A book has been written in America devoted to the medieval writ of Habeas corpus – a writ sent in the king’s name commanding whoever might be holding one of his subjects to release that person or to bring him to trial before the king’s courts. The continuing validity of this writ, the author argues, underpins American freedom, by making government the servant and not the master of the citizen. Nowhere outside the anglosphere is there the equivalent of Habeas corpus, and all attempts to curtail its extent or effect are greeted by English-speaking people with defiance. It expresses, in the simplest possible terms, the unique relation between the government and the governed that has grown from the English common law. That relation is one part of what conservatives uphold in freedom’s name. In explaining and defending conservatism, therefore, I am addressing my remarks primarily to the English-speaking world. I am assuming a readership for whom common-law justice, parliamentary democracy, private charity, public spirit and the ‘little platoons’ of volunteers describe the default position of civil society, and who have yet to become entirely accustomed to the top-down authority of the modern welfare state, still less to the transnational bureaucracies that are striving to absorb it.

The conservatism I shall be defending tells us that we have collectively inherited good things that we must strive to keep. In the situation in which we, the inheritors both of Western civilization and of the English-speaking part of it, find ourselves, we are well aware of what those good things are. The opportunity to live our lives as we will; the security of impartial law, through which our grievances are answered and our hurts restored; the protection of our environment as a shared asset, which cannot be seized or destroyed at the whim of powerful interests; the open and enquiring culture that has shaped our schools and universities; the democratic procedures that enable us to elect our representatives and to pass our own laws – these and many other things are familiar to us and taken for granted. All are under threat. And conservatism is the rational response to that threat.

Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century. It is also one reason why conservatives suffer such a disadvantage when it comes to public opinion. Their position is true but boring, that of their opponents exciting but false.

My Journey

It is not unusual to be a conservative. But it is unusual to be an intellectual conservative. In both Britain and America some 70 per cent of academics identify themselves as ‘on the left’, while the surrounding culture is increasingly hostile to traditional values, or to any claim that might be made for the high achievements of Western civilization. Ordinary conservatives – and many, possibly most, people fall into this category – are constantly told that their ideas and sentiments are reactionary, prejudiced, sexist or racist. Just by being the thing they are they offend against the new norms of inclusiveness and non-discrimination. Their honest attempts to live by their lights, raising families, enjoying communities, worshipping their gods, and adopting a settled and affirmative culture – these attempts are scorned and ridiculed by the Guardian class. In intellectual circles conservatives therefore move quietly and discreetly, catching each other’s eyes across the room like the homosexuals in Proust, whom that great writer compared to Homer’s gods, known only to each other as they move in disguise around the world of mortals. We, the supposed excluders, are therefore under pressure to hide what we are, for fear of being excluded. I have resisted that pressure, and as a result my life has been far more interesting than I ever intended it to be.

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about (the other two laws are: any organization not explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing in the end; and the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.) My father perfectly illustrated this law. He knew about the countryside, about local history, about the old ways of living, working and building. He studied the villages around High Wycombe, where we lived, and the history and architecture of the town. And through knowing about these matters, he became, in respect of them, an ardent conservative. Here were good things that he wished to conserve. He urged others to join in his campaign to protect High Wycombe and its villages from destruction, threatened as they were by the unscrupulous tactics of developers and motorway fanatics. He founded the High Wycombe Society, gathered signatures for petitions, and gradually raised the consciousness of our town to the point where it made a serious and lasting effort to conserve itself. I shared his love of the countryside and of the old ways of building; I believed, as he did, that the modernist styles of architecture that were desecrating our town were also destroying its social fabric; and I saw, for the first time in my life, that it is always right to conserve things, when worse things are proposed in their place. That a priori law of practical reason is also the truth in conservatism.

Reading for the Bar, and studying the English law as it was before the pollution injected by the European Courts and before the constitutional changes haphazardly introduced by Tony Blair, I was granted a completely different vision of our society. Common-law justice spoke to me of a community built from below, through the guarantee offered by the courts to all who came before them with clean hands. This vision stayed with me thereafter as a narrative of home. In the English law there are valid statutes and leading cases that date from the thirteenth century, and progressive people would regard this as an absurdity. For me, it was proof that the English law is the property of the English people, not the weapon of their rulers.

I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher’s motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual’s life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The situation she inherited was typified by the National Economic Development Council, set up under a lame Conservative government in 1962, in order to manage the country’s economic decline. Staffed by big-wigs from industry and the civil service, ‘Neddy’, as it was known, devoted itself to perpetuating the illusion that the country was in ‘safe hands’, that there was a plan, that managers, politicians and union leaders were in it together and working for the common good. It epitomized the post-war British establishment, which addressed the nation’s problems by appointing committees of the people who had caused them. Neddy’s ruling idea was that economic life consists in the management of existing industries, rather than the creation of new ones. Wilson, Heath and Callaghan had all relied upon Neddy to confirm their shared belief that, if you held on long enough, things would come out OK and any blame would fall on your successor. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher believed that, in business as in politics, the buck stops here. The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them. Whether Thatcher succeeded in replacing an economy of management and vested interests with one of entrepreneurship and risk may of course be doubted. By liberating the labour market she put the economy on an upward climb. But the long-term result has been the emergence of a new managerial class, as the multinationals move in with their takeover bids, their legal privileges and their transnational lobbyists for whom small businesses and entrepreneurs are the enemy. Those who object to this new managerialism (and I am one of them) should nevertheless recognize that what is bad in it is precisely what was bad in the old corporatist economy that Thatcher set out to destroy. When she claimed that entrepreneurs create things, while managers entomb them, it was immediately apparent that she was right, since the effects of the management culture lay all around us. I say it was immediately apparent, but it was not apparent to the intellectual class, which has remained largely wedded to the post-war consensus to this day. The idea of the state as a benign father-figure, who guides the collective assets of society to the place where they are needed, and who is always there to rescue us from poverty, ill health or unemployment, has remained in the foreground of academic political science in Britain. On the day of Margaret Thatcher’s death I was preparing a lecture in political philosophy at the University of St Andrews. I was interested to discover that the prescribed text identified something called the New Right, associated by the author with Thatcher and Reagan, as a radical assault on the vulnerable members of society. The author assumed that the main task of government is to distribute the collective wealth of society among its members, and that, in the matter of distribution, the government is uniquely competent. The fact that wealth can be distributed only if it is first created seemed to have escaped his notice.

Thus began a long connection with the unofficial networks in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, through which I learned to see socialism in another way – not as a dream of idealists, but as a real system of government, imposed from above and maintained by force. I awoke to the fraud that had been committed in socialism’s name, and felt an immediate obligation to do something about it. All those laws formulated by the British Labour Party, which set out to organize society for the greater good of everyone, by controlling, marginalizing or forbidding some natural human activity, took on another meaning for me. I was suddenly struck by the impertinence of a political party that sets out to confiscate whole industries from those who had created them, to abolish the grammar schools to which I owed my education, to force schools to amalgamate, to control relations in the workplace, to regulate hours of work, to compel workers to join a union, to ban hunting, to take property from a landlord and bestow it on his tenant, to compel businesses to sell themselves to the government at a dictated price, to police all our activities through quangos designed to check us for political correctness. And I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There is indeed such a thing as society; but it is composed of individuals. And individuals must be free, which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them.

Those experiences helped to convince me that European civilization depends upon the maintenance of national borders, and that the EU, which is a conspiracy to dissolve those borders, has become a threat to European democracy. Through the operation of the European courts and the shape of its legislation, the EU has created a political class which is no longer accountable to the people – a class typified by Baroness Ashton, a former CND apparatchik who has never stood for an election in her life and who has advanced through Labour Party quangos and leftist NGOs to become Commissioner in charge of Foreign Relations, in other words, the foreign minister of our continent. The European Commission itself passes laws that cannot be overridden by national parliaments, following discussion behind closed doors among bureaucrats who need never answer for their decisions.

What we are now seeing in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ is the inside of governments in which accountability had no place – governments in which power was the only commodity. And the experience reminds us of an important truth, which is that accountable government does not come through elections. It comes through respect for law, through public spirit and through a culture of confession. To think that there is a merely accidental connection between those virtues and our Judaeo-Christian heritage is to live in cloud cuckoo land. It is to overlook the culture that has focused, down the centuries, on the business of repentance. Understanding this in my own life has made me see it all the more clearly in the context of politics. It is precisely this aspect of the human condition that was denied by the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. And the desire to deny it underlies the anti-Christian turn of the European Union and the sly dictatorship of its elites.

Having said that, I acknowledge that the conservative philosophy that I summarize in what follows in no way depends on the Christian faith. The relation between them is subtler and more personal than that implies. The argument of this book is addressed to the reader, regardless of his or her religious convictions, since it is about living in the empirical world, not believing in the transcendental. Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.

Starting from Home

We live in great societies, and depend in a thousand ways on the actions and desires of strangers. We are bound to those strangers by citizenship, by law, by nationality and neighbourhood. But those bonds between us do not, in themselves, suffice to solve the great problem that we share, which is the problem of coordination. How is it that we can pursue our lives in relative harmony, each enjoying a sphere of freedom and all pursuing goals of our own? In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that self-interest can solve this problem. Given a free economy and an impartial rule of law, self-interest leads towards an optimal distribution of resources. Smith did not regard economic freedom as the sum of politics, nor did he believe that self-interest is the only, or even the most important, motive governing our economic behaviour. A market can deliver a rational allocation of goods and services only where there is trust between its participants, and trust exists only where people take responsibility for their actions and make themselves accountable to those with whom they deal. In other words, economic order depends on moral order. In The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone. And this means that people can best satisfy their interests only in a context where they are also on occasion moved to renounce them. Beneath every society where self-interest pays off, lies a foundation of self-sacrifice.

We are not built on the model of homo oeconomicus – the rational chooser who acts always to maximize his own utility, at whatever cost to the rest of us. We are subject to motives that we do not necessarily understand, and which can be displayed in terms of utilities and preference orderings only by misrepresenting them. These motives make war on our circumstantial desires. Some of them – the fear of the dark, the revulsion towards incest, the impulse to cling to the mother – are adaptations that lie deeper than reason. Others – guilt, shame, the love of beauty, the sense of justice – arise from reason itself, and reflect the web of interpersonal relations and understandings through which we situate ourselves as free subjects, in a community of others like ourselves. At both levels – the instinctive and the personal – the capacity for sacrifice arises, in the one case as a blind attachment, in the other case as a sense of responsibility to others and to the moral way of life.

