Conservative Case for Freedom

By M. Stanton Evans

There is widespread agreement nowadays that, somewhere along the way, Western society has taken a wrong turn – that it has strayed from the values which once made it strong and informed it with purpose. Unfortunately, there is considerably less agreement as to what, exactly, those values are.

Those who have been most vocal in decrying our fallen state have usually been identified as “conservatives” – a term which conceals a number of deep and inhibiting disagreements. In the case of anything so vast and disorderly as modern error, it is only natural that there should be some confusion as to what is the matter. And while the question is difficult and philosophical, it is of more than academic interest; until we have some kind of agreed analysis, those concerned to correct things can hardly marshal the resources necessary for the job.

The confusion is greatly increased by the forces which error has thrust into power. Understandably enough, the ruling collectivists and “liberals,” so called, have tried to conjure the protest movement out of existence. A whole school of literature has been developed attempting to define present-day conservatism either as revenant classical liberalism, or else as a form of mental disorder. In either case, the point is to dispose of it as something too silly to be of much account. The more damaging of these criticisms, because the one more nearly containing a suggestion of truth, is the identification with classical liberalism. All those objecting to the growing dominance of government and the contraction of individual freedom are lumped together as descendants of Spencer and Sumner, and thus, presumably, disposed of. While labeling someone a classical liberal is necessarily an insult, it must be pointed out that today’s conservatives, while opponents of statism, are generally not Manchesterians. There are, to be sure, some classical liberals in the conservative camp, just as there seem to be some Metternichian strong men. Yet there are still other conservatives who are neither statists not Manchesterians; and it is this three-way babel of ideas, now and again punctuated by a helpful shout from the far left, which has sundered conservative effort and diffused its strength.

The fundamental disagreement occurs over the problem of man and his nature: specifically, whether the imperatives of individual freedom can be reconciled with the Christian conception of the individual as flawed in mind and will, with its demand for individual subordination to an objective, non-secular order. Critics of the protest movement delight in pointing to what they consider an insoluble dilemma. They are joined by sectarians within the movement itself, urging on the one hand that we give up our Christianized view of man. The two, we are repeatedly informed, are simply not compatible. For the purposed of this essay, I shall call those who choose the first alternative “authoritarians,” those who choose the “libertarians.”*

The authoritarian believes in the objective order, and is generally ready to limit individual freedom to follow its prescriptions. He prefers a hierarchical to a fluid society, conceiving some men as destined to rule, others to obey-all ordained by the objective order. The libertarian finds the idea of such an immobile society repugnant, and rejects the principles which have been used to sanction it. It is the argument of this essay that both positions rest on the form of illicit conversion-that they have not properly related first principles and conclusions. Patient inquiry will disclose, I think, that affirmation of a transcendent order is not only compatible with individual autonomy, but the condition of it; and that a skeptical view of man’s nature not only permits political liberty, but demands it.

The problem can best be examined if we divide it in two: first, the question of freedom as related to the existence of objective value; second, the question of freedom as related to the nature of man. The “libertarian,” or “classical liberal,” characteristically denies the existence of a God-centered moral order, to which man should subordinate his will and reason. Alleging human freedom as the single moral imperative, he otherwise is a thoroughgoing relativist, pragmatist, and materialist. He puts considerable emphasis on economics. Man and his satisfactions, the libertarian maintains, are themselves the source of value-and other values cannot be imposed from without. Because the free economy best serves man, and best supplies his material needs, it is moral. It works.

There seem to be a number of reasons for libertarian devotion to these views. One no doubt is that some present-day libertarians are genuine descendants of Spencer and Sumner, and proceed-logically, as they believe-from relativist premises to a vindication of freedom. But I believe the more common occurrence is that other considerations, largely unspoken, incline the libertarian to his particular brand of relativism. I think many attacks on the idea of a transcendent order can be traced to fears about the uses to which any particular affirmation of truth may be put. The libertarian suspects that commitment to this or that ethical judgment will imply the need for having it enforced by the political authorities. Additionally, there seems to be considerable confusion between value, as received from tradition and the counsels of religious teaching, and conformity imposed by the pressures of the group. The two may of course coincide-specifically, when group pressures aim at enforcing traditional value. But the fact that they may appear in conjunction does not mean they are the same; and in a time of triumphant revolution, inability to make the distinction constitutes failure at the most elementary level of analysis.

