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The Anglo-Saxon Conservative Tradition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Rod Preece
Rod Preece
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
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Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 1980 , pp. 3 - 32
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Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1980

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References

1 Modern British Politics (London: Faber, 1965), 275.Google Scholar (American edition: British Politics in the Collectivist Age [New York: Knopf, 1966]).Google Scholar

2 Ibid.

3 The phrase belongs to Christian, William and Campbell, Colin, Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada (Toronto: McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 1974), 92Google Scholar, but the idea is common to those who have adopted or adapted the hypotheses of Samuel Beer in his Modem British Politics or of Hartz, Louis in The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).Google Scholar

4 See, for example, Gad Horowitz's description of American conservatism as “purely individualistic, purely liberal” in Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 10.Google Scholar

5 See The Liberal Tradition in America, and The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966).Google Scholar

6 (London: Williams and Northgate, 1912).

7 (London: Macmillan, 1933).

8 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959).

9 In Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962).Google Scholar

10 Modern British Politics, 275. For other examples of the same idea see Watkins, F. M., The Age of Ideology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964), 28ff.Google Scholar and Hayek, Friedrich, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 397ff.Google Scholar It also pervades the work of Grant, George, see Lament for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), especially 63ff.Google Scholar, and Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969).Google Scholar

11 Modem British Politics, 271.

12 One might thus challenge the claims of George Grant (Lament for a Nation, 14), Gad Horowitz (Canadian Labourin Politics, 10), Whitaker, Reg (“Images of the State in Canada” in Panitch, Leo [ed.], The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977], 37)Google Scholar, and Christian, William and Campbell, Colin (Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada [Toronto: McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 1974], 24)Google Scholar that state-dominated economic activities in Canada—such as railway and canal building—are reflective of a tory collectivism or indicative of a nonliberal element in the Canadian culture. Adam Smith is, indeed, the most commonly maligned and misrepresented of thinkers. He was quite explicit that individual liberty was to be promoted only insofar as it was compatible with “the security of the whole society.” He wrote further of the depths into which “in every improved and civilized society… the labouring poor must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it” (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [New York: Modern Library, 1937], Bk. 2, chap. 2, 308, and Bk. 5, chap. 1, pt. 3, art. 2, 735Google Scholar). Moreover, far from being the philosopher of egotism as he is commonly portrayed, Smith taught the natural sociality of man and proclaimed sympathy the highest of human virtues. The perfection of human nature, he affirmed, is “to feel much for others and little for ourselves… to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections…” (Theory of Moral Sentiments, Bk. 1, chap. 1, pt. 5, 24 in The Essays of Adam Smith [London: Alexander Murray, 1869]Google Scholar).

13 “The Empirical Basis of Edmund Burke's Classical Economic Liberalism,” Duquesne Review 10 (1965), 57–58.Google Scholar

14 Eden, Anthony, Freedom and Order (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), 420.Google Scholar

15 Quoted in Butler, Lord (ed.), The Conservatives: A History From Their Origins to 1965 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977), 448.Google Scholar

16 The Spirit of the Laws, Part 2, Books 11–13. See also de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Random House, 1955), 33–34Google Scholar; for similar remarks by Voltaire see Baugh, D. A. (ed.), Aristocratic Government and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Watts, 1975), 2–3.Google Scholar If there were authoritarian and oppressive elements at a later stage—many would point to the Eldonite and Monmouth tones—this should be recognized as the consequence of conflicting interests rather than competing ideologies. Moreover, similar elements are to be found, for example, in the New England and Georgia hierarchies, which, like the Family Compact in Canada, espoused the sterner virtues (as, incidentally, did Locke) rather than disavowed Whig principles.

17 See the conversation with the Due de San Carlos as reported in Wellington's correspondence in Gleig, G. R., The Life of Arthur, Duke of Wellington (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), 245Google Scholar; for the reference to The Wealth of Nations, see 427–28.

