I’ve spent several blog posts summarizing the argument Yoram Hazony makes in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery. So, what to make of Hazony’s case?
To begin with, do Hazony’s definitions of conservative and liberal make sense? One might say this is a moot question – Hazony is free to stipulate what he means by “conservative” and “liberal” and make his case according to those definitions. And in a sense I agree – as Hazony correctly notes, many people have used the term “conservative” to refer to many different worldviews, and for Hazony to make his case for conservatism effectively it is necessary to make clear exactly what he means when he speaks of conservatism. That said, his definitions are not without issue.
One issue is that it makes for some odd classifications. For example, if asked to put together a list of the most influential conservative thinkers in academia, one name that is almost guaranteed to be on anyone’s list is the Princeton professor Robert P. George. Yet Robert George argues for religious freedom on the grounds that religious freedom is a universal human right, and the existence of this right is knowable by consulting reason – the kind of rationalist argument Hazony says is characteristic of liberal thought. So, by Hazony’s reckoning, we would have to classify Robert George as a liberal, not a conservative.
If your definition of conservatism commits you to saying “Robert George isn’t a real conservative” you should expect a few people to raise their eyebrows in response. Perhaps that is a bullet Hazony is willing to bite – he briefly acknowledges this concern by noting “there are many writers who believe that conservatism should be based on something like Catholic natural law teaching, itself a form of philosophical rationalism.” But he also acknowledges this is a question he will leave unexplored, as “the book is already long enough, and an adequate treatment of this question would have taken me too far afield.” Fair enough – no matter how much we say on a topic, there is always more that could be said. But acknowledging that there are forms of rationalist thought like Catholic natural law theory (or secular natural law theory, for that matter) that also lead to conservatism undermines Hazony’s usual framing of secular/rationalist/liberal vs religious/empiricist/conservative.
There are numerous other examples of thinkers who don’t fit Hazony’s classification. It’s not as though all liberal thinkers accept every liberal premise Hazony articulates, nor does every conservative thinker accept all of Hazony’s conservative premises. One example that jumps to mind is the economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek. Hazony does acknowledge that Hayek confounds his classification in a way, because Hayek’s work contained “the most sophisticated defense of inherited tradition to appear during the twentieth century. He added significantly to the theory of tradition and custom, in the process making the Enlightenment liberal rejection of inherited tradition look amateurish and ill-considered.” Nonetheless, Hazony says, Hayek is a liberal, not a conservative, because Hayek was excessively concerned with the liberty of the individual, declaring individual liberty to be the supreme principle.
For Hayek to be a proper empiricist, Hazony says, “the status of the principle of individual liberty would have to be that of an empirically derived moral rule – which would have to be balanced out against similarly derived moral rules such as peace, justice, stability and permanence, national independence, and national cohesion, in an ongoing process of adjustment in light of experience.” Instead, Hazony says, “the freedom of the individual is not, for Hayek, an empirically derived moral rule which must be balanced against other such principles in seeking to steer the ship of state” but rather “appears to be a dogma or axiom that Hayek imports from Enlightenment rationalism.”
As it happens, Hazony is simply mistaken in his characterization of Hayek. A closer reading of Hayek’s work reveals that Hayek does not argue that “individual liberty is the supreme principle” as Hazony claims, but rather that a stable and enduring political system requires that we act as if individual liberty is a supreme principle, which cannot be traded off for the benefit of other concerns. And Hayek does, in fact, ground this argument based on what he believes experience shows, arguing in the first volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty that, as a matter of experience, when “the choice between freedom and coercion is thus treated as a matter of expediency, freedom is bound to be sacrificed in almost every instance”, and thus “freedom can be preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be sacrificed for particular advantages”[emphasis added], because the “progressive discarding of principles and the increasing determination during the last hundred years to proceed pragmatically” has shown destructive results.
Treating individual liberty as something to be traded off for the sake of other socially desirable goals is “something most of the Western world has indeed been doing for the past two or three generations, and which is responsible for the conditions of present politics”, and experience shows this “view which has now dominated politics for so long has hardly produced the results which its advocates desired. Instead of having achieved greater mastery over our fate we find ourselves in fact more frequently committed to a path which we have not deliberately chosen, and faced with ‘inevitable necessities’ of further action which, though never intended, are the result of what we have done.”
