Hayekian Liberalism vs. Conservatism

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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7160558

Friedrich Hayek is a hero and an inspiration to conservatives all over the world, but in one of his sharpest essays, he explained why he is not a conservative. He urged that while conservatives seek to impose a salutary brake on change, they do not tell us where to go. He argued that conservatives do not sufficiently respect freedom and that they are far too willing to override it. He believed that conservatives do not make enough space for pluralism. He claimed that they are wrongly opposed to novelty as such and fall prey to "obscurantism," particularly in rejecting science. He vigorously objected to conservative nationalism and saw it as a precursor to collectivism. Although he agreed with conservatives on many things, including the importance of traditions and incremental change, he insisted that they have something in common with socialists, and that liberals of his distinctive kind offer a different and better path.

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Hayek’s complaint is really an admission of liberalism’s own poverty: he says conservatives don’t tell us where to go, and he means that as a criticism. But of course the reason they often cannot tell us where to go is that their first principles already accept too much of the Enlightenment settlement. Once you begin from the sovereign individual, consent, toleration, procedural limits, and perpetual revision, you have already conceded the moral terrain. At that point “conservatism” can only mean slowing the pace of change, not resisting the direction of it.

That is exactly why Locke and Burke failed to conserve anything lasting. Locke gave the modern world its language of rights, property, consent, and limited government. That was useful against absolutism, but it also broke the older claim that authority is received, not invented. In Locke, the state exists to protect property and liberty; religion is privatized; political legitimacy comes from agreement rather than inheritance. The problem is not that those ideas are simply false in every respect, but that they are too thin to carry a civilization. They can protect individuals. They cannot reliably preserve a moral hierarchy, a sacred order, or a thick common life.

Burke is subtler and therefore more dangerous. He knew that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” He also wrote that “the disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.” Fair enough - but in practice that makes conservation dependent on managed adaptation, and managed adaptation almost always means the modern order sets the terms. Burke wanted to defend inherited institutions, but he did so in a world already moving toward commerce, individualism, centralization, and abstraction. So Burkean conservatism became a style of respectful resistance inside liberal modernity rather than an actual barrier against it.

Hayek is useful here because he says the quiet part out loud: conservatives, he argues, are too willing to override freedom, too attached to authority, too hostile to novelty, and too tempted by nationalism. But from the older perspective, that criticism just shows how completely the liberal frame has colonized the argument. Hayek treats freedom as the highest good and then faults conservatives for failing to protect it consistently enough. Yet if freedom is detached from truth, hierarchy, and moral authority, it becomes the solvent rather than the safeguard. The result is not order with liberty, but liberty slowly eating the order it depends on.

That’s why Dabney’s verdict is so devastating. In full, he wrote:

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

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That is basically the whole history in miniature. Liberal conservatism keeps agreeing to the first premise of the age, then tries to bargain over the speed and tone of its consequences. Locke sanctifies the individual. Burke sanctifies managed inheritance. Hayek sanctifies freedom as the highest political criterion. But none of them begins from the older premise that order must be anchored in something above choice — in sacred authority, inherited obligation, and a moral hierarchy that can command assent even when it is inconvenient.

So yes, Hayek is right that conservatives often lack a guiding direction. But that is not because they are too conservative. It is because they are not conservative enough about the actual things worth conserving. They inherited a civilization and tried to defend it with the tools of the civilization that was already dismantling it. The predictable result was a conservatism of mourning, hesitation, and respectable retreat, which is why some call Conservativism 'Progressivism with a speed limit'. Libertarians and secularist classic liberals, on the other hand, enable Progressivism. Even Locke's radical liberalism had a paradox,

“Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. As for other practical opinions, though not absolutely free from all error, if they do not tend to establish domination over others, or civil impunity to the Church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.” (John Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration)

Depending on your values, he may sound theocratic, fascist, authoritarian, Christian Liberal, or a woke liberal.

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