18 The Conservative Mind (New York: Avon, 1973).Google Scholar

19 The Conservative Tradition (London: A. & C. Black, 1964).Google Scholar

20 Conservatism (London: Dent, 1976).Google Scholar

21 The Ascent of Britain (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1977).Google Scholar

22 Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism (London: Hutchinson, 1977).Google Scholar

23 How Conservatives Think (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).Google Scholar

24 Quotations are from “The Character of a Trimmer.”

25 Quotations are from “A Dissertation on Parties” and “The Idea of a Patriot King.” So far from an espousal of despotism, Bolingbroke's use of the separation of powers conforms directly to Immanuel Kant's definition of republicanism. See Perpetual Peace (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 13–15.Google Scholar

26 See Mansfield, H. C. Jr, Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 5. Lord Macaulay held to the same opinion—and may well have been the source of Trevelyan's view. “Our Revolution,” Macaulay affirms,’ ‘as far as it can be said to bear the character of any single mind, assuredly bears the character of the large yet cautious mind of Halifax.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Conservatism in Europe: 1770–1945 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 41–45.Google Scholar

28 Germany: 2000 Years, vol. 2 (New Yoik: Ungar, 1961), 498.Google Scholar

29 Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization (London: Macmillan, 1969), 45, 57.Google Scholar

30 Reaction and Revolution: 1814–1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 67.Google Scholar De Maistre's “L'homme ne peut faire une constitution, et nulle constitution légitime ne saurait être écrite…” is quite at odds with Burke's pragmatic and prudential considerations on the legitimacy of 1688 and 1776. And de Bonald's “L'homme n'existe que pour la société, la societe ne le forme que pour elle-même” is a contradiction of Burke's assertion that “all natural rights must be the rights of individuals as by nature there is no such thing as politic or corporate personality; all these ideas are mere fictions of law, they are creatures of voluntary institution; men as men are individuals, and nothing else.” The European conservatives may have possessed a similar disposition to Burke but, since they possessed that disposition in a significantly different political context, it led to significantly different philosophical conclusions.

31 The Conservative Case (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), 17.Google Scholar See also Epstein, Klaus, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 17Google Scholar, where he writes of conservatism as calling for an “equilibrium between liberty and order, equality and hierarchy, individualism and collectivism, self-government and authority, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, material goods and ideal aspirations, pleasure and asceticism, reason and emotion, secularism and religion, dynamism and stability.” Surely, this goes too far—especially for German conservatism with its stress on order, hierarchy and authority—for it merely permits almost any ideological pronouncement to be fitted neatly and consistently into the schema and allows all manner of contradictions between different versions of conservative ideology to pass unrecognized. Indeed, bitter ideological enemies—say the Freiherr vom Stein and Friedrich von der Marwitz—may be so construed as ideologically consistent allies. It must surely be clear that if each of these antinomies may on any given occasion be appropriate to the conservative disposition then none of them can be a part of any definition of conservatism.

32 Abridgment of English History (1757), Works, vol. 6 (London: Bohn, 1854–89), 297.Google Scholar To those who might think this a premature observation of Burke's youth it may be appropriate to point out that the commendation was repeated in 1791 in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Works, vol. 3, 113.

33 Catholic Political Thought: 1789–1848 (London: Burns, Oates, 1952), 38–39.Google Scholar

34 Two exceptions come to mind. Christian, William in his “A Note on Rod Preece and Red Tories,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 2 (1978), 129Google Scholar, indicates that he does not accept Burke as the authentic source of conservatism but does not offer anyone in his stead; and Michael Oakeshott suggests that Hobbes, Montaigne, Pascal or Hume rather than Edmund Burke might be treated as the appropriate representative of the conservative disposition (Rationalism in Politics, 195). Oakeshott and Christian are not, however, in accord. The one starts from a laissez-faire conception, the other from its antithesis.

35 See note 13 above.

36 Dunn, William C., “Adam Smith and Edmund Burke: Complementary Contemporaries,” The Southern Economic Journal 7 (1940–1941), 330–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Liberalism (London: Dent, 1976), 71.Google Scholar

38 The Conservative Case, 65.

39 Ibid., 22.

40 Onthe conceptof “fragment” see Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, chap. 1.

41 Works, 1877, Boston ed., vol. 5, 151. My comments on Burke's economics are dependent in large measure on the articles of DrPetrella, Frank Jr: “Edmund Burke: A Liberal Practitioner of Political Economy,” Modern Age 8 (1963–1964),52–60Google Scholar, and “The Empirical Basis of Edmund Burke's Classical Economic Liberalism,” Duquesne Review 10 (1965), 53–61.Google Scholar

42 Quoted in “Edmund Burke: A Liberal Practitioner of Political Economy,” 55.

43 Ibid., 53–54.

44 Works, vol. 5, 142.

45 Ibid., 157.

46 Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (London: Barnes and Noble, 1929), 193.Google Scholar

47 Quoted in “Edmund Burke: A Liberal Practitioner of Political Economy,” 53.

48 Ibid.

49 Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973), 46.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 47.