So Hayek doesn’t argue as an axiom that “individual liberty is the supreme principle.” Hayek argues that we should act as if individual liberty is the supreme principle, because experience and history show that this approach works better than the alternative. Hazony is free to disagree with Hayek about whether or not this is really what experience shows – but he’s wrong to say Hayek treated the priority of individual liberty as an axiomatic premise. Hayek’s argument is firmly rooted in experience.
Hazony has also shown a strange tendentiousness in how he interprets the importance of liberty among other thinkers. For example, when discussing his book in an interview with Michael Shermer on Shermer’s podcast, Hazony again reiterates the need to keep individual liberty in its proper scope. Repeating his point from the book that liberty is just one goal among many listed in the preamble to the Constitution, Hazony calls out that there are “seven different purposes of government” listed in the preamble, and that “the very first one is to form a more perfect union” while “only the last one is the blessings of Liberty.” He seems to be implying that coming last on the list says something about its relative importance – but why think that? I could just as easily (and just as arbitrarily) suggest that it being the last item mentioned signified that it was the most important of the values, because it shows liberty is the one to which all the others have been building up. He also points out in his book that these seven goals are very similar to a list laid out by Edmund Burke, thus connecting American conservatism to English conservatism. But liberty is placed much higher on Burke’s list – and there, Hazony feels no need to make a point about the ordering.
In the next post, I’ll focus on some of what Hazony says about philosophy and economics.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Nov 24 2023 at 12:07pm
Good stuff. Does Hazony ever state under which circumstances individual liberty should be sacrificed and when upheld? Do, for example, “national cohesion” or “stability” always trump individual liberty?
Many liberal scholars (Hayek among them, but I am thinking mainly of Adam Smith) have a presumption of liberty. Liberty is not the supreme goal, but the presumption is that liberty ought to be upheld unless there is a compelling reason to sacrifice it. Further, the mere presence of a reason is insufficient: the bar to clear is extremely high (as Smith discusses at length in Books IV and V of Wealth of Nations).
Perhaps you’re about to get to this in your next post, but does Hazony discuss the circumstances in which liberty triumphs and which it does not?
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 24 2023 at 12:33pm
I do not get to this in my next post so I’ll answer this here. No, Hazony does not get into specifics about under what specific circumstances individual liberty ought to be curtailed for the sake of other goals. More importantly, the fact that he does not do this isn’t really an omission within his argument. By the worldview he advocates, attempting to put out specific formulations of when liberty is or isn’t to yield to other concerns ventures into the kind of rationalist formulations Hazony opposes. (The reasoning here is similar to his reservations about the very idea of laying out premises of conservatism.) That sort of thing is an issue that will involve the necessary and inevitably fallible exercise of judgement, based on the circumstance, and being informed as closely as possible in light of past experience and precedent. But there is no specific formulation to be made, so he does not attempt one. The process by which that gets decided is in Hazony’s worldview (and to borrow a phrase from a certain someone) something that is unavoidably loose, vague, and indeterminate. So, by Hazony’s lights, understanding this and avoiding any attempt at an explicit formulation at least gives you the chance to be vaguely right, whereas an officially formalized system guarantees that you’ll be precisely wrong.
Jon Murphy
Nov 24 2023 at 12:40pm
I’m sorry, I asked the question in a poor manner. I didn’t mean to imply a formula (I agree with him such a thing would be a foolish endevour). I should have asked if he gives examples of individual liberty trumping other concerns that he approves of. Like Adam Smith arguing for the prohibition of small bank notes: he agrees it is a violation of natural liberty but is necessary.
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 24 2023 at 3:20pm
Ah, I see what you mean.
Yes, while he doesn’t set out any particular theory or formula for deciding when individual liberty must yield to other concerns, he does provide particular examples. Although he’s fairly thin on those – I think his primary concern was addressing the argument about whether or not people bear obligations they must fulfill even if they never consented to them, rather than working out what such obligations might be.
