative tradition somewhat analogous to Locke
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.1 It is here that any
conservative should begin his or her education in the Anglo-American
tradition.

For eight years during the Wars of the Roses, beginning in 1463, John
Fortescue lived in France with the court of the young prince Edward of
Lancaster, the “Red Rose” claimant to the English throne, who had been
driven into exile by the “White Rose” king Edward IV of York. Fortescue had
been a member of Parliament and for nearly two decades chief justice of the
King’s Bench, the English Supreme Court. In the exiled court, he became the
nominal chancellor of England. While in exile, Fortescue composed several
treatises on the constitution and laws of England, foremost among them a
small book entitled Praise of the Laws of England.
Although Praise of the Laws of England is often mischaracterized as a work
on law, anyone picking it up will immediately recognize it for what it is: an
early great work of English political philosophy. Far from being a sterile
rehearsal of existing law, it is written as a dialogue between the chancellor
of England and the young prince he is educating, so that he may wisely rule
his realm. It 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 will be dismayed to find that this argument is presented
more clearly by Fortescue nearly three hundred years earlier, in a work with
which Montesquieu was probably familiar.)

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 (i.e., “royal government”), but together
with the representatives of the nation in Parliament and in the courts (i.e.,
“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. This is in contrast with the Holy Roman Empire of
Fortescue’s day, which was supposedly governed by Roman law, and
therefore by the maxim that “what pleases the prince has the force of law,”
and in contrast with the kings of France, who governed absolutely. 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.

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. 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, c. 1471), he starkly contrasts 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. . . . Verily, they live in the most extreme poverty
and misery, and yet they dwell in one of the most fertile parts of the world.”

Like later conservative tradition, Fortescue does not believe that either
scripture or human reason can provide a universal law suitable for all
nations. We do find him drawing frequently on the Mosaic constitution and
the biblical “Four Books of Kings” (1–2 Samuel and 1–2 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
argues that a nation that is self-disciplined and accustomed to obeying the
laws voluntarily rather than by coercion is one that can productively
participate in the way it is governed. This, Fortescue proposes, 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.

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 play the part of chancellor of England only in his philosophical
dialogue, Praise of the Laws of England. His book, however, went on to
become one of the most influential works of political thought in history.
Fortescue wrote in the decades before the Reformation, and as 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. First printed around
1545, Fortescue’s 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. This environment quickly established Fortescue as England’s first
great 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.

The Greatest Conservative: John Selden

We turn now to the decisive chapter in the formation of modern Anglo-
American conservatism: the great seventeenth-century battle between
defenders of the traditional English constitution against political absolutism
on one side, and against the first advocates of a Lockean universalist
rationalism on the other. This chapter in the story is dominated by the figure
of John Selden (1584–1654), probably the greatest theorist of Anglo-
American conservatism.

Under the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, Fortescue’s account of the virtues of

England’s traditional institutions had become an integral part of the self-
understanding of a politically independent English nation. But in 1603,
Elizabeth died childless and was succeeded by her distant relative, the king
of Scotland, James Stuart. The Stuart kings had little patience for English
theories of “political and royal rule.” In fact, James, himself a thinker of
some ability, had four years earlier penned a political treatise of his own, in
which he explained that kings rule by divine right and the laws of the realm
are, as the title of his book suggested, a Basilikon Doron (Greek for “Royal
Gift”). In other words, the laws are the king’s freely given gift, which he can
choose to make or revoke as he pleases. James was too prudent a man to
openly press for his absolutist theories among his English subjects, and he
insisted that he meant to respect their traditional constitution. But the
English, who had bought thousands of copies of the king’s book when he
ascended to their throne, were never fully convinced. Indeed, the policies of
James and, later, his son Charles I constantly rekindled suspicions that the
Stuarts’ aim was a creeping authoritarianism that would eventually leave
England as bereft of freedom as France.
When this question finally came to a head, most of the members of the
English Parliament and common lawyers proved willing to risk their careers,
their freedom, and even their lives in the defense of Fortescue’s “political
and royal rule.” Among these were eminent names such as Sir John Eliot and
the chief justice of the King’s Bench, Sir Edward Coke. But in the generation
that bore the full brunt of the new absolutist ideas, it was John Selden who
stood above all others. The most important common lawyer of his
generation, he was also a formidable political philosopher and polymath who
knew more than twenty languages. Selden became a prominent leader in
Parliament, where he joined the older Coke in a series of clashes with the
king. In this period, Parliament denied the king’s right to imprison
Englishmen without showing cause, to impose taxes and forced loans
without the approval of Parliament, to quarter soldiers in private homes, and
to wield martial law in order to circumvent the laws of the land.

In 1628, Selden played a leading role in drafting and passing an act of

Parliament called the Petition of Right, which sought to restore and
safeguard “the divers rights and liberties of the subjects” that had been
known under the traditional English constitution. Among other things, it
asserted that “your subjects have inherited this freedom, that they should
not be compelled to contribute to any tax . . . not set by common consent in
Parliament”; that “no freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of
his freehold or liberties, or his free customs . . . but by the lawful judgment
of his peers, or by the law of the land”; and that no man “should be put out
of his land or tenements, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disinherited nor put
to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.”

In the Petition of Right, then, we find the famous principle of “no taxation
without representation,” as well as versions of the rights enumerated in the
Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments of the American Bill of
Rights—all declared to be ancient constitutional English freedoms and
unanimously approved by Parliament, before Locke was even born. Although
not mentioned in the Petition explicitly, freedom of speech had likewise been
reaffirmed by Coke as “an ancient custom of Parliament” in the 1590s and
was the subject of the so-called Protestation of 1621 that landed Coke, then
seventy years old, in the Tower of London for nine months.
In other words, Coke, Eliot, and Selden risked everything to defend the
same liberties that we ourselves hold dear in the face of an increasingly
authoritarian regime. (In fact, John Eliot was soon to die in the king’s
prison.) But they did not do so in the name of liberal doctrines of universal
reason, natural rights, or “self-evident” truths. These they explicitly rejected
because they were conservatives, not liberals. Let’s try to understand this.

