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The Strange Quest for An American Conservatism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Bernard Crick
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Extract

The body of the Federalists [even] were always, and yet are, essentially democratic in their political notions … willing to hazard the experiment of an … almost unqualified proportion of democracy…. The Federal Constitution was as good, or very nearly as good, as our country could bear; … Our materials for government were all democratic; and whatever the hazard of their combination may be, our Solons and Lycurgeses in the convention had no alternative, nothing to consider, but how to combine them…. We should have succeeded worse if we had trusted our metaphysics more. Experience must be our physician, though his medicines may kill.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 1955 , pp. 359 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1955

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References

* Ames, Fisher, “The Dangers of American Liberty” (1805), Works of Fisher Ames (Boston, 1854), pp. 348–349Google Scholar, my italics …. a genuine conservative.

1 Quoted by Wilson, Francis in his influential Case for Conservatism, (Seattle, 1951) p. 25.Google Scholar

2 See Francis Wilson, ibid. and especially Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana (Chicago: 1953); also Rossiter, Clinton, Conservatism in America (New York, 1955).Google Scholar

3 Cook, T. I. “The Methods of Political Science, chiefly in the United States”, Contemporary Political Science, (U.N.E.S.C.O., 1950).Google Scholar

4 See, Hallowell, John, Main Currents in Modern Political Thought, (New York, 1950)Google Scholar; Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952)Google Scholar; Elliott, William, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (New York, 1928)Google Scholar; Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind.Google Scholar

5 Randall, Clarence B., A Creed for Free Enterprise (Boston, 1952Google Scholar.). No better guide to the thinking of the responsible and internationally-minded American businessman can be found.

6 Boorstin, Daniel, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar. These excellent lectures stress how traditional American thought is, but they do not equate tradition with conservatism.

7 This is said in no wish to disparage the virtues of Michigan State or any other similar college: it is only argued that their peculiar virtues are not peculiarly conservative virtues.

8 Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma, (New York, 1944), p. 7.Google Scholar

9 This thesis is the great concern of ProfessorHartz, Louis, of Harvard: “The concept of a liberal community arises out of the American experience of establishing liberalism without being compelled to fight the heritage of a decadent feudalism.”Google Scholar See his recent book, The Liberal Tradition in America, (New York: 1955)Google Scholar. It is a brilliant and profound understanding of the nature and dilemma of American liberalism.

10 Sumner, William Graham's What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York, 1883)Google Scholar had, for an academic book, a success in the popular market akin to ProfessorHayek, 's Road to SerfdomGoogle Scholar in our own day.

11 An article of Kirk, 's well illustrates this nostalgia: “The Face of Britain,” Queens Quarterly, Vol. LXI, No. 1., Spring 1954Google Scholar. Actually it betrays a great disappointment that Britain is no longer as truly conservative as he imagined it. It is to be hoped that, by being in a Canadian journal, it will not be missed by American readers, especially the passage on page 35 beginning: “The Earl, sitting in his library with his dogs at his feet, had suggested that….”

12 Godkin, E. L., The Unforseen Tendencies of Democracy (New York, 1898), p. 42Google Scholar, my emphasis.

13 Alger, Horatio, Struggling Upwards, or Luke Larkin's Luck (New York, 1890), p. 201Google Scholar. When “luck” has always to play a leading role in such moralities, the Ark of the Liberal Covenant is clearly in need of many patches; but people are willing to go on patching, anything to escape a fundamental criticism of liberal individualism.

14 Recent editions of Man versus the State by Nock, Albert J. and by ProfessorHeath, A. E. (1950)Google Scholar show the perennial popularity of Spencer with American “Conservatives”. Spencer himself, of course, right from the 1860's reached a far wider audience and was far more published in the United States than in Great Britain.

15 Quoted by Northrop, F. S. C. in his The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities (New York, 1947), p. 147.Google Scholar

16 The revision of judgment on the “Gilded Age” appears at its strongest in Nevin, Allan's Study in Power; John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist (New York, 1953).Google Scholar

17 McCloskey, , American Conservatism, p. 22.Google Scholar

18 Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind, p. 428.Google Scholar

19 Hartz, Louis, “The Reactionary Enlightenment. Southern Political Thought before the Civil War”, Western Political Quarterly, Vol. V (03 1952) pp. 31–50Google Scholar. The South is of especial interest here. Immediately after the Civil War there are parties called “Conservative” forming. But they soon change their labels back to the regular Democratic. They were a mixed marriage of the Whigs and Democrats, but the Whigs dominate and they receive and propagate the Northern philosophy of business and progress. This is decisively shown in Woodward, C. Van, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1951).Google Scholar

20 McCloskey, , American Conservatism, p. 29.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 31.

22 Rossiter, Clinton, “Towards an American Conservatism”, Yale Review XLIV (No. 3, Spring 1955), pp. 355, 357, and 361.Google Scholar

23 The recent revival of interest in the political thought of Lord Acton sets a problem to the new conservatives that none of them has faced. No definition, however wide, could turn his liberalism into conservatism—a liberalism he found fully compatible with his Catholicism.

24 Wilson, , The Case for Conservatism, op. cit., p. 68.Google Scholar

25 On this point there are some illuminating remarks about the oddity of American conservatism in Niebuhr, Reinhold's Christian Realism and Politic (New York: 1954).Google Scholar

26 Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind, op cit.Google Scholar As recent American conservatives he has Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and—boldly—Santayana. Earlier there are four “frustrated conservatives” (i.e., liberals): James Russell Lowell, E. L. Godkin, Henry and Brooks Adams. In the British scene he speaks of the “system of ideas which is endorsed” by men like Bryant, Arthur and Butterfield, Herbert, SirBeerbohm, Max and Waugh, Evelyn, Lancaster, Osbert and Betjeman, John, Woodruff, Douglas and Brogan, Colm, and Inge, Dean and Lewis, C. S. (p. 417)Google Scholar. These all live together in one sentence— a sentence peculiar for any one of them to receive. (The only thing they have in common is that they probably all vote Conservative).

27 Santayana, George, Charter and Opinion in the United States (New York, 1921), p. 49.Google Scholar

28 Burke, in the Reflections, at one point quotes a verse of Ecclesiastes: “The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure; and he that has little business shall become wise”. Alas, that this would be hardly a realistic maxim on any American campus.