In my previous post, I introduced Yoram Hazony’s project in his new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery.
What, to Hazony, separates true conservatism from Enlightenment liberalism, and why is the former superior to the latter? To answer this, Hazony looks to the writings of major conservative thinkers in centuries past, such as John Fortescue, Richard Hooker, John Seldon, and Edmund Burke.
What unites these thinkers is their support for what Hazony dubs historical empiricism, and their distrust of universalist, rationalist theories founded on abstract reason. Quoting John Seldon, Hazony says of historical empiricism that by “this view, our reasoning in political and legal matters should be based upon inherited national tradition. This permits the statesman or jurist to overcome the small stock of observation and experience that individuals are able to accumulate during their own lifetimes (‘that kind of ignorant infancy, which our short lives alone allow us’) and to take advantage of ‘the many ages of former experience and observation’ which permit us to ‘accumulate years to us, as if we had lived even from the beginning of time.’ In other words, by consulting the accumulated experience of the past, we overcome the inherent weakness of individual judgment, bringing to bear the many lifetimes of observation by our forebears, who wrestled with similar questions under diverse circumstances.”
This is distinguished from the thought of the political philosopher John Locke, a key figure in the Enlightenment liberal tradition. Hazony identifies Locke as a rationalist and a universalist, whose approach to political philosophy stands in stark contrast to the historically grounded and experience-based vison of conservatism. Hazony explains: “Rationalists have a different view of the role of reason in political thought, and in fact a different understanding of what reason itself is. Rather than arguing from the historical experience of nations, rationalists set out by asserting general axioms that they believe to be true of all human beings and that they suppose will be accepted by all human beings examining them with their native rational abilities. From these, they deduce the appropriate constitution or laws for all men.” Perhaps Locke’s most famous work, his Second Treatise on Government, demonstrates this process in action. Locke’s approach is not an “effort to formulate a theory of the state from an empirical standpoint. Instead, it begins with a series of axioms that are without any evident connection to what can be known from the historical and empirical study of the state…From these axioms, Locke then proceeds to deduce the proper character of the political order for all nations on earth.”
As with all deductive reasoning, Locke’s axiomatic-deductive approach is only as strong as the assumptions on which it rests. But, Hazony says, “there is no reason to think any of Locke’s axioms are, in fact, true.” And in claiming the universal validity of these axioms and the systems deduced from them, rationalists recklessly seek to overthrow generations of accumulated experience in favor of something grounded in little more than their own armchair thought experiments. For if this axiomatic-deductive reasoning, untethered from experience, successfully “reveals to all the universal laws of nature governing the political realm, then there will be little need for the historically and empirically grounded reasoning of men such as Fortescue, Hooker, Coke, Selden, and Hale. All men, if they will just gather together and consult with their own reason, can design a government that will be better than anything that ‘the many ages of experience and observation’ produced in England. On this view, the Anglo-American conservative tradition—far from having brought into being the freest and best constitution ever known to mankind—is in fact shot through with unwarranted prejudice, and an obstacle to a better life for all.”
Conservatives reject the universal claims of rationalist liberals. It is simply beyond the powers of the human mind to create, from whole cloth, a universally valid system of rights, or a universally valid political order, equally applicable in all times to all peoples. However, one must be careful not to overstate this point. The conservative thinkers Hazony cites, along with Hazony himself, do admit that universally correct answers exist. For example, Hazony says while “there are certainly principles of human nature that are true of all men, and therefore natural laws that prescribe what is good for every human society,” the true nature of “these principles and laws are the subject of unending controversy.” Elsewhere Hazony reiterates the point: “Conservatives do believe there are truths that hold good in all times and places, but given the extraordinary variety of human opinions on any given subject, they are skeptical about the capacity of the individual to attain universal political or moral truths simply by reasoning about them.”
What separates empiricist conservatives from rationalist liberals is how to go about discovering what these universal laws are. Rationalist liberals believe they can be derived through human reason, and once known these universal laws can be applied to consciously construct a universally valid political order. Empiricist conservatives believe human reason can only provide an understanding that is very limited and partial, and it’s only through long periods of experience and trial-and-error, built up across generations, that we can attempt to more closely approximate these ideals in practice.