Selden saw himself as an heir to Fortescue and, in fact, was involved in

republishing the Praise for the Laws of England in 1616. His own much more
extensive theoretical defense of English national traditions appeared in the
form of short historical treatises on English law, as well as in a series of
massive works (begun while Selden was imprisoned on ill-defined sedition
charges for his activities in the 1628–29 Parliament) examining political
theory and law in conversation with classical rabbinic Judaism. The most
famous of these was his monumental Natural and National Law (1640). In
these works, Selden sought to defend conservative traditions, including the
English one, not only against the absolutist doctrines of the Stuarts but also
against the claims of a universalist rationalism, according to which men
could simply consult their own reason, which was the same for everyone, to
determine the best constitution for mankind. This rationalist view had begun
to collect adherents in England among followers of the great Dutch political
theorist Hugo Grotius, whose On the Law of War and Peace (1625)
suggested that it might be possible to do away with the traditional
constitutions of nations by relying only on the rationality of the individual.

Then as now, conservatives could not understand how such a reliance on

alleged universal reason could be remotely workable, and Selden’s Natural
and National Law includes an extended attack on such theories in its first
pages. There Selden argues that, everywhere in history, “unrestricted use of
pure and simple reason” has led to conclusions that are “intrinsically
inconsistent and dissimilar among men.” If we were to create government
on the basis of pure reason alone, this would not only lead to the eventual
dissolution of government but to widespread confusion, dissention, and
perpetual instability as one government is changed for another that appears
more reasonable at a given moment. Indeed, following Fortescue, Selden
rejects the idea that a universally applicable system of rights is even
possible. As he writes in an earlier work, what “may be most convenient or
just in one state may be as unjust and inconvenient in another, and yet both
excellently as well framed as governed.” With regard to those who believe
that their reasoning has produced the universal truths that should be evident
to all men, he shrewdly warns that

custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in [by this]
to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom,
frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind.

Selden responds to the claims of universal reason by arguing for a position

that can be called historical empiricism. On this view, our reasoning in
political and legal matters should be based upon inherited national tradition.
This permits the statesman or jurist to overcome the small stock of
observation and experience that individuals are able to accumulate during
their own lifetimes (“that kind of ignorant infancy, which our short lives
alone allow us”) and to take advantage of “the many ages of former
experience and observation,” which permit us to “accumulate years to us, as
if we had lived even from the beginning of time.” In other words, by
consulting the accumulated experience of the past, we overcome the
inherent weakness of individual judgement, bringing to bear the many
lifetimes of observation by our forebears, who wrestled with similar
questions under diverse conditions.

This is not to say that Selden is willing to accept the prescription of the past
blindly. He pours scorn on those who embrace errors originating in the
distant past, which, he says, have often been accepted as true by entire
communities and “adopted without protest, and loaded onto the shoulders of
posterity like so much baggage.” Recalling the biblical Jeremiah’s insistence
on an empirical study of the paths of old (Jer. 6:16), Selden argues that the
correct method is that “all roads must be carefully examined. We must ask
about the ancient paths, and only what is truly the best may be chosen.” But
for Selden, the instrument for such examination and selection is not the wild
guesswork of individual speculation concerning various hypothetical
possibilities. In the life of a nation, the inherited tradition of legal opinions
and legislation preserves a multiplicity of perspectives from different times
and circumstances, as well as the consequences for the nation when the law
has been interpreted one way or another. Looking back upon these varied
and changing positions within the tradition, and considering their real-life
results, one can distinguish the true precepts of the law from the false turns
that have been taken in the past. As Selden explains:
The way to find out the Truth is by others’ mistakings: For if I [wish] to go
to such [and such] a place, and [some]one had gone before me on the right-
hand [side], and he was out, [while] another had gone on the left-hand, and
he was out, this would direct me to keep the middle way that peradventure
would bring me to the place I desired to go.

Selden thus turns, much as the Hebrew Bible does, to a form of pragmatism
to explain what is meant when statesmen and jurists speak of truth. The
laws develop through a process of trial and error over generations, as we
come to understand how peace and prosperity (“what is truly best,” “the
place I desired to go”) arise from one turn rather than another.

Selden recognizes that, in making these selections from the traditions of the
past, we tacitly rely upon a higher criterion for selection, a natural law
established by God, which prescribes “what is truly best” for mankind in the
most elementary terms. In his Natural and National Law, Selden explains
that this natural law has been discovered over long generations since the
biblical times and has come down to us in various versions. Of these, the
most reliable is that of the Talmud, which describes the seven laws of the
children of Noah prohibiting murder, theft, sexual perversity, cruelty to
beasts, idolatry and defaming God, and requiring courts of law to enforce
justice. The experience of thousands of years has taught us that these laws
frame the peace and prosperity that is the end of all nations, and that they
are the unseen root from which the diverse laws of all the nations ultimately
derive.

Nonetheless, Selden emphasizes that no nation can govern itself by directly

appealing to such fundamental law, because “diverse nations, as diverse
men, have their diverse collections and inferences, and so make their
diverse laws to grow to what they are, out of one and the same root.” Each
nation thus builds its own unique effort to implement the natural law
according to an understanding based on its own unique experience and
conditions. It is thus wise to respect the different laws found among nations,
both those that appear right to us and those that appear mistaken, for
different perspectives may each have something to contribute to our pursuit
of the truth. (Selden’s treatment of the plurality of human knowledge is cited
by Milton as a basis for his defense of freedom of speech in Areopagitica.)

Selden thus offers us a picture of a philosophical parliamentarian or jurist.

He must constantly maintain the strength and stability of the inherited
national edifice as a whole—but also recognize the need to make repairs and
improvements where these are needed. In doing so, he seeks to gradually
approach, by trial and error, the best that is possible for each nation.