The problem is akin to that created by obscurantists of the “new conservative” variety, who tell us that since conservatives are opposed to change, they should be in favor of the New Deal. The argument empties conservatism of all value content, and makes it simply a matter of technique. But conservatives who wish to conserve value generally have some particular value in mind, and must oppose any particular status quo which denies it. The libertarian falls into the converse error. Because he is opposed to the status quo of New Dealism, he determines that he must not be a conservative, and battles those who so call themselves. It is hard to believe anyone interested in conserving historic American institutions could become reconciled to the patchwork collectivism of the last 25 years. The conformity of statism represents a radical break with American tradition; those who wish to affirm the values embodied in the tradition must perforce be nonconformists and rebels, ready to brave the censure of the group. Moreover, it is only if they are motivated that they can manage to do so. So far are “value” and “conformity” from being identical that the second can rise to its current distasteful height only when the first declines. A man without the interior armor of value has no defense against the pressures of his society. It is precisely the loss of value which has turned the “inner-directed” citizen of the 19th century America into the “other directed” automaton of today.

Man, Ortega wrote, “is a being forced by his nature to seek some higher authority. If he succeeds in finding it of himself, he is a superior man; if not, he is a mass-man, and must receive it from his superiors.” To exist in community, men must harmonize their desires; some kind of general equilibrium has to prevail. Men who lose the “inner check,” as Babbitt called it, must therefore submit to an outer one; they become mass men, ruled by their “superiors.”

The erosion of value is doubly destructive. As it promotes statism by creating the need for an external force to order conflicting desires, it simultaneously weakens the individual’s ability to withstand the state. Men without values are more than willing to trade their freedom for material benefits. That the loss of moral constraint invites the rule of power is surely one of the best established facts of 20th-century history. Indeed, a number of quite unconservative witnesses have pointed out that the vigor of civilization is dependent on people who are guided by some internalized system of value, and who are thus capable of initiative of self-reliant behavior. This is the burden of David Riesman’s celebrated study, The Lonely Crowd (in which the terms “inner-directed” and “other-directed” were coined), and the message of such critics of modern society as Pitirim Sorokin, William H. Whyte, and Professor Richard LaPiere.

The authoritarian, like the libertarian, believes that value and enforcement go hand in hand; unlike the libertarian, however, he accepts both. He merely wants to be the person doing the enforcing. The conservative, as I conceive him, rejects the common analysis. While he does not share the authoritarian’s readiness to coerce his fellow men into virtue, neither does he share the libertarian’s commitment to freedom at virtue’s expense. The conservative believes man should be free; he does not believe being free is the end of human existence. He maintains that man exists to form his life in consonance with the objective order, to choose the Good. But “choice” for the Good can take place only in circumstances favoring volition. Freedom is thus the political context of moral decision; it is the modality within which the human mind can search out moral absolutes. In the conservative view, then, right choice is the terminal value; freedom an instrumental and therefore subsidiary value.

To the conservative, economic and political freedom per se are not “moral”; only willed human actions have moral content, and freedom dictates no particular actions. A freely acting man may or may not be moral, depending on what he does. But while freedom is morally neutral, the possible alternatives, i.e., varying forms of coercion, are not. By their nature, all coercive systems require certain actions which we hold immoral: arbitrary exercise of power over men by other men. The free economy permits morality, but does not guarantee it; the coerced economy guarantees immorality. This formulation may prove distasteful to authoritarians accustomed to identifying all defenders of economic freedom as Manchesterians. Yet I can conceive of no other which can maintain the conditions of moral choice. It may prove equally distasteful to libertarians, accustomed to seeing all “true believers” as enemies of liberty. Yet I can conceive of no other that will insure the sanctity of freedom. If there is no value system with which we may rebuke the pretensions of despots, what is to prevent the rule of force in the world? If there are no objective standards of right and wrong, why object to tyranny?

