the New Pantagruel

Understanding Traditionalist Conservatism

by Mark C. Henrie

A shorter version of this essay appeared in Varieties of Conservatism in America, Peter Berkowitz, Ed. (Hoover Press, 2004) ISBN: 4572-5; 167 pages. $15.00 Individual chapters can be downloaded as PDFs from Hoover Press.

n the years following the Second World War, a group of writers emerged who became known as America’s “New Conservatives,” prominently including Richard M. Weaver, Peter Viereck, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk. In this case, “new” did not merely indicate a generational transition; these thinkers did not represent a simple return to the conservatism of the 1930s following the emergency of world war. Instead, the New Conservatives articulated ideas and concepts that were unprecedented in American intellectual history. They took their political bearings from a quite novel set of intellectual authorities. Most striking of all, at the very moment of America’s historic victory over the most potent totalitarian threat of the century, their writings were redolent with sometimes sweeping doubts about the “progress” of the Modern Project – and about the individualism at the heart of liberalism’s liberty.

Central to the conservatism of the 1930s had been intransigent opposition to the “socialism” of Roosevelt’s New Deal on the part of various Republican-leaning social groups: East Coast financiers, Midwestern manufacturers, Chamber of Commerce types, the more prosperous farmers. Centralized bureaucratic administration of the economy was resisted by the possessing classes in the name of an older form of liberal capitalist social order. Among intellectuals, articulate conservatism in the 1930s had been represented by such men as H. L. Mencken, George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, and Albert Jay Nock. With the partial exception of Santayana, each may be said to have subscribed to some version or another of classical liberalism or libertarianism, emphasizing something resembling Mill’s individuality as against social conformity. Without exception, their worldviews were markedly elitist and sharpened by a waspish religious skepticism. This last could be seen in Santayana’s genteel atheism, in Mencken’s noisy contempt for American Bible thumpers, in Nock’s preference for the most coldly rationalist of French freethinkers, and in Babbitt’s quest for wisdom in Hinduism, having dismissed his Puritan ancestry. In other words, these pre-war conservatives connected not at all with the lived traditions of the vast majority of the American people, except on the single point of the tradition of liberal individualism, whether rugged or not.

Kirk, of course, quickly became the leading figure of the New Conservatism – a position which later received the appellation of “traditionalism” or “traditionalist conservatism.” While he himself was influenced by some of the currents of thought in the 1930s, and while The Conservative Mind purported to be a “recovery” of a pre-existing Burkean tradition in American political and social thought, it is difficult to deny that there was also a large element of invention in Kirk’s account of the conservative tradition. Kirk’s “canons” of conservatism begin with an orientation to “transcendent order” or “natural law,” a view that political problems are at bottom religious and moral problems rather than the other way around: whereas the libertarian conservatives of the 1930s usually understood themselves as heirs of various enlightenment dissenters from Europe’s Christian civilization, Kirk is a dissenter from dissent, striving to learn from the sidelined champions of orthodox religion. Kirk therefore rejects rationalism, utilitarianism, and egalitarianism. He ties freedom to property-holding, but there is no discussion of the “magic of the marketplace” or interest in economic efficiency. He is hostile to the experimentalism of the social scientific mind, and he defends the latent reasonableness of evolved social forms. The three evils which emerge as antagonists throughout The Conservative Mind are the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, and the bureaucratic-managerial revolution of the first half of the twentieth century. Communism is mentioned hardly at all.

Focusing on the French Revolution, Kirk states emphatically that the overarching evil of the age is “ideology,” and he claims that conservatism properly understood is “the negation of ideology.” As such, conservatism prescribes a “politics of prudence,” a cautious statesmanship founded upon a sensitive understanding of the complexities of human nature, the limitations of human history, and the capaciousness of the human good. Of course, liberalism’s ancient boast has always been that it founds itself upon, and best adequates to, human nature – once that nature is shorn of illusions and superstition. To the liberal mind, one might even say that if ideology is defined as a project to achieve a utopian intellectual abstraction, then it is liberalism that is the negation of an ideology.

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