But still, he mentions examples. For example he says:
So he clearly considers things like military service (at least in wartime) and family obligations areas where individual liberty must yield. The same with upending long established domestic industry. Drug and alcohol abuse too, as well as what I gather is support for involuntary treatment of the mentally ill.
It’s a little vague, though, how much of this he would want done through the apparatus of the state, as opposed to his more general definition of “government” which includes non-state means of social pressure and influence. He does argue at various points that what’s needed is a widespread acceptance of the general ideas that we bear these obligations whether we chose them or not, and when this is widely accepted and socially enforced, use of the state is unnecessary. But he keeps that door ajar.
Jon Murphy
Nov 24 2023 at 3:46pm
Right, but my question is the opposite: does he give examples where these other virtues yeild to individual liberty?
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 24 2023 at 4:00pm
Aaaagh, I’m sorry, I totally misread that. I think the part where you spoke of “Adam Smith arguing for the prohibition of small bank notes: he agrees it is a violation of natural liberty but is necessary” put my mind onto thinking of cases where Hazony, likewise, though violations of liberty were necessary.
The short answer is no, he doesn’t spell out cases where he thinks other virtues must yield to individual liberty, at least not in any length. (Or if he did, they’re not springing to mind, or recorded in my notes.) Given that he sees his primary ideological opponents as favoring individual liberty as a supreme principle, I suspect he doesn’t see much need to argue in favor of individual liberty in particular cases, since that doesn’t produce much of a clash in ideas that he’s trying to bring about. (Though that is, of course, speculation on my part.)
Thomas L Hutcheson
Nov 25 2023 at 8:22am
Most of what is historically conservative in the Anglo American sense (Burke, etc.) is liberal in valuing individual self determination (Cass Sunstein’s sense of “liberal”). It’s only recently that “Conservatives” have glommed onto illiberal identity politics, and various [X]phobias (and are now moving to embrace populist economic economic intervention) as electoral tactics. It seems to me Hazny is trying to provide a framework and justification for these move away from traditional liberalism.
Richard Fulmer
Nov 25 2023 at 3:50pm
Exactly. I think that people like Hazony and Patrick Deneen got started down this path by attempting to build some sort of logical framework for Trump’s actions and rhetoric. That was a fool’s errand since Trump is guided by little more than his neurotic needs and desires of the moment.
When Hazony et al finally clicked to this fact, they were faced with the choice of admitting the truth to themselves and their readers or trying to salvage their rationales by turning them into something resembling a coherent political philosophy.
By that time their arguments had already included justifications for Trump’s attacks on anyone in the GOP who failed to accord him the obsequious fealty that his hypersensitive ego and his monumental insecurity demanded. Thus their conflation of Progressivism and classical liberalism – they needed a plausible punching bag on the right.
Trump’s malign legacy will haunt this nation for a very long time.
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 29 2023 at 10:10am
I think you may be overstating things, at the very least, regarding Burke and his valuing of self-determination. This is not to say Burke did not value it, of course. He certainly did. But Burke, like Hazony, holds a limited and prescribed support for self-determination. To start, in Burke’s general worldview as he put it, “Nothing is good, but in proportion and with reference.” That is, no particular value or good categorically trumps all others – each good, self-determination included, must be taken in proportion and with reference to other goods and values.
Additionally, Burke also held that “Neither the few nor the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.” Note what Burke is saying here – he’s not saying that people have the right to act as they will so long as they don’t violate the negative rights of others. He’s arguing that the positive restraints of “duty, trust, engagement, or obligation” also limit how you have the right to act – and these issues run across a broad spectrum of life in Burke’s view.
This isn’t to say Burke necessarily held that all these things should be matters of state. Part of the reason he was such a staunch defender of inherited institutions and moral traditions was that they helped restrain people’s behavior without use of the state. For Burke, use of the state was a last resort, but being a last resort doesn’t mean it was off the table. As Burke put it, “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.”
