Rationalism in Conservative Politics 

“British conservatism,” notes Ferenc Hörcher, one of the two editors of (and a contributor to) Intellectual Conservatism: From Burke to Scruton, “has generally had little taste for intellectuals.” This new volume, edited by Hörcher and Daniel Pitt, attempts to understand, and in some ways transcend, this anti-intellectual tendency. In doing so, it—perhaps inadvertently—illustrates some important ways British conservatives need to learn from their American counterparts.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the British and American conservative traditions lies in their respective attitudes toward intellectuals and their ideas. The founding moment of the modern American conservative movement involved the conviction that, since “ideas have consequences,” possessing the right ideas would be a crucial precondition for producing the right political consequences. In contrast, British conservatives have tended to believe that even the right ideas will have the wrong consequences if programmatically implemented—and the best that intellectuals can therefore do is keep a respectful distance from the irreducibly prudential and pragmatic business of actually governing.  

Hörcher and Pitt’s volume illustrates the virtues of the American approach while sympathetically interrogating the British one. The contributors, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, confront a paradox. To provide a reasoned defense of British conservative opposition to what the mid-twentieth-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott called “rationalism”—the belief that political action should be driven by rationally derived, abstract principles—is itself to engage in the kind of intellectualism for which many British conservatives have had a distaste.  

One way of escaping this paradox is to acknowledge the second-order character of one’s intellectualism. Oakeshottian antirationalism, if true, is certainly not self-evidently true. It requires a defense: abstract principles will have to be invoked, not to defend specific political decisions, but to explain why no such defense is possible. The other route away from this paradox is to qualify one’s antirationalism and to admit that abstract principles sometimes have at least some first-order relevance, even if they cannot provide a fully determinate blueprint for governance. This latter approach concedes something to the “rationalist” while still critiquing his utopian optimism.  

Pitt and Hörcher illustrate, from a range of perspectives and across a spectrum of political domains, the appeal of the concessionary approach. In doing so, they also show us why British Conservatives (big “C”) have rarely been conservative enough on substantive questions about the political conditions for human flourishing—and why they need to learn from their American counterparts. 

Pitt’s own contributed essay, an intriguing attempt to transcend “Oakeshottian proceduralism” and defend a “substantive framework” for a “coherent conservative view of the British constitution,” nicely illustrates the concessionary approach. Pitt works up a set of seven broad principles from basic conservative assumptions; at the same time, he contrasts the “lightly sketched territorial map” that results from the futile rationalist desire for a completely determinate schema that supplies ready-made answers to every practical question. 

An excellent essay by Christopher Fear demonstrates how even Oakeshott himself accepted the political relevance of some abstract principles. A preference for viewing the state as a “civil association” with no specific and substantive moral ends of its own led Oakeshott to defend an “individualism” in which government refrains from “determining a ‘common good.’” Here, an antirationalist principle at one level—rejecting the state’s role in rationally determining the “common good”—leads to rationalism at another level. But the troubling result is a rationalistically derived principle of antipaternalism that could threaten to become just as schematic and hubristic as its inverse. 

The antipaternalist principle could easily become horribly, well, progressive. Oakeshott’s target was Britain’s postwar regime of socialist economic planning, but “individualism” could just as easily be deployed against the “moral vigilance” campaigns of 1950s social conservatism. As James Baresel has observed, important strands of British conservatism have thus embraced a perverse “fusionism” of traditionalism and leftist progressivism.

Hörcher’s essay, however, which charts the intellectual history of Cold War Britain’s conservative scholarly networks, shows us that, where the qualified embrace of rationalism is more self-conscious, its results tend to be less perverse. Contrasting Oakeshott’s coterie at the London School of Economics with the circles surrounding the late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton and the Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling, Hörcher notes that both Oakeshott and Cowling, and their followers, tended to criticize Scruton for excessive rationalism. Cowling “harboured serious doubts about Scruton’s project of trying to formulate a philosophical defence of conservatism” and preferred “irony, geniality, and malice” to rational debate about principles. Yet it was Scruton who succeeded, unlike Cowling, in producing a “public doctrine” (to borrow Cowling’s phrase) that is still attractive to many thinkers and politicians today—and a doctrine that, unlike Oakeshott’s, does not risk collapsing into a genteel Tory progressivism.  

Several of the volume’s contributors depart from the paradigm of antirationalism altogether, and in doing so raise the kind of questions American social conservatives are prone to ponder but that British Conservative politicians tend to avoid like the plague. Sebastian Morello, drawing on his fascinating recent book, argues that conservatism requires a theistic foundation. Morello builds on Scruton’s insights into the phenomenology of the religious life to argue that conservatism is grounded, ultimately, in affirming the legitimacy of a nation’s collective pursuit of second-personal union with the Divine.  

Similarly, Imogen Sinclair attempts to locate the “transcendent source” of the “conservative instinct.” Approaching the question through Philip Rieff’s claim that “social order” and its associated moral “interdicts” express a “sacred order” of moral and metaphysical truth, Sinclair reaches the appealing conclusion that a “covenantal” conservative society, recognizing this truth, will realize human fulfilment through citizens’ freely chosen integration into an order both social and sacred.  

A limitation of the volume arises from its ambivalent relationship to British conservatism’s party of that name. The book sets out to explore conservatism “inside and outside the [Conservative] Parliamentary Party.” But it is surely impossible today to assume that whatever happens inside the party is automatically relevant to conservatism. Even Evelyn Waugh, whose own decidedly small-c conservatism is profiled by P. Bracy Bersnak in the volume, condemned the party for failing to “put the clock back a single second.”  

One must wonder, then, about the purpose of the contributions in Part 2 (“Conservative Ideas and the Conservative Party”), which—excellent on their own terms as they certainly are—fail to clarify the referential ambiguity attaching to the first occurrence of the word “Conservative” in this part’s title. These contributors sometimes seem more interested in the ideas of the Conservative Party (whatever they may have been) than in the conservative ideas with which the party, from time to time, interacted. Indeed, it is at least possible to argue that some of the most interesting contemporary developments in British conservative practice are taking place inside a party—but a party other than the Conservative one.  

Questions of party aside, the volume is a masterly guide to the state of British conservative thought. But precisely because of this clarity, one worries that we are witnessing the owl of Minerva spreading its wings as darkness gathers over the book’s subject. At any rate, British conservatism, and the British right, stand at a crossroads. As Morello and Sinclair’s contributions illustrate, a defensible conservatism will ultimately have to appeal to a substantive vision of the human good—to take sides on which activities and forms of life contribute to human flourishing and which do not. Doing so need not entail theocracy, coercion, or political extremism of any kind. But it will involve uncomfortable decisions for British conservatives.  

Failure, here, is not an option. Leo Strauss once wrote that the social science of his time was excused by the facts that “it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.” A British conservatism that refuses to overcome its aversion to rational reflection on the good may avail itself of neither excuse. Hörcher and Pitt have shown the way: the perils of naïve rationalism are great, but the perils of Oakeshotting one’s way to leftism are greater. Ideas about the political conditions for human flourishing sometimes have unforeseen consequences. But the consequences of refusing to traffic in these ideas are foreseeably very bad indeed.  

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