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Abstract
Is there any reason to discriminate among the rival claims self-proclaimed conservatives make for being truly conservative? This article argues that at least some of these claims can legitimately be dismissed by an independent third. Drawing on and critically interrogating the theories of conservatism provided by Huntington, Oakeshott, as well as Brennan and Hamlin, this article argues that many characterizations of conservatism mistake contingent circumstances explaining why people historically were or conceivably might be reluctant to promote social change for a fully formed conservative ideology. Not least, risk- and uncertainty-centered accounts, which have gained in popularity as of recently, constitute no viable basis for plausible claims to being truly conservative. Rather than specifying what it takes to be a true conservative, these accounts provide a formalized description of one kind of contingent circumstances that may lead a principled non-conservative to adopt conservative political attitudes.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Vanessa Rampton, the two anonymous reviewers, and especially Sebastian Muders for their help to improve the clarity of the argument.
Notes
1. For a seminal analysis of certain forms of disputes over authenticity, namely true succession and rightful inheritance of a tradition, see Ruben (Citation2013, esp. 32–34).
2. Besides ideological authenticity and faithful succession, rightful inheritance of a tradition can be distinguished as another subcategory of disputes over authenticity. Whereas faithful succession requires that a person has developed a set of beliefs or practices that is qualitatively similar, to a very high degree, to some earlier set of beliefs or practices, rightful inheritance of a tradition is defined through a causal-similarity chain. The set of beliefs or practices of a rightful inheritor of a tradition must therefore be qualitatively similar, to a very high degree, to the last link in the chain of a tradition, and so may be in fact qualitatively dissimilar to the set of beliefs or practices developed by the originator of the tradition, provided that the tradition chain includes a sufficiently high number of links in between. For a more detailed and accurate comparison, see Payton (Citation2013, 41–43) and Beckstein (Citation2014, 31).
3. One aspect of this convention, as I understand it following Muller (Citation1997, 4–5) and Huntington (Citation1957, 460), is that (metaphysical) ideologies that postulate the existence of some transcendent order (‘orthodoxy’) are excluded from the spectrum of potentially plausible conceptions of conservatism, as are (reactionary) doctrines that wish to re-activate some idealized bygone state of affairs.
4. A general description of this danger is Dewey’s (2007) ‘historical fallacy’.
5. For example, O’Hear (Citation1998, 609) and White (Citation1957, 1). For rejections of this view, see e.g., Brennan and Hamlin (Citation2004, 677) and Oakeshott (Citation1991b, 407).
6. Freeden’s (2008) Ideologies and Political Theory stands out as a particularly felicitous such project.
7. Mannheim’s attempt to avoid this problem by establishing the notion of traditionalism as a residual category is unsatisfying for two reasons. First, Mannheim’s suggestion that human beings have a general weakness for the traditional is questionable (Vierhaus Citation1997, 532; Oakeshott Citation1991b, 425). Second, we will see in Section 4 that the aspiration to continue traditions is only one way among others in which the imperative of conservation can be conceptualized.
8. For similar criticisms of the ‘sociological’ characterization of conservatism, see Brennan and Hamlin (Citation2014, 233–234), Hamlin (Citation2013, 4), and Huntington (Citation1957, 457).
9. For the sake of simplicity, I will therefore not make explicit reference to the case of a person who is conservative in both the adjectival and the nominal sense.
10. The repetition of liberal ideology, Huntington claimed, did not help to repel the threat of socialism posed by the Soviet Union. Due to its ideational nature, liberal ideology is bound to encounter socialism at the same level of last questions and final answers. However, conservatism, because of its situational nature, manages to immunize the established liberal society against any challenge from ideational ideologies. Therefore, Huntington (Citation1957, 458, 470–473) concludes, ‘American liberals have no recourse but to turn to conservatism … [and] accept the values of conservatism for the duration of the threat’.
11. In the rough-and-tumble play of ordinary political discourse, the Realos of the German Green Party are regularly taunted as being ‘blacks’ (i.e., conservatives) who are equipped with ‘green’ party membership cards (e.g., Deininger Citation2012). On the basis of the discussion provided in this article, it seems more appropriate to say that they are green by conviction and conservative by circumstance, or green at heart and conservative at head.