Burke saw society as an association of the dead, the living and the unborn. Its binding principle is not contract, but something more akin to love. Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil. There is a line of obligation that connects us to those who gave us what we have; and our concern for the future is an extension of that line. We take the future of our community into account not by fictitious cost-benefit calculations, but more concretely, by seeing ourselves as inheriting benefits and passing them on.

Society, Burke believed, depends upon relations of affection and loyalty, and these can be built only from below, through face-to-face interaction. It is in the family, in local clubs and societies, in school, workplace, church, team, regiment and university that people learn to interact as free beings, taking responsibility for their actions and accounting to their neighbours. When society is organized from above, either by the top-down government of a revolutionary dictatorship, or by the impersonal edicts of an inscrutable bureaucracy, then accountability rapidly disappears from the political order, and from society too. Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves. In place of top-down government, Burke made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate. The important social traditions are not just arbitrary customs, which might or might not have survived into the modern world. They are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, as people attempt to adjust their conduct to the conduct of others. To put it in the language of game theory, they are the discovered solutions to problems of coordination, emerging over time. They exist because they provide necessary information, without which a society may not be able to reproduce itself. Destroy them heedlessly and you remove the guarantee offered by one generation to the next.

In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These answers are tacit, shared, embodied in social practices and inarticulate expectations. Those who adopt them are not necessarily able to explain them, still less to justify them. Hence Burke described them as ‘prejudices’, and defended them on the ground that, though the stock of reason in each individual is small, there is an accumulation of reason in society that we question and reject at our peril. Reason shows itself in that about which we do not, and maybe cannot, reason – and this is what we see in our traditions, including those that contain sacrifice at the heart of them, such as military honour, family attachment, the forms and curricula of education, the institutions of charity and the rules of good manners. Tradition is not theoretical knowledge, concerning facts and truths; and not ordinary know-how either. There is another kind of knowledge, which involves the mastery of situations – knowing what to do, in order to accomplish a task successfully, where success is not measured in any exact or pre-envisaged goal, but in the harmony of the result with our human needs and interests. Knowing what to do in company, what to say, what to feel – these are things we acquire by immersion in society. They cannot be taught by spelling them out but only by osmosis; yet the person who has not acquired these things is rightly described as ignorant.

There cannot be a society without this experience of membership. For it is this that enables me to regard the interests and needs of strangers as my concern; that enables me to recognize the authority of decisions and laws that I must obey, even though they are not directly in my interest; that gives me a criterion to distinguish those who are entitled to the benefit of the sacrifices that my membership calls from me, from those who are interloping. Take away the experience of membership and the ground of the social contract disappears: social obligations become temporary, troubled and defeasible, and the idea that one might be called upon to lay down one’s life for a collection of strangers begins to border on the absurd. Moreover, without the experience of membership, the dead will be disenfranchised, and the unborn, of whom the dead are the metaphysical guardians, will be deprived of their inheritance. Unless the ‘contract between the living’ can be phrased in such a way that the dead and the unborn are a part of it, it becomes a contract to appropriate the earth’s resources for the benefit of its temporary residents.

Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile. The oikos is the place that is not just mine and yours but ours. It is the stage-set for the first-person plural of politics, the locus, both real and imagined, where ‘it all takes place’. Virtues like thrift and self-sacrifice, the habit of offering and receiving respect, the sense of responsibility – all those aspects of the human condition that shape us as stewards and guardians of our common inheritance – arise through our growth as persons, by creating islands of value in the sea of price. To acquire these virtues we must circumscribe the ‘instrumental reasoning’ that governs the life of Homo oeconomicus. We must vest our love and desire in things to which we assign an intrinsic, rather than an instrumental, value, so that the pursuit of means can come to rest, for us, in a place of ends. That is what we mean by settlement: putting the oikos back in the oikonomia. And that is what conservatism is about.

People settle by acquiring a first-person plural – a place, a community and a way of life that is ‘ours’. The need for this ‘we’ is not accepted by internationalists, by revolutionary socialists, or by intellectuals wedded to the Enlightenment’s timeless, placeless vision of the ideal community. But it is a fact, and indeed the primary fact from which all community and all politics begin.

There are two ways in which the first-person plural can emerge: it can emerge through a shared purpose, or it can emerge through a shared lack of purpose. Purposeless things are not necessarily useless things, nor are all useless things worthless. Consider friendship. Friends are valued for their own sake; and the benefits of friendship are not what we value, but by-products of the thing that we value, obtainable only by the person who does not pursue them. In the scope of human life, purposeless things like friendship are supremely useful: they are ends, not means, the places of fulfilment and homecoming, the goal of every pilgrimage. Without them, our purposes are null and void. The lesson of recent history, for me, is that purposeful arrangements crumble as the purpose fades, while purposeless arrangements endure.

Michael Oakeshott earned a well-deserved reputation as a political thinker through his lifelong attempt to understand the nature of ‘civil association’, as he called it – the kind of association in which our political aspirations find equilibrium and completion. In On Human Conduct, he based his theory of political order on a contrast between civil association and ‘enterprise association’. In enterprise, people combine for a purpose, and their association is predicated on the need to cooperate in order to achieve it. Enterprise associations are of many kinds: for example, there is the army, in which top-down commands, relayed through the ranks of subordinates, point always to the single end of defeating the enemy; there is business, in which purposes may fluctuate from day to day, though with the overriding need for profit in the long run; there are the various forms of learning that train people for the professions and the trades. Oakeshott believed that civil association has been increasingly displaced by enterprise, under pressure from political elites, managers, parties and ideologues.

The most important political effect of this displacement of civil by enterprise association has been the gradual loss of authority and decision-making from the bottom of society, and its transfer to the top. If you supply society with a dynamic purpose, especially one conceived in these linear terms, as moving always forwards towards greater equality, greater justice, greater prosperity or, in the case of the EU, ‘ever closer union’, you at the same time license the would-be leaders. You give credentials to those who promise to guide society along its allotted path, and you confer on them the authority to conscript, dictate, organize and punish the rest of us, regardless of how we might otherwise wish to lead our lives. In particular, you authorize the invasion of those institutions and associations that form the heart of civil society, in order to impose on them a direction and a goal that may have nothing to do with their intrinsic nature.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy is always increasing, and that every system, every organism, every spontaneous order will, in the long term, be randomized. Is not the conservative simply someone who cannot accept this truth – the truth, as the Anglo-Saxon poem puts it, that ‘this too will pass’? In response I say that the transience of human goods does not make conservatism futile, any more than medicine is futile, simply because ‘in the long run we are all dead’, as Keynes famously put it. Rather, we should recognize the wisdom of Lord Salisbury’s terse summary of his philosophy and accept that ‘delay is life’. Conservatism is the philosophy of attachment. We are attached to the things we love, and wish to protect them against decay. But we know that they cannot last forever. Meanwhile we must study the ways in which we can retain them through all the changes that they must necessarily undergo, so that our lives are still lived in a spirit of goodwill and gratitude.

The Truth in Nationalism

Nationalism, as an ideology, is dangerous in just the way that ideologies are dangerous. It occupies the space vacated by religion, and in doing so excites the true believer both to worship the national idea and to seek in it for what it cannot provide – the ultimate purpose of life, the way to redemption and the consolation for all our woes. That is the national idea as Sieyès invokes it, and as it appears in the literature of Nazi Germany. But it is not the idea of the nation as this features in the ordinary day-to-day life of the European people. For ordinary people, living in free association with their neighbours, the ‘nation’ means simply the historical identity and continuing allegiance that unites them in the body politic. It is the first-person plural of settlement. Sentiments of national identity may be inflamed by war, civil agitation and ideology, and this inflammation admits of many degrees. But in their normal form these sentiments are not just peaceful in themselves, but a form of peace between neighbours.

Opposition, disagreement, the free expression of dissent and the rule of compromise all presuppose a shared identity. There has to be a first-person plural, a ‘we’, if the many individuals are to stay together, accepting each other’s opinions and desires, regardless of disagreements. Religion provides such a first-person plural: I might define myself as a Christian or a Muslim, and that might be sufficient to bind me to my fellow believers, even when we disagree on matters of day-to-day government. But that kind of first-person plural does not sit easily with democratic politics. In particular it does not accept the most fundamental disagreement within the state, between the faithful who accept the ruling doctrine and the infidels who don’t. That is why democracies need a national rather than a religious or an ethnic ‘we’. The nation state, as we now conceive it, is the by-product of human neighbourliness, shaped by an ‘invisible hand’ from the countless agreements between people who speak the same language and live side by side. It results from compromises established after many conflicts, and expresses the slowly forming agreement among neighbours both to grant each other space and to protect that space as common territory. It has consciously absorbed and adjusted to the ethnic and religious minorities within its territory, as they in turn have adjusted to the nation state. It depends on localized customs and a shared routine of tolerance. Its law is territorial rather than religious and invokes no source of authority higher than the intangible assets that its people share. All those features are strengths, since they feed into an adaptable form of pre-political loyalty. Unless and until people identify themselves with the country, its territory and its cultural inheritance – in something like the way people identify themselves with a family – the politics of compromise will not emerge. We have to take our neighbours seriously, as people with an equal claim to protection, for whom we might be required, in moments of crisis, to face mortal danger. We do this because we believe ourselves to belong together in a shared home.

There is another and deeper reason for adhering to the nation as the source of legal obligation. Only when the law derives from national sovereignty can it adapt to the changing conditions of the people. We see this clearly in the futile attempt of modern Islamic states to live by the shar‘iah.

To put the point in a nutshell – secular law adapts, religious law endures. Moreover, precisely because the shar‘iah has not adapted, nobody really knows what it says. Does it tell us to stone adulterers to death? Some say yes, some say no. Does it tell us that investing money at interest is in every case forbidden? Some say yes, some say no. When God makes the laws, the laws become as mysterious as God is. When we make the laws, and make them for our purposes, we can be certain what they mean. The only question then is ‘Who are we?’ And, in modern conditions, the nation is the answer to that question, an answer without which we are all at sea.

