I’ve been enjoying reading Lawrence E Cahoone’s “Civil Society – The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics”, which I think is a very honest and thoughtful attempt to articulate a philosophy of contemporary conservatism. I plan to post a series of thoughts stimulated by his book.
A key problem for theorists of conservatism is the phenomenon of political and social “change”, given that the essence of conservatism seems to be about preserving the status quo and resisting a liberal reformist agenda. In response to this there are famous Burke and Disraeli quotes as to how a good conservative society needs to embrace change, and the favourite conservative trope for this is the organic or ecological metaphor – namely that of course change and adaptation are necessary, but these processes follow a natural and spontaneous path. While the metaphor appears an attractive one it suffers from the fact that its central idea is to deny a role for overt or “designing” political intervention, whereas in human societies it is precisely in the political realm that the enabling or legitimising of change takes place. How can one differentiate between political action which merely formalises “organic” developments and that which seeks to intervene premeditatedly “against the social grain” ?
Cahoone tries to rescue us from this paradox by positing that conservatism recognises that in any society there is an “incommensurability” between goods and that political action comprises an ongoing rebalancing between these goods based on continual practical learning. So, for example, the good of “self-autonomy” needs to be balanced against “civic order”, and one can see how this balance will shift with new technologies and even with new discoveries in social science (e.g. better understanding of the causes of criminal behaviour). Hence conservatism can be seen to be fluid and responsive and not hamstrung by the need to defend outdated practices. And Cahoone is robust in asserting that changes in social values, which may have evolved from a distinctively liberal and non-conservative political rhetoric, need to be accepted by conservatives as "de facto" part of the incommensurable set of social goods which politics sets out to balance.
A key element of Cahoone’s definition of conservatism is the demotion of politics. Pragmatic political action based on practical experience (phronesis) is to be seen as only a small part of what goes on in the civitas. Society is too complex and multi-faceted to be understood or articulated by the political sphere and the prime conservative opposition to liberalism is what it perceives as liberalism’s wish to use political action to “redress” and “reshape” aspects of society based on a rationalistic set of premises. It is the consistency-driven application of liberal principles, the prioritising of a value like “equality” or “liberty” above, say, the value of “cultural continuity” that Cahoone’s conservatism is most resolutely set against.
I’m not sure how easy it will be to distinguish between a politics of progress based on phronesis from one based on more programmatic liberal reforming zeal, but I think it is a nice attempt to articulate how conservative politics can embrace progressive change. And it also admits the reality of conflict in society, which some conservative theorists seem to ignore.
Incommensurability between goods means that value conflicts are part and parcel of the social world and Cahoone’s acceptance of this leads him to talk of conservatism’s intrinsic pluralism. However, what I am sure that conservatism wants to reject is the notion of anything like, say, class conflict. Class conflict implies the kind of struggle whereby the social order is only held in place by the ongoing strength of one class relative to another, but that should this strength reverse, then the outcome of the struggle would be a wholesale remoulding of the social order. The conservative emphasis on the authority of inherited practical experience and on the organic, ecological metaphor means it has to reject any notion of conflicts latent in society which could lead to wholesale transformation. So it is I think a key premise of Cahoone’s conservatism, and it reverberates for me with what I have heard many conservatives say, namely that politics should be anodyne. Politics should be about economic management, incremental rebalancing, but emphatically not about anything one might call a political movement. And of course what Cahoone does not address, though it is the elephant in the room for any conservative theorising, is privilege, and how the notion of an anodyne politics and an organic social metaphor plays above all to defence of privilege.
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