The last argument needs to be taken a step further. The Manchesterians allege that man’s self-interest, which flourishes under a regime of freedom, is sufficient sanction to keep liberty intact. But that calculus of desires is too subtle for most of mankind. It is the immemorial habit of man to be unable to see his ling term interest when a short-term one looms before him. When he thinks he can achieve an immediate benefit, he is willing to give up some of his freedom to obtain it. Surely the entire trend of modern politics has demonstrated this point with disturbing finality. Only when there is one which sanctions the continuance of freedom, can freedom endure. As freedom is the condition of value, so is the value the guarantor of freedom.

When we have examined the question of value to determine whether or not freedom is desirable, we must turn to the problem of man’s nature to decide what political arrangements offer the best promise of sustaining it. Metaphysically, freedom is the context of choice-the ground of decision where one seeks to break through to transcendence. Politically, it is a physical condition existing between and among men. In conventional discourse, “freedom” usually means the absence of constraint by one man upon another. Since some form of constraint is necessary to let men live together, the degree to which it can be relaxed, and the conflict of what are variously defined as “freedoms,” are problems for which there are almost as many answers as there are theorists.

But whatever our difficulties in defining it, freedom is obviously a product of the way men behave toward one another. If we want to maximize freedom, we can begin to do so only after examining the motives of human behavior; and the first task in the pursuit of political freedom is therefore to reach a reasoned position about the nature of man.

Again, there is a division of opinion on the right. The “libertarian,” or classical liberal, affirms the natural goodness, or-in the more scientistic forms-the non-evil, of human nature. He views government as the source of evil, the unfettered individual as the source of good. He has considerable faith in “progress” as the natural creation of free men, and tends to believe that material success and moral virtue are closely akin, if not identical. For all of these reasons, he has concluded that government should let people alone to employ their natural goodness. In his extreme form, the modern-day libertarian is a philosophical anarchist-a free-enterprise Utopian.

The authoritarian holds precisely the opposite view. He believes people in their natural state are not good, but evil. Viewing human will as perverse and human reason as limited, he does not believe at all in automatic “progress.” He does not accept the Darwinian equation of morality and economic prosperity, with its subordination of value to the observable relation of forces. Like Henry Adams, he thinks things more probably than not are tending to unravel-which is only to be expected if the natural direction of human choice is downward. For all these reasons, the authoritarian believes in strong government. Because man is feckless, he needs aristocratic guidance to force him to be good.

The conservative, again, believes the two schools have reached their positions through a shared mistake in analysis; they fail to relate the question of man’s nature to the problem of government. Concretely, they fail to see that government cannot be treated as something apart form “men”-in the one case as the source of evil, in the other as the source of moral guidance. For what is government, after all, but men in the exercise of power? In the case of the libertarian, if men are naturally good, whence comes the evil of government? In the case of the authoritarian, if men are fundamentally evil, how does government become a force of virtue?

The conservative agrees with the authoritarian that men are not to be trusted, and his constant concern is to restrain the destructive tendencies he discerns in a fallen humanity. But he does not agree that such a judgment means man should be rules by an aristocracy. For if men are evil, then potential aristocrats are evils too-and no man, logically, can be said to have a commission to coerce another. “Absolute monarchs,” in Locke’s phrase, “are but men”-and as such heirs to the same weaknesses of the human kind as are their subjects. Moreover, their ability to inflict evil on others obviously increases with the amount of power they wield. The conservative wants political freedom precisely because he fears the fundamental nature of man.

I concede there is little difference between what I call the “conservative” philosophy on this point and the views of a number of men sometimes thought of as “classical liberals”-Adam Smith, Lord Acton, de Tocqueville. The position of this “liberal” school, if such it be, is best suggested by F. A. Hayek’s characterization of himself as an “old-fashioned Whig.” Such “liberals” fear big government because they fear man-and on the technical point of the relation between man’s nature and the kind of government appropriate to him are indistinguishable for the conservatives.