The European Union arose from the belief that the European wars had been caused by national sentiment, and that what is needed is a new, trans-national form of government, which will unite people around their shared interest in peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately, people don’t identify themselves in that way. There is no first-person plural of which the European institutions are the political expression. The Union is founded in a treaty, and treaties derive their authority from the entities that sign them. Those entities are the nation states of Europe, from which the loyalties of the European people derive. The Union, which has set out to transcend those loyalties, therefore suffers from a permanent crisis of legitimacy.

Here, then, is the truth in nationalism, as I see it. When we ask ourselves the question, to what do we belong, and what defines our loyalties and commitments, we do not find the answer in a shared religious obedience, still less in bonds of tribe and kinship. We find the answer in the things that we share with our fellow citizens, and in particular in those things that serve to sustain the rule of law and the consensual forms of politics. First among these things is territory. We believe ourselves to inhabit a shared territory, defined by law, and we believe that territory to be ours, the place where we are, and where our children will be in turn. Even if we came here from somewhere else, that does not alter the fact that we are committed to this territory, and define our identity – at least in part – in terms of it.

Of almost equal importance are the history and customs through which that territory has been settled. There are rituals and customs that occur here and which bind neighbours together in a shared sense of home. These rituals and customs may include religious services, but these are by no means essential, and are open to reinterpretation when it is necessary to include some neighbour who does not share our faith. Increasingly, therefore, the stories and customs of the homeland are secular. The stories may not be literally true; they may include large areas of myth, like the stories that the French tell about Jeanne d’Arc, about the Bastille and about the Revolution, or the stories that the Scots tell about Robert the Bruce and about the Jacobite rebellions. The stories are the product of shared loyalty and not the producer of them: the loyalty does not come about because the stories are believed; the stories are believed because the loyalty needs them. And the stories change to accommodate the changing first-person plural of the people. They are, as Plato put it, noble lies: literal falsehoods expressing emotional truths. A rational being will see through them, but nevertheless respect them, as he respects religious convictions that he does not share, and the heroes of other nations. Hence national myths tend to be of three kinds: tales of glory, tales of sacrifice and tales of emancipation, each reflected in the history books of the day.

The Truth in Socialism

It is because we cooperate in societies that we enjoy the security, prosperity and longevity to which we have become accustomed, and which were unknown, even to the minority of aristocrats, before the twentieth century. The way in which our activities are woven together, binding the destiny of each of us to that of strangers whom we shall never know, is so complex that we could never unravel it. The fiction of a social contract fails to do justice to all the relations – promising, loving, coercing, pitying, helping, cooperating, forbidding, employing, dealing – that bind the members of society into an organic whole. Yet the benefit of membership is inestimable. Hobbes may have been wrong to think that he could reduce the obligation of society to a contract; but he was surely right to think that outside society life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. And the more we take from this arrangement, the more we must give in return. This is not a contractual obligation. It is an obligation of gratitude. But it exists for all that, and must be built into the conservative vision as a cornerstone of social policy. That, in my view, is the truth in socialism, the truth of our mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice to obtain them. How this is to be done is an intricate political question.

Every system has attendant disadvantages as well as virtues. But all have proved subject to two defects. First, they contribute to the creation of a new class of dependants – people who have come to depend on welfare payments, perhaps over several generations, and who have lost all incentive to live in another way. Often the system of benefits is so devised that any attempt to escape from it by working will lead to a loss, rather than a gain, in family income. And once the cycle of reward is established, it creates expectations that are passed on in the families of those who enjoy them. Habits such as out-of-wedlock birth, malingering and hypochondria are rewarded, and the habits are passed on from parent to child, creating a class of citizens who have never lived from their own industry and know no one else who has done so either. The cost of this is not primarily economic: it directly impacts on the sentiment of membership, antagonizing those who live in a responsible way, and separating the dependant minority from the full experience of citizenship.

The other defect is that welfare systems, as so far devised, have an open-ended budget. Their cost is constantly increasing: free health care, which extends the life of the population, leads to ever-increasing health-care costs at the end of life, and also to pension liabilities that cannot be met from existing funds. As a result, governments are increasingly borrowing from the future, mortgaging the assets of the unborn for the benefit of the living. The ever-increasing public debt has until now been serviced, on the assumption that governments don’t default and will not default while the level of debt remains at the present order of magnitude. But trust in government debt has been heavily shaken by recent events in Greece and Portugal, and should this trust evaporate, so will the welfare state – at least in its existing form.

All across the Western world the welfare state is becoming unaffordable in its present form, and the constant borrowing from the future will only make its collapse more devastating when it comes. Yet seldom will a governing party risk embarking on radical reform, for fear of giving a hostage to the left, for whom this is not just an iconic issue, but a way of summoning its captive voters. The debates have been distorted by the widespread adoption of a relative definition of poverty. Peter Townsend, in Poverty in the United Kingdom, published in 1979, defined poverty as ‘relative deprivation’, meaning the comparative inability to enjoy the fruits of surrounding affluence. He concluded that 15 million Britons (a quarter of the total) lived on or near the margins of poverty. In a similar spirit, the last Labour government defined poverty as the condition of someone who receives less than 60 per cent of the median income. Since it is inevitable, given the unequal distribution of human talent, energy and application, that there will be people with less than 60 per cent of the median income this definition implies that poverty will never go away, regardless of how wealthy the poorest are. By this sleight of hand it has been possible to berate governments on behalf of the poor, however much their policies raise the standard of living. The relative definition serves also to perpetuate the great socialist illusion, which is that the poor are poor because the rich are rich. The implication is that poverty is cured only by equality, and never by wealth.

The other great obstacle to coherent thinking about poverty is the central role now occupied by the state in the lives of its clients. When your budget is provided by the state then you will vote for the politician who promises to augment it. In this way it has proved possible for parties of the left to build up reliable block votes, paying for these votes with the taxes of those who vote the other way. This involvement of the state in the most basic decisions of its dependants radically curtails the room for manoeuvre.

I have referred to the truth in socialism. But this truth has been packaged with falsehoods. One of these falsehoods is the doctrine that the welfare state manages the social product as a common asset, ‘redistributing’ wealth, so as to ensure that all have the share to which they are entitled. This picture, according to which the products of human labour are essentially unowned until the state distributes them, is not merely the default position of left-wing thought. It has been programmed into academic political philosophy, so as to become virtually unassailable from any point within the discipline. Thus Rawls, summarizing his celebrated ‘difference principle’, writes that ‘all social primary goods – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured’.4 Ask the question ‘Distributed by whom?’ and you will search his book in vain for an answer. The state is omnipresent, all-possessing, all-powerful in organizing and distributing the social product, but never mentioned by name. The idea that wealth comes into the world already marked by claims of ownership, which can be cancelled only by violating the rights of individuals, is an idea that has no place in the left-liberal worldview.

It is precisely at this point that we should look for clear and transparent language in describing what is at stake. The socialist state does not ‘redistribute’ a common asset. It creates rents on the taxpayers’ earnings, and offers those rents to its privileged clients. These clients hold on to their rents by voting for those who provide them.

Those defects are serious enough. However, it seems to me that the real perversion of socialism is not to be found in the topsy-turvy economic theories that fascinated Marx, nor in the theories of social justice proposed by thinkers like John Rawls. The real perversion is a peculiar fallacy that sees life in society as one in which every success is someone else’s failure. According to this fallacy, all gains are paid for by the losers. Society is a zero-sum game, in which costs and benefits balance out, and in which the winners’ winning causes the losers’ loss.

For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan. Hence the unanswered and unanswerable complaint of so many socialists, who cannot admit that the poor benefit from the wealth of the wealthy. Injustice, for such people, is conclusively proved by inequality, so that the mere existence of a wealthy class justifies the plan to redistribute its assets among the ‘losers’. If you injure me, I have a grievance against you: I want justice, revenge, or at least an apology and an attempt to make amends. This kind of grievance is between you and me, and it might be the occasion of our coming closer together should the right moves be made. The zero-sum way of thinking is not like that. It does not begin from injury, but from disappointment. It looks around for some contrasting success, on which to pin its resentment. And only then does it work on proving to itself that the other’s success was the cause of my failure. Those who have invested their hopes in some future state which will be one of blessedness will very often end up with transferable grievances of this kind, which they carry around, ready to attach to every observed contentment, and to hold the successful to account for their own otherwise inexplicable failure.

It seems to me that this zero-sum fallacy underlies the widespread belief that equality and justice are the same idea – the belief that seems to be the default position of socialists, and programmed as such into university courses of political philosophy. Few people believe that if Jack has more money than Jill this is in itself a sign of injustice. But if Jack belongs to a class with money, and Jill to a class without it, then the zero-sum way of thinking immediately kicks in, to persuade people that Jack’s class has become rich at the expense of Jill’s. This is the impetus behind the Marxist theory of surplus value. But it is also one of the leading motives of social reform in our time, and one that is effectively undermining the real claims of justice and putting a spurious substitute in the place of them. For a certain kind of egalitarian mentality, it matters not that Jack has worked for his wealth and Jill merely lounged in voluntary idleness; it matters not that Jack has talent and energy, whereas Jill has neither; it matters not that Jack deserves what he has while Jill deserves nothing: the only important question is that of class, and the ‘social’ inequalities that stem from it. Concepts like right and desert fall out of the picture, and equality alone defines the goal. The result has been the emergence in modern politics of a wholly novel idea of justice – one that has little or nothing to do with right, desert, reward or retribution, and which is effectively detached from the actions and responsibilities of individuals.

Rejection of zero-sum thinking and the associated concept of ‘social justice’ does not mean accepting inequality in its current form. We can question the idea of social justice without believing that all inequalities are just. Besides, inequality breeds resentment, and resentment must be overcome if there is to be social harmony. Wealthy people may be aware of this and anxious to do something about it. They may give to charity, devote some part of their resources to helping others, and in general display an appropriate measure of sympathy for those less fortunate than themselves. In particular, they may set up enterprises that offer employment, and so give to others a stake in their own success. That is how it has usually been in America, and it is one reason why, in my experience, Americans, however disadvantaged, are pleased by others’ good fortune – believing that, in some way, they might have a share in it.

