On Being Liberal?

How do we define conservatism? For John Ray the answer is clear. We simply follow “how people use” the term and we find that people agree in applying it to certain individuals and parties.

John declares himself to be bemused that some of us at MR don’t follow this procedure and that we insist on questioning the credentials of certain mainstream “conservatives”.

To prove his point, John gives us a selection from Michael Oakeshott’s essay “On Being Conservative”. He introduces the selection as follows:

“Here is another quote from a famous conservative thinker whom certain wiseheads here will no doubt declare to be a “liberal” - despite everyone else thinking it otherwise.”

Everyone else? I decided to check the experts. One of the leading Oakeshott scholars is Dr Efraim Podoksik. He published an essay last year titled “Oakeshott: What Kind of Liberal?” In this essay, Dr Podoksik writes,

“Another example of misunderstanding Oakeshott’s position is the essay ‘On Being Conservative’. To begin with the title, I know a number of respectable universities in which decent teachers offer this work to their students as a major statement of conservative ‘ideology’ ... I find it quite amusing that a certain text is regarded as a classic of conservatism just on account of the word ‘conservative’ in its title.

“Oakeshott’s account of conservatism is peculiar ... he hardly leaves any room for any serious world view historically associated with conservatism ... what we are offered ... is the doctrine of minimal government whose function is the maintenance of order rather than the pursuit of a certain moral ideal. If anything, this view is typical of classical liberalism. Whence the word “conservative” then?”

“… these examples do not exhaust the topic of Oakeshott’s liberalism. Many commentators have discussed it extensively and I would like to refer you also to my book on Oakeshott. I just wanted to give you a glimpse at still persisting stereotypes and show how misplaced the characterisation of him as a traditionalist conservative is ...”

What this commentary from Dr Podoksik shows is that John’s approach to defining conservatism is wrong on two counts. First, it simply isn’t the case that “everyone agrees” on how to apply the term. The leading Oakeshott scholars regard it as plain that he is a liberal, and yet there are other academics who refer to him as a conservative.

Second, it is not the case that political terms are accepted merely on account of prevalent usage. Scholars like Dr Podoksik look at the actual content of what people believe to categorise their politics in a consistent and coherent way. Dr Podoksik rightly believes it to be meaningless to label Oakeshott a conservative when Oakeshott’s political beliefs derive so clearly from classical liberalism.

So we shouldn’t accept that people or parties are “conservative” merely because the label is applied to them by the media or by themselves. We have to look at what these people actually declare their beliefs to be.

If we don’t do this, then we perpetuate the confusion in which the term conservatism is often applied to various right-wing, or classical, forms of liberalism.

We then have the sorry situation in which people who set out to be a conservative opposition actually adopt some form of the liberal philosophy, leaving them unable to defend their own tradition in a principled way.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Thursday, May 19, 2005 at 12:32 PM in Liberalism & the Left
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Comments:

Posted by jonjayray on May 20, 2005, 01:20 AM | #

So Podoksik agrees with Richardson. One swallow does not make a summer. But it is certainly true that the term “liberal” has changed meaning and that this confuses people. Some theoreticians cannot handle the real-world complexity that in one sense conservatives ARE liberal. They are still confused by the 19th century in which Leftists espoused various sorts of liberty as a tactic to disrupt society as it then was.

Posted by jonjayray on May 20, 2005, 01:42 AM | #

Getting into a discussion of 19th cent politics is quite a leap but consider this: Pitt the younger is considered by many to be the first modern conservative and yet at one stage his government had big support from the Whigs—ancestors of the modern-day British Liberals. How odd if conservatism and liberalism are opposed! The confusion arises because Leftists—who are NOT liberals—have usurped that label. To this day however Leftists will propose some libertarian policies (mainly in the moral field) if they can use that to disrupt.

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