Question: Why isn't this a quote-mine?

[elfs]

Brad DeLong makes the case that Burke wasn't a conservative, and that "Reflections on the Revolution in France" is not the paeon to conservatism that conservatives make it out to be. He says this in response to Jacob Levy's complaint that there are no conservative writers in the 20th Century who can stand alongside the socialist Rawls or anarcholibertarian Nozick and make so strong a case for adherence to tradition as Nozick or Rawls do for their own ideologies. DeLong respons to Levy, saying, "There are no attractive modern conservatives because conservatism simply is not attractive!" [Bold in the original] This is from a usually, sometimes begrudgingly, freemarket economist. (I often think of him as coming from the "Damn, the market not only works, it's the most efficient mechanism there is; how do we exploit it for social justice without killing it?" school of liberal economics.)

DeLong quotes a long paragraph from Burke and then writes:

Burke's argument is not that France in 1789 should have followed its ancestral traditions. Burke's argument is, instead, that France in 1789 should have dug into its past until it found a moment when institutions were better than in 1788, and drawn upon that usable past in order to buttress the present revolutionary moment. This isn't an intellectual argument about how to decide what institutions are good. It is a practical-political argument about how to create good institutions and then buttress and secure them by making them facts on the ground.

What are good institutions? Burke sounds like Madison: checks-and-balances, separation of powers, rights of the subject, limitations on the state. Burke's views on what good institutions are Enlightenment views--that branch of the Enlightenment that took people as they are and politics as a science...

To my untrained eye, it really does look as if Burke is saying what DeLong claims he's saying. Which, if true, is quite a poke in the eye of modern "Burkean" conservatism. Burke himself seems to be saying that he'd be perfectly pleased with a high-minded quest for the best among known traditions rather than either blind acceptance of existing traditions or the blind dismantling of traditions with only academic theory to drive what happens next.

So help me, oh Intarwebs, to explain how Leo Strauss and William F. Buckley could claim to descend from a "Burkean tradition of tradition."

(Is it just me, or is Burke here advocating a program for selecting good tradition in almost exactly the same way Christopher Alexender advocates the selection of good architecture and urban development?)

(Good grief; I think that's a PhD thesis right there.)

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

purely from listening to NPR coverage of buckley, while he was eloquent in his discussions on conservatism, he did seem to come around to something of a more libertarian stance. It sounded as if once he tossed aside the racist opinions he was brought up with, he saw the need for racial equality, and supported various economic protests of the civil rights movement, since they were an effort to use market forces to structure civil society, and not just getting equal rights by shouting loudly enough. (much paraphrasing there, but...)

Something here puts me in mind of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" and the highly successful neovictorian society which dominates. There's a passage in which the characters compare themselves with the first victorians, what they kept, and what they didn't. The society is very conservative, but has a marked tendency to stagnate. New ideas, creativity, and art tend to come from new members who see the superiority of joining that phyle, but come from outside it.

Any philosophy needs some degree of flexibility in order to survive, of course. Fundamentalist ANYTHING doesn't work in the long run, and the neoconservatives aren't terribly accepting of anybody with a view that isn't their own. Modern conservatism seems to have stagnated, admitting no new ideas, nor any old ones they've previously tried, but aren't currently in the current vogue. Maybe this is why the modern types aren't making any headway.

The biggest conflict with conservatism (in my mind) is that the world changes every day, and you either change with it or get left behind. You can't hold it back, and while mining the past for good ideas will often yield some quite nice ones, sometimes you need to be open to a new idea when all of the old ones run out. None of the Big Name Conservatives today seem to want to hear that, and often go out of their way to mock anybody who says differently.

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

(sorry for any poorly structured sentences, i'm knocking this off quickly while at work, since market forces here have me bored at my desk at the end of the day, instead of beavering away at writing more damned SOP's)

[mundens.livejournal.com]

I'm not trying to insult anyone here, but to my mind most "liberals" are just as conservative as "conservatives" when comes to accepting change and truly new ideas.

I think the word "conservative" is largely useless terminology when referring to ideas on political, economic, or social theory. About the only groups that could really be considered "non-conservative" are the radical factions of various groups whom I'll call "Destructionists" (coz I can't think of the right terminology, i.e.: those whom, whatever their ideology, want to destroy the current systems and build new ones, even if what they want to build is based on old ideas) and the Dynamists and others of their ilk.

Everyone else is basically conservative, no matter how liberal their views, because once a freedom or right has been enshrined in law or accepted practice, they generally want to maintain that status quo, and that's what being conservative is all about.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we shoudn't try to make things stable, just that one needs to recognize that conservatism occurs regardless of ideologies.