Hayek divides the people we think of as “classical liberals” into two camps-the “true” and the “false” individualists. “True” individualism may or may not come coupled with the deeper moral affirmations of the conservative position, but it is a far cry from the alternately sentimental and mechanistic notions about man which convert themselves so easily to the uses of collectivism.

“THE CULTIVATED MAN,” said Renan in a celebrated flight of false individualism, “has only to follow the delicious incline of his inner impulses.” This was the kind of fatuous self-love which prompted Jacob Burckhardt to reflect that mankind was losing its conception of the need for external standards-”whereupon, of course, we periodically fall victims to sheer power.” The “true” individualist sides not with Renan but with Burckhardt. His chief concern in seeking freedom is not to liberate the “natural goodness” of man, but to localize as much as possible man’s tendencies toward evil. “It would scarcely be too much to claim,” Hayek says of Adam Smith, “that the main merit of the individualism which he and his contemporaries advocated is that it is a system which bad men can do the least harm.”

The mutual regard that existed between Smith and Edmund Burke is, of course, a matter of record. The similarity of their ideas suggests that, on the point of fearing man and his behavior in power, the camps of “true” individualism and “conservatism” are indeed one; and the rapprochement suggests, in turn, that a view of freedom as compatible with mistrust of human nature is recommended by a broad tradition as well as by the homely counsel of clear thought.

The conservative’s task, then, is to insure that enough governmental authority exists to suppress criminal outcroppings of human weakness, but at the same time to insure that no man, or group of men, is vested with too much political power. It has proved, down the centuries, to be quite a task. There is very little difficulty in establishing either the authoritarian’s ideal of a strong government, or the libertarian’s contrary ideal of complete (if therefore temporary) freedom. The great problem is to set up a system of “free government,” providing both order and freedom; and, as Burke said, “to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful and combing mind.”

This was, as it happened, the very problem which preoccupied the founders of the American nation, and the problem which achieved its highest resolution in the compact on which the United States was based. The dilemma of government, as our Constitution-makers saw it, was to restrain power in the very act by which it was granted: to establish an authority which could be used for certain limited purposes, but for those only; which would be hedged about by alternative centers of decision, jealous of their own prerogatives, and by constitutional proscription. The object was for power to be so diffused and equilibrated that each source of authority would limit and restrain another, while having sufficient strength to perform the tasks appropriate to it.

In a word, the model answer to the dilemma of “free government” is the American Constitution-founded in the counterpoise of interests of colonial North America, and fused in the sagacious, powerful and combing mind of James Madison. It is noteworthy that neither the “authoritarian” ideas of Hamilton nor the “libertarian” notions of Jefferson dominated the Constitution. Instead, the great conceptual balance struck by Madison prevailed in that document, and, for a time, in the nation. “The great desideratum of government,” Madison said, “is such a modification of sovereignty as will render it sufficiently neutral between the different interests and factions, to control one part of the country from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controlled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the whole society.”

Being itself a product of fallible men, and administered by others still more fallible, the Constitution has of course achieved less than perfection. But it has maintained a shifting equilibrium, and it is testimony to the founders’ intentions that they are even today the center about which our political controversies revolve. Certainly, whatever its imperfections and whatever its current ravaged condition, the American Constitution has proved that the practice of “conservatism: beginning from a profound mistrust of man, and of man panoplied as the state, can well serve the ends of freedom.

