Jerry z. Muller - Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought From David Hume to the Present

CONSERVATISM

CONSERVATISM

AN ANTHOLOGY OF SOCIAL AND

POLITICAL THOUGHT FROM

DAVID HUME TO THE PRESENT

EDITED BY

Jerry Z. Muller

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 1997 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conservatism : an anthology of social and political thought

from David Hume to the present / edited by Jerry Z. Muller.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-03712-4 (cl : alk. paper). ISBN 0-691-03711-6 (pb : alk. paper)

eISBN 978-0-691-21311-8

1. ConservatismHistory. I. Muller, Jerry Z., 1954- .

JC573.C65 1997

320.52dc21 96-45563

R0

For my liberal teachers

Robert K. Merton

George L. Mosse

Fritz Stern

This book is published at a time when the word conservative is on many lipswhether as a label of honor or as an epithet. Yet there is a remarkable discrepancy between the contemporary impact of conservatism and the attention devoted to its history. While this applies to studies of conservative political movements, it holds especially for the study of conservative thought. To be sure, there are many fine studies of one or another conservative thinker, but scholarly works which cover more than one era or more than one national history of conservative thought are few and far between. Readers who wish to acquaint themselves with conservative thought and to acquire a critical or comparative perspective on what passes for conservatism in their own time and place, will, it is hoped, find this book of use. At a time when the label conservative is promiscuously applied to fundamentalists, populists, libertarians, fascists, and the advocates of one or another orthodoxy, this book may help readers to acquire a clearer and more nuanced sense of what is distinctive about conservative social and political thought. Together with liberalism, socialism, and a few other isms, conservatism is a central strand of modern thought. Of these it is arguably the ideological tradition most in need of historical and cross-cultural illumination.

This book is an anthology with an argument, which brings together important specimens of European and American conservative social and political analysis from the mid-eighteenth century through our own day. The book argues in its introductionand demonstrates in its contentsthat there are characteristic features of conservative analysis which recur across a wide swath of time and across national borders. The institutions which conservatives have sought to conserve have varied, the major targets of conservative criticism have changed over time, and conservatism differs from one national context to another. Yet, as this anthology shows, there is an identifiable constellation of shared assumptions, predispositions, arguments, metaphors, and substantive commitments, which taken together form a distinctive conservative pattern of social and political analysis.

This volume is primarily intended as an anthology of conservative analysis on issues of what might broadly be called public policy. It is not a collection of conservative political programs. Nor is it a history of conservative political parties or political practice. Rather, it is a compendium of conservative social and political analysis that showcases the social scientific cast of conservative thought at the expense of more literary and romantic strands of conservatism that traffic in the nostalgic evocation of the past. The selections are composed, for the most part, of conservative diagnoses of specific social and political issues. For it is in response to proposed or enacted plans for radical reform that conservative thought has been most effectively articulated.

Although this volume does not provide a history of conservatism, it does take a historical approach to the understanding of conservative texts. That approach is based in part on the conviction that significant works of social and political thought are in general best understood in context. This applies especially to conservative texts. For conservative thought has arisen primarily as a response to challenges to existing institutions, and consists in good part of attempts to refute those challenges by historically specific analysis. Because of their characteristic emphasis on the hidden functions and interdependence of social institutions, and on the link of institutions to particular historical experience, conservatives have often presented their arguments through an examination of specific social and political institutions. As a result, the more general principles and propensities animating conservative thought are frequently lost to view. Political or social theorists who identify theory with the analytic and deductivist style of Hobbess Leviathan, Lockes Two Treatises of Government, or Rawlss Theory of Justice are apt to complain that works such as Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France lack theoretical content. They dismiss the theory embedded in Burkes discussions of the Revolution of 1688 and of Marie Antoinettes bedchamber as too hard to come by. Yet it is precisely in such details that the substance of conservative political and social thought is often to be found. General and abstract conservative arguments must be mined from the particular and historical ore.

This book was conceived as a teaching tool, and not merely in the sense that it could be used in the classroom. My hope was to recapture some of the experience of studying each reading with a teacher who in addition to selecting the texts would introduce each thinker, explicate the text, and call the readers attention to some of its most significant images, conceptual themes, and rhetorical strategies. Thus each of the readings is prefaced by an introduction which sketches the relevant biographical and historical contexts, and by editors footnotes which gloss the text, explaining potentially obscure references and calling the readers attention to the more general conservative arguments being advanced amid the discussion of specific historical instances.

Readings from European and American thinkers have been chosen, not only because the volume is intended for both European and American readers, but because the juxtaposition of conservative texts from different national traditions is itself instructive. A comparison of American conservatism to its British and continental counterparts helps to call attention to some of the peculiarities of American conservatism. But readers will also notice that the gap between American conservatism and that of England, France, or Germany has narrowed from the eighteenth century to the present as the structure of institutions which conservatives in each nation seek to conserve has become more similar.

The readings have been selected, glossed, translated, and edited with an eye to making them user-friendly. Allusions in need of explanation are treated either in footnotes or in square brackets within the text. Translations other than those by the editor have been checked against the French or German language originals and occasionally altered in the interests of clarity or precision. In translating several of the selections anew, I have tried to recapture the meaning of the original and to render it in idiomatic English, rather than aiming at close replication of the sentence structure and vocabulary of the original document. In so doing, I have been struck again by the extent to which every translation is inevitably an interpretation. Readers should also keep in mind that the selection of particular portions of a document for inclusion is itself an act of interpretation, as is the very process of selecting some texts and authors rather than others for inclusion in the volume.