Foundationalist Conservatism

Conservatives have a strange relationship to theorising. They claim that their position is untheoretical, yet they often make that claim in the process of articulating a theory of conservatism. This raises the question of whether conservatism is a ‘theoretical’ position. I argue that conservatism is both theoretical and untheoretical, and that one can say so without contradiction. I take the core of conservatism to be what I call the Tradition Principle: other things equal, we ought to comply with traditions. The Tradition Principle generates a form of conservatism which is (in some sense) untheoretical. It implies that in assessing political arrangements, the appropriate thing to do is not to appraise them by appeal to abstract principles, utopian ideologies, or theoretically-defined values, but to defer to tradition unless there are reasonably strong countervailing reasons. However, the Tradition Principle itself requires justification. In my view, the Tradition Principle can be justified by appeal to pessimism – the doctrine that human beings are necessarily imperfect. This leaves room for theorising, because demonstrating how the Tradition Principle can be inferred from pessimism is a theoretical enterprise. This explains why conservatism is both theoretical and untheoretical. There is no contradiction in maintaining that since the Tradition Principle is true, we ought not to theorise about first-order normative matters, but the Tradition Principle is supported by a theory. If this is correct, conservatism’s structure is analogous to the structure attributed to epistemic justification by foundationalists. Pessimism is the justificatory foundation for conservatism, since conservatism’s principles are inferred from it, but pessimism is not itself in need of inferential justification. An advantage of Foundationalist Conservatism is that pessimism is not only accepted by conservatives. Hence, Foundationalist Conservatism supports conservatism’s core claim with a principle which is independently plausible, thus allowing conservatism to gain wider appeal.