Comprehending conservatism: frameworks and analysis

Abstract

Jan-Werner Müller provides a four-dimensional framework for comprehending conservatism as a political ideology. We focus on conservatism as a political philosophy, rather than an ideology, and provide more detailed analysis in order to re-assess Müller's framework; arguing that the suggested sociological and aesthetic dimensions do not play significant roles in defining political conservatism, while the suggested methodological and philosophical dimensions are better understood in terms of an alternative analytic structure.

Notes

^1. Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Comprehending conservatism: a new framework for analysis’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 11 (3) (2006), pp. 359–365. In what follows, all references to page numbers without further attribution relate to this article.

^2. We take it that this methodological point is part of what Müller has in mind when he suggests that the multi-dimensional method might be ‘applied to other strands of political thought, even though the dimensions clearly would then have to be described differently’ (p. 360). Note that the ‘family resemblance’ method does not block ‘logic chopping’ entirely—but it does render any application of standard tools of analysis much less direct. The classic philosophical reference to the concept of ‘family resemblance’ is Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953/2010).

^3. We shall use the term ‘comprehending’ to include the various more specific tasks of exploring, studying, making sense of and analysing—appealing to the comprehensive connotation of ‘comprehending.’

^4. In contrast to Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Conservatism as an ideology’, American PoliticalScience Review, 51 (2) (1957), pp. 454–473. For Huntington, a clear commitment to existing institutions is certainly necessary and probably sufficient to identify conservatism.

^5. Müller uses ‘aesthetic’ and ‘dispositional’ to describe this dimension of conservatism (see p. 362). We prefer to reserve the term ‘dispositional’ for a different purpose—to refer to a habit of mind or inclination—or, as Buchanan and Tullock might put it, to the agent's ‘personal constitution,’ so we will use the phrase aesthetic conservatism hereafter. See James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 97.

^6. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, New and Expanded Edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), p. 408.

^7. This is important from the ‘family resemblance’ perspective, because it would imply that once conservatism is more finely specified there is no barrier to analysis of a standard kind: only political conservatism would be resistant to standard logical methods and this only because of its (definitional but unexplained) hybrid character.

^8. A hierarchy of any particular type might be (almost) infinitely costly to overcome and yet the necessarily futile gestures railing against it might not cost very much.

^9. We take it as an open question whether Müller is himself a conservative in one or more of the senses his categories admit.

^10. To establish this claim would require a more extensive interrogation of the conservative library than is appropriate here. Besides, there is the danger that assigning certain authors to that library begs exactly the definitional issues that Müller's discussion declares open. So we leave the relation between conservatism and the negative method as a speculation based on casual observation.

^11. See Friedrich A. Hayek, in ‘Why I am not a conservative’, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge, 2006); and James M. Buchanan, Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005).

^12. We set aside the proviso implied by the opening ‘nearly’: Müller doesn't indicate what cases he has in mind where method and factual claims wouldn't be required.

^13. Specifically, why that expressive dimension ought to be considered a crucial part of political process within the broadly ‘rational actor’ framework. See Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin, ‘Expressive voting and electoral equilibrium’, Public Choice, 95 (1–2) (1998), pp. 149–175; Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin, Democratic Devices and Desires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Democracy and Decision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Alan Hamlin and Colin Jennings, ‘Expressive political behaviour: foundations, scope and implications’, British Journal of Political Science, 41 (3) (2011), pp. 645–670.

^14. Perhaps, by causing a significant proportion of the marginal workers to lose their jobs, see Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

^15. See, for example, OECD, Economic Policy Reforms: Going for Growth (Paris: OECD, 2010), chapter 5.

^16. See Matthew Rabin and Joel L Schrag, ‘First impressions matter: a model of confirmatory bias’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114 (1) (1999), pp. 36–82.

^17. Coherence is, after all, a matter of degree.

^18. As do Hayek, op. cit., Ref. 11; and Buchanan, op. cit., Ref. 11.

^19. In the spirit of Müller's multi-dimensional framework we need not suppose that a status quo bias exhausts conservatism.

^20. Torbjörn Tännsjö, Conservatism for Our Time (London: Routledge, 1990). But see Section 5 below for further discussion of the status quo bias as an element of conservatism.

^21. On the adjectival form of conservatism, see Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin, ‘Analytic conservatism’, British Journal of Political Science, 34 (2004), pp. 675–691.

^22. G. A. Cohen, ‘Rescuing conservatism: a defence of existing value’, in Rahul Kumar, Wallace R. Jay and Freeman Samuel (Eds) Reasons and Recognition. Essays in the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For our own discussion, see Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin, ‘Conservative value’, MANCEPT Working Paper 7/13 (Manchester: University of Manchester, 2013).

^23. Huntington, op. cit., Ref. 4.

^24. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 332.

^25. Or, in the Irish case, the Battle of the Boyne or, in the post-Yugoslavian case, 14th century battles the details of which even the rival groups cannot relate.

^26. Buchanan, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 4–5.