Selden’s view of the underlying principles of what was to become the Anglo-
American traditional constitution is perhaps the most balanced and
sophisticated ever written. But neither his intellectual powers nor his
personal bravery, nor that of his colleagues in Parliament, were enough to
save the day. Stuart absolutism eventually pressed England toward civil war
and, finally, to a Puritan military dictatorship that not only executed the king
but destroyed Parliament and the constitution as well. Selden did not live to
see the constitution restored. The regicide regime subsequently offered
England several brand-new constitutions, none of which proved workable,
and within eleven years it had collapsed.

In 1660, two eminent disciples of Selden, Edward Hyde (afterward Earl of

Clarendon) and Sir Matthew Hale, played a leading role in restoring the
constitution and the line of Stuart kings. When the Catholic James II
succeeded to the throne in 1685, fear of a relapse into papism and even of a
renewed attempt to establish absolutism moved the rival political factions of
the country to unite in inviting the next Protestants in line to the throne. The
king’s daughter Mary and her husband, Prince William of Orange, the
Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, crossed the channel to save Protestant
England and its constitution. Parliament, having confirmed the willingness of
the new joint monarchs to protect the English from “all other attempts upon
their religion, rights and liberties,” in 1689 established the new king and
queen on the throne and ratified England’s famous Bill of Rights. This new
document reasserted the ancient rights invoked in the earlier Petition of
Right, among other things affirming the right of Protestant subjects to “have
arms for their defense” and the right of “freedom of speech and debates” in
Parliament, and that “excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive
fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted”—the basis for
the First, Second, and Eighth Amendments of the American Bill of Rights.
Freedom of speech was quickly extended to the wider public, with the
termination of English press licensing laws a few years later.

The restoration of a Protestant monarch and the adoption of the Bill of

Rights were undertaken by a Parliament united around Seldenian principles.
What came to be called the “Glorious Revolution” was glorious precisely
because it reaffirmed the traditional English constitution and protected the
English nation from renewed attacks on “their religion, rights and liberties.”
Such attacks came from absolutists like Sir Robert Filmer on the one hand,
whose Patriarcha (published posthumously, 1680) advocated authoritarian
government as the only legitimate one, and by radicals like John Locke on
the other. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) responded to the
crisis by arguing for the right of the people to dissolve the traditional
constitution and reestablish it according to universal reason.

The Challenge from Locke and Liberalism

Over the course of the seventeenth century, English conservatism was
formed into a coherent and unmistakable political philosophy utterly opposed
both to the absolutism of the Stuarts, Hobbes, and Filmer (what would later
be called “the Right”), as well as to liberal theories of universal reason
advanced first by Grotius and then by Locke (“the Left”). The centrist
conservative view was to remain the mainstream understanding of the
English constitution for a century and a half, defended by leading Whig
intellectuals in works from William Atwood’s Fundamental Constitution of the
English Government (1690) to Josiah Tucker’s A Treatise of Civil
Government (1781), which strongly opposed both absolutism and Lockean
theories of universal rights. This is the view upon which men like Blackstone,
Burke, Washington, and Hamilton were educated. Not only in England but in
British America, lawyers were trained in the common law by studying Coke’s
Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628–44) and Hale’s History of the
Common Law of England (1713). In both, the law of the land was
understood to be the traditional English constitution and common law,
amended as needed for local purposes.

Because Locke is today recognized as the decisive figure in the liberal

tradition, it is worth looking more carefully at why his political theory was so
troubling for conservatives. We have described the Anglo-American
conservative tradition as subscribing to a historical empiricism, which
proposes that political knowledge is gained by examining the long history of
the customary laws of a given nation and the consequences when these laws
have been altered in one direction or another. Conservatives understand
that a jurist must exercise reason and judgment, of course. But this
reasoning is about how best to adapt traditional law to present
circumstances, making such changes as are needed for the betterment of
the state and of the public, while preserving as much as possible the overall
frame of the law. To this we have opposed a standpoint that can be called
rationalist. Rationalists have a different view of the role of reason in political
thought, and in fact a different understanding of what reason itself is. Rather
than arguing from the historical experience of nations, they set out by
asserting general axioms that they believe to be true of all human beings,
and that they suppose will be accepted by all human beings examining them
with their native rational abilities. From these they deduce the appropriate
constitution or laws for all men.

Locke is known philosophically as an empiricist. But his reputation in this

regard is based largely on his Essay concerning Human Understanding
(1689), which is an influential exercise in empirical psychology. His Second
Treatise of Government is not, however, a similar effort to bring an empirical
standpoint to the theory of the state. Instead, it begins with a series of
axioms that are without any evident connection to what can be known from
the historical and empirical study of the state. Among other things, Locke
asserts that, (1) prior to the establishment of government, men exist in a
“state of nature,” in which (2) “all men are naturally in a state of perfect
freedom,” as well as in (3) a “state of perfect equality, where naturally there
is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another.” Moreover, (4) this state
of nature “has a law of nature to govern it”; and (5) this law of nature is, as
it happens, nothing other than human “reason” itself, which “teaches all
mankind, who will but consult it.” It is this universal reason, the same
among all mankind, that leads them to (6) terminate the state of nature,
“agreeing together mutually to enter into . . . one body politic” by an act of
free consent. From these six axioms, Locke then proceeds to deduce the
proper character of the political order for all nations on earth.

Three important things should be noticed about this set of axioms. The first
is that the elements of Locke’s political theory are not known from
experience. The “perfect freedom” and “perfect equality” that define the
state of nature are ideal forms whose relationship with empirical reality is
entirely unclear. Nor can the identity of natural law with reason, or the
assertion that the law dictated by reason “teaches all mankind,” or the
establishment of the state by means of purely consensual social contract, be
known empirically. All of these things are stipulated as when setting out a
mathematical system.