* { I want to emphasize that my use of the word ‘libertarian” signifies the chemically pure form of classical liberalism, with all of its metaphysical implications. The term is sometimes used in a different sense, to identify those who insist on limited government and political freedom, without implying acceptance of the anti-religious philosophy here associated with it. I have used the authoritarian-conservative-libertarian terminology in order to establish a recognizable continuum of ideas, and intend no derogation of “libertarians” of the second sort. Indeed, I believe many of the people who call themselves “libertarians” would accept the position I describe as “conservative”-which its dual emphasis on freedom and moral authority. To the extent they do, I trust my terminology with not obscure the fact that the argument of this essay is not an attack on such “libertarians,” but a vindication of them.}

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Problem of Tradition

by Russell Kirk

Why, when all is said, do any of us look to the interest of the rising generation, and to the interest of the generations which shall exist in the remote future? Why do we not exhaust the heritage of the ages, spiritual and material for our immediate pleasure, and let posterity go hang? So far as simple rationality is concerned, self-interest can advance no argument against the appetite of present possessors. Yet within some of us, a voice that is not the demand of self-interest or pure rationality says that we have no right to give ourselves enjoyment at the expense of our ancestors’ memory and our descendants’ prospects. We hold our present advantages only in trust.

A profound sentiment informs us of this; yet this sentiment, however strong, is not ineradicable. In some ages and in some nations, the consciousness of a sacred continuity has been effaced almost totally. One may trace in the history of the Roman empire the decay of belief in the contract of eternal society, so that fewer and fewer men came to sustain greater and greater burdens; the unbought grace of life shrank until only scattered individuals partook of it-Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, here and there a governor or a scholar to knit together, by straining his every nerve, the torn fabric of community and spiritual continuity; until, at length, those men were too few, and the fresh dedication of Christian faith triumphed too late to redeem the structure of society and the larger part of culture from the ruin that accompanies the indulgence of present appetites in contempt of tradition and futurity.

Respect for the eternal contract is not a mere matter of instinct, then; it is implanted in our consciousness by the experience of the race and by a complex process of education. When the disciplines which impart this respect are imperiled by violence or by a passion for novelty, the spiritual bond which joins the generations and links our nature with the divine nature is correspondingly threatened. Mr. Christopher Dawson, in his little book Understanding Europe, expresses this better than I can:

Indeed the catastrophes of the last thirty years are not only a sign of the bankruptcy of secular humanism, they also go to show that a completely secularized civilization is inhuman in the absolute sense-hostile to human life and irreconcilable with human nature itself. For … the forces of violence and aggressiveness that threaten to destroy our world are the direct result of the starvation and frustration of man’s spiritual nature. For a time Western civilization managed to live on the normal tradition of the past, maintained by a kind of sublimated humanitarian idealism. But this was essentially a transitional phenomenon, and as humanism and humanitarianism fade away, we see societies more and more animated by the blind will to power which drives them on to destroy one another and ultimately themselves. Civilization can only be creative and life-giving in the proportion that it is spiritualized. Otherwise the increase of power inevitably increases its power for evil and its destructiveness.

For the breaking of the contract of eternal society does not simply obliterate the wisdom of our ancestors: it commonly converts the future into a living death, also; since progress, beneficent change, is the work of men with a sense of continuity, who look forward to posterity out of love for the legacy of their ancestors and the dictates of an authority more than human. The man who truly understands the past does not detest all change; on the contrary, he welcomes change, as the means of renewing society; but he knows how to keep change in a continuous train, so that we will not lose that sense of gratitude which Marcel describes. As Burke puts it, “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.”
The outward fabric of our world must alter, as do our forms of society; but to demolish all that is old, out of a mere contempt for the past, is to impoverish that human faculty which yearns after continuity and things venerable. By such means of measurement as we possess-by such indices as suicide-rate, the incidence of madness and neurosis, the appetites and tastes of the masses, the obliteration of beauty, the increase of crime, the triumph of force over the law of nations-by these signs, it seems clear, all that complex of high aspiration and imaginative attainment which makes us civilized men is shrinking to a mere shadow of a shadow. If indeed society is governed by an eternal contract, then we may appeal to the Author of that covenant; but words without thoughts to Heaven never go, and the continuity which pertains directly to society must be repaired by those means which still are within the grasp of man.