51 Details are provided by Petrella in “Edmund Burke: A Liberal Practitioner of Political Economy,” 56–59.

52 I do not mean to criticize those Americans who have written of Locke as a political philosopher—Sterling Lamprecht and Willmoore Kendall, to take but two at random, have performed admirable tasks—but rather to refer to those who have depicted Locke as the ideological father of the American political culture.

53 See for example, Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (3rd ed.; London: Harrap, 1960), 442ff.Google Scholar

54 Second Treatise, vol. 4, 22.

55 See Sabine, History of Political Theory, 462–63. For Bolingbroke, see Works, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1841), 84Google Scholar and Kramnick, Isaac, Bolingbroke and His Circle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), chap. 1, esp., 27.Google Scholar

56 Lament for a Nation, 4, 33, 63.

57 Second Treatise, vol. 2, 5.

58 See, for example, Works, Bohn ed., vol. 2, 322–23, and 331–32.

59 Quoted in Bluhm, William T., Theories of the Political System (3rd ed.; Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1978), 319.Google Scholar

60 Rationalism in Politics, 1.

61 Lament for a Nation, 65.

62 “The Structure of Canadian History,” in Hartz, The Founding of New Societies, 219, 234.

63 See in particular his Canadian Labour in Politics, chap. 1.

64 See, for example, Winn, Conrad and McMenemy, John, Political Parties in Canada (Toronto: McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 1976)Google Scholar and Truman, Tom, “A Critique of Seymour Martin Lipset's article, ‘Value Differences, Absolute or Relative: The English Speaking Democracies,'” this JOURNAL 4 (1971), 497–525.Google Scholar

65 See “A Note on Rod Preece and Red Tories,” 130.

66 Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada, 89.

67 “A Note on Rod Preece and Red Tories,” 130.

68 Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (London: John Murray, 1829), 2 vols.Google Scholar

69 Vol. 1,247.

70 Vol. 1, 254.

71 Vol. 2, 146.

72 Vol. 2, 40–41.

73 Vol. 1, 105.

74 Colloquies 4 and 5.

75 Vol. 1,96.

76 Vol. 1, 79.

77 Vol. 1, 131–33.

78 1814–29.

79 Vol. 1, 194, 197.

80 See, for example, Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics, 21.

81 Vol. 2, 414.

82 Vol. 1, 106.

83 Which hints the lie to C. B. Macpherson's overly facile reading of Burke as “merely a theorist of hierarchy and class subordination.” See Kramnick, , The Rage of Edmund Burke (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 164.Google Scholar

84 Lament for a Nation, 14.

85 “Images of the State in Canada,” 37.

86 Canadian Labour in Politics, 10.

87 Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada, 24.

88 See note 12 above.

89 SeeChandler, Alice, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth Century Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).Google Scholar

90 See in particular Alton Locke (1850) and Yeast (1851). His later and more famous novels were in similar vein but, set in the more distant past, were less explicitly relevant to contemporary problems.

91 Quoted in Butler, The Conservatives, 127.

92 Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. by Middleton, Thomasson, Ray (London: Constable, 1936), 341–42.Google Scholar

93 Quoted in Blake, R. N. W., Disraeli (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 29.Google Scholar

94 Ibid., 39.

95 For an obvious example, see Gilmour, Inside Right, 74–86.

96 See Chandler, A Dream of Order, 234ff.

97 Quoted in ibid., 234.

98 Ibid.

99 Quoted in Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 145.

100 Theories of the Political System (3rd. ed.), 326. The equation of Lockeanism with Americanism is commonly accomplished by way of the practices of New England Puritanism. But, as Tawney, Richard points out, “Its practice had more affinity with the iron rule of Calvin's Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies of contemporary English Puritanism,” (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977], 135).Google Scholar Quakerism and Catholicism were not, however, as authoritarian as American Calvinism, thus providing something of the same measure of balance as was present in England. Fora European's astonishment at “the lengths to which self-interest and business immorality could be carried” in the New World by the “godly and sober descendents of William Penn,” Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe prove a delight as well as an instruction. But one should not imagine that nascent America was all of a piece, nor forget that individualism was already rife in England.

101 Quoted in Butler, The Conservatives, 43.