Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair?

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Book Review

Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? Ted Honderich London: Pluto Press, 2005, 334 pp.

You need not get very far into the new revised edition of British philosopher Ted Honderich's survey Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? to detect that his attempt to unearth the "rationale" of conservatism--its deep first principle, "the nature of its fundamental and general commitment" (p. 23)--has gone seriously amiss. To be precise: You need get no further than the subtitle.

A political tradition that really did unite those four figures--a traditionalist monarchist, a radical libertarian influenced by Kant and Locke, an evangelical Christian neoconservative, and a New Labour leader--not merely by family resemblance or superficial policy overlap, but by way of some profound shared philosophical principle, that would be hot ice and wonderous strange snow. Others, apparently, have noticed that Honderich appears to be off on a snipe hunt, as he attempts to address this objection in his new introduction. But he offers only the rather lame observation that one may generalize usefully about a class or set, despite inevitable differences between its members. It should be fairly obvious that this begs the question.

The inconsistency of such a motley crew is, however, ultimately necessary to Honderich's final conclusion--more in sorrow than in anger, surely--that "organized selfishness is the rationale of their politics, and they have no other rationale" (p. 302). There are some obvious problems with that conclusion--among them the existence of working-class cultural or religious conservatives for whom economic issues are at best an afterthought, but Honderich's almost monomaniacal focus on redistribution allows him to neglect such problems.

This misstep out of the starting gate is a fecund source of lesser errors, among them a tendency to harp on supposed internal contradictions that merely reveal different strains of conservative thought, and a tendency to false generalization that produces some spectacular howlers. We learn, for example, that conservatives have no patience for "natural rights, abstract rights, rights in theory, human rights.... For the most part they do not take seriously ... anything other than established legal rights" (pp. 34-35). There is, sure enough, a certain sort of conservative of which that might be said. But as a general description of modern conservatism in particular, it is close to the opposite of the truth: It is...