By upholding the inherited traditions and institutions of a society, we are able to place more of this restraint from within than from without – but still, people who don’t sufficiently constrain their behavior with regards to “duty, trust, engagement, or obligation” are no longer “qualified for civil liberty” as Burke put it. To Burke, civil liberties and individual self-determination were decidedly not things that you were entitled to by right – they were things you must be worthy of to be able to posses, and you were only made worthy of them by living a virtuous and constrained life bound by duty and obligation.
And this basically matches Hazony’s argument for the importance of traditional institutions and moral constraints when he said “it is precisely those who wish for mild government and generous liberties who should make it their business to speak of the cohesiveness of their society and to find ways of heightening this cohesion and resilience, rather than ceaselessly breaking it down.”
Richard Fulmer
Nov 29 2023 at 2:06pm
How does Hazony propose to use government to force people to act in accordance with “duty, trust, engagement, and obligation”?
I suggest that, rather than giving government more power to control our lives – power that will eventually fall into the hands of our political opponents – we reduce government’s power. Stop giving government the job of ameliorating all pain. Let people bear the consequences of their actions rather than forcing others to bear them. Stop destroying the feedback loops that link cause and effect.
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 30 2023 at 10:43am
One point to make at the outset in response to your question is to make sure you are not conflating “government” with “the state.” As described in a previous portion of this series, in Hazony’s worldview, “government” and “the state” are not synonymous terms. Government is a much broader concept than the state. And this is not some esoteric idea peculiar to Hazony. Vincent Ostrom, for example, put it well when he said “We need not think of ‘government’ or ‘governance’ as something provided by states alone. Families, voluntary associations, villages, and other forms of human association all involve some form of self-government. Rather than looking only to states, we need to give much more attention to building the basic institutional structures that enable people to find ways of relating constructively to one another and of resolving problems in their daily lives.” (From an interview in the book Challenging Institutional Analysis and Design: The Bloomington School by Pete Boettke and Paul Dragos Aligica.) This pretty closely mirrors one of the arguments Hazony made that I covered previously in this series.
David Colander and Roland Kupers make the same observation in their book Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society’s Problems From the Bottom Up when they say “Since many of those problems are collective problems, collective institutions are necessary to deal with them, but these collective institutions don’t have to be the state as we currently know it.” This, too, mirror’s how Hazony had described things.
Also, Yuval Levin wrote an entire book addressing the same concept, The Fractured Republic, where he speaks of the need to address social problems by reviving what he calls the “middle layers” of society – families, community groups, churches, local organizations, and the like. All these forms of social organization, too, are included under what Hazony would call “government”, although they are decidedly not “the state”, nor do they involve giving the state “power to control our lives – power that will eventually fall into the hands of our political opponents”, as you put it.
Hazony calls for leaders within government – broadly defined as all these different forms of association – to speak out in favor of conservative values, and of living the conservative life. He puts a great deal of weight on the idea that what is treated as honorable and worthy by these community organizations will have strong influence on how people live. And as Hazony sees it, this has been all but abandoned, and instead of emphasizing the importance of duty, trust, engagement, and obligation, the prevailing view is simply (as the kids say these days (or at least I think they still use this phrase, I might be out of date)) “You do you! As long as you’re not hurting anyone else, just live however you want and do whatever seems fulfilling to you. No judgment!” The idea that all lifestyles are equally valid, and no more deserving of honor or dishonor than any other lifestyle, so long as one does not use violence to violate the negative rights of others, is not, in Hazony’s view, something that can by itself hold human societies together for very long.
Richard Fulmer
Dec 2 2023 at 1:06pm
I agree with restoring society’s “little platoons” of private, voluntary organizations. How does Hazony propose to do that other than by exhortation?
We are unlikely to rebuild the private sphere while government is in the way. We’ll need to peel back the welfare state to make room once again for the voluntary organizations that were so prevalent in this country before the Great Society crowded them out.
Roger McKinney
Dec 4 2023 at 10:54am
Of course, Hayek didn’t call himself a conservative and wrote “Why I am not a Conservative.”
Hazony should have read Hayek’s “Individualism: True and False” before making such claims as he did, and Hayek’s Counter-revolution in Science in which Hayek distinguished between reason and rationalization.
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