The second thing to notice is that there is no reason to think that any of
Locke’s axioms are in fact true. Faced with this mass of unverifiable
assertions, empiricist political theorists such as Hume, Smith, and Burke
rejected all of Locke’s axioms and sought to rebuild political philosophy on
the basis of things that can be known from history and from an examination
of actual human societies and governments.

Third, Locke’s theory not only dispenses with the historical and empirical
basis for the state, it also implies that such inquiries are, if not entirely
unnecessary, then of secondary importance. If there exists a form of reason
that is accessible to “all mankind, who will but consult it,” and that reveals to
all the universal laws of nature governing the political realm, then there will
be little need for the historically and empirically grounded reasoning of men
such as Fortescue, Coke, and Selden. All men, if they will just gather
together and consult with their own reason, can design a government that
will be better than anything that “the many ages of experience and
observation” produced in England. On this view, the Anglo-American
conservative tradition—far from having brought into being the freest and
best constitution ever known to mankind—is in fact shot through with
unwarranted prejudice and an obstacle to a better life for all. Locke’s theory
thus pronounces, in other words, the end of Anglo-American conservatism,
and the end of the traditional constitution that conservatives still held to be
among the most precious things on earth.

While Locke’s rationalist theories made limited headway in England, they

were all the rage in France. Rousseau’s On the Social Contract (1762) went
where others had feared to tread, embracing Locke’s system of axioms for
correct political thought and calling upon mankind to consent only to the one
legitimate constitution dictated by reason. Within thirty years, Rousseau,
Voltaire, and the other French imitators of Locke’s rationalist politics
received what they had demanded in the form of the French Revolution. The
1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was followed by the
Reign of Terror for those who would not listen to reason. Napoleon’s
imperialist liberalism rapidly followed, bringing universal reason and the
“rights of man” to the whole of continental Europe by force of arms, at a
cost of millions of lives.2

In 1790, a year after the beginning of the French Revolution, the Anglo-Irish
thinker and Whig parliamentarian Edmund Burke composed his famous
defense of the English constitutional tradition against the liberal doctrines of
universal reason and universal rights, entitled Reflections on the Revolution
in France. In one passage, Burke asserted that

Selden, and the other profoundly learned men, who drew this petition of
right, were as well acquainted, at least, with all the general theories
concerning the “rights of men” [as any defenders of the revolution in
France]. . . . But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which
superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded,
hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen, to that
vague speculative right, which exposed their sure inheritance to be
scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild, litigious spirit.

In this passage, Burke correctly emphasizes that Selden and the other great
conservative figures of his day had been quite familiar with the “general
theories concerning the ‘rights of men’” that had now been used to
overthrow the state in France. He then goes on to endorse Selden’s
argument that universal rights, since they are based only on reason rather
than “positive, recorded, hereditary title,” can be said to give everyone a
claim to absolutely anything. Adopting a political theory based on such
universal rights has one obvious meaning: that the “sure inheritance” of
one’s nation will immediately be “scrambled for and torn to pieces” by “every
wild litigious spirit” who knows how to use universal rights to make ever new
demands.

Burke’s argument is frequently quoted today by conservatives who assume

that his target was Rousseau and his followers in France. But Burke’s attack
was not primarily aimed at Rousseau, who had few enthusiasts in Britain or
America at the time. The actual target of his attack was contemporary
followers of Grotius and Locke—individuals such as Richard Price, Joseph
Priestley, Charles James Fox, Charles Grey, Thomas Paine, and Thomas
Jefferson. Price, who was the explicit subject of Burke’s attack in the first
pages of Reflections on the Revolution in France, had opened his
Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776) with the assertion that
“the principles on which I have argued form the foundation of every state as
far as it is free; and are the same with those taught by Mr. Locke.” And
much the same could be said of the others, all of whom followed Locke in
claiming that the only true foundation for political and constitutional thought
was precisely in those “general theories concerning the rights of men” that
Burke believed would bring turmoil and death to one country after another.

The carnage taking place in France triggered a furious debate in England. It

pitted supporters of the conservatism of Coke and Selden (both Whigs and
Tories) against admirers of Locke’s universal rights theories (the so-called
New Whigs). The conservatives insisted that these theories would uproot
every traditional political and religious institution in England, just as they
were doing in France. It is against the backdrop of this debate that Burke
reportedly stated in Parliament that, of all the books ever written, the
Second Treatise was “one of the worst.”

Liberalism and Conservatism in America

Burke’s conservative defense of the traditional English constitution enjoyed a
large measure of success in Britain, where it was continued after his death
by figures such as Canning, Wellington, and Disraeli. That this is so is
obvious from the fact that institutions such as the monarchy, the House of
Lords, and the established Church of England, not to mention the common
law itself, were able to withstand the gale winds of universal reason and
universal rights, and to this day have their staunch supporters.

But what of America? Was the American revolution an upheaval based on

Lockean universal reason and universal rights? To hear many conservatives
talk today, one would think this were so, and that there never were any
conservatives in the American mainstream, only liberals of different shades.
The reality, however, was rather different. When the American English, as
Burke called them, rebelled against the British monarch, there were already
two distinct political theories expressed among the rebels, and the
opposition between these two camps only grew with time.

First, there were those who admired the English constitution that they had
inherited and studied. Believing they had been deprived of their rights under
the English constitution, their aim was to regain these rights. Identifying
themselves with the tradition of Coke and Selden, they hoped to achieve a
victory against royal absolutism comparable to what their English forefathers
had achieved in the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights. To individuals of this
type, the word revolution still had its older meaning, invoking something
that “revolves” and would, through their efforts, return to its rightful place—
in effect, a restoration. Alexander Hamilton was probably the best-known
exponent of this kind of conservative politics, telling the assembled
delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787, for example, that “I
believe the British government forms the best model the world ever
produced.” Or, as John Dickinson told the convention: “Experience must be
our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not reason that discovered
the singular and admirable mechanism of the English constitution….
Accidents probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a
sanction to them.” And it is evident that they were quietly supported behind
the scenes by other adherents of this view, among them the president of the
convention, General George Washington.