Further, the discoveries made through this evolved and experienced-based process will not be universally applicable. They will be shaped into different forms by the differing characters, experiences, constraints, and histories of each nation, and may manifest in different, often incompatible, but equally useful ways. Again quoting Seldon (whom Hazony ranks as the greatest of conservative thinkers), Hazony writes “no nation can govern itself by directly appealing to such fundamental laws, because ‘diverse nations, as diverse men, have their diverse collections and inferences, and so make their diverse laws to grow to what they are, out of one and the same root.’” But these laws and traditions of different nations, despite growing from “out of one and the same root” may be incompatible with each other, says Seldon, who writes that what “may be most convenient or just in one state may be as unjust and inconvenient in another, and yet both excellently well framed as governed.”
An analogy might be drawn by referencing an archery target. Suppose the middle of the target, a perfect bullseye, represents the “principles of human nature that are true of all men” and the “natural laws that prescribe what is good for every human society.” Rationalist liberals believe one can create a social order through human reason that operates squarely on the bullseye. But empiricist conservatives see it differently. Human reason is far too feeble a guide to accomplish this. Different peoples and different nations, through trial and error and hard-earned experience, can try, over time and bit by bit, to move closer and closer to the bullseye. One nation may end up in a spot six inches above the center, while another ends up six inches below, with a third six inches to the left and a fourth six inches to the right. Each of these nations have developed systems and institutions that are equally close to correct, yet the institutions and traditions of each will be in many ways different from or incompatible with each other. Additionally, they didn’t end up where they were through sheer chance. Where each nation ended up had its own path-dependent logic based on its own unique history and circumstances. So even though the customs and institutions for each may be equally valid in a sense, they won’t be universal or interchangeable. What works at the northern-most point won’t work as well in the western-most point, and so on.
Because of this, Hazony writes, conservatism does not attempt to reach beyond its borders, or attempt to influence or interfere with other nations. “Each nation’s effort to implement the natural law is in accordance with its own unique experience and conditions. It is therefore wise to respect the different laws found among nations, both those that appear right to us and those that appear mistaken, for different perspectives may each have something to contribute to our pursuit of the truth.” There is no similar basis for such tolerance or respect in Enlightenment liberalism. For if the correct laws can be known through simply consulting universal human reason, and the validity of these reason-derived laws are always and everywhere valid, we have no more reason to respect the experience and character of other nations than we do to respect the accumulated experience of the past within our own society. If they seem contrary to what you can determine through reason, we can freely dispense with them.
In the next post, I will review Hazony’s views on conservatism and nationalism, and why he sees these ideas as necessarily connected.
READER COMMENTS
steve
Nov 8 2023 at 3:18pm
Does he offer any examples of where his kind of conservatism actually existed? I cant think of any examples, except for pretty small countries, that didnt feel pretty free about interfering in the affairs of other countries. Also, historically, governments were monarchies. I find it odd that anyone who has read much history would wish to have monarchies. There are lots of other issues here, but while our Constitution is not perfect, a group of guys really did get together and create pretty much without precedent a new form of government that has given us, arguably, the most successful country in the world. By and large, the countries which have rejected monarchies/authoritarian governments have been more successful. Countries with especially awful monarchies seemed to take on new forms of govt that were also really awful, like Russia, but I dont think that means that overall monarchies were better.
All that said, I agree that we need people who will challenge change. There is some merit to the idea that something which has persisted for many years may have some value. However, if that idea/belief/practice is founded on nothing other than tradition it likely falls, and deservedly so. If it has merit it should be able to stand up to challenge.
Steve
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 8 2023 at 4:16pm
As one might expect by his advocacy of “Anglo-American conservatism,” he particularly focuses on both England and the United States (at least, prior to the last sixty years or so) as examples of the kind of conservatism he envisions.
