Conservatism, the late philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, emerged into the modern world as “a kind of ‘yes but…’” response to liberalism. Conservatives, he observed, believe, like liberals, in the importance of the free market, of private property and of individual choice. They believe also in the overriding significance of community and tradition as setting limits to the reach of individualism. Liberalism, for Scruton, made sense “only in the social context that conservatism defends”.
The relationship between these two philosophical wellsprings of conservatism has never been comfortable. The tension between the individualism of the market and private property and the communality of custom and tradition, between promethean capitalist development and the fetters of history and culture, has always gnawed away at the heart of conservatism.
It is a tension that can be seen in a surprising ambivalence towards Margaret Thatcher. Certainly, she is an unalloyed Tory heroine, the Iron Lady who transformed both Britain and the Conservative party. Yet, many conservatives also regret the destruction Thatcherism wrought on Britain’s social fabric and its customs and traditions. Scruton himself admired Thatcher but in his memoirs, Gentle Regrets, described his 1980 book The Meaning of Conservatism as “a somewhat Hegelian defence of Tory values in the face of their betrayal by the free marketeers”.
Or take Thatcher’s favourite free-market economist, Friedrich Hayek. One anecdote has Thatcher, during a party meeting, producing a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slamming it down on the table and declaring, “This is what we believe.” Hayek was as admiring of Thatcher as she was of him. Yet, he added a postscript to The Constitution of Liberty explaining: “Why I am not a conservative.” And while Hayek might have become a conservative icon, he is also godfather to that bête noire of contemporary conservatism, globalisation.
The debate over what constitutes “real conservatism” is a thread that runs through much Tory history and will undoubtedly dominate proceedings at this week’s party conference in Birmingham, at the heart of which will be the leadership campaign. For both leading contenders in that contest, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, the Tories lost the election because they were insufficiently conservative. Both demand a more muscular nationalism, fear immigration is undermining the soul of the nation, challenge what they regard as “woke” history, and desire the restoration of more traditional cultural values.
Thirty years ago, Edward Luttwak observed wryly that “the standard Republican/Tory after-dinner speech is a two-part affair, in which part one celebrates the virtues of unimpeded competition and dynamic structural change, while part two mourns the decline of the family and community ‘values’ that were eroded precisely by the forces commended in part one”. Three decades on, the tendency to evade responsibility for the very problems for which they claim to have the solution has become even more pronounced. Those calling for the restoration of “real conservatism” to repair Britain’s social fabric and rebuild the nation are also the ones who advocated – and still advocate – policies that helped erode the fabric and fracture the nation in the first place, from austerity to privatisation, from the undermining of civil society to assaults on working-class communities.
At the same time, those, such as the writer and historian Edmund Fawcett, who wonder “What happened to liberal conservatism?”, lamenting the Tories’ “collapse towards the hard right”, also miss the point. The distinction between liberal and reactionary strands of conservatism is more blurred than many assume.
The significance of history, community and tradition to conservative thought derives largely from the work of the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke. For Burke, a nation was “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”, its values defined not by reason but by what Burke called the “latent wisdom” of prejudice and custom accumulating across generations.
Burkean ideas underpin liberal strands of conservatism. They appeal also to more reactionary strands, buttressing the calls for a more obedient, hierarchical and intolerant society.
“Liberals naturally rebel, conservatives naturally obey,” Scruton reflected, because conservatives recognise “the culture of obedience” as the necessary foundation of social order. Hence, it is not liberty or equality but obedience, “the prime virtue of political beings”, on which the ideal society must be founded. What Scruton learned from Burke was that “Our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable” and that any “attempt to justify them will merely lead to their loss.”
For many contemporary conservatives, their excoriation of the “liberal elite” is a demand not for a more democratic society but for one more ordered and tractable. Patrick Deneen, the American political philosopher whose books Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change have become required reading for US conservatives, argues for the creation of a new elite capable, unlike today’s, of inculcating the lower orders with an “understanding of what constitutes their own good”. “A virtuous people,” he insists, “can only be maintained through the… efforts of a virtuous elite.”
Burkean notions of history and tradition equally provide justification for ethnic, rather than civic, concepts of nationhood and for more exclusive communities. “Everyone inherits a ‘constituent community’ which precedes him and which will constitute the root of his values and norms.” That might be a very Burkean view of cultural inheritance but it flows from the pen of Alain de Benoist, the French philosopher of the far right.
Immigrants, Benoist insists, must always remain outsiders because they are carriers of distinct histories and cultures, and so can never be absorbed into the host nation. Democracy only works, he insists, where “demos and ethnos coincide”. The line between Burkean and “Völkisch” visions of nationhood can be thin. Which is why many mainstream conservatives have picked up on far-right themes of immigration and identity, and talk fervidly now of migrant “invasions”, of Britons “surrendering their territory”, of white Europeans “losing their homelands” and “committing suicide”, of the perils of London becoming less white.
There have always been strands of liberal conservatism. Only in the postwar period, though, after the discrediting by Nazism of more reactionary movements, did they become its dominant feature. Now, as that postwar order continues to crumble, the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the radical and far right is being reset. Whoever gains the Conservative crown, how they negotiate this realignment will determine the party’s future.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