The Truth in Capitalism

It is important to be aware of terms that have been inherited from dead theories. They may have an aura of authority, but they also distort our perceptions and weigh down our consciousness with newspeak, of the kind so brilliantly satirized by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s point in writing that book was to show that the dehumanizing jargon of Marxism produces also a dehumanized world, in which people become abstractions, and truth is merely an instrument in the hands of power. And the point should never be forgotten by conservatives, who need to escape from the nineteenth-century theories that sought to make their position not just obsolete but also, in some way, inexpressible. We need to look at the world afresh, using the natural language of human relations. That said, it would be foolish and naïve to assume that the attacks levelled at something called ‘capitalism’ are without foundation, or do not need a reply. In order to develop this reply we need to begin from the truth in capitalism, the truth that socialism has traditionally denied. And this truth is simple, namely that private ownership and free exchange are necessary features of any large-scale economy – any economy in which people depend for their survival and prosperity on the activities of strangers. It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists don’t in their hearts accept this. They see society as a mechanism for distributing resources among those with a claim to them, as though resources all exist in advance of the activities that create them, and as though there is a way to determine exactly who has a right to what, without reference to the long history of economic cooperation.

The point was brought home by the Austrian economists – notably by von Mises and Hayek – during the ‘calculation debate’ that surrounded the early proposals for a socialist economy, in which prices and production would both be controlled by the state. The Austrian response to these proposals turns on three crucial ideas. First, economic activity depends upon knowledge of other people’s wants, needs and resources. Second, this knowledge is dispersed throughout society and is not the property of any individual. Third, in the free exchange of goods and services, the price mechanism provides access to this knowledge – not as a theoretical statement, but as a signal to action. Prices in a free economy offer the solution to countless simultaneous equations mapping individual demand against available supply. When production and distribution are fixed by a central authority, however, prices no longer provide an index either of the scarcity of a resource or of the extent of others’ demand for it. The crucial piece of economic knowledge, which exists in the free economy as a social fact, has been destroyed. The economy either breaks down, with queues, gluts and shortages replacing the spontaneous order of distribution, or is replaced by a black economy in which things exchange at their real price – the price that people are prepared to pay for them. This result has been abundantly confirmed by the experience of socialist economies; however, the argument given in support of it is not empirical but a priori. It is based on broad philosophical conceptions concerning socially generated and socially dispersed information.

The important point in the argument is that the price of a commodity conveys reliable economic information only if the economy is free. It is only in conditions of free exchange that the budgets of individual consumers feed into the epistemic process, as one might call it, which distils in the form of price the collective solution to their shared economic problem – the problem of knowing what to produce, and what to exchange for it. All attempts to interfere with this process, by controlling either the supply or the price of a product, will lead to a loss of economic knowledge. For that knowledge is not contained in a plan, but only in the economic activity of free agents, as they produce, market and exchange their goods according to the laws of supply and demand. The planned economy, which offers a rational distribution in place of the ‘random’ distribution of the market, destroys the information on which the proper functioning of an economy depends. It therefore undermines its own knowledge base. It is a supreme example of a project that is supposedly rational while not being rational at all, since it depends on knowledge that is available only in conditions that it destroys.

One corollary of this argument is that economic knowledge, of the kind contained in prices, lives in the system, is generated by the free activity of countless rational choosers and cannot be translated into a set of propositions or fed as premises into some problem-solving device. As the Austrians were possibly the first to realize, economic activity displays the peculiar logic of collective action, when the response of one person changes the information base of another.

Conservatives believe in private property because they respect the autonomy of the individual. But it is fair to say that too many conservatives have failed to take seriously the many abuses to which property is subject. Libertarian economists have rightly emphasized the role of the market in spreading freedom and prosperity, and have shown clearly that the wage contract is not, as Marx supposed, a zero-sum game, in which one party gains what the other loses, but an arrangement for mutual benefit. But the market is the benign mechanism that Hayek and others describe only when it is constrained by an impartial rule of law, and only when all participants bear the costs of their actions as well as reaping the benefits. Unfortunately, that idealized vision of the market is increasingly far from the truth. Certainly, at the local level, private deals have all the beneficial and freedom-enhancing characteristics that the libertarians emphasize. But as soon as we rise above that level, to consider the activities of the larger corporations, the picture changes. Instead of the benign competition to secure a market share, we discover a malign competition to externalize costs. The firm that can transfer its costs to others has the advantage over the one that must meet its costs itself, and if the costs can be transferred so widely that it is impossible to identify a victim, they can be effectively written off.

In short, global capitalism is in some respects less an exercise in free market economics, in which cost is assumed for the sake of benefit, than a kind of brigandage, in which costs are transferred to future generations for the sake of rewards here and now. How do we restore the ‘feudal principle’ to an economy that has moved so far in this direction? That ought to be a major and troubling item on the conservative agenda. But it is all but unmentionable in political debates either in America or in Europe. Even socialists steer away from any criticism of the real corporate predation, which is the predation on future generations in which we too are involved.

The Truth in Liberalism

The word ‘liberal’ has changed meaning many times. It is now used in America to denote those who would be described as ‘on the left’ in European terms – people who believe that the state must use its powers and its resources to equalize the fates of its citizens, and who accept a larger role for the state in the economy and in the regulation of ordinary life than would be naturally endorsed by conservatives. But this use of the term ‘liberal’ is virtually the opposite of its use during the nineteenth century, when liberal parties set out to propagate the message that political order exists to guarantee individual freedom, and that authority and coercion can be justified only if liberty requires them.

A consensual order is one in which the decisions on which our relations with others depend are, discounting emergencies, freely taken. Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives – which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignty exists only where the state guarantees rights, such as the right to life, limb and property, so protecting citizens from invasion and coercion by others, including invasion and coercion by the state.

It is characteristic of the times in which we live, to identify the virtue of citizenship with the democratic spirit, so encouraging the belief that the good citizen is simply the person who puts all questions to the vote. On the contrary, the good citizen is the one who knows when voting is the wrong way to decide a question, as well as when voting is the right way. For he knows that his obligations to strangers may be violated when majority opinion alone decides their fate. That is part of what Tocqueville and Mill had in mind when warning us against the tyranny of the majority. Political order enables us to transcend the rule of the majority. And the great gift of political liberalism to Western civilization has been in working out the conditions under which protection is offered to the dissident, and religious unity replaced by rational discussion among opponents.

The idea that there are ‘natural’ or ‘human’ rights arose out of two distinct currents of opinion. There was the ancient belief in a universal code – the natural law – which applies to all people everywhere and which provides a standard against which any particular legal system can be measured. And there was the common-law assumption that law exists in part to protect the individual from arbitrary power. Combining those two ideas, Locke argued for a system of natural rights. These rights would guarantee that the individual is sovereign over his own life, able both to enter relations by agreement and to withdraw from them by mutual consent. On this understanding, incorporated in the 1689 Bill of Rights, human rights are to be understood as liberties – freedoms that we respect by leaving people alone. The doctrine of human rights is there to set limits to government, and cannot be used to authorize any increase in government power that is not required by the fundamental task of protecting individual liberty.

It is at this point, however, that the truth in liberalism slides almost unnoticeably into falsehood. For the search for liberty has gone hand in hand with a countervailing search for ‘empowerment’. The negative freedoms offered by traditional theories of natural right, such as Locke’s, do not compensate for the inequalities of power and opportunity in human societies. Hence egalitarians have begun to insert more positive rights into the list of negative freedoms, supplementing the liberty rights specified by the various international conventions with rights that do not merely demand non-encroachment from others, but which impose on them a positive duty. And in this they are drawing on the other root of the human rights idea – the root of ‘natural law’, which requires that every legal code conform to a universal standard.

The original purpose behind liberalism’s invocation of natural rights was to protect the individual from arbitrary power. You held your rights, according to Locke and his followers, as an individual, and regardless of what group or class you belonged to. These rights force people to treat you as a free being, with sovereignty over your life, and as one who has an equal claim on others’ respect. But the new ideas of human rights allow rights to one group that they deny to another: you have rights as the member of some ethnic minority or social class that cannot be claimed by every citizen. People can now be favoured or condemned on account of their class, race, rank or occupation, and this in the name of liberal values. The rights that form the substance of international declarations therefore reflect a profound shift in liberal philosophy. The rhetoric of rights has shifted from freedoms to claims, and from equal treatment to equal outcomes.

A freedom right imposes a general duty on others to observe it; but it may arise from no specific relationship, and may make no specific demands of any individual. It is a right that may be invaded by others; but by doing nothing they respect it, and the duty to observe it is neither onerous nor a special responsibility of any particular person. Such is my right to move freely from place to place, my right to life, limb and property, and the other rights traditionally acknowledged as flowing from the natural law. You respect them by non-invasion, and the duty to respect them falls clearly and unambiguously on everyone. That is not obviously the case with claims, especially when the claims are to non-specific benefits like health, education, a certain standard of living and so on. There are indeed elementary claims of morality, which impose an individual duty on the rest of us. It is reasonable to argue that the man set upon by thieves in Christ’s famous parable had a claim – a moral claim – upon those who passed him by, and one that only the Good Samaritan was prepared to answer. But such cases of basic morality impose claims on each of us individually, and cannot be answered on our behalf by the state. As for the more specific claims that people make against each other – for succor, for a share of goods, for compensation – these demand a history, an account of the special relation between the claimant and the one against whom the claim arises, which will justify imposing this claim as a duty. In the absence of such a history, specifying who is liable to answer them, universal claims inevitably point to the state as the only possible provider. And large, vague claims require a massive expansion of state power, a surrender to the state of all kinds of responsibilities that previously vested in individuals, and the centralization of social life in the government machine. In other words, claim rights push us inevitably in a direction that, for many people, is not only economically disastrous, but morally unacceptable. It is a direction that is diametrically opposed to that for which the idea of a human right was originally introduced – a direction involving the increase, rather than the limitation, of the power of the state.

In short, the relation between law and morality is deep and conflicted. But when it comes to the many claims made in the declarations of human rights, morality is doing all the work, with no constraint from practical politics or from the many conflicting interests that politicians must broker. The morality in question is not the old, conservative morality, based on family values and social respectability, but the morality of our urban elites, in which non-discrimination and the free choice of lifestyles take precedence over the old forms of social order. Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan imposes a huge moral burden on us all. But to transfer this moral burden to the state, to say that it is for the state to transform that moral duty into a right of the recipient, and a right, moreover, against the state and therefore against society as a whole, is to take a large step away from the original liberal idea, of a state founded on the sovereignty of the individual. It is to move towards the new idea of a society ordered by an overarching morality, which may have little or nothing to do with the way people live. Judges in human rights courts therefore play with an abstract calculus of legal privileges, while passing the cost of their judgements to others with whom they have no connection. And nobody knows whether that cost can really be borne. It is this fact that is giving rise in Britain to a growing discontent with human rights, and especially with the decisions of the foreign court tasked with inventing and imposing them. At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes on the side of the favoured party. Rights, which for the liberal are the sine qua non of peaceful politics, become thereby a declaration of war on the majority culture.