Also, you say
Hazony would strongly disagree with that sentiment. Most relevant to that claim in his book would be section 3 of chapter 2, which is entitled Continuity with the British Constitution. In this part of the book, Hazony argues:
Thus, Hazony argues, far from being a case of the American system representing a wholly new form of government, the system of the United States was carefully constructed with close reference and continuity to the British system from which it had originated, which is why “sixteen of the twenty-one sections making up the first four articles of the constitution, as well as much of the first eight amendments to the Constitution, implicitly refer to English sources.”
And this intentional continuity with established English law “was a matter of theoretical significance” for the Founders. For example, John Adams “takes up a survey of constitutions throughout history in order to demonstrate that the greatest insights into the nature of free governments have been implemented only in the English constitution, which is therefore closer to perfection than any other known to mankind.” Adam himself would go on to write:
Similarly, Hazony writes that another…
So by and large, the people responsible for the construction of the American Constitution were not engaged in the task of creating a new system “pretty much without precedent” as you put it. They saw themselves not as creating a new system based on the abstract “rights of man,” but as restoring an established system to its original function in order to, as they would say, “reclaim their rights as Englishman,” and in doing so they deliberately and carefully stuck as closely as possible to established precedent as it existed in both the English constitution and the tradition of English common law. There were some who did wish for the kind of rationalist reconstruction detached from precedent, such as Jefferson, but crucially they did not win the day. Hence why “The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb once said, only half-jokingly, that the absence of Jefferson from the American Constitutional Convention was the clearest sign of Providence intervening in American history.”
Richard Fulmer
Nov 8 2023 at 9:07pm
Why do Hazony and the new right spend so much time attacking Locke given that, as you note, the Founders did not base the Constitution on his theoretical axioms, but on the practical experience of the Romans and the British?
The solution, in my opinion, is not to reinvent conservatism but to rediscover it. We can start by putting the federal government back into the constitutional cage that the Founders created. The last thing we should do is give the government even more power over our lives than it already has.
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 9 2023 at 10:52am
Because despite the fact that the Founders did in fact build the system on practical experience and established precedent, there was an active argument going on at the time over whether that should be the case. Many argued against such an approach, and in favor of something more like the Lockean axiomatic approach Hazony describes. Key among these figures is Jefferson, of whom Hazony says “As a devotee of Enlightenment rationalist philosophy, he held tradition to be unimportant at best, and considered constitutions to be merely transitory and technical devices, to be rewritten from scratch every twenty years. For him, the only real constitution was the universal rights of man, which could be known by reason and had no need for constraints inherited from the past.”
Most importantly, this argument never really ended. And, Hazony says, in the last sixty years, it is in fact the Lockean style Enlightenment paradigm that has become dominant. So even though that’s not the system the Founders ultimately intended, it is the system that exists now, which is why it’s made the subject of criticism. When you say “The solution, in my opinion, is not to reinvent conservatism but to rediscover it”, you are actually very much in sync with what Hazony says as well. It’s not for nothing that his book is called Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and not Conservatism: A Reinvention.
By Hazony’s argument, much of what is called the modern conservative movement is in fact a (false) reinvention of conservatism. He would identify George Will as an example, as George Will argues in his recent book that American conservatism is rooted in, and about preserving, the ideas of the Enlightenment. Will argues that we are creatures with a certain fixed nature, therefore there are laws that dictate what is conducive to the thriving of creatures of our nature, and crucially, that these laws can be known through reason. That, Hazony argues, is a reinvention of conservatism, which is why he thinks true conservatism needs to be rediscovered.
This is why Hazony also argues that “what is now called ‘liberal democracy’ refers not to the traditional Anglo-American constitution but rather to a rationalist reconstruction of it.” He, too, thinks this calls for a return to the original constitutional tradition that existed prior to the rationalist reconstruction that became the dominant political paradigm over the last sixty years.
Richard Fulmer
Nov 9 2023 at 7:43pm
I tend to agree with George Will that there are “laws” of human nature, or at least discernible human tendencies. If this were not the case and human behavior was completely random, experience and empirical evidence would not, contra Hazony, yield any useful laws.
