Conservatives would like to have philosophic roots, and this desire, at least, is to their credit. But I think that really conservatism is empirical. The idea of Burke and Blackstone, after all, is that you don't need to call up Burke and Blackstone to write you a legal system. Instead, you let one grow for a few centuries, pushing it here and there at appropriate moments. Russell Kirk compiled anthologies; he didn't write philosophy. William Buckley wrote journalism based on common-sense principles. Libertarians, to be sure, care a lot about pedigree, but to the extent that they are philosophic, they tend not to be conservative. And their philosophic foundations are not very old, and the old bits are not solid-- J.S. Mill is not a foundation I'd want to put any weight on.

Economics does provide quite a bit of theoretical support for conservatism, but it is really just an offshoot of its pragmatic nature. Economists say not to worry too much about matters of principle-- keep things flexible and honest, and good things will happen. I think, though, that it has provided the best political philosophy--- Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, Gordon Tullock, George Stigler, the whole positive political economy literature.

And so we move to the liberals. They don't seem to care about not having any philosohic foundations. Rawls and Dworkin are laughable. They aren't philosophy--- they are rationalization, at best. And I have to say "at best", because Rawls doesn't really even rationalize-- he just says there are "primary goods", which equate with things he likes personally.

This is odd. Liberals reject the past, and reject mere empiricism in favor of radical innovation based on principle. You'd think, then, that they, more than conservatives, would be interested in philosophic underpinnings and ideological history. And, indeed, leftists in the Marxist, anarchist, and socialist styles were all very much that way. But what seems to have won out with the American and European Establishments is unintellectual-- a collection of objectives such as equality, racial and sexual representation, a certain kind of tolerance, an end to traditional morality, anti- capitalism, environment worship, pantheism, democracy, the welfare state, uniformity of political belief, and so forth. There is no such pretence towards science as Marxism and socialism had-- indeed, there is a clear fear of science and hostility to it because of the threat from evolutionary theory. There is a also a softness which causes an aversion to self-definition. Liberals do not want to say that God does not exist, or that traditional cultures, including Western ones, are evil, even though they clearly believe these things.

The history and psychology of liberalism (psychopathology?) is a good topic for study. But I should really put my attention on trying to systematize conservatism, since economists are in the best position to do so (perhaps Reformed theologians, too, but they're usually too busy with theology). I'll have to write that book on Economic Regulation and Social Regulation one of these days. There are the Posner and Kaplow-Shavell books of the past year or two-- very important books, but they're more destructive than constructive. I should get those three to write something more positive. They're all smarter than me, and would write something worth reading. ... [in full at 04.05.24a.htm]

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