The Truth in Multiculturalism

For Herder, Maistre, Burke and others, the Enlightenment was not to be regarded as a complete break with the past. It made sense only against the background of a long-standing cultural inheritance. Liberal individualism offered a new and in many ways inspiring vision of the human condition; but it depended upon traditions and institutions that bound people together in ways that no merely individualistic worldview could engender. The Enlightenment proposed a universal human nature, governed by a universal moral law, from which the state emerges through the consent of the governed. The political process was henceforth to be shaped by the free choices of individuals, in order to protect the institutions that make free choices possible. It was all beautiful and logical and inspiring. But it made no sense without the cultural inheritance of the nation state, and the forms of social life that had taken root in it. In this connection, Herder famously distinguished Kultur from Zivilisation, arguing that, while the second could be shared between the nations of Europe – and indeed increasingly was shared – the first was distinctive of each of them.

All such thoughts were issued as warnings. The freedom won through enlightenment, they implied, was a fragile and threatened thing. It depended upon a cultural base that it could not itself guarantee. Only if people are held together by stronger bonds than the bond of free choice can free choice be raised to the prominence that the new political order promised. And those stronger bonds are buried deep in the community, woven by custom, ceremony, language and religious need. Political order, in short, requires cultural unity, something that politics itself can never provide.

And this, I maintain, is the truth in multiculturalism. Thanks to the ‘civic culture’ that has grown in the post-Enlightenment West, social membership has been freed from religious affiliation, from racial, ethnic and kinship ties, and from the ‘rites of passage’ whereby communities lay claim to the souls of their members, by guarding them against the pollution of other customs and other tribes. It is why it is so easy to emigrate to Western states – nothing more is required of the immigrant than the adoption of the civic culture, and the assumption of the duties implied in it.

As a result of the Enlightenment and all that it has meant for Western civilization, communities can be absorbed and integrated into our way of life, even when they arrive bearing strange gods. But this virtue of our civilization, so clearly manifest in America, has been used precisely to repudiate that civilization’s claim on us, to argue, in the name of multiculturalism, that we need to marginalize our inherited customs and beliefs, even to cast them off, in order to become an ‘inclusive’ society in which all our newcomers feel at home, regardless of any effort to adapt to their new surroundings. This has been urged on us in the name of political correctness, which has gone hand in hand with the kind of repudiating liberalism that I described at the end of the previous chapter. Political correctness exhorts us to be as ‘inclusive’ as we can, to discriminate neither in thought, word nor deed against ethnic, sexual, religious or behavioural minorities. And in order to be inclusive we are encouraged to denigrate what is felt to be most especially ours.

The ‘down with us’ mentality is devoted to rooting out old and unsustainable loyalties. And when the old loyalties die, so does the old form of membership. Enlightenment, which seems to lead of its own accord to a culture of repudiation, thereby destroys enlightenment, by undermining the certainties on which citizenship is founded. This is what we have witnessed in the intellectual life of the West. The most interesting aspect of this culture of repudiation has been the attack on the central place accorded to reason in human affairs by the writers, philosophers and political theorists of the Enlightenment. The old appeal to reason is seen merely as an appeal to Western values, which have made reason into a shibboleth, and thereby laid claim to an objectivity that no culture could possibly possess. For cultures offer membership, not truth, and can therefore make no exclusive claims on the one who sees them from a point of view outside their territory. Moreover, by claiming reason as its source, Western culture has (according to the ‘post-modernist’ critique) concealed its ethno-centrism; it has dressed up Western ways of thinking as though they have universal force. Reason, therefore, is a lie, and by exposing the lie we reveal the oppression at the heart of our culture.

A single theme runs through the humanities as they are regularly taught in American and European universities, which is that of the illegitimacy of Western civilization, and of the artificial nature of the distinctions on which it has been based. All distinctions are ‘cultural’, therefore ‘constructed’, therefore ‘ideological’, in the sense defined by Marx – manufactured by the ruling groups or classes in order to serve their interests and bolster their power. Western civilization is simply the record of that oppressive process, and the principal purpose of studying it is to deconstruct its claim to our membership. This is the core belief that a great many students in the humanities are required to ingest, preferably before they have the intellectual discipline to question it, or to set it against the literature that shows it to be untenable. To put the point in another way, the Enlightenment displaced theology from the heart of the curriculum, in order to put the disinterested pursuit of truth in place of it. Within a very short time, however, we find the university dominated by theology of another kind – a godless theology, to be sure, but one no less insistent upon unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less ardent in its pursuit of heretics, sceptics and debunkers. People are no longer burned at the stake for their views: they simply fail to get tenure, or, if they are students, they flunk the course. But the effect is similar, namely to reinforce an orthodoxy in which nobody really believes.

Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side by side. To deny this is to forgo the very possibility of moral judgement, and therefore to deny the fundamental experience of community. It is precisely this that has caused the multiculturalists to hesitate. It is culture, not nature, that tells a family that their daughter who has fallen in love outside the permitted circle must be killed, that girls must undergo genital mutilation if they are to be respectable, that the infidel must be destroyed when Allah commands it. You can read about those things and think that they belong to the pre-history of our world. But when suddenly they are happening in your midst, you are apt to wake up to the truth about the culture that advocates them. You are apt to say, that is not our culture, and it has no business here. And you will probably be tempted to go one stage further, the stage that the Enlightenment naturally invites, and to say that it has no business anywhere.

For what is being brought home to us, through painful experiences that we might have avoided had it been permitted before now to say the truth, is that we, like everyone else, depend upon a shared culture for our security, our prosperity and our freedom to be. We don’t require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life or to participate in the same festivals. But we have a shared civic culture, a shared language and a shared public sphere. Our societies are built upon the Judaeo-Christian ideal of neighbour-love, according to which strangers and intimates deserve equal concern. They require each of us to respect the freedom and sovereignty of every person, and to acknowledge the threshold of privacy beyond which it is a trespass to go unless invited. Our societies depend upon law-abidingness and open contracts, and they reinforce these things through the educational traditions that have shaped our common curriculum. It is not an arbitrary cultural imperialism that leads us to value Greek philosophy and literature, the Hebrew Bible, Roman law, and the medieval epics and romances and to teach these things in our schools. They are ours, in just the way that the legal order and the political institutions are ours: they form part of what made us, and convey the message that it is right to be what we are. And reason endorses these things, and tells us that our civic culture is not just a parochial possession of inward-looking communities, but a justified way of life.

So what happens when people whose identity is fixed by creed or kinship immigrate into places settled by Western culture? The activists say that we must make room for them, and that we do this by relinquishing the space in which their culture can flourish. Our political class has at last recognized that this is a recipe for disaster, and that we can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them into our culture, and not beside or against it. But that means telling them to accept rules, customs and procedures that may be alien to their old way of life. Is this an injustice? I do not think that it is. If immigrants come it is because they gain by doing so. It is therefore reasonable to remind them that there is also a cost. Only now, however, is our political class prepared to say so, and to insist that the cost be paid.

The Truth in Environmentalism

Conservatives endorse Burke’s view of society, as a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead; they believe in civil association between neighbours rather than intervention by the state; and they accept that the most important thing the living can do is to settle down, to make a home for themselves, and to pass that home to their children. Oikophilia, the love of home, lends itself to the environmental cause, and it is astonishing that the many conservative parties in the English-speaking world have not seized hold of that cause as their own.

There are two reasons for this, I believe. The first is that the conservative cause has been polluted by the ideology of big business, by the global ambitions of the multinational companies, and by the ascendancy of economics in the thinking of modern politicians. Those factors have led conservatives to enter into alliance with people who regard the effort to conserve things as both futile and quaint. The second reason is that the truth in environmentalism has been obscured by the agitated propaganda of the environmentalists and by the immensity of the problems that they put before us. When the attention of the world is directed towards global warming, climate change, mass extinctions and melting ice caps – all of which lie outside the reach of any national government, and for none of which does a remedy immediately present itself – the result is a loss of confidence in ordinary politics, a despair at human incapacity, and a last ditch adoption of radical internationalist schemes that involve a surrender of sovereignty.

There is a tendency among environmentalists to single out the big players in the market as the principal culprits: to pin environmental crime on those – like oil companies, motor manufacturers, logging corporations, agribusinesses, supermarkets – that make their profits by exporting their costs to others (including others who are not yet born). But this is to mistake the effect for the cause. In a free economy such ways of making money emerge by an invisible hand from choices made by all of us. It is the demand for cars, oil, cheap food and expendable luxuries that is the real cause of the industries that provide these things. Of course it is true that the big players externalize their costs whenever they can. But so do we. Whenever we travel by air, visit the supermarket, or consume fossil fuels, we are exporting our costs to others, and to future generations. A free economy is driven by individual demand. And in a free economy, individuals, just as much as big businesses, strive to export the cost of what they do.

The solution is not the socialist one, of abolishing the free economy, since this merely places massive economic power in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats, who are equally in the business of exporting their costs, while enjoying secure rents on the social product. The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And we can correct ourselves in this way only if we have motives to do so – motives strong enough to restrain our appetites.

The need is for non-egotistical motives that can be elicited in ordinary members of society, and relied upon to serve the long-term ecological goal. We should recognize that environmental protection is a lost cause if we cannot find the incentives that would lead people in general, and not merely their self-appointed and non-elected representatives, to advance it. Here is where environmentalists and conservatives can and should make common cause. That common cause is territory – the object of a love that has found its strongest political expression through the nation state.

It is through developing this idea, of a territorial sentiment that contains the seeds of sovereignty within itself, that conservatives make their distinctive contribution to ecological thinking. Were conservatism to adopt a slogan, it should be ‘Feel locally, think nationally.’ In the current environmental crisis, there is no agent to take the needed measures, and no focus of loyalty to secure consent to them, other than the nation state. Rather than attempt to rectify environmental and social problems at the global level, therefore, conservatives seek a reassertion of local sovereignty over known and managed environments. This involves affirming the right of nations to self-government, and to the adoption of policies that will chime with local loyalties and customs. It also involves opposing the all-pervasive tendency of modern government towards centralization, and actively returning to local communities some of the powers confiscated by central bureaucracies – including those confiscated by transnational institutions like the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the European Union.

