Conservatism and Liberalism: Two Books on the Great Divide

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

E very man and every woman, it seems, knows Gilbert and Sullivan's quipping lines from "Iolanthe" (1882): "That every boy and every gal / That's born into the world alive. / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative." When the lines were first sung, the labels matched up with Britain's political parties, but they obviously have a wider application—each calling to mind, then and now, a cultural outlook, an inclination, a temperament, even a philosophy. Over time, of course, even the firmest definition will shift, making easy summary difficult and historical circumstance—context, that is—crucial to our understanding of what "liberalism" is and how "conservatism" differs from it. These days, we may also ask: What sets the two sides of democratic politics so far apart?

Edmund Fawcett, a former editor and correspondent at the Economist, grappled with one end of this polarity in "Liberalism: The Life of an Idea," published in 2014 and revised four years later. He now explores its opposing force in "Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition." A self-described left-wing liberal, Mr. Fawcett believes that both categories of thought (and politics) are facing critical tests, making it all the more urgent that we grasp their genealogy—how they developed and what they have come to represent. He calls his explorations "historical essays," and indeed they are written in a reflective mode, though at times in an impassioned style. Members of both thought-categories will find much to learn from both books, not least from the historical figures Mr. Fawcett brings into view.

Portrait of Edmund Burke by James Barry, ca. 1774.

Mr. Fawcett notes that, in the broadest terms, the modern era in advanced societies has been governed by a liberal outlook, one in which the liberty or freedom of the individual has been increasingly protected from the state or "liberated" from custom, hierarchy and the institutions—notably, the church—that once dictated social relations and guided man's understanding of himself. The origins of this outlook, he notes, can be traced to the Enlightenment, when "reason" was elevated to an exalted position and, it was believed, a rational scrutiny of both principles and institutions would lead humanity away from dark superstition and upward toward the light.

Enlightenment thinkers, Mr. Fawcett reminds us, encouraged the idea that society might be understood and thereby changed for the better. They also sought to sever moral codes from their traditional mooring, or at least to rethink them: As Mr. Fawcett puts it, David Hume and Immanuel Kant "welcomed liberty from ethical tutelage" so that men could determine their own standards of conduct. The German statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt saw education as a way to realize individual possibility rather than, as tradition would have it, train for an occupation or a social role. Benjamin Constant, in France, focused on the concept of liberty, which he defined as a condition of existence allowing people to turn away interference from either society or the state. Calling absolute power radically illegitimate, Francois Guizot insisted that human imperfection meant that no person, class, faith or interest should have the final say. Like other French liberals of his day, he sought a juste milieu —a place where interests and ideas could be balanced. Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent also challenged the assumptions of the ancien regime, helping open careers to talent and remove restrictions on office-holding long governed by religion and class.

These currents of thought we associate with the 18th century, and for good reason, but after the shock of the American and French revolutions, they were dammed up by the Napoleonic Wars and an interlude of restoration. It was only in the 1830s that the dam broke. A period of rapid change—brought on by the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution, the railway's remarkable shrinking of distance, and episodes of agricultural depression and financial crisis—demanded a re-assessment of established patterns of thought and governance. Enlightenment-driven liberalism was one mode of response; conservatism, one might say, was a response to the response.

Mr. Fawcett grounds modern liberalism in a set of ideas operating in tension: a belief in the inescapability of conflict; a distrust of power; a faith in progress; and, perhaps most conspicuously, an affirmation of the individual’s claim to self-definition. Where such “accidents” as social class and birth order used to determine a good part of a life-trajectory, the liberal ideal sought an opening up of possibility. In particular, it sought the individual’s freedom to pursue his passions and exploit his talents and, along the way, enjoy social respect no matter what class or “estate” he belonged to. It is easy to see how this aspirational idea of the self, seeking betterment, matched a broad governing principle of reform: of society seeking to improve itself unhindered by the old regime’s codes and structures.

And what about conservatism? Here the story is, by its very nature, less triumphalist in its tone and less visible, these days, in its effects. Custom and tradition, in the conservative view, are sources of wisdom, gathered over time, not oppressive forms to be liberated from. Authority—whether invested in civic leaders or in the clergy—is to be respected, even revered. The individual is defined by his relation to an overarching social structure, which itself possesses, ideally, an organic unity and a sense of the common good. Religion is an indispensable part of this unity, a source of moral authority and revealed truth. Continuity is the ideal, not disruption—and property, passed along from one generation to the next, is essential to such continuity. Law and custom rightly impose constraints and enforce order, keeping at bay the forces that threaten to dissolve social bonds and unloose anarchy.

It is thus logical that Mr. Fawcett locates the forerunners of modern conservatism in Edmund Burke’s meditations on the French Revolution. Even at an early stage, Burke saw the extremes to which an attack on tradition may reach: the uprooting of an entire moral and social order in the name of a political abstraction. The result, Burke argued, was first anarchy, then tyranny. Mr. Fawcett notes that Burke drew on classical Greek thinking, which posits the cyclic nature of politics and the constant threat of self-destruction.

Another foundational figure from “Conservatism” is Joseph de Maistre, the Savoyard diplomat, who went further than Burke in his reaction to the events in France. For him, both church and crown were necessary to avoid anarchy and tyranny: Without the order they provide, man becomes monstrous. The free thinking in the salons of Paris, Maistre argued, led to the mobs in the streets. Mr. Fawcett writes that Maistre’s ultramontane Catholicism, not to mention his sharp tone and bleak outlook, may not “sit well in conservatism’s front parlor,” but it “belongs in the household.”

The French Revolution affected many other thinkers, of course. Gouverneur Morris, who followed Jefferson as America’s representative in Paris, echoed Burke’s warning that the revolution’s proponents planned a new order around people who existed nowhere outside their own imaginations, “least of all in France.” By contrast—more realistically—James Madison had forged a Constitution that used structural balance to check power and secure lasting order.

One of the lesser-known figures in Mr. Fawcett’s chronicle is Friedrich von Gentz, a German legal thinker who argued that the French Revolution, though claiming to exalt rationality and reason, instead attacked both. Gentz believed that the problems in Europe in the late 18th century didn’t derive from monarchy but from the breakdown of the state system under the pressure of Prussian growth (among much else). As Mr. Fawcett shows, Gentz was an early advocate of balance-of-power politics and ended up, after Napoleon’s defeat, as an adviser to Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, another conservative figure devoted to stability and order.

In its extremism, the French Revolution didn’t turn out to be the model for liberalism’s progress in history, nor the Continent its principal venue. In “Liberalism,” Mr. Fawcett tells the story of Anglo-American liberalism, which was propelled by John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden and William Gladstone, among others. It sought to enlarge the scope of civil society rather than deploy the state toward liberal ends (as in France); it also sought to reform institutions incrementally and facilitate economic development. In this sense, Mr. Fawcett says, Lincoln was a liberal statesman. (By contrast, he deems John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster conservatives.) In general, the Anglo-Americans, while reducing the claims of privilege and ending slavery, aimed to extend suffrage and set up a low-tax, free-trade system. But laissez-faire didn’t extend to all aspects of life. If “true liberty rests on character,” as the British writer Samuel Smiles asserted in 1859, then diligence and self-control became indispensable.