This brings us back to my hill above the mill-pond. The eternal contract, the sense of continuity among men, has been made known to succeeding generations, from the dawn of civilization, by the agency of tradition. Tradition is the process of handing on beliefs, not so much through formal schooling or through books, as through the life of the family and the observances of the church. Until the end of the eighteenth century, no one thought it conceivable that most men could obtain most of their knowledge in any other way than this; and though cheap books and eleemosynary schooling have supplanted to some extent the old functions of traditionary instruction, still tradition remains the principal source of our moral beliefs and our worldly wisdom. Young persons do not acquire in school to any considerable extent, the sense of continuity and the veneration for the eternal contract which makes possible willing obedience to social order; children acquire this sense from their parents and other elders, and from their gradual introduction to religion, if they obtain any; the process is illative, rather than deliberate. Now let us suppose that parents cease to impart such instruction, or come to regard tradition as superstition; suppose that young people never become acquainted with the church-what happens to tradition? Why, its empire is destroyed, and the young join the crowd of the other-directed whom Mr. David Riesman describes.

In a looser sense, by “tradition” we mean all that body of knowledge which is bound up with prescription and prejudice and authority, the accepted beliefs of a people, as distinguished from “scientific” knowledge; and this, too, is greatly weakened in its influence among the rising generation by a growing contempt for any belief that is not founded upon demonstrable “fact.” Almost nothing of importance really can be irrefutably demonstrated by finally ascertained “facts”; but the limitations of science are not apprehended by the throng of the quarter-educated who think themselves emancipated from their spiritual heritage. When we confront these people, we are dealing not merely with persons ignorant of tradition, but actively hostile toward it.

Now cheap books and free schooling are not the principal reasons for this decay of the influence of tradition. The really decisive factors are the industrialization and urbanization of modern life. Tradition thrives where men follow naturally in the ways of their fathers, and live in the same houses, and experience in their own lives that continuity of existence which assures them that the great things in human nature do not much alter from one generation to another. This is the mood of Ecclesiastes. But the tremendous physical and social changes that have come with the later stages of our industrial growth, and the concentration of population in raw new cities, shake men’s confidence that things will be with them as they were with their fathers. The sanction of permanence seems to have been dissolved. Men doubt the validity of their own opinions, founded upon tradition, and hesitate to impart them to their children-indeed, they may thrust all this vast obligation upon the unfortunate school-teacher, and then grow annoyed when the teacher turns out to be incapable of bestowing moral certitude, scientific knowledge, and decent manners upon a class of fifty or sixty bewildered and distracted children. Most natural keepers of tradition, in short, abdicate their function when modern life makes them doubt their own virtue.

Though of course I did not understand all this at the time, it was this decay of the force of tradition which was sweeping away the old mill-pond almost before my eyes, as I lay on the hill under my oak. For my part, I still was a tradition-guided boy; but the planners who altered the landscape, presently, were Benthamites confident in the sufficiency of pure rationality, and the man who demolished the octagon-house was an other-directed individual who positively dreaded identification with anything dead and gone, and longed to be associated, however vaguely, with the milieu of Beverly Hills. The Utilitarians and the other-directed people were using up the moral and intellectual capital which had been accumulated by a traditionary society, I came to realize much later; and that process has been in the ascendant, with an increasing velocity, throughout the United States, for more than a generation now.

It cannot continue forever. Our guardians of tradition have been recruited principally, although not wholly, from our farms and small towns; the incertitude of the cities disturbs the equanimity of the tradition-guided man. And our great cities have been swelling at the expense of our country and village population, so that the immense majority of young people today have no direct acquaintance with the old rural verities. Our reservoir of tradition will be drained dry within a very few decades, if we do not deliberately open up once more the springs of tradition. The size of the United States, and the comparative gradualness of industrial development in many regions, until now saved us from a complete exhaustion of tradition, such as Sweden seems to have experienced. At the beginning of this century, Sweden had seven people in the country for one in the city; now that ratio is precisely inverted; and one may obtain some hint of what the death of tradition means to a people from the fact that the Swedes, previously celebrated for their placidity and old-fashioned heartiness, now have the highest rates of abortion and suicide in the world, dismayed at the thought of bringing life into this world or even of enduring one’s own life.