That, it seems to me, is the goal towards which serious environmentalism and serious conservatism both point – namely, home, the place where we are and that we share, the place that defines us, that we hold in trust for our descendants, and that we don’t want to spoil. Nobody seems to have identified a motive more likely to serve the environmentalist cause than this one. It is a motive in ordinary people. It can provide a foundation both for a conservative approach to institutions and a conservationist approach to the land. It is a motive that might permit us to reconcile the demand for democratic participation with the respect for future generations and the duty of trusteeship. It is, in my view, the only serious resource that we have, in our fight to maintain local order in the face of globally stimulated decay.

We should recognize that the problem of climate change that occupies international negotiations today is not in fact a diplomatic problem. It is primarily a scientific problem: the problem of discovering a cheap and effective source of clean energy that will remove both the cost of signing up to a treaty and the motive to defect from it. The solution to this scientific problem is indeed more likely to be found through international cooperation – but cooperation among scientists, not among states.

As with the other truths I have been discussing, however, the truth in environmentalism can be leaned on until it becomes a falsehood, and as with the other instances this transition from truth to falsehood occurs when the religious impulse displaces the political. The environmental issue has been presented, by activist NGOs and by Green politicians, as a confrontation between the force of darkness and the force of light. The force of darkness corresponds to the traditional target of left-wing criticism: big business, the market and the ‘greed’ and ‘selfishness’ that are destroying us. Against those powerful forces are aligned the forces of light: activists, NGOs, people animated by a selfless concern for future generations rather than the pursuit of their own comfort. And, because such people do not enjoy the enormous institutional and economic power of their opponents, they must call on another and higher force to represent them, the force of the state, which can use the law to overbear the selfish behaviour of those who would otherwise destroy the planet. Once it is presented in that way, with all the ideological embellishments with which we are familiar, the left-wing position calls into being by its very logic a right-wing position, which defends individual freedom and markets against the bogeyman of state control and top-down dictatorship. And as the ideological conflict heats up, all kinds of thing are put in question that ought not to be put in question, facts are fabricated and research politicized, and the legitimate use of the state and the legitimate sphere of private enterprise are both lost sight of in the flurry of accusations. The lesson that conservatives should take from this is the same as the lesson they should take from the other mass movements of solidarity that I have mentioned. They should learn from the conflicts over the environment that political solutions emerge from below and are shaped by the motives of real people. They are not imposed from above by those who regard their fellow humans with suspicion, and who long to replace them with something better.

The Truth in Internationalism

The truth in internationalism is that sovereign states are legal persons, and should deal with each other through a system of rights, duties, liabilities and responsibilities: in other words, through the ‘calculus of rights and duties’. They should enter into voluntary agreements that have the force of contracts in law, and these agreements should be binding on successive governments in just the way that contracts entered into by a firm bind its successive directors. To make these dealings possible, states must be sovereign – that is, able to decide matters for themselves – and also willing to relinquish powers to those bodies charged with maintaining international agreements and the law that governs them. So much is common sense. But it is not what internationalism now amounts to. Once again a fundamental truth has been captured by people with an agenda, and so turned to falsehood. This transformation of the internationalist idea has influenced not only the UN but, more concretely, the EU and the European Court of Human Rights, both institutions that arose from the European wars, as a result of pressure from utopian internationalists.

Instruments for dealing with the problems of 50 years ago are not necessarily suited to the problems of today. Although the Soviet empire has collapsed, it has left a legacy of political distrust and covert lawlessness that can be overcome only by a strengthening, rather than a weakening, of national attachments. Europe’s rapidly diminishing share of the world’s trade and wealth bespeaks a shift in power of a kind that is only seen every few centuries. Mass immigrations from Africa, Asia and the Middle East have created potentially disloyal, and in any case anti-national, minorities in the heart of France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries and Britain. The Christian faith has receded from public life, leaving a vacuum into which nihilism, materialism and militant Islam have flowed unresisted. The population is getting older and sparser – except in Britain, which is the destination of choice for so many European migrants, and now in deep conflict as a result. In confronting those ills, which define the new crisis of Europe as surely as the rise of totalitarianism defined the old one, the exclusive emphasis on ‘integration’ is at best an irrelevance, at worst a fatal mistake.

However radical our vision of Europe’s future, we shall have to depend on the nation states for its realization. By replacing national accountability with distant bureaucracy, the machinery of the EU has left us disarmed and bewildered in the face of our current crisis. Its constant seizure of powers and privileges without any reciprocal attempt to account for their exercise is undermining all trust in the political process. By constantly going against the deeply rooted diversity of the European nations, the project of ‘ever closer union’ has not merely alienated the people of Europe, but has shown its inability to tap the true resources and the creative potential of our people, and to revitalize the idea of European civilization.

The integrationists have attempted to soothe the growing discontent among the people with the doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’. This word, incorporated into the Maastricht Treaty, and ostensibly guaranteeing local sovereignty, was given its current sense in an encyclical of Pope Pius XI in 1931, describing the decentralization of power as a fundamental item of the social doctrine of the Church. According to Pius XI, ‘subsidiarity’ means that decisions are taken always at the lowest level compatible with the overarching authority of government. The term was appropriated by Wilhelm Röpke, the German economist who, exiled from Nazi Germany in Switzerland, was amazed and encouraged to discover a society which is the opposite in so many ways to the one from which he had escaped. He saw that Swiss society is organized from the bottom up, and resolves its problems at the local level, through the free association of citizens in those ‘little platoons’ to which Edmund Burke had made such a passionate appeal when decrying the top-down dictatorship of the French Revolution. Subsidiarity, in Röpke’s understanding of the term, refers to the right of local communities to take decisions for themselves, including the decision to surrender the matter to a higher forum. Subsidiarity places an absolute brake upon centralizing powers, by permitting their involvement only when requested. It is the way to reconcile a market economy with the local loyalties and public spirit that it might otherwise erode. In the EU as it is today, the term ‘subsidiarity’ denotes not the means whereby powers are passed up from the bottom, but the means whereby powers are allocated from the top. It is the EU and its institutions that decides where subsidiary powers begin and end, and by purporting to grant powers in the very word that removes them, the term ‘subsidiarity’ wraps the whole idea of decentralized government in mystery. For the Eurocrats, national governments are autonomous only at the ‘subsidiary’ level, with the European institutions uniquely empowered to determine which level that is. It is hardly surprising if the Swiss people, observing the effect of this, have, in defiance of their political class, persistently refused to join the European Union.

The crisis to which the institutions of Europe were a first response was the result of one thing above all – the centralized and dictatorial approach to politics, exemplified in the Nazi Party’s warmongering, in the Communist Party’s totalitarian control, and in the fascist grip on Italy and Spain. The EU has benign origins and noble intentions that can bear no comparison with those vanished agendas. Yet it is this same dictatorial approach that has been built into the European process, which has one and only one way forward, namely ‘more laws, more rules, more government, more power to the centre’. The dangers attendant on this concentration of powers are not aggressive, military or totalitarian. They are subtle and insidious: the dangers of civic alienation, of a loss of economic competitiveness, and of the domination of decision-making by an increasingly unaccountable elite.

Internationalists tend to be cosmopolitans, who identify themselves as ‘world citizens’, and consciously repudiate the old national loyalties that bind them to a particular nation, a particular country and a particular jurisdiction. However, it could be that the national perspective is more favourable to national security and also to world order than a philosophy that construes all people everywhere on the model of the armchair liberal. Nationalism, construed as a belligerent assertion of the nation’s ‘rights’ against its neighbours, has certainly been a destructive force in European politics. But nation states, in which constitutional and democratic procedures rest on national attachment, have, on the whole, been peaceful members of the international community. Although the border between Canada and the United States is disputed, and has been disputed for a century or more, the chances that this dispute will lead to war are zero. The national perspective encourages realistic assumptions about the sympathies, budgets, energies and intellects of human beings. It assumes that the people for which it speaks are citizens, whose consent must be won to any act of belligerence, and who vastly prefer negotiation and compromise to intransigence and war.

If the democracies are to protect themselves against the growing threats to them, therefore, it is as necessary as it ever was to take the national rather than the transnational perspective. Globalization, easy travel and the removal of barriers to migration have changed the nature of the threat. But they have not changed the effective response to it, which is, as Clausewitz taught us, to disarm the enemy so that we can impose our will. The enemy is now hidden in global networks. But this makes the international approach not more useful to us, but less. Enemies can be confronted only if they are first brought to earth. And that means bringing them to earth somewhere, as the Americans brought al-Qa‘eda to earth in Afghanistan. Globalization may have made it harder to defend ourselves against terrorist assaults, but we are nevertheless defending territory, the place where we are, and hunting down our enemies in the place where they are.

The Truth in Conservatism

Conservatism is not in the business of correcting human nature or shaping it according to some conception of the ideal rational chooser. It attempts to understand how societies work, and to make the space required for them to work successfully. Its starting point is the deep psychology of the human person.

Our existence as citizens, freely participating in the polis, is made possible by our enduring attachments to the things we hold dear. Our condition is not that of Homo oeconomicus, searching in everything to satisfy his private desires. We are home-building creatures, cooperating in the search for intrinsic values, and what matters to us are the ends, not the means, of our existence.

The truth in conservatism lies in those thoughts. Free association is necessary to us, not only because ‘no man is an island’, but because intrinsic values emerge from social cooperation. They are not imposed by some outside authority or instilled through fear. They grow from below, through relations of love, respect and accountability. The fallacy of thinking that we can plan for a society in which fulfilment is readily available, dispensed to all-comers by a benign bureaucracy, is not one that I need here attack. The important point is that what matters to us comes through our own efforts at constructing it, and seldom if ever from above, except in those emergencies in which a top-down command is indispensable.

