The Transnational Conservative Project

Ferenc Hörcher and Daniel Pitt have assembled some of the brightest conservative minds to confront not only the history of conservative thought, but also its future. Intellectual Conservatism: From Burke to Scruton is a collection of essays largely meant for conservative intellectuals. It’s a specialized book, but that doesn’t detract from its accessibility or its usefulness. The great virtue of Intellectual Conservatism from Burke to Scruton is the editors’ and contributors’ ability to encounter conservative thought in a truly transnational context. British, Continental, and Latin American contributors all make important contributions to a work that is helpfully divided into four thematic sections. Each of those sections includes essays that incisively confront aspects of the development of conservative intellectual discourse over the last 250 years.

The introductory essays clarify which conservatism the book revolves around. The first section makes the work’s Anglocentrism clear. Most of the historical actors are British, and therefore the collection is in many ways a breath of fresh air for scholars weary of the United States’ seemingly undefinable politics. Clintons, Trumps, Bidens, and Vances are nowhere to be found. Instead, the reader learns that the terms of conservatism are older than Twitter, Trump, and 2016. The first intellectual to make his appearance is John Stuart Mill, in all his libertarian glory, making his famous swipe at the 1860s-era British Tories as the “stupid party.” Stupidity, Mill sneered, had a tendency toward conservatism. Hörcher’s most prescient observation is that British conservative intellectuals, rather than being stupid about politics, tended to be distant from politics, especially after the rise of mass politics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Totalitarian governments easily recruited intellectuals, usually by flattering them, whereas conservative parties, particularly in polities that emphasize popular democracy, did not. Hörcher recognizes the need for intellectual involvement in politics and broader society but stops short of the sort of lionization of the intellectual expert that defines post-Wilsonian American politics. Intellectuals, Hörcher notes, are often imprudent and woefully ignorant regarding actual policy considerations.

Hörcher’s cautious treatment of conservatism in political and social life naturally leads to the question of what, then, conservatism can offer the body politic. Daniel Pitt takes up the question in an essay proposing that conservatism provides necessary principles for governance, provided its principles are rightly defined. Intellectual conservatism must necessarily begin not with a procedure, but with a theory. Pitt treats the legacy of Michael Oakeshott respectfully, but the inquisitive reader is refreshingly presented with a conservative proposition not wedded to mere procedure. Appeals to a gauntlet of identifiable conservative thinkers, from T.S. Eliot to Lord Hugh Cecil to Americans like Russell Kirk, provide a stable of potential definitions on which to litigate what conservatism is and how it thinks, but conservatism in Pitt’s hands is still a literary and intellectual proposition that informs politics, not a political proposition in itself.

Michael Oakeshott’s shadow looms large over the first section of Intellectual Conservatism, and for good reason. The foremost conservative British political philosopher of the twentieth century exercised an outsized influence in an era dominated by the pseudo-utopianism of British leftism of the 1960s and 1970s, but Oakeshott’s age and the changing British political scene elevated a new generation of thinkers who owed their status to the rejuvenation of the British right in the age of Thatcherism. Conservative British historian Maurice Cowling, a self-consciously elite but also thoroughly Augustinian product of Britain’s old middle class, seemed downright pessimistic compared to Margaret Thatcher, a product of Britain’s new middle class who saw aspects of One Nation Toryism as a fogeyish holdover from a time when aristocrats ran British politics. Cowling was an uneasy Thatcherite, even though he claimed to support the Iron Lady’s premiership. Roger Scruton’s agrarianism, while certainly traditionalist, allowed for a sort of libertarianism that endeared him to the new British conservatives, even as he maintained a kind of distance from politics proper that Cowling—who dabbled in electoral politics as a young man—never did.

The collection’s second section focuses on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, and British, American, and European readers can find a comprehensive understanding of how much Thatcher remade British conservatism and how British conservatism as a movement moved forward after she left the House of Commons in 1992. Ojel Rodriguez Burgos’ work on the London School of Economics Right (LSE Right) seems particularly pertinent for British politics moving forward. The LSE Right was a third road for British conservatism. It did not declaim the “high” political orientation of Cowling’s Peterhouse Right; it also had the high view of personal liberty of the Scrutonian Right. But, unsurprisingly, economic theory and antagonism toward socialism informed the LSE Right to a greater extent than the other two schools of British conservatism. An affable elitism, combined with what Burgos calls a conservative individualism and anti-socialism, encapsulates the LSE Right and makes it perhaps the most electorally viable in Britain, if not for a rising tide of populism and heated, American-style culture-war politics.

Despite the subtle tribalism of conservative intellectuals and their not always identifiable effect on British politics, the relationship between British intellectuals and the Conservative Party that emerges from these pages is fundamentally strong. The fact that any leading conservative intellectual had the sort of influence of Cowling, Scruton, or Oakeshott in public political life is impressive enough. The fact that they did it—excepting Cowling—by keeping a relatively healthy distance from politics is perhaps the most compelling aspect of the chapter.

The book’s third part confronts the intersection of free speech and conservatism. This section was, in many ways, the most informative and, given that the present reviewer is an American, the most discomfiting. Matt Beech’s confrontation with questions of speech and liberty is direct, uncomfortable, and undoubtedly necessary, especially in a society with a different view of liberty and speech than the United States. Great Britain, no less than the United States, is in a culture war, and speech is a weapon that respective combatants use in cultural conflicts. The British left’s current war on speech is not, Beech notes, an indication of the political power of the British left, but an indication of political weakness. The weakness of the British left, particularly in its older Marxist form, has led to the development of a post-Marxist left that Beech terms Maoist. The older Marxist left used speech to pursue a specific eschatological end: utopian communism. The new Maoist left in Britain uses—and curtails—speech to pursue a fundamentally different end: decolonization and liberation of mankind. Speech is, therefore, a battleground because politics is always a struggle with an end. “Never a destination, always a struggle,” Beech quips in one of the book’s more memorable and pithy lines.

The second essay in the free speech section explicates how British Indians understand free speech. It’s a niche essay, but undoubtedly a necessary one. Any viable conservatism, intellectual or political, in Great Britain will be forced to reckon with and recruit Britons from historically South Asian communities, accounting for both points of connectivity and points of tension on questions like free speech among British Indians.

The final section is the most romantic and the most prescient. Sebastian Morello, Imogen Sinclair, and Phillip Bond each, in turn, explore the more eternal and spiritual aspects of intellectual conservatism in Britain. Morello’s essay will resonate with religious, and particularly Christian, readers of the collection. Grace and intellectual life and politics are all on the tip of Anglophone tongues on both sides of the Atlantic, but Morello’s chapter approaches the subject without the hard edges that religious political thought—Protestant and Roman Catholic—in the United States often has.

Intellectual Conservatism from Burke to Scruton is not a readily accessible book for laypeople, but it is not meant to be. It’s a book for conservative intellectuals, by conservative intellectuals. The essays, while not thesis-driven, cohere and exhibit a substantive unity. The development of conservative intellectual life in Britain is comprehensively covered. Hörcher and Pitt give the reader exactly what they promise in the work’s introductory essays. Pitt’s concluding paragraph is framed as an interrogative, which adds gravity to it: Is intellectual conservatism a worthwhile pursuit? And we might add: is it a worthwhile pursuit in Britain in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? If the history recorded here is any indication, the answer is yes. Intellectual conservatism has proved to be both durable and versatile over the last 250 years, and none of these essays gives the reader reason to believe that intellectual conservatism in the United Kingdom will be any less versatile in the future.

Miles Smith IV is assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.