“Conservatism,” not unlike any other term in our political vocabulary, is ridden with ambiguity. As the label of a distinctive intellectual orientation, it is of limited use, for there seems to be virtually no end to the number of interpretations to which it lends itself. This makes defining “conservatism” a challenging enterprise. Yet an endeavor that is difficult is not impossible, and there is a centuries-old tradition of thought widely recognized as “conservative” that may hold the key to its success. To this intellectual tradition the eighteenth century Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke made an immeasurable contribution, and it is with some justice that he is widely credited with being “the Father” or “Patron Saint” of (modern) conservatism. By attending to the ideas that Burke advanced, we may hope to bring into focus a reasonably coherent, defensible account of the school of thought of which he was among the most notable progenitors.
Reason
The French Revolution occurred during the latter end of the eighteenth century, arguably the zenith of what we today call “the Enlightenment.” Contrary to the relatively monolithic characterization of the Enlightenment that is the bogeyman of its critics and the deity of its defenders, the Enlightenment was composed of a multiplicity of intellectual currents. Still, there is little doubt that its dominant impulse was a belief in the “omnicompetence” of human Reason and all that this entailed. So it is with some justice that this is the belief with which we in “the post-Enlightenment” West readily equate the Enlightenment age.
And it is against this belief in a (human) Reason that transcends place and time, the tribune before which all social and political institutions must be “justified,” that Burke stridently argued.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke famously states:
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would be better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages…The trans-historical, trans-cultural conception of reason to which his opponents subscribed, Burke is saying, is sorely mistaken. The intellectual powers of even the brightest individuals are as of nothing compared to the wisdom, accumulated over the span of centuries and even millennia through the hard lived experience of our ancestors, of the human race. This wisdom is distilled in unreflective and largely unarticulated traditions and customs in the absence of which human life as we know it would be unfathomable. Put another way, the reason of the individual is but a miniscule abstraction from the “reason” of the tradition(s) to which he or she belongs.