If people are free to associate, then they can form long-standing institutions, outside the control of the state. These institutions might confer advantages on their members, in the form of knowledge, skills, networks of trust and goodwill. They will contribute to the stratification of society, by offering those advantages selectively. For it is a law of association that to include is to exclude; and exclusion can hurt. Indeed, in no area does the tension between liberty and equality reveal itself more vividly than in this one. Free association leads naturally to discrimination, and the advocacy of non-discrimination leads naturally to top-down control. How do we choose the acceptable middle ground, and on whom do we confer the right to forbid us? The libertarians tell us that no one has a right to exercise this kind of control and that it will always get into the wrong hands – the hands of those who most want to herd us, in directions that we least want to go. There is a truth in that – but it is not the whole truth. For we know that our liberties are diminished if our fellow citizens are excluded from exercising them. The privileges of social membership should not be withheld from people purely on grounds – such as race or class – that are irrelevant to their exercise. For this reason, most of us now accept that where discrimination brings with it an unacceptable penalty, as in contracts of employment and admission to schools and colleges, it is part of true civil liberty to prohibit the divisive forms of it.

There is, in the circumstances of modern life, only one solution to the problem of resentment, and that is social mobility. The worst thing that the state can do is to create those traps – the poverty trap, the welfare trap, the education trap – which deprive people of the motives and the skills to improve their lot, and retain them in a state of permanent discontented dependence on a world that they cannot fully enter.

The truth in conservatism is that civil society can be killed from above, but it grows from below. It grows through the associative impulse of human beings, who create civil associations that are not purpose-driven enterprises but places of freely sustained order. Politicians often try to press these associations into alien moulds, making them into instruments for external purposes that may be in conflict with their inner character.

Civil society, Hayek argued, is, or ought to be, a spontaneous order: an order emerging by an invisible hand from our dealings with each other. It is, or ought to be, consensual, not in the sense of issuing from some gesture of mutual consent like a contract, but in the sense of arising from voluntary transactions and the steps we take to adjust, accommodate and correct them. One way to understand this idea is by reference to the art of conversation – an art sometimes referred to by Oakeshott as a paradigm of civil association.

There is an ideal of civilization which is exemplified in the perfect seminar or dinner-table conversation, in which each person gives of his best for the others’ sake, in which nobody dominates or monopolizes the theme, and in which good manners ensure that each gives way at the moment collectively required, so that the conversation can take its unpredictable course. It is rare that we encounter such a conversation, however, and it is quite clear that it can occur only between people of a certain kind – people who have internalized the rules of social intercourse, who are happy not to dominate, but who are also sufficiently good humoured to contribute as best they can.

Aristotle divided friendships into three kinds: friendships of utility, of pleasure and of virtue. The division applies to conversation too. There is the conversation of utility that governs a shared task, the conversation of pleasure that directs our relaxation, and the conversation of virtue that informs the bond between people who admire and cherish what they find in each other. All actual conversations involve a mixture of these things. And in taking conversation as our model of political order, we are reverting to something like Aristotle’s conception of the polis, as a place of friendship – but without Aristotle’s defence of slavery as the aspect of civil order imposed on those who are ‘naturally slaves’. This suggests to me that the contrast that Oakeshott urges, between civil association and enterprise association, should be augmented by another and more radical contrast, between communities of cooperation and communities of command. Enterprise is one form of cooperation, which has its own ingress into the world of conversation, and its own role to play in the building of friendship. It is a form of free association that is governed by law, morality and good manners in just the way that leisure is governed.

The vision of the polis presented by Aristotle is of a society organized by and for the purpose of friendship, in which the higher friendship of virtue is encouraged, not only between individuals, but between individuals and the state. The citizen is the friend of the state, which reciprocates his friendship. Only the virtuous polis can be based in friendship of this kind, and the virtuous polis is the one that encourages virtue in its citizens. That suggestion reminds us that the virtuous polis is an ideal, and that another kind of polis is possible, in which the friendship that binds the citizens is the friendship of utility, not virtue. And, some would have it, that better describes our position today than the noble conception put forward by Aristotle. It often seems as though modern states offer their citizens a deal, and that they require nothing of the citizens beyond respect for the terms of the deal. This is what Philip Bobbitt means by the ‘market state’: one in which the old notions of national loyalty and patriotic duty are replaced by conditional allegiance, in return for material benefits. If the benefits aren’t good enough, the citizen will look for them elsewhere, roaming the world in search of a better bargain.

If we are to propose conversation as our model of political order, therefore, we need to answer the questions: conversation in what circumstances, between whom and of what kind? Conversations arise in human society even in the most instrumentalized of our interests and activities. And Aristotle helps us to see how the truth in conservatism morphs into another all-absorbing falsehood. Conservatives are right to emphasize free association as the root of civil society. But when free association becomes a shibboleth, when all forms of community are regarded as equally worthwhile, provided only that the participants consent to them, then we lose sight of the distinction between associations in which people make no demands of each other, and associations in which moral discipline grows between the participants and informs and transforms their lives. The truth in conservatism depends on our recognition that free association is to be valued only if it is also a source of value – in other words, only if it is ordered towards fulfilment, rather than mere utility or recreation. In the libertarian free-for-all what is worst in human nature enjoys an equal chance with what is best, and discipline is repudiated as a meddlesome intrusion. Conservatism is the attempt to affirm that discipline, and to build, in the space of free association, a lasting realm of value.

When people see their social relations in terms of utility, as in Bobbitt’s market state, or as mere amusements, as in Brave New World, the bond of society is weakened. Societies can survive a major crisis only if they can call upon a fund of patriotic sentiment. Where that is lacking the social order crumbles at the first shock, as people scramble to secure their own safety regardless of their neighbours. So it was along the Pacific Rim when Japan launched its bid for imperial mastery, and so it was, on some accounts, in France, at the outbreak of the Second World War. It is from an awareness of this that conservatives have always emphasized the connection between a nation and its military arm. The true citizen is ready to defend his or her country in its hour of need, and sees in its military institutions an expression of the deep attachment that holds things in place.

Realms of Value

Putting together the argument of the previous chapters, I draw the following broad conclusion: that the role of the state is, or ought to be, both less than the socialists require, and more than the classical liberals permit. The state has a goal, which is to protect civil society from its external enemies and its internal disorders. It cannot be merely the ‘night watchman state’ advocated by Robert Nozick, since civil society depends upon attachments that must be renewed and, in modern circumstances, these attachments cannot be renewed without the collective provision of welfare. On the other hand, the state cannot be the universal provider and regulator advocated by the egalitarians, since value and commitment emerge from autonomous associations, which flourish only if they can grow from below. Moreover, the state can redistribute wealth only if wealth is created, and wealth is created by those who expect a share in it.

From its beginnings in the world of the Enlightenment, conservatism has been engaged in a work of rescue. New social movements, new modes of industrial production, new political aspirations all threatened to destroy or destabilize customs, institutions and forms of life on which people in one way or another depended. And the question arose as to how those things could be protected and whether there was anything that a politician could do to lend support to them. Essentially the conservative is the one who answers: yes, they can be protected, but no, it is not for the politician to adopt this as a goal. All politics can do is to enlarge the space in which civil society can flourish. Value comes to us in many ways, and wherever and whenever it comes it brings with it authority, peace and a sense of membership. But it does not come through a political programme.

Nor does it come through economics. According to a famous definition given by Lionel Robbins, economics ‘is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’. Economics assumes that we not only have knowledge of our ends but are also prepared to assign a price to them; and it establishes its empire over the human imagination by pricing everything that human beings might want, need, admire or value, so replacing the great questions of human life with the abracadabra of the experts. For the economist, value and price are indistinguishable and Wilde’s definition of the cynic, as the ‘man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’, expresses a truth that has no translation in the dismal science. Yet those things that we truly value are precisely the things, such as life, love and knowledge, that we are reluctant to price. Value begins where calculation ends, since that which matters most to us is the thing that we will not exchange.

Moreover, our values are not given in advance of discovering them. We do not go through life with clear goals and use our reason merely to achieve them. Values emerge through our cooperative endeavours: those things to which we become most attached are often unforeseeable before they envelop us, like erotic love, the love of children, religious devotion, the experience of beauty. And all such things are rooted in our social nature, so that we learn to understand them and to focus upon them as ends in themselves only in dialogue with others, and seldom in advance of achieving them. Economics, which is the science of instrumental reasoning, is therefore silent about our values, and if it pretends to deal with them nevertheless it is only by putting Homo oeconomicus in the place that should be occupied by real human beings. Value comes about because we humans create it, and we do so through the traditions, customs and institutions that enshrine and promote our mutual accountability.

Where is religion, in the worldview of the modern conservative? The answer, I suspect, is this: religion plays an undeniable role in the life of society, introducing ideas of the sacred and the transcendental that spread their influence across all the customs and ceremonies of membership. But religious obedience is not a necessary part of citizenship, and in any conflict it is the duties of the citizen, and not those of the believer, that must prevail. It is one of the triumphs of Christian civilization to have held on to the Christian vision of human destiny, while acknowledging the priority of secular law. This was not achieved without intense conflict, and a slow, steady recognition that a society could be founded on the duties of neighbourliness and yet permit distinctions of faith. The achievement of Christian civilization is to have endowed institutions with a religious authority without demanding a religious, as opposed to a secular, obedience to them.

It seems to me, therefore, that religious freedom is itself a legacy of the religion that has enjoyed precedence in the Western world – the faith for which the stranger and the brother have an equal claim. When that faith declines, as it has been declining during our time, there remains only the shell of the political order that grew from it. Many people hunger for the spiritual life, which that shell protected. Christianity provided that life; Islam cannot, in its present form, provide it, since it presses against the shell of secular law, and threatens always to replace it with another law entirely – a law that seeks brotherhood and shared submission, rather than neighbourhood and mutual freedom. Such a law is directed against the otherness of others, rather than setting out to protect it.

According to Hegel freedom involves an active engagement with the world, in which opposition is encountered and overcome, risks are taken and satisfactions weighed: it is, in short, an exercise of practical reason, in pursuit of goals whose value must justify the efforts needed to obtain them. Likewise self-consciousness, in its fully realized form, involves not merely an openness to present experience, but a sense of my own existence as an individual, with plans and projects that might be fulfilled or frustrated, and with a clear conception of what I am doing, for what purpose and with what hope of happiness. All those ideas are contained in the term first introduced by Fichte, to denote the inner goal of a free personal life: Selbstbestimmung or self-certainty. The crucial claim of Hegel is that the life of freedom and self-certainty can only be obtained through others. I become fully myself only in contexts that compel me to recognize that I am another in others’ eyes. I do not acquire my freedom and individuality and then, as it were, try them out in the world of human relations. It is only by entering that world, with its risks, conflicts and responsibilities, that I come to know myself as free, to enjoy my own perspective and individuality, and to become a fulfilled person among persons.