Second, there were true revolutionaries, liberal followers of Locke such as

Jefferson, who detested England and believed—just as the French followers
of Rousseau believed—that the dictates of universal reason made the true
rights of man evident to all. For them, the traditional English constitution
was not the source of their freedoms but rather something to be swept away
before the rights dictated by universal reason. And indeed, during the French
Revolution, Jefferson and his supporters embraced it as a purer version of
what the Americans had started. As he wrote in a notorious letter in 1793
justifying the revolution in France: “The liberty of the whole earth was
depending on the issue of the contest. . . . [R]ather than it should have
failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.”

The tension between these conservative and liberal camps finds rather
dramatic expression in America’s founding documents: The Declaration of
Independence, drafted by Jefferson in 1776, is famous for resorting, in its
preamble, to the Lockean doctrine of universal rights as “self-evident” before
the light of reason. Similarly, the Articles of Confederation, negotiated the
following year as the constitution of the new United States of America,
embody a radical break with the traditional English constitution. These
Articles asserted the existence of thirteen independent states, at the same
time establishing a weak representative assembly over them without even
the power of taxation, and requiring assent by nine of thirteen states to
enact policy. The Articles likewise made no attempt at all to balance the
powers of this assembly, effectively an executive, with separate legislative
or judicial branches of government.

The Articles of Confederation came close to destroying the United States.

After a decade of disorder in both foreign and economic affairs, the Articles
were replaced by the Constitution, drafted at a convention initiated by
Hamilton and James Madison, and presided over by a watchful Washington,
while Jefferson was away in France. Anyone comparing the Constitution that
emerged with the earlier Articles of Confederation immediately recognizes
that what took place at this convention was a reprise of the Glorious
Revolution of 1689. Despite being adapted to the American context, the
document that the convention produced proposed a restoration of the
fundamental forms of the English constitution: a strong president,
designated by an electoral college (in place of the hereditary monarchy); the
president balanced in strikingly English fashion by a powerful bicameral
legislature with the power of taxation and legislation; the division of the
legislature between a quasi-aristocratic, appointed Senate and a popularly
elected House; and an independent judiciary. Even the American Bill of
Rights of 1789 is modeled upon the Petition of Right and the English Bill of
Rights, largely elaborating the same rights that had been described by Coke
and Selden and their followers, and breathing not a word anywhere about
universal reason or universal rights.

The American Constitution did depart from the traditional English

constitution, however, adapting it to local conditions on certain key points.
The Americans, who had no nobility and no tradition of hereditary office,
declined to institute these now. Moreover, the Constitution of 1787 allowed
slavery, which was forbidden in England—a wretched innovation for which
America would pay a price the framers could not have imagined in their
wildest nightmares.
Another departure—or apparent departure—was the lack of a provision for a
national church, enshrined in the First Amendment in the form of a
prohibition on congressional legislation “respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The English constitutional
tradition, of course, gave a central role to the Protestant religion, which was
held to be indispensable and inextricably tied to English identity (although
not incompatible with a broad measure of toleration). But the British state,
in certain respects federative, permitted separate, officially established
national churches in Scotland and Ireland. This British acceptance of a
diversity of established churches is partially echoed in the American
Constitution, which permitted the respective states to support their own
established churches, or to require that public offices in the state be held by
Protestants or by Christians, well into the nineteenth century. When these
facts are taken into account, the First Amendment appears less an attempt
to put an end to established religion than a provision for keeping the peace
among the states by delegating forms of religious establishment to the state
level.

As early as 1802, however, Jefferson, now president, announced that the

First Amendment’s rejection of a national church in fact should be
interpreted as an “act of the whole American people . . . building a wall of
separation between church and state.” This characterization of the American
Constitution as endorsing a “separation of church and state” was surely
overwrought, and more compatible with French liberalism—which regarded
public religion as abhorrent to reason—than with the actual place of state
religion among “the whole American people” at the time. Yet on this point,
Jefferson has emerged victorious. In the years that followed, his “wall of
separation between church and state” interpretation was increasingly
considered to be an integral part of the American Constitution, even if one
that had not been included in the actual text.

Lockean liberalism grew increasingly dominant in America after Jefferson’s

election. Hamilton’s death in a duel in 1804, at the age of 47, was an
especially heavy blow that left American conservatism without its most able
spokesman. Nevertheless, the tradition of Selden and Burke was taken up by
Americans of the next generation, including two of the country’s most
prominent jurists, New York chancellor James Kent (1763–1847) and
Supreme Court justice Joseph Story (1779–1845). Story’s influence was
especially significant. Although appointed to the Supreme Court by Jefferson
in the hope of undermining Chief Justice John Marshall, Story’s opinions
almost immediately displayed the opposite inclination, and continued to do
so throughout his thirty-four-year tenure on the court. Perhaps Story’s
greatest contribution to the American conservative tradition is his famous
Commentaries on the Constitution (3 vols., 1833), which were dedicated to
Marshall and went on to be the most important and influential interpretation
of the American constitutional tradition in the nineteenth century. These
were overtly conservative in spirit, citing Burke with approval and repeatedly
criticizing not only Locke’s theories but Jefferson himself. Among other
things, Story forcefully rejected Jefferson’s claim that the American founding
had been based on universal rights determined by reason, emphasizing that
it was the rights of the English traditional law that Americans had always
recognized and continued to recognize. As he wrote:

[This] has been the uniform doctrine in America ever since the settlement of
the colonies. The universal principle (and the practice has conformed to it)
has been, that the common law is our birthright and inheritance, and that
our ancestors brought hither with them upon their emigration all of it, which
was applicable to their situation. The whole structure of our present
jurisprudence stands upon the original foundations of the common law.

