Politics vs. Philosophy on the Right

A conversation has started which will, and should, only grow louder, more vociferous, and more comprehensive. It’s about whether or not conservatives should work on developing and pitching new ways of addressing today’s big problems. Stephen Bainbridge, Megan McArdle, Yuval Levin, Andrew Sullivan, and Jim Antle (twice) have weighed in worthily — and not at all uniformly. I made a stab at some remarks here, but the latest round of posts makes me think I should cast the argument in general terms and then challenge those terms with a weird British quote from a thick book with a long name.

The basic tension here is between politics and philosophy. Throughout Old World intellectual history you can find political philosophers who steered clear of politics (Hobbes, Rousseau, Nietzsche), plunged in (Locke, Burke), tried unsuccessfully to distinguish themselves in government (Tocqueville), or nibbled at the periphery (Constant). I find it intriguing that the British political philosophers were best at doing politics, while, in America, the only real political philosopher who got in the game after the Founders (they were all born British, of course) was Calhoun. The closest we ever came afterward was Wilson, and that’s quite a stretch.

I mention this because it presents two slightly overtypified but heuristically valuable models for conservatives in politics: straightforward, unambiguously practical policy work that engages both head and hands (American style) versus working a complicated balance between poking your head in the clouds and getting your hands dirty (British style). There are class inflections here: in America, once the Founders were gone, political philosophy largely disappeared along with the last vestiges of aristocracy. In Britain, on the other hand, aristocracy survived, and with it a class practice of professional pondering and amateur politicking. This shows the endurance of the classical Greek understanding of philosophy: to think is for those liberated from having to do.

In such a cultural climate, a politics of prudence, improvisation, and situated practicality makes a great deal of horse sense — but only because the British aristocracy, unlike, say, the French, ably handled the task of integrating the moneyed bourgeoisie into the upper classes. Landed ponderers of independent wealth found themselves developing certain political interests, while moneyed businessmen of independent power found themselves needing a principled explanation of their place in the social order. The result, in Britain, was a fusion or intermingling of politics and philosophy in which a conservative ideology was grown from prudential, aristocratic soil. The soil that nourished American conservatism, by contrast, was pragmatic and democratic.

Russell Kirk worked overtime to remind conservatives that these two branches of the right-leaning tree were exactly that — branches, not separate trunks; but in a way he was deeply wrong. For as much as Lockean conservatism privileges and prizes industry, democratic pragmatism prizes progress, and science — problem-solving expertise — can quickly dominate the landscape when industry is taken as but a means to progress. Now’s the time for that book quote: the book is Barrington Moore, Jr.’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, and the quote is in fact a quote lifted from Sir Lewis Namier’s England in the Age of the American Revolution. It shows precisely how the amateur prudence of the aristocratic British politician strikes such a contrast with the hands-on, progress-oriented expertise of the democratic American pragmatist:

We prefer to make it appear as if our ideas came to us casually — like the Empire — in a fit of absence of mind. … Specialisation necessarily entails distortion of the mind and loss of balance, and the characteristically English attempt to appear unscientific springs from a desire to remain human. … What is not valued in England is abstract knowledge as a profession, because the tradition of English culture is that professions should be practical and culture should be the work of the leisured classes.

The American tradition, by contrast, is that professions should be practical but there is no leisured class, so culture becomes whatever it is that everyone does when they earn their fleeting moments of repose. As Tocqueville tells us, Americans can’t relax; the minute we get a long weekend we jump in the car for a cross-country road trip, we fly the kids to Disney, we start blogs and obsess nervously over them, too — or we throw ourselves, so Tocqueville says, into politics. But Tocqueville underrated the extent to which politics would be professionalized in America. He should have seen better how we hectic, ‘practical Cartesians’ would look to solve the big, complex problems in an age of equality by outsourcing them
to designated experts in efficiency and profit. For a long time in America, these were private-sector types, such that ‘the business of America’ was business. But the Great Depression ruined all that. So we started mass-producing not private-sector but public-sector experts in efficiency (if not profit). And once we got back on our feet, we discovered that (as Christopher Lasch has very unhappily demonstrated) the key to ‘upward mobility’ was hurling your children in any way possible onto the incline treadmill that led them to embrace lives as officially accredited experts. We were always a nation of practical doers; what changed was the way we demanded of ourselves that our practical doers become more scientific. We retained practical ends — our big country with its many moving parts would produce plenty of ad hoc problems to be solved or managed — but we wanted now to solve or manage them by the most expert and scientific of means. Welcome to the age of number crunchers, from which we still have never escaped.

And welcome, therefore, to a crossroads on the right. We have the rather ill-fitting but still romantically appealing British model; we have the Office of Budget Management / Newt Gingrich model of right-wing whiz kiddery; and then we have the timeless but faded old American model of small-scale, improvised, restless, ambitious, questing folk practicality. Oh, and then we have one other model: the ideologue’s model, the permanently-mobilized Ann Coulter model, the keep the enemy out of power’n everything’ll be fine model. There are pitfalls and opportunities all over the place, and sometimes in the same places. So I think that in a strange way we need both more and less of politics and philosophy. We need a philosophical approach to politics that isn’t cheapened or banalized by crude ideology. But we also need a philosophy that isn’t reduced to the principle of whatever works. We need an approach to politics that recognizes the paramount importance of actually engaging together in the practice of citizenship. But we also need a politics that understands how to delegate policymaking to intelligent representatives in a world where we lack the time and energy to be either politicians or philosophers like the kind that thrived in ancient Greece.

This modern problem, which has been around for over 200 years, admits of both modern and postmodern answers. But the bottom line is that conservatives better start talking, because we’ve got a lot of lost ground to make up for.