Consider the following examples of observable human tendencies:
(1) People generally respond to incentives.
(2) People generally work about as hard as they must to get by. As a result, we often observe that people who migrate from harsh environments to friendlier ones often become wealthier than the natives.
(3) People given power over others tend to abuse that power.
(4) Threats go to the top of our mental in-boxes.
(5) People seek, observe, and respond to patterns.
(6) Combining tendencies 4 and 5, people often have negative stereotypes of others. Suppose, for example, that 100 purple people walk by you without incident. The 101st, however, assaults you. You’ll tend to be suspicious of the 102nd purple person because the 101st made a far bigger impression on you (both literally and figuratively) than did the first 100.
Because these tendencies exist, trial and error leads us to useful laws and norms that enable us to peacefully cooperate.
steve
Nov 9 2023 at 1:51pm
We were definitely borrowing a lot from English law and governance, but we also had significant changes. Maybe most importantly we rejected nobility. In the mid 1700s Britain still had the king very involved in government and the nobility made up a significant percentage of the House of Commons (as well as Lords). Of those with the power who dominated Parliament that was largely nobility. Our constitution pushed us much more towards universal (OK, make) suffrage than Britain. If you go back and read Burke and his contemporaries note that the rejection of the ruling class by inheritance was a major concern as was letting the common many vote and participate in government.
Steve
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 9 2023 at 3:31pm
Well there’s a pretty big gap between your first comment of that the formation of the United States represented “pretty much without precedent a new form of government” to your second comment saying the structure of the new government was “definitely borrowing a lot from English law and governance” albeit with “significant changes.”
In the first instance, I think Hazony would say the similarities far outweigh the differences – consider, for example, his point about how the majority of the articles of the constitution as well as the majority of the first ten amendments were derived from English sources. In the second, it’s worth noting that where there were differences in the form of the American system compared to the English, the differences weren’t simply derived from pure axiomatic reason. Rather, it represented the new “nation’s effort to implement the natural law…in accordance with its own unique experience and conditions.” Even where the differences existed, they weren’t designed top-down through abstract reason. They were carefully attempting to created institutions that reflected the bottom-up, evolved character of the new nation.
steve
Nov 9 2023 at 4:22pm
I may have overstated my case, but I dont think the similarities in the laws is all that important. No matter what form of govt we chose we would have laws against murder, theft, kidnapping, etc. Whether that followed English common law or some other legal system wasn’t that important. In my mind rejecting the idea of nobility and rule based upon inheritance and titles, laying the groundwork for universal suffrage, was much more important. Britain’s government was really run by the king and the nobility. Maybe Rome came closer but for most of the time it was a Republic the Senate and the patricians held the real power. Rome was also largely a city state for much of that time. Also, who was allowed to vote was pretty limited. The idea that government could be voted for and run by anyone was pretty novel.
Steve
steve
Nov 9 2023 at 4:26pm
Ooops. Let’s not forget religious freedom and freedom of speech. Also pretty new. Britain had an official state religion. One of the reasons people left and came here was the religious intolerance.
Steve
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 9 2023 at 4:53pm
Here, Hazony (and many others) would strongly disagree that the decision “English common law or some other legal system wasn’t that important”, or that the fact that virtually any system of government would likely have had “laws against murder, theft, kidnapping, etc” is the relevant point. The value of the English common law system isn’t that it was merely one system among many that would have outlawed murder – English common law is a rich, powerful, and distinctive legal tradition, and the presence or absence of this particular legal system is very, very far from being rendered trivial just as long as there were some kind of laws against murder.
And regarding the various changes that exist that you point out (some of which are also overstated, but I don’t have time to delve into that right now), that’s still beside the point. The point isn’t merely that differences existed, or how big those differences were. The point is the process by which those difference arose – that they were not created top down through abstract reason, but instead reflected bottom-up reflections of historically and empirically grounded reasoning, based on evolved local conditions related to the unique circumstances of time and place. That’s the relevant point for Hazony’s case here, and nothing you’ve said in your comments so far makes contact with that.
steve
Nov 10 2023 at 1:40pm
First, I think he fetishizes the British common law. It was convenient since so many of the colonists were familiar with it to adopt it. It saved a lot fo work. We would not have been that much different if we had imported someone else’s legal system.