Regarding the American Constitution’s deviation from English tradition in the

matter of a national religion, Story’s view was appropriately balanced. On
the one hand, he confirmed “the right of private judgment in matters of
religion, and of the freedom of public worship according to the dictates of
one’s conscience” as an integral part of the nation’s constitutional heritage.
At the same time, he asserted the traditional Anglo-American conservative
view that “the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of
religion will hardly be contested by any persons, who believe that piety,
religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well-being of the
state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice.” For this
reason, he was confident that the ongoing circumstances of his day, in which
some of the states continued to “support and sustain, in some form, the
Christian religion,” as being “without the slightest suspicion that it was
against the principles of public law or republican liberty.” Story thus
recognized no wall of separation between the government and religion at the
state level as being either required by the American constitution or
desirable.

As for the breach in conservative principles that had opened up with the
barring of an establishment of religion at the national level, Story wrote with
prescient concern:

It yet remains a problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free

government can be permanent, where the public worship of God, and the
support of religion, constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any
assignable shape.

Principles of the Conservative Tradition

As we have seen, the period between John Selden and Edmund Burke gave
rise to two highly distinct and conflicting Anglo-American political traditions,
conservative and liberal. Both were opposed to royal absolutism and devoted
to freedom. But they were bitterly divided on theoretical grounds, as well as
on a wide range of policy matters. Indeed, many of the principal issues that
divided these two traditions continue to divide liberals and conservatives
today.

What is the substance of the Anglo-American conservative political tradition?

We can summarize the principles of conservatism as they appeared in the
writings and deeds of the early architects of this tradition as follows:

(1) Historical Empiricism. The authority of government derives from

constitutional traditions known, through the long historical experience of a
given nation, to offer stability, well-being, and freedom. These traditions are
refined through trial and error over many centuries, with repairs and
improvements being introduced where necessary, while maintaining the
integrity of the inherited national edifice as a whole. Such empiricism entails
a skeptical standpoint with regard to the divine right of the rulers, the
universal rights of man, or any other abstract, universal systems. Written
documents express and consolidate the constitutional traditions of the
nation, but they can neither capture nor define this political tradition in its
entirety.

(2) Nationalism. The diversity of national experiences means that different

nations will have different constitutional and religious traditions. The Anglo-
American tradition harkens back to principles of a free and just national
state, charting its own course without foreign interference, whose origin is in
the Bible. These include a conception of the nation as arising out of diverse
tribes, its unity anchored in common traditional law and religion. Such
nationalism is not based on race, embracing new members who declare that
“your people is my people, and your God is my God” (Ruth 1:16).

(3) Religion. The state upholds and honors the biblical God and religious
practices common to the nation. These are the centerpiece of the national
heritage and indispensable for justice and public morals. At the same time,
the state offers wide toleration to religious and social views that do not
endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole.

(4) Limited Executive Power. The powers of the king (or president) are
limited by the laws of the nation, which he neither determines nor
adjudicates. The powers of the king (or president) are limited by the
representatives of the people, whose advice and consent he must obtain
both respecting the laws and taxation.

(5) Individual Freedoms. The security of the individual’s life and property is
mandated by God as the basis for a society that is both peaceful and
prosperous, and is to be protected against arbitrary actions of the state. The
ability of the nation to seek truth and conduct sound policy depends on
freedom of speech and debate. These and other fundamental rights and
liberties are guaranteed by law, and may be infringed upon only by due
process of law.

These principles can serve as a useful summary of the conservative political

tradition as it existed long before Locke and long before liberalism, serving
as the basis for the restoration of the English constitution in 1689, and for
the restoration that was the ratification of the American Constitution of
1787. Moreover, we see them as principles that we can affirm today, and
which can serve as a sound basis for political conservatism in Britain,
America, and other countries in our time.

Conservatism versus Liberalism in Current Affairs

How do these conservative principles conflict with those of liberalism? We
understand the crucial differences between ourselves and our liberal friends
in the following way:

Liberalism is a political doctrine based on the assumption that reason is

everywhere the same and accessible, in principle, to all individuals; and that
one need only consult reason to arrive at the one form of government that is
everywhere the best, for all mankind. In its current form, liberalism asserts
that this one best form of government is “liberal democracy.” This is a term
popularized in the 1920s to describe a type kind of government that borrows
certain principles from the earlier Anglo-American conservative tradition,
including those limiting executive power and guaranteeing individual
freedoms (Principles 4 and 5 above). But liberalism regards these principles
as stand-alone entities, detachable from the broader Anglo-American
tradition in which they arose. Liberals thus tend to have few, if any, qualms
about discarding the national and religious foundations of Anglo-American
government (Principles 2 and 3), regarding these as unnecessary, if not
simply contrary to universal reason.

With Selden, we believe that, in their campaign for universal “liberal

democracy,” liberals have confused certain historical-empirical principles of
the traditional Anglo-American constitution, painstakingly developed and
inculcated over centuries (Principle 1), for universal truths that are equally
accessible to all human beings, regardless of historical or cultural
circumstances. This means that, like all rationalists, they are engaged in
applying local truths, which may hold good under certain conditions, to quite
different situations and circumstances, where they often go badly wrong. For
conservatives, these failures—for example, the repeated collapse of liberal
constitutions in places such as Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, Nigeria,
Russia, and Iraq, among many others—suggest that the principles in
question have been overextended and should be regarded as true only
within a narrower range of conditions. Liberals, on the other hand, explain
such failures as a result of “poor implementation,” leaving liberal democracy
as a universal truth that remains untouched by experience and unassailable,
no matter what the circumstances.