I do not want our traditions to run out, because I do not believe that formal indoctrination, or pure rationality, or simple mutation of our contemporaries, can replace traditions. Traditions are the wisdom of the race; they are the only sure instruments of moral instruction; they have about them a solemnity and a mystery that Dr. Dryasdust the cultural anthropologist never can compensate for; and they teach us the solemn veneration of the eternal contract which cannot be imparted by pure reason. Even our political institutions are sustained principally by tradition, rather than by utilitarian expediency. A people who have exhausted their traditions are starved for imagination and devoid of any general assumptions to give coherence to their life.

Yet I do not say that tradition ought to be our only guide, nor that tradition is always beneficent. There have been ages and societies in which tradition, stifling the creative faculty among men, put an end to variety and change, and so oppressed mankind with the boredom of everlasting worship of the past. In a healthy nation, tradition must be balanced by some strong element of curiosity and individual dissent. Some people who today are conservatives because they protest against the tyranny of neoterism, in another age or nation would be radicals, because they could not endure the tyranny of tradition. It is a question of degree and balance. But I am writing of modern society, especially in the United States; and among us there is not the slightest danger that we shall be crushed beneath the dead weight of tradition; the danger is altogether on the other side. Our modern affliction is the flux of ceaseless change, the repudiation of all enduring values, the agonies of indecision and the social neuroses that come with a questioning of everything in heaven and earth. We are not in the plight of the old Egyptians or Peruvians; it is not prescription which enslaves us, but the lust for innovation. A young novelist, visiting George Santayana in his Roman convent in the last year of the philosopher’s life, remarked that he could not endure to live in America, where everything was forever changing and shifting. Santayana replied, with urbane irony, that he supposed if it were not for kaleidoscopic change in America, life there would be unbearable. A people infatuated with novelty presently cannot bear to amble along; but the trouble with this is that the pace becomes vertiginous, and the laws of centifugal force begin to operate.

I know that there are people who maintain that nothing is seriously wrong with life in the United States, and that we need not fret about tradition one way or the other; but I confess, at the risk of being accused of arrogance, that I take these people for fools, whether they call themselves liberals or conservatives. They have a fondness for pointing to the comfortable routine of our suburbs as a demonstration of our mastery over the ancient tragedy of life. Now I am not one of those critics of society who look upon residence in suburbia a stain worse than the mark of the beast; but neither am I disposed to think that a commuter’s ticket and a lawn-sprinkler are the proofs of national greatness and personal exaltation. And I am convinced that, if the reservoir of our traditions is drained dry, there will not be ten thousand tidy little suburbs in America, very long thereafter; for the suburbs are dependent upon an older order of social organization, as well as upon an intricate modern apparatus of industrial technology, for their being.

When tradition is dissipated, men do not respond to the old moral injunctions satisfactorily; and our circumstances and national character differing from Sweden’s, I do not think we would experience the comparative good fortune to slip into an equalitarian boredom. The contract of eternal society forgotten, soon every lesser form of contract would lose its sanction. I say, then, that we need to shake out of their complacency the liberals who are smug in their conviction of the immortality of Liberal Democratic Folkways in the United States, and the conservatives who are smug in their conviction of the abiding superiority of the American Standard of Living. Political arrangements, and economic systems, rest upon the foundation of moral prejudices which find their expression in tradition.