Maybe I would have to read the book but what we did was to reject the British system which was largely top-down. The monarch was still important and the nobility had an outsized role in British government. We rejected the concept of nobility and the right to rule based upon inheritance and we started the path to universal suffrage. Now if he wants to say that based upon our experiences in the colonies we were rejecting much of the British form of govt then OI am mostly on board, but then Think that undercuts his entire argument about respecting stuff we have valued for a long time. Much of what the colonies valued was by any historical standard pretty new. Also, remember that many of the colonists were good royalists so the idea of rejecting royalty was new, at scale. Freedom of religion and freedom of religion for everyone was also new. Practiced in individual colonies but not so widespread.
Steve
Mactoul
Nov 8 2023 at 10:30pm
There were plenty of republics too, going back to ancient times. Rome, Venice, ancient Greek cities, medieval Italian towns, even in ancient India,
So, the establishment of American republic isn’t evidence of liberalism per se. In fact, to be a republic is an illiberal assertion or an unprincipled exception,
This is because liberalism logically implies either a world state or no state,.
steve
Nov 9 2023 at 1:54pm
Roman and Greek republics were only vaguely similar to our government.
Steve
Mactoul
Nov 8 2023 at 10:43pm
However, all rationalist projects are not liberal. For instance, Plato’s Republic isn’t liberal.
Liberalism arises from disaffection from evolved forms of human society and doesn’t appreciate the subtlety of evolved forms. For instance, a key feature of liberalism is dismissal of neighbor-stranger distinction, fundamental to human society,
This dismissal takes two forms, one is to treat everyone as neighbor, this is the left-liberal tendency and climaxes in a world-state,
The second form is to treat everyone as stranger, which is the right-liberal tendency and climaxes in anarchism/libertarianism .
Mark Z
Nov 12 2023 at 2:51pm
I would rebut that conservatism – as you understand it – is a adherence to vestigial social models rendered obsolete by technological change. In a modern, urban society, our neighbors our usually strangers. Moreover, strangers are not as threatening anymore. Modern impersonal institutions – and most importantly markets – that resolve inter-personal conflicts have yielded a society where one can be almost as confident that a total stranger won’t attack or fleece you as a neighbor (this is not entirely an optimistic statement; your ‘neighbors’ are no longer people you’ve known your whole life as in older times, and so are less reliable).
In other words, it’s not that liberals are disaffected with some eternal conservative truth, but that conservatism – again, your presentation of it, at least – is maladapted to modern life.
Dylan
Nov 9 2023 at 10:00am
Is John Seldon meant to be John Selden?
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 9 2023 at 10:53am
Ugh, yes, thank you for catching that
Roger McKinney
Nov 9 2023 at 10:24am
Hazony knows just enough history to be dangerous. It’s obvious to any good historian that Locke didn’t arrive at his views on human nature and government through speculation. He got them from the theologians at the University of Salamanca during the Reformation who distilled them from natural law and the Bible. Those theologians were the first modern economists according to Hayek, Rothbard, Schumpeter, Chafuen and other scholars. For details, see my book God is a Capitalist: Markets from Moses to Marx.
Had Western Europe followed Hazony’s conservatism, the hockey stick growth in per capita GDP that began in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century would never have happened. The West would be poorer than Haiti. The Dutch Republic shocked and horrified the rest of Europe with its free markets, equality before the law, limited government and other attributes of classical liberalism. And it was the first nation to break out of the Malthusian trap of mass starvation in frequent famines.
The English constitution that Hazony so admires came from the Dutch with the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in which the William III conquered England and implemented the Dutch system of government.
Kevin Corcoran
Nov 9 2023 at 11:24am
You mention that Locke got his ideas “from the theologians at the University of Salamanca during the Reformation who distilled them from natural law and the Bible.”
