On Being A Conservative
Lessons from Friedrich Hayek
1
Friedrich Hayek is a great hero to conservatives, and rightly so. He revered traditions. He despised socialism. He favored free markets.
Hayek helps to define modern conservatism. And yet one of his most interesting and vivid essays has this title: Why I Am Not A Conservative.
Well, why wasn’t he? And what might we learn from his clear desire to distinguish himself from conservatives?
2
In the relevant essay, written in the late 1950s and published in 1960, Hayek rejected the idea that socialists are on the left, conservatives on the right, and liberals in the middle. He didn’t like the idea of some kind of line from left to right. He wrote: “Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third.” Three corners, not a straight line.
3
Hayek had plenty of nice things to say about conservatives and conservatism. His essay is written in sadness, not in anger. (It was apparently started as a paper delivered to the Mount Pelerin Society in 1957, sharply critical of the traditionalism associated with Russell Kirk, who apparently delivered an extemporaneous response at the time. That must have been quite an occasion.
In tribute to conservatism, Hayek said this: “To their loving and reverential study of the value of grown institutions we owe (at least outside the field of economics) some profound insights which are real contributions to our understanding of a free society.” Hayek shared with conservatives that reverence for grown institutions, the beneficial products of social processes, not of any individual designer.
With that justified reverence, conservatives “did show an understanding of the meaning of spontaneously grown institutions such as language, law, morals, and conventions that anticipated modern scientific approaches and from which the liberals might have profited.”
This understanding was central to Hayek’s own thinking. It was even defining. Liberalism, as Hayek understood and championed it, shares that reverence, and hence is deferential to traditions. It never sneers at them. This is a close connection here between Hayek and Burke (and on Hayek’s account, Adam Smith as well).
Divergent attitudes toward traditions help to explain Hayek’s split from John Stuart Mill (and from other liberals). In Hayek’s telling, Mill was a rationalist who thought that human reason could be used to challenge traditions. Hayek did not like that at all. He thought that it was a “fatal conceit.” Hayek well knew that many contemporary liberals follow Mill, and he lamented that. Hayek’s preferred form of liberalism, which he believed to be the truest form of liberalism, treasures not arrogant reason, but invisible hands, undesigned orders, the common law, the rule of law, and customs.
Designs without designers - they are fundamental to Hayekian liberalism and to conservatism alike.
Hayek did not want to freeze any status quo, but like conservatives, he tended to favor incrementalism rather than large-scale change. He greatly admired Burke. “There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed strong. “
4
In 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr., a defining American conservative, wrote that his new magazine, and the conservative movement as he would like it to be, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”
That’s a great line. It’s exactly what Hayek rejected. I don’t know if Hayek knew of the line, but I suspect so. You can see his essay as a direct response to it.
5
Hayek identified the following as “the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such”: “by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving.”
Sure, “It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.”
For Hayek: Ugh. We might say that in Hayek’s view, conservatism lacks a theory. It’s mostly a red light. By contrast: Focused on freedom, spontaneous orders, traditions, and free markets, Hayekian liberalism has a theory. It tells us where to go. It’s a path.
6
Hayek complained that conservatives want to freeze things. They do not want to allow free markets to do their work, or to permit freedom to have its way, or to see what surprises the future, governed by liberal principles, has in store for us.
In particular, Hayek lamented that conservatives “are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about. It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance.”
Hayek much liked entrepreneurship and innovation. He thought that the future could not be predicted - and that we should be open to and delighted by surprise, so long as it came from exercises of freedom.
Here is where Hayek got tougher on conservatives. In his account, they do not like freedom nearly enough. They are open to the exercise of arbitrary power. They might even welcome it. They are fine with coercion, so long as they are the ones who are behind it.
He objected in particular to “the characteristic complacency of the conservative toward the action of established authority and his prime concern that this authority be not weakened rather than that its power be kept within bounds. This is difficult to reconcile with the preservation of liberty. In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes” (emphasis added).
7
Hayek urged that in this respect, the conservative was “[l]ike the socialist.” (For Hayek, those are exceptionally strong words.) The reason is that “he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.”
Coercion, then, was one of Hayek’s key concerns. “[T]o the liberal neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits. I sometimes feel that the most conspicuous attribute of liberalism that distinguishes it as much from conservatism as from socialism is the view that moral beliefs concerning matters of conduct which do not directly interfere with the protected sphere of other persons do not justify coercion. This may also explain why it seems to be so much easier for the repentant socialist to find a new spiritual home in the conservative fold than in the liberal.”
That is especially interesting (and the last sentence is shrewd). Hayek did not endorse Mill’s Harm Principle, which he thought potentially destructive of liberty. But he came pretty close to that principle, certainly insofar as he wanted to limit coercion.
8
There is a further point here about tolerance — not a great word, but a word of Hayek’s time. A better term might be: mutual forbearance.
Hayek objected: “The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions.”
Hayek tended to agree with conservatives on those particular values. He shared many of them. (How many? Good question.) But still: “The acceptance of such principles means that we agree to tolerate much that we dislike. There are many values of the conservative which appeal to me more than those of the socialists; yet for a liberal the importance he personally attaches to specific goals is no sufficient justification for forcing others to serve them.”
Here is Hayek’s central claim: “To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one’s concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends.”
You can see this as a pragmatic point about what is necessary to enable different people to live together (a modus vivendi). Hayek did make that pragmatic point. But you can also see it as a point about liberty, and for Hayek, that was the more fundamental one, I think.
9
Hayek also offered a vigorous claim about novelty, and the right attitude toward it. Hayek urged “Though the liberal certainly does not regard all change as progress, he does regard the advance of knowledge as one of the chief aims of human effort and expects from it the gradual solution of such problems and difficulties as we can hope to solve. Without preferring the new merely because it is new, the liberal is aware that it is of the essence of human achievement that it produces something new; and he is prepared to come to terms with new knowledge, whether he likes its immediate effects or not.”
Thus "the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it—or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs” (emphasis added).
This is an argument against motivated reasoning, and a suggestion that conservatives tend to succumb to it. (Not incidentally, Hayek also had some things to say against nationalism, and the conservative tendency to favor it.)
10
Still: In important respects, and notwithstanding his title, Hayek really was a conservative. He emphasized throughout his life how much we do not know, and how much we benefit from traditions, practices, and institutions that no human being designed. On that count, consider this crucial passage:
”What I have described as the liberal position shares with conservatism a distrust of reason to the extent that the liberal is very much aware that we do not know all the answers and that he is not sure that the answers he has are certainly the right ones or even that we can find all the answers. He also does not disdain to seek assistance from whatever non-rational institutions or habits have proved their worth.”
Hayekian liberals and conservatives are humble; they know how much we do not know. Like the conservative, the Hayekian liberal welcomes institutions and habits that have proved their worth, even if we do not really understand them.
Hayek had some things to say about religion here:
“Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. That this is not essential to liberalism is clearly shown by its English ancestors, the Old Whigs, who, if anything, were much too closely allied with a particular religious belief. What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused.”
Okay then.
11
We can easily see why Hayek has inspired, and continues to inspire, conservatives and conservatism all over the world. But he thought it important to say that he was not a conservative. He really did not like the idea of standing athwart history, yelling stop.
He had an account of liberty, associated with his understanding of markets, traditions, and dispersed knowledge. Sure, he agreed that we need a “brake on the vehicle of progress.” But what he added, with some passion, was this: “I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake. What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move.”