Men who assail smugness cannot hope to be popular, in any climate of opinion; so the conservative ought not to expect to be thanked for reminding his age of the contract of eternal society. When he protests against the reduction of the mass of men to a condition below the dignity of true humanity, he will be attacked as an enemy of democracy, and ridiculed as a snob-when, in truth, he is endeavoring to save a democracy of elevation, and to put down the snobbery of a rootless new managerial elite. Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in Rude Assignment, refers to the abuse which many professors and publicists heap upon anyone who presumes to suggest that there is something wrong with modern minds and hearts: “To keep other people in mental leading-strings, to have beneath you a broad mass of humanity to which you (although no intellectual giant) can feel agreeably superior: this petty and disagreeable form of the will-to-power of the average ‘smart’ man counts for much in the degradation of the Many. And there is no action of this same ‘smart’ man that is more aggravating than the way in which he will turn upon the critic of the social scene (who has pointed out the degradation of the Many) and accuse him of ‘despising the people.”‘ Nothing is more resented than the truth, and, as Mr. Lewis says, “people have deteriorated. They have neither the will nor common sense of the peasant or guildsman, and are more easily fooled. This can only be a source of concern and regret, to all except ‘the leader of men.”‘
Wherever human dignity is found, it is the product of a conviction that we are part of some great continuity and essence, which elevates us above the brutes; and wherever popular government is just and free, it is in consequence of a belief that there are standards superior to the interest of the hour and the will of a temporary majority. If these things are forgotten, then indeed the people will become despicable. The conservative, in endeavoring to restore a consciousness among men of the worth of tradition, is not acting in contempt of the masses; he is acting, instead, out of love for them, as human persons, and he is trying to preserve for them such a life as men should lead.

*As appeared in A Program for Conservatives (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1956).

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Friedrich Hayek Interviewes

Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992), was an Austrian-born economist and philosopher known for his defence of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought. He is considered by some to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century. Hayek’s account of how changing prices communicate signals which enable individuals to coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics. Hayek also wrote on the topics of jurisprudence, neuroscience and the history of ideas.

Hayek is one of the most influential members of the Austrian School of economics, and in 1974 shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his “pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and [his] penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.” He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from president George H. W. Bush.

Hayek lived in Austria, Great Britain, the United States and Germany, and became a British subject in 1938. He spent most of his academic life at the LSE, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.

Biography of F.A. Hayek
http://mises.org/about/3234

Selected online books and essays by F.A. Hayek:

The Road to Serfdom
http://www.atlasusa.org/reports/Road_…

Intellectuals and Socialism
http://mises.org/resources/1019

Individualism and Economic Order
http://mises.org/resources/4015

Tiger by the Tail
http://mises.org/resources/4098

A Free-Market Monetary System and Pretense of Knowledge
http://mises.org/resources/3925

What Price a Planned Economy?
http://mises.org/daily/4004

Engineers and Planners
http://mises.org/daily/2782

A Free-Market Monetary System
http://mises.org/daily/3204

The Pure Theory of Capital
http://mises.org/resources/3032

Reflections on the Pure Theory of Money of Mr. J.M. Keynes
http://mises.org/resources/3035

Road to Serfdom in Cartoons
http://mises.org/resources/1003

The Mythology of Capital
http://mises.org/resources/3034

Can We Still Avoid Inflation?
http://mises.org/resources/2672

Choice in Currency
http://mises.org/resources/3983

Denationalisation of Money: the Argument Refined
http://mises.org/resources/3970

Economics and Knowledge
http://mises.org/resources/88

Monetary Nationalism and International Stability
http://mises.org/resources/570

Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle
http://mises.org/daily/3121

The Meaning of Competition
http://mises.org/daily/4181

Prices and Production
http://mises.org/resources/3665

Profits, Interest, and Investment
http://mises.org/resources/4901

Investment that Raises the Demand for Capital
http://mises.org/resources/3033

The Non Sequitur of the Dependence Effect
http://mises.org/resources/1039

Substitute for Foreign Aid
http://mises.org/daily/3596

Decline of the Rule of Law
http://mises.org/daily/3610

Mises As We Knew Him
http://mises.org/daily/3511

The Skillful Professor Rothbard
http://mises.org/daily/1964

The Use of Knowledge in Society
http://mises.org/resources/89

The Pretence of Knowledge
http://mises.org/resources/1002

Related links:

http://hayekcenter.org

http://fee.org/

http://www.cato.org/

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hayek.html

http://www.iea.org.uk
http://mises.org