The liberal assertion that Principles 4 and 5 are universal truths that are
readily recognized by all human beings has had far-reaching consequences
even in the United States and Britain. The fact is that what is now called
“liberal democracy” refers not to the traditional Anglo-American constitution
but to a rationalist reconstruction of it that has been entirely detached from
the Protestant religion and the Anglo-American nationalist tradition. Far
from being a time-tested form of government, this liberal-democratic ideal is
something new to both America and Britain, dating only from the mid-
twentieth century. The claim that liberal-democratic regimes of this kind can
be maintained for long without the conservative principles they have blithely
discarded is a hypothesis now being tested for the first time. Those who
believe that a favorable outcome of this experiment is assured draw this
conclusion not from historical or empirical evidence, for we have none.
Rather, their confidence derives from the closed Lockean-rationalist system
that holds them captive, preventing them from being able to anticipate any
of the other quite possible outcomes before us.

These pronounced differences between conservatives and liberals do not, of

course, remain at the rarified level of political theory. They quickly lead to
disagreements over proposed policy, expressed in somewhat different ways
from one generation to the next. In our own day, we recognize the clash
between conservatism and liberalism in the following areas, among others
(here described only very briefly, and so in overly simple terms):

Liberal Empire. Because liberalism is thought to be a dictate of universal

reason, liberals tend to believe that any country not already governed as a
liberal democracy should be pressed—or even coerced—to adopt this form of
government. Conservatives, on the other hand, recognize that different
societies are held together and kept at peace in different ways, so that the
universal application of liberal doctrines often brings collapse and chaos,
doing more harm than good.
International Bodies. Similarly, liberals believe that, since liberal principles
are universal, there is little harm done in reassigning the powers of
government to international bodies. Conservatives, on the other hand,
believe that such international organizations possess no sound governing
traditions and no loyalty to particular national populations that might
restrain their spurious theorizing about universal rights. They therefore see
such bodies as inevitably tending to arbitrariness and autocracy.

Immigration. Liberals believe that, since liberal principles are accessible to

all, there is nothing to be feared in large-scale immigration from countries
with national and religious traditions very different from ours. Conservatives
see successful large-scale immigration as possible only where the
immigrants are strongly motivated to integrate and assisted in assimilating
the national traditions of their new home country. In the absence of these
conditions, the result will be chronic intercultural tension and violence.

Law. Liberals regard the laws of a nation as emerging from the tension
between positive law and the pronouncements of universal reason, as
expressed by the courts. Conservatives reject the supposed universal reason
of judges, which often amounts to little more than their succumbing to
passing fashion. But conservatives also oppose an excessive regard for
written documents, which leads, for example, to the liberal mythology of
America as a “creedal nation” (or a “propositional nation”) created and
defined solely by the products of abstract reason that are supposedly found
in the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Economy. Liberals regard the universal market economy, operating without

regard to borders, as a dictate of universal reason and applicable equally to
all nations. They therefore recognize no legitimate economic aims other than
the creation of a “level field” on which all nations participate in accordance
with universal, rational rules. Conservatives regard the market economy and
free enterprise as indispensable for the advancement of the nation in its
wealth and wellbeing. But they see economic arrangements as inevitably
varying from one country to another, reflecting the particular historical
experiences and innovations of each nation as it competes to gain advantage
for its people.
Education. Liberals believe that schools should teach students to recognize
the Lockean goods of liberty and equality as the universal aims of political
order, and to see America’s founding political documents as having largely
achieved these aims. Conservatives believe education should focus on the
particular character of the Anglo-American constitutional and religious
tradition, with its roots in the Bible, and on the way in which this tradition
has given rise to a unique family of nations with a distinctive political
thought and practice that has influenced the world.

Public Religion. Liberals believe that universal reason is the necessary and
sufficient basis for just and moral government. This means that the religious
traditions of the nation, which had earlier been the basis for a public
understanding of justice and right, can be replaced in public discourse by
universal reason itself. In its current form, liberalism asserts that all
governments should embrace a Jeffersonian “wall separating church and
state,” whose purpose is to banish the influence of religion from public life,
relegating it to the private sphere. Conservatives hold that none of this is
true. They see human reason as producing a constant profusion of ever-
changing views concerning justice and morals—a fact that is evident today in
the constant assertion of new and rapidly multiplying human rights.
Conservatives hold that the only stable basis for national independence,
justice, and public morals is a strong biblical tradition in government and
public life. They reject the doctrine of separation of church and state, instead
advocating an integration of religion into public life that also offers broad
toleration of diverse religious views.

The Restoration of Conservatism?

Burke and Hamilton belonged to a generation that was still educated in the
significance of the Anglo-American tradition as a whole. Only a few decades
later, this had begun to change, and by the end of the nineteenth century,
conservative views were increasingly in the minority and defensive both in
Britain and America. But conservatism was really only broken in a decisive
way by Franklin Roosevelt in America in 1932, and by Labour in Britain in
1945. At this point, socialism displaced liberalism as the worldview of the
parties of the “Left,” driving some liberals to join with the last vestiges of the
conservative tradition in the parties of the “Right.” In this environment, new
leaders and movements did arise and succeed from time to time in raising
the banner of Anglo-American conservatism once more. But these
conservatives were living on a shattered political and philosophical
landscape, having lost much of the chain of transmission that had connected
earlier conservatives to their forefathers. Thus their roots remained shallow,
and their victories, however impressive, brought about no long-term
conservative restoration.

The most significant of these conservative revivals was, of course, the one
that reached its peak in the 1980s under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
and President Ronald Reagan. Thatcher and Reagan were genuine and
instinctive conservatives, displaying traditional Anglo-American conservative
attachments to nation and religion, as well as to limited government and
individual freedom. They also recognized and gave voice to the profound
“special relationship” that binds Britain and America together. Coming to
power at a time of deep crisis in the struggle against Communism, their
renewed conservatism succeeded in winning the Cold War and freeing
foreign nations from oppression, in addition to liberating their own
economies, which had long been shackled by socialism. In both countries,
these triumphs shifted political discourse rightward for a generation.

