KIRK SMILES:

In Disraeli's footsteps: Cameron's scramble for power (Andrew Adonis, 5/23/10, Independent)

David Cameron looks on Benjamin Disraeli as a hero. I haven't visited the graveyard of Hughenden parish church of late, but I imagine gasps of astonished admiration issuing forth from the founder of modern Conservatism. For Cameron has pulled off a coup in some ways modelled on Disraeli's masterstroke in "dishing the Whigs" and projecting himself into the premiership in 1868. The longer-term effect in rebranding the Tory party may be of similar consequence. [...]

Cameron did a Disraeli, sweeping Nick Clegg off his feet and presenting him with an ever larger hoard of gifts, including the referendum on the alternative vote which Lib Dems prize above all. By this means – after five days of alarums and excursions – Hughenden Man persuaded Clegg to put him in office. In the process, Cameron also hopes to have isolated his own right wing and appropriated Liberal branding so that he, too, is seen as leading a new centrist Lib-Con party able to win a majority against Labour.

As for the Lib Dems, who suffered the greatest disappointment on 6 May, their right side is already half consumed by Cameron, and their larger left is now prey to Labour, the Greens, and, no doubt, a breakaway "true Liberal" party hereafter. A similar fate befell the Liberals when they last formed a peacetime coalition with the Tories, but that is another story.

The meaning of conservatism: Disraeli followed Burke’s “politics of imperfection”, while Thatcher favoured Hayek’s free-market ideas. To which line of political thought are today’s Tories the heirs? (Jonathan Derbyshire, 08 October 2009, New Statesman)

The political historian and former Labour MP David Marquand thinks that the left is getting it dangerously wrong in charging Cameron with "crypto-Thatcherism". He sees the Conservative leader as a "Whig imperialist", a descendant of Burke who offers "inclusion, social harmony and evolutionary adaptation to the cultural and socio-economic changes of his age". Supposing that Marquand is right, where does this leave Cameron in relation to the recent history of his own party? To answer that question, one needs to look back more than 30 years.

In October 1976, the philosopher Anthony Quinton was invited to deliver the T S Eliot memorial lectures at the University of Kent. He took as his topic the history of conservative thought in England, tracing a lineage that stretched from the Tudor thinker Richard Hooker, via Bolingbroke, Burke and Disraeli, to the 20th-century political theorist Michael Oakeshott. The conservatism espoused by these thinkers was, Quinton argued, a "politics of imperfection" - that is, their views about the nature and proper extent of government were rooted in a vision of human weakness. For Burke and the others, men are morally and intellectually imperfect creatures, and political authority - specifically, the authority that inheres in customs and institutions - is to be understood as a remedy or palliative for that imperfection.

The principles of this venerable tradition guided Tory politicians from Disraeli and Lord Salisbury to Stanley Baldwin and Rab Butler. But by the time Quinton came to give his lectures, the Conservative Party was preparing to abandon them. Two years earlier, Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph had founded the Centre for Policy Studies, one of a number of "New Right" think tanks that would make the intellectual running in British politics in the late 1970s, and would transform the Tories from the party of Burke and Hume into the party of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek - turning it from a conservative party, in the Quinton sense, into a classical or neoliberal one that would begin a long and ultimately destructive march through many of Britain's most established institutions. [...]

There was nothing especially conservative about Hayek's free-market ideas. One of the modern masterpieces of authentically conservative thought, Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics, contains a single, solitary reference to the Austrian thinker - and a critical one at that. The "main significance" of Hayek, Oakeshott maintained, was not the "cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine. A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics." It belonged, in other words, to a "rationalist" style in thrall to the "illusion of the evanescence of imperfection".
Disposition, not a creed

Conservatism for Oakeshott, by contrast (and this places him squarely in the tradition explored by Quinton), was not a creed, but a “disposition". Such beliefs as the Oakeshottian conservative holds are acquired piecemeal, over the long haul; they are inductions from
experience, not deductions from logical or metaphysical premises. The conservative is certainly disposed towards limited government, say, but not on the basis of general, abstract ideas about choice or autonomy, or some "natural right" theory of private property.

The same held true for Burke, whose conservatism was based on a distrust of all ideologies. The reason he denounced the French Revolution was that he saw in it an attempt to remake a society in the image of abstract ideals. But politics, in his view, was not a rational science; it couldn't be, because it was limited by what human beings, imperfect creatures that they are, are capable of knowing.

When Quinton gave his lectures, the capture of the Conservative Party by the neoliberal "New Right" was not yet complete, but he knew which way the wind was blowing. Looking across the Atlantic, Quinton noted that in the United States, in "colloquial speech . . . a conservative is a defender of legislatively untrammelled free enterprise, of the absolute rights of property ownership, with an eccentric fringe of adherents who drive around in vans with placards on them, proclaiming the un­constitutional character of the federal income tax". Conservatism, in other words, had congealed into an ideology, a set of inflexible principles. To be a "conservative" was simply to hold a particular bundle of beliefs - about socialised medicine, taxation, the minimal state and so on.

By the mid-1980s, this was true of British conservatism, too. And in remaking itself in the image of the American Republican right, the Conservative Party forgot not only Burke's warnings about the dangers of a priori theorising in politics (like other experimental sciences, he wrote, the "science of building a commonwealth" cannot be taught as if it were logic), but also Disraeli's concern with the ravaging effects of an unchecked free market.
During his second stint as prime minister, between 1874 and 1880, Disraeli had overseen wide-ranging legislation designed to mitigate the depredations of industrial capitalist expansion. The Employers and Workmen Act and the Public Health Act, both passed in 1875, were part of an attempt to impose on the owners of industrial property the kinds of obligations to the propertyless that had in the past been assumed by rural squires. It could be argued, moreover, that Disraeli was the first British politician to accept that it was one of the responsibilities of the state to provide essential public services; and that, in doing so, he took the first steps, however tentative, towards the establishment of the welfare state. That is certainly the revisionist view of Marquand, who sees the Beveridge report as being as much a victory for the "Whig imperialist" tradition, in which he counts Burke and Disraeli, as it was a triumph for Keynesianism.

So, rather than railing against the spread of big cities and the growing influence of the commercial spirit, Disraeli recognised that these changes were largely irreversible. The task of a conservative politics, therefore, was not to take refuge in a kind of reactionary immobilism or nostalgia, but rather to work to attenuate the most serious consequences of a new set of social conditions.
No going back

In this, as in other respects, Disraeli was a Burkean. He understood that, in Burke, the "disposition to preserve" had combined with an "ability to improve". His most substantial work of political theory, the Vindication of the English Constitution (1835), is, among other things, a paean to what he calls the "spirit of conservation and optimism". (The Vindication is also a thoroughgoing attack on Benthamite utilitarianism, which Disraeli regarded as the attempt to measure or judge political institutions according to a formal principle - the principle of utility, according to which an action or policy is desirable to the extent that it promotes the "greatest happiness of the greatest number". He thought that rule hopelessly abstract: it may well be the task of government to increase happiness, but it is always the happiness of some particular group or other, not the sum of "human happiness", whatever that might be.)

Disraeli saw that Burke's traditionalism, the view that political knowledge was a matter not of logic, but of accumulated collective wisdom, did not entail a belief in the restoration of an earlier, putatively ideal state of affairs. "A state without the means of some change," Burke had written, "is without the means of its conservation." Conservatism, in other words, is not the same as counter-revolution.

One vital caveat here is that the point of conservative support for free markets is that they allow imperfect men to screw up and then sort out, hopefully, the better ideas from the worse ones.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 23, 2010 7:14 AM