Conservatism 101

What is it?

Conservatives notoriously cannot seem to agree on what they want to conserve. As of 2025, we might say that a conservative is someone who opposes progressivism, “because reasons.” Among the reasons, we have:

• Man is fallen

• There are no solutions, only trade-offs (Sowell)

• It is easier to destroy than to build.

• Power corrupts (Acton).

• Little platoons (Burke).

• Associations (Tocqueville)

• Invisible hand (Smith)

• The seen and the unseen (Bastiat)

• Chesterton’s fence

About thirty years ago, Princeton University Press published an anthology titled Conservatism. Jerry Muller compiled the anthology and wrote the introduction, which, Tyler Cowen recently put it in his assorted links.

Muller lists various themes in conservative thought, including

• Human imperfection

More than any other animal, man is dependent upon other members of his species, and hence upon social institutions for guidance and direction.

Yes, the topic of human interdependence pervades my writing. And of course it is “the secret of our success” as Joseph Henrich put it.

• Epistemological modesty

The opposite of epistemological modesty is what philosophers call “naive realism,” meaning the disposition to believe that you see the world exactly as it is. It is fine for you to assume that your perceptions of the objects in your living room are accurate, but for complex social processes you should allow that you could be wrong.

The populist believes that his common sense gives him reliable understanding. The progressive believes that a credentialed technocrat has reliable understanding. Jeffrey Friedman termed this latter belief “second-order naive realism.”

• Institutions

that is, patterned social formations with their own rules, norms, rewards, and sanctions. While liberals typically view with suspicion the restraints and penalties imposed upon the individual by institutions, conservatives are disposed to protect the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions because they believe human society cannot flourish without them.

This follows from human imperfection. Without institutions, you end up with what Hobbes called “the war of all against all.” But today conservatives are not so disposed to protect the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions. Thus the conservative message is ambiguous.

• Critique of “Theory”

Conservative theorists repeatedly decry the application to society and politics of a mode of thought which they characterize as overly abstract, rationalistic, and removed from experience. Whether termed “the abuse of reason” (by Burke), “rationalism in politics” (by Oakeshott), or “constructivism” (by Hayek), [I would add “the man of system” (Smith)], the conservative accusation against liberal and radical thought is fundamentally the same: liberals and radicals are said to depend upon a systematic, deductivist, universalistic form of reasoning which fails to account for the complexity and peculiarity of the actual institutions they seek to transform

• Unanticipated Consequences, Latent Functions, and the

  Functional Interdependence of Social Elements

In the 1770s, for example, Justus Möser would argue against governmental measures to do away with the social sanctions against illegitimate children, on the grounds that such measures decreased the incentives to marry, thus weakening the institution of marriage, on which so much of social well-being depended.

And look where we are now.

A final word

Thirty years after Muller composed his introduction, many conservatives are fed up with important institutions, including higher education and mainstream media. This has turned many conservatives into “brokenists.” They are not disposed to protect the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions.

I believe that this creates a need for conservatives to discuss what it is that they wish to conserve. The lack of consensus on how to approach institutions is a weakness of the contemporary conservative movement.