Yet the Reagan-Thatcher moment, for all its success, failed to touch the
depths of the political culture in America and Britain. Confronted by a
university system devoted almost exclusively to socialist and liberal
theorizing, their movement at no point commanded the resources needed to
revive Anglo-American conservatism as a genuine force in fundamental
arenas such as jurisprudence, political theory, history, philosophy, and
education—disciplines without which a true restoration was impossible.
Throughout the conservative revival of the 1980s, academic training in
government and political theory, for instance, continued to maintain its
almost complete boycott of conservative thinkers such as Fortescue, Coke,
Selden, and Hale, just as it continued its boycott of the Bible as a source of
English and American political principles. Similarly, academic jurisprudence
remained a subject that is taught as a contest among abstract liberal
theories. Education of this kind meant that a degree from a prestigious
university all but guaranteed one’s ignorance of the Anglo-American
conservative tradition, but only a handful of conservative intellectual figures,
most visibly Russell Kirk and Irving Kristol, seem to have been alert to the
seriousness of this problem. On the whole, the conservative revival of those
years remained resolutely focused on the pressing policy issues of the day,
leaving liberalism virtually unchallenged as the worldview that conservatives
were taught at university or when they picked up a book on the history of
ideas.

This is why conservative discourse today is so often just a pastiche of liberal

themes and principles, with the occasional reference to Burke or Hamilton
thrown in as a rhetorical ornament. We have not made the effort necessary
to understand the intellectual and political heritage for which these great
Anglo-American conservatives stood their ground, to know what it was and
what it was about. As a consequence, conservatives remain uprooted from
the wisdom of past generations and speak so unpersuasively when they talk
of passing the tradition to future generations. For one cannot pass on what
one does not have.

There may have been genuine advantages to soft-pedaling differences

between conservatives and liberals until the 1980s, when all the strength
that could be mustered had to be directed toward defeating Communism
abroad and socialism at home. But we are no longer living in the 1980s.
Those battles were won, and today we face new dangers. The most
important among these is the inability of countries such as America and
Britain, having been stripped of the nationalist and religious traditions that
held them together for centuries, to sustain themselves while a universalist
liberalism continues, year after year, to break down these historic
foundations of their strength. Under such conditions of internal
disintegration, there is a palpable danger that liberal rationalism, having
established itself in a monopoly position in the state, will drive a broad public
that cannot accept its regimented view of the world into the hands of gen-
uinely authoritarian movements.

Liberals of various persuasions have, in their own way, sought to warn us

about this, from Fareed Zakaria’s “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” in
Foreign Affairs (1997) to the Economist’s “Illiberalism: Playing with Fear”
(2016) and Commentary’s “Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis,” mentioned
earlier. These and many other publications have made intensive use of the
term illiberal as an epithet to describe those who have strayed from the path
of Lockean liberalism. In so doing, they divide the political universe into two:
there are liberals—those decent persons who are willing to exercise reason
in the universally accepted manner and come to the appropriate liberal
conclusions; and there are those others—the “illiberals,” who, out of
ignorance, resentment, or some atavistic hatred, will not get with the
program. When things are divided up this way, the latter group ends up
including everyone from Brexiteers, Trump supporters, Evangelical
Christians, and Orthodox Jews to dictators, Iranian ayatollahs, and Nazis.
Once things are framed in this way, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that
everyone in that second group is in some degree a threat that must be
combated.

We conservatives, however, have our own preferred division of the political

universe: one in which Anglo-American conservatism appears as a distinct
political category that is obviously neither authoritarian nor liberal. With the
rest of the Anglo-American conservative tradition, we uphold the principles
of limited government and individual liberties. But we also see clearly (again,
in keeping with our conservative tradition) that the only forces that give the
state its internal coherence and stability, holding limited government in
place while staving off authoritarianism, are our nationalist and religious
traditions. These nationalist and religious principles are not liberal. They are
prior to liberalism, in conflict with liberalism, and presently being destroyed
by liberalism.

Our world desperately needs to hear a clear conservative voice. Any

continued confusion of conservative principles with the liberalism on our
Left, or with the authoritarianism on our Right, can only do harm. The time
has arrived when conservatives must speak in our own voice again. In doing
so, we will discover that we can provide the political foundations that so
many now seek, but have been unable to find.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume I, Number 2

(Summer 2017): 219–46.
Notes

1 Fortescue is now available in an easily readable edition, transcribed in

modern English spelling. See John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance
of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
2 Our account diverges here from that of Leo Strauss, who presents
Rousseau as a critic of Locke and asserts that “the first crisis of modernity
occurred in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” See Natural Right and
History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 252. Strauss is right in
seeing Rousseau, especially in his Discourses, as demanding a return to the
cohesive community of classical antiquity, as well as to the virtues that are
required to maintain such social cohesion and to wage wars in defense of the
community. But it is a mistake to regard this demand as initiating “the first
crisis of modernity.” What is now regarded as political modernity is more
accurately regarded as emerging from the conservative tradition represented
by Fortescue, Coke, and Selden. The first crisis of modernity is that which
universalist-rationalists such as Grotius and Locke initiate against this
conservative tradition. In certain ways, Rousseau does side with earlier
conservative tradition, which likewise held that Lockean rationalism would
make social cohesion impossible and destroy the possibility of virtue. But
while Rousseau believed he could revive social cohesion and virtue while
retaining Locke’s liberal axioms as a point of departure, Anglo-American
conservatism regards this entire effort as futile. The intractable
contradictions in Rousseau’s thought derive from the fact that there is no
way to square this circle. Once liberal axioms are accepted, there is neither
any need for, nor any possibility of, the social cohesion and virtue that
Rousseau insists are necessary. Rousseau’s “civil religion” and his nation-
state have no hope of playing the role that the traditional religion and nation
play in conservative thought. These are ersatz creations of the Lockean
universe, in which Rousseau’s thought remains imprisoned.

About the Author

Ofir Haivry is vice president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, distinguished
senior fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, and author of John Selden
and the Western Political Tradition (Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming).

ALSO BY OFIR HAIVRY

American Restoration: Edmund Burke and the American Constitution
Yoram Hazony is president of the Herzl Institute and author of The
Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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