PRESTOPUNDIT

• Keith Burgess-Jackson
• Michael C. Sudduth
• Jim Ryan
• Max Goss
• William F. Vallicella
• Stephan L. Burton
• Robert C. Koons
• John Kekes
• Edward C. Feser
• Roger Scruton
• Francis J. Beckwith
• Scott Campbell
• John-Christian Smith
• Jean-Pierre Schachter
• Daniel Bonevac

One of the things I hope to accomplish with this blog is the clarification of conservatism. Joel Feinberg (my teacher) said that “Conceptual clarification is the most distinctively philosophical of enterprises” (Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others, vol. 1 of The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984], 17). I concur. One of Feinberg’s aims throughout his long and illustrious career was to clarify liberalism, at least as concerns the moral limits of the criminal law. Another liberal philosopher with a clarificatory aim is Ronald Dworkin. His 1978 essay “Liberalism” set out “a theory about what liberalism is” (Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” chap. 8 in his A Matter of Principle [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], 181-204, at 181 [essay first published in 1978]).

To clarify a thing is to show how (i.e., in what respects) it differs from other things with which it might be confused. It is to distinguish those features that are essential to it from those that are inessential. For example, how, precisely, does conservatism differ from libertarianism? What do they have in common that distinguishes them from, say, liberalism? It’s now often said that libertarianism comes in two varieties: left and right. Is right libertarianism the same as conservatism? But why would that be, unless left libertarianism is the same as liberalism? Does conservatism presuppose theism? If so, how and why? What, precisely, is the relation between conservatism and tradition? Is tradition to conservatism as individual liberty is to liberalism?

It may turn out, upon inquiry, that conservatism has no essential features, no core, no sine qua non. It may be a Wittgensteinian family-resemblance concept, or even, God forbid, a Galliean essentially contested concept. If this is so, then it is unlikely that other political moralities, such as liberalism, have essential features. Then again, why should we think that all political moralities have the same structure? Perhaps some of them have essential features and others do not. Perhaps conservatism arose, and survives, purely in reaction to liberalism. A philosopher leaves these matters for discovery. We should not guess about what we will find when we begin our conceptual search.

There is one other peculiarity of this project. We should not assume at the outset that all those who call or consider themselves conservatives are in fact conservatives. You can’t make yourself an X by calling or thinking of yourself as an X. The aim here is not to cast people out, as if conservatism were an exclusive club, but to get a proper understanding of it. It may turn out that certain individuals we once thought of as conservatives are not conservatives, properly speaking, or that individuals we once thought of as nonconservatives are conservatives, properly speaking (or both). Was David Hume a conservative? How about Ludwig Wittgenstein? Once we clarify the concept, these will be factual questions—which is not to say that they will be easily answered, for sometimes evidence is sparse or ambiguous.