Risk-avoidance in human relations means the avoidance of accountability, the refusal to stand judged in another’s eyes, to come face to face with another person, to give yourself in whatever measure to him or her, or to expose yourself to the risk of rejection. Accountability is not something we should avoid; it is something we need to learn. Without it we can never acquire either the capacity to love or the virtue of justice. Other people will remain for us merely complex devices, to be negotiated in the way that animals are negotiated, for our own advantage and without opening the possibility of mutual judgement. Justice is the ability to see the other as having a claim on you, as being a free subject just as you are, and as demanding your accountability. To acquire this virtue you must learn the habit of face-to-face encounters, in which you solicit the other’s consent and cooperation rather than imposing your will. The retreat behind the screen is a way of retaining complete control of the encounter, while never acknowledging the other’s point of view. It involves setting your will outside yourself, as a feature of virtual reality, while not risking it as it must be risked, if others are truly to be met. To meet another person in his freedom is to acknowledge his sovereignty and his right: it is to recognize that the developing situation is no longer within your exclusive control, but that you are caught up by it, made real and accountable in the other’s eyes by the same considerations that make him real and accountable in yours.

Aesthetic interest is an interest in appearances. But there are appearances that we ought to avoid, however much they fascinate us. By contrast, there are appearances which are not merely permissible objects of aesthetic interest, but which reward that interest with knowledge, understanding and emotional uplift. We deplore the Roman games, at which animals are slaughtered, prisoners crucified and innocents tormented, all for the sake of the spectacle and its gruesome meaning. And we would deplore it, even if the suffering were simulated, as in some cinematic replication, if we thought that the interest of the observer were merely one of gleeful fascination. But we praise the Greek tragedy, in which profound myths are enacted in lofty verse, in which the imagined deaths take place out of sight and unrelished by the audience. An interest in the one, we suppose, is depraved; in the other, noble. And a high culture aims, or ought to aim, at preserving and enhancing experiences of the second kind, in which human life is raised to a higher level – the level of ethical reflection.

A culture does not comprise works of art only, nor is it directed solely to aesthetic interests. It is the sphere of intrinsically interesting artefacts, linked by the faculty of judgement to our aspirations and ideals. We appreciate jokes, works of art, arguments, works of history and literature, manners, dress, rituals and forms of behaviour. And all these things are shaped through judgement. A culture consists of all those activities and artefacts that are organized by the ‘common pursuit of true judgement’, as T. S. Eliot once put it. True judgement involves the search for meaning through the reflective encounter with things made, composed and written with such an end in view. Some of those things will be works of art, addressed to the aesthetic interest; others will be discursive works of history or philosophy, addressed to the interest in ideas. Both kinds of work explore the meaning of the world and the life of society. And the purpose of both is to stimulate the judgements through which we understand each other and ourselves. Artistic and philosophical traditions therefore provide our paradigm of culture. And the principle that organizes a tradition also discriminates within it, creating the canon of masterpieces, the received monuments, the ‘touchstones’ as Matthew Arnold once called them, which it is the goal of humane education to appreciate and to understand. Hence the conservative defence of realms of value will focus on the curriculum, and on keeping present in the minds of the young those great works that created the emotional world in which they live, whether or not they are yet aware of it.

The haste and disorder of modern life, the alienating forms of modern architecture, the noise and spoliation of modern industry – these things have made the pure encounter with beauty a rarer, more fragile and more unpredictable thing for us. Still, we all know what it is, suddenly to be transported by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation. It happens often during childhood, though it is seldom interpreted then. It happens during adolescence, when it lends itself to our erotic longings. And it happens in a subdued way in adult life, secretly shaping our life projects, holding out to us an image of harmony that we pursue through holidays, through homebuilding and through our private dreams. We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home – the place where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging. We achieve it not alone but with others. And all our attempts to make our surroundings look right – through decorating, arranging, creating – are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love. Hence our human need for beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. And the experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.

Practical Matters

I see mass movements of solidarity as arising when the stock of reason gives out – they are the place to which we return when we cease to negotiate, cease to recognize the other as entitled to his otherness, cease to live by the rule of humility and compromise. Mass movements reflect the default position of the human psyche, when fear, resentment or anger take over, and when no social order seems acceptable without an absolute unity of purpose. Constantly in the Old Testament we see this default position showing through the rags of civil order, with the Lord of Hosts often joining in the work of destruction, and the prophets fulminating on his behalf. And we see it in the revolutions of modern times, not least in those of the communists and fascists. We find it in the language of Marx and Lenin – the secular prophets who speak for the god of ‘history’, who is to triumph over all our idols. This prophetic language rises like a mist from the pool of our inner resentments. Conservatives understand this; they wish to keep the frail crust of civilization in place as long as possible, knowing that beneath it there does not lie the idyllic realm of Rousseau’s noble savage, but only the violent world of the hunter-gatherer. Faced with civilizational decline, therefore, they hold with Lord Salisbury that ‘delay is life’.

There are avenues into politics on the left that bypass all natural forms of human life. You start with a cause, you join an NGO (a non-governmental organization), try to squeeze into a quango, enter local government, acquire the habit of dispensing other people’s money, and learn to play the political machine. All that can be achieved without risk and without ever doing what others would regard as an honest day’s work.

The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This freedom was enshrined in the American Constitution, defended in the face of the Victorian moralists by John Stuart Mill, and upheld in our time by the dissidents under communist and fascist dictatorships. So much of a shibboleth has it become, that commentators barely distinguish free speech from democracy, and regard both as the default positions of humanity – the positions to which we return if all oppressive powers are removed from us. It seems not to occur to people now that orthodoxy, conformity and the hounding of the dissident define the default position of mankind, or that there is no reason to think that democracies are any different in this respect from Islamic theocracies or one-party totalitarian states. Of course, the opinions that are suppressed change from one form of society to another, as do the methods of suppression. But we should be clear that to guarantee freedom of opinion goes to a certain extent against the grain of social life, and requires people to take risks that they may be reluctant to take. For in criticizing orthodoxy you are not just questioning a belief; you are threatening the social order that has been built on it. Moreover, orthodoxies are the more fiercely protected the more vulnerable they are.

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, but Admitting Loss

A religion is not something that occurs to you; nor does it emerge as the conclusion of an empirical investigation or an intellectual argument. It is something that you join, to which you are converted, or into which you are born. Losing the Christian faith is not merely a matter of doubting the existence of God, or the incarnation, or the redemption purchased on the Cross. It involves falling out of communion, ceasing to be ‘members in Christ’, as St Paul puts it, losing a primary experience of home. All religions are alike in this, and it is why they are so harsh on heretics: for heretics pretend to the benefits of membership, while belonging to other communities in other ways. This is not to say that there is nothing more to religion than the bond of membership. There is also doctrine, ritual, worship and prayer. There is the vision of God the creator, and the search for signs and revelations of the transcendental. There is the sense of the sacred, the sacrosanct, the sacramental and the sacrilegious. And in many cases there is also hope for the life to come. All those grow from the experience of social membership and also amend it, so that a religious community furnishes itself with an all-embracing Weltanschauung, together with rituals and ceremonies that affirm its existence as a social organism, and lay claim to its place in the world.

The loss of faith is therefore a loss of comfort, membership and home: it involves exile from the community that formed you, and for which you may always secretly yearn.

George Orwell wrote in 1941 that ‘the common people of England are without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries … And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost forgetting the name of Christ.’ This ‘tinge of Christian feeling’ had a source, and that source is the Anglican Church, whose messages have not been shouted in English ears like the harangues of the Ranters and the Puritans, but filtered through the landscape, through the web of spires, pinnacles and finials that stitched the townscape to the sky, through the hymns, carols and oratorios that rang out in all their assemblies, and through that fragment of the Prayer Book that many people still recite each day, promising to ‘forgive them that trespass against us’, while never quite sure what the word ‘trespass’ really means. The buildings that the Church of England maintains are not just symbols therefore: they are part of our national identity. They define our spiritual condition even in the midst of scepticism and unbelief. They stand in the landscape as a reminder of what we are and what we have been; and even if we look on them with the disenchanted eyes of modern people, we do so only by way of recognizing that, in their own quiet way, they are still enchanted. Hence those who strive to preserve them include many who have lost the habit of Christian worship, and even atheists like my father, who rejected that habit, and yet saw our churches as a part of our ‘heritage’, like the village streets around them and the landscape in which they are set. Indeed, our churches now rely for their survival more on their beauty than their use: but in doing so, they testify to the profound usefulness of beauty.

Conservation is about beauty; but it is also, for the very same reason, about history and its meaning. Some have a static conception of history, seeing it as the remains of past time, which we conserve as a book in which to read about things that have vanished. The test of the book is its accuracy, and once deemed to be part of our history, objects, landscapes and houses must be conserved as they were, with their authentic surroundings and details, as lessons for the restless visitor. This is the concept of history that you find in the American ‘heritage’ trails and historic landmarks: meticulously preserved ephemera of brick and timber, standing on concrete between hostile towers of glass. My father favoured rather a dynamic conception, according to which history is an aspect of the present, a living thing, influencing our projects and also changing under their influence. The past for him was not a book to be read, but a book to be written in. We learn from it, he believed, but only by discovering how to accommodate our actions and lifestyles to its pages. It is valuable to us because it contains people, without whose striving and suffering we ourselves would not exist. These people produced the physical contours of our country; but they also produced its institutions and its laws, and fought to preserve them. On any understanding of the web of social obligation, we owe them a duty of remembrance. We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born. Conservatism should be seen in that way, as part of a dynamic relation across generations.

This dynamic relation across generations is also what we mean, or ought to mean, by dwelling. At their best, our conservative endeavours are attempts to preserve a common dwelling-place – the place that is ours. And there is a deep connection in the human psyche between space and time. A locality is marked as ours through the time scale of the ‘we’. By bearing the imprint of former generations, a corner of the earth pleads for permanence. And in becoming permanent, it becomes a place, a somewhere. True landmarks identify places by testifying to time.