by Charles Mills
At the time of the founding of the first modern conservative political organization, Young Americans for Freedom, traditionalists and libertarians had three great common goals: the defeat of Communism, the shrinking of the Federal government, and the restoration of the Constitution. (Perhaps the libertarians were not completely in favor of the restoration of the Constitution since they were opposed to state power at all levels, but my statement is essentially correct.)
Traditionalists operated from a variety of reasons: Divine revelation, love of beauty, belief in stability, common sense, reason, and a desire not to be subject to arbitrary power. Libertarians operated from a neat set of interlocking principles, frequently utilitarian and simplistic, but generally reached the same conclusions as traditionalists.
This can easily be illustrated with two examples: 1) the seven day week, and 2) the necessity of a judicial system.
The seven day week is not found in nature like months and years are but it is Divinely revealed. Every attempt by revolutionaries to change it has failed. The U.S. Supreme Court has used tortured reasoning to uphold it. Catholics, other Eastern Christians, Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, Sabatarian Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Moslems have made it clear beyond doubt that they will never give it up. The seven day week is something almost everybody accepts, but it has no libertarian philosophical justification. It is simply revealed. Libertarians do acceot the seven day week, probably instinctively.
Jewish tradition teaches that God gave Noah seven commandments, one of which was to establish a judiciary. This is not revealed truth and Christians are not required to believe it. Interestingly, though, it is a rarity in Jewish law, a commandment binding on all the peoples of the World. This is because God gave us enough reason to discover, unaided by revelation, the need for a judicial system. Libertarians, therefore, have no trouble making it a cornerstone of their beliefs, and traditionalists believe it both because of common-sense/stability concerns, and also because it is part of that portion of Divine law that God has equipped us to discover outside of revelation.
The conclusions of libertarians and traditionalists converge, probably not as much as in 1960, but the starting points are quite different. |
by Jared Lobdell
Yes and no, Charles, at least as I see it.
Tradition, along with utility and personal revelation (immediate or inherited), may be seen as an inductive starting point or basic principle, while libertarian (or "individualist") conclusions are among those that may be deduced from that starting point as well as from others.
 Frank Meyer, I would say, deduced libertarian conclusions from traditionalist (some once said "conservative") first principles. Those, like Bill Buckley, who got to more or less libertarian conclusions from an inherited revelatory point of induction, sometimes appeared less consistent than Frank was. My old Yale room-mate Dick Posner, a sometime Marxist, deduces libertarian conclusions (generally) from utilitarian first principles (or if you like a utilitarian answer to the question of induction).
To be a libertarian is to draw certain conclusions; to be a traditionalist is to have a particular answer to the problem of induction. It is of course a good thing if one's logical processes are self-consistent--indeed, if they are logical. It is also a good thing to be skeptical of immediate personal revelation as an answer to the problem of induction. It is very hard, evidence suggests, to draw individualist/libertarian conclusions from a (believed) direct personal revelation.
So far as I am concerned, a conservative is generally one who draws individualist (libertarian) conclusions from either traditionalist or (their closest cousin) inherited revelatory bases or some combination thereof.
So--in the question that was asked me in Madison ca 1962, "Are you a libertarian or a conservative?" or later "Are you a libertarian or a traditionalist?" the answer is "No, not 'or' but 'and'"--but the answer for some calling themselves conservatives is simply "No"--not either. I'm not, as some of my friends will tell you, a philosopher, but when I tried this schema out on Bill Buckley some years ago, he had me write it up as a brief piece in National Review, so it may have some value. |