This mode of thought is also addressed in Hazony’s book – it was just largely left out of this section because, when attempting to sum up 100 pages of argument into a single blog post, unfortunately, key points are inevitably going to be left out. So in this, you have identified my shortcoming as a reviewer more than Hazony’s as an author. But to (very) briefly summarize, Hazony’s critique extends to theologically rooted natural law theory as well, largely channeled through the ideas of Hooker and Fortescue. Even though both of these men were deeply religious (as is Hazony himself), they were also deeply skeptical of claims to have derived natural law from religious scripture. For example Hazony writes that Hooker stood in in opposition to those who “believed that by their understanding of nature and revelation, they had attained certain knowledge of God’s will, which applies in all times and places. Hooker, on the other hand, remained deeply skeptical as to what human beings can know with certainty. He excoriated those who believed that they had put their finger on the ’cause of all the world’s ills’ and had ‘a comprehensive solutions to all these problems.'”
Hazony, too, holds such a view, making him very skeptical of natural law style claims rooted in religion – and he supports that with claims appealing to his own religious tradition. He writes “Whereas Hebrew Scripture depicts human reason as weak, capable only of local knowledge, and generally unreliable, liberalism depicts human reason as exceedingly powerful, capable of universal knowledge, and accessible to anyone who will but consult it.”
So Hazony’s critique and historical review does extend to arguments which are “distilled…from natural law and the Bible.” He does not believe human reason is up to the task of deriving knowledge with certainty about natural law, even with reference to scripture, and that the successful forms natural law can take must be discovered through long experience, rather than being distilled from religious texts.
Roger McKinney
Nov 10 2023 at 12:06pm
Thanks for the update. And that brings up the criticism that Hazony is anti-science since he believes there are no general principles about human nature that we can know. Hazony’s position is that of the socialists of the chair that Mises fought as well as that of the socialist institutionalists.
Roger McKinney
Nov 10 2023 at 12:11pm
PS, I think Hazony creates a straw man version of natural law. It’s not arm chair theory as he claims, but general principles of behavior distilled from observation of human behavior today and in history.
Roger McKinney
Nov 10 2023 at 12:36pm
I apologize for the repeated posts but I don’t know how to edit previous posts.
Not only does Hazony battle a straw man version of natural law, but the capitalism that enriched the world came from them. Like integralists, he somehow sees the extreme poverty before the industrial revolution as idyllic. But then because of his ignorance of economics, he probably sees no connection between classical liberalism and increasing wealth.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Nov 10 2023 at 2:39pm
The description of Rationalist Liberalism sound to me like a straw man that hardly exist outside of some academic departments and Twitter. What do Rational Liberalism, Conservatism, and Nationalism have to say about taxing carried interest as ordinary income? The shadow price of CO2 emissions? NINBYism? TPP? VAT v wage taxation of SS/Medicare/Medicaid/ACA?
Richard Fulmer
Nov 11 2023 at 6:53pm
While I agree that Mr. Hazony’s version of classical liberalism is little more than a punching bag and not a set of beliefs that serious liberals hold, I don’t understand how your list of topics proves that his version of liberalism is a straw man.
That said, I can take a stab at how a liberal might view the issues you list.
Taxes and CO2 pricing: People respond to incentives. Taxes, therefore, tend to discourage the activities that are taxed. To the extent that legislators wish to increase productivity, then, they should tax consumption rather than either work or investment.
TPP: Free, unregulated trade is the ideal. Trade agreements that reduce barriers are a second best option. Trade agreements, like TPP, that are designed to strengthen allied countries in the face of a self-declared belligerent nation are, perhaps, a necessary evil.
Entitlement programs: The government should not be in the business of transferring wealth from one faction to another. First, it’s immoral. Second, it creates incentives for individuals, companies, and institutions to redirect scarce resources away from productive activities and toward competitive lobbying. Third, when the government is in the business of selling special privileges, it’s the rich and powerful who are best able to buy. Fourth, the programs as currently structured are unsustainable. Better to privatize them, from both moral and practical standpoints.
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