Books reviewed in this article:

Against Liberalism, by John Kekes (Cornell University Press, 256 pp., $16.95)

A Case for Conservatism, by John Kekes (Cornell University Press, 256 pp., $29.95)

After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, by Paul Edward Gottfried (Princeton University Press, 185 pp., $27.95)

Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought From David Hume to the Present, edited by Jerry Z. Muller (Princeton University Press, 464 pp., $19.95)

The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, by Virginia Postrel(Free Press, 295 pp., $25)

I.

In 1948, Richard Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences, a book that would become, according to Frank Meyer, "the fons et origo of the contemporary American conservative movement." Weaver explored the consequences of one particular idea: that there were no transcendental truths lying beyond the capacity of man to make sense out of the world. Scientific and philosophical rationalism led to the denial of original sin, Weaver argued, and so man was cut off from eternals and forced to live with nothingness. Ideas, then, could be very pernicious things; but the title of Weaver's book--chosen, incidentally, by his publisher--left the opposite impression. For if bad ideas had consequences, so presumably did good ideas. Conservatives had never quite lived down Mill's description of them as "the stupid party"--especially in America, whose best conservative minds, Henry James and T.S. Eliot, preferred to live abroad. Weaver's manifesto was read to suggest that American conservatives must develop ideas of their own.

Yet another conclusion, equally pertinent to the fate of conservatism in contemporary America, could be drawn from Weaver's title. If ideas have consequences, so does the absence of ideas. Nothing is more important to an understanding of contemporary conservatism, I think, than this stark but little noticed fact: despite decades of trying, and a golden opportunity handed to them by liberal failure, conservatives in America have been unable to come up with any sustained and significant ideas capable of giving substance to their complaints against the contemporary world. I say ideas, not slogans.

This should have been the golden age of conservatism. Liberals--understood in the New Deal, Keynesian sense of the term--had quite a run for their money; but time runs out on even the most consensual of philosophies, and by the 1980s the twin triumphs of Reaganism and Thatcherism appeared to herald a revolution in thought and in policy. No longer would conservatism be a " remnant," attractive only to "superfluous" men. (The words are Albert J. Nock's.) Barely containing their triumphalism, conservative intellectuals bypassed universities to create think tanks that spewed out books, articles, and position papers at dizzying rates. No activity of the modern state--from its economic interventions to its drug policy--was left uncriticized.

And so liberals became the tired party, tied down by their constituents to unimaginative tinkerings at the margins. 1968ers discovered, to their astonishment, that younger intellectuals were more likely to be attracted to the right than to be impressed by war stories about Mayor Daley or Bull Connor. The term "social critic," once reserved for the cantankerous C. Wright Mills, now seemed to apply to the cantankerous Allan Bloom. An ideology that had been attractive primarily to Southern racists, Midwestern isolationists, aristocratic European emigres, and devout Catholics all of a sudden dominated the dinner parties of Georgetown and Manhattan.

Out of such ferment, two things should have happened. One is that someone should have written a serious, original, philosophically fundamental book that would do for conservatism what John Rawls had done for liberalism: systematize its principles, or, if that were considered uncongenial to the conservative point of view, explore in analytical depth its relevance for contemporary conundrums. The other is that, at least in part based on such a book, governments should have introduced programs that not only marked a sharp break with liberal ideas (there were plenty of those), but also demonstrated that conservative policies could work on their own terms. Neither happened.

Given the political excitement of the 1980s, the governmental failings of conservatism in the 1990s are nothing short of astonishing. In all of Europe, only one country, Spain, can be said to have a conservative government, and its leader, Jose Maria Aznar, emphasizes his belief in compassionate governme parties in France, Italy, Germany, and Austria. They are in disarray, torn apart by rivalries and factionalism and unable to move beyond the electoral bases that they established some time ago. In Britain, to be sure, Tony Blair sometimes sounds like Margaret Thatcher, but not even his co-optive political skills can explain why the Tory Party collapsed as thoroughly as it did. It is the absence of a significant conservative force anywhere in Europe--and not, as one might have expected just a few years back, the defensive weakness of unions and Social Democrats--that has enabled the European Union to move forward so fast.

Even more striking is the near complete collapse of conservative government in the United States. Disenchanted with liberalism, Americans voted for Ronald Reagan and then continued to love him because he never took the conservatism that he preached all that seriously. They elected Bill Clinton, and then decided to keep a check on him by supporting Republicans for the House and the Senate. Conservatives responded to the latter opportunity first by trying to shut down the government and then, when that proved to be a disaster, by trying to shut down the government again. Americans took one look at the conservative members of the House of Representatives who managed the Senate trial of Bill Clinton and reached an unequivocal conclusion: if conservatism means a powerful state pushing its nose into private affairs, judging the morality of others while acting immorally itself, trampling on tradition, scorning bipartisanship, trying systematically to overturn the results of two elections, and all along insisting that the voice of the people ought to be ignored, then they did not very much like conservatism. Even if our next president is George W. Bush, it is hard to imagine conservatives having a free hand to transform America in their image.

Surely the governmental failure of conservatism is one of the consequences of the failure of its ideologists to produce lasting ideas. The financial resources poured into the think tanks were enormous, but all the furious publication notwithstanding, conservatives seemed congenitally unable to write significant books. Irving Kristol's magnum opus was a collection of articles. Roger Scruton, the leading conservative intellectual in Britain, turned to the defense of fox-hunting and joined with leftist romantics to denounce the corrosive effects of cities. James Q. Wilson and Mary Ann Glendon wrote thoughtful and persuasive books on bureaucracies and rights, and Wilson dealt with larger themes in The Moral Sense, but they still seemed to deal with the parts rather than the whole of a conservative mentality. Charles Murray, an especially well-financed conservative policy wonk, found himself unable to compete with social scientists on their technical terrain; Losing Ground and The Bell Curve exposed him as little more than a mean- spirited soul spouting quasi-academic language. The most interesting writers that Peter Steinfels listed in The Neo-Conservatives in 1979--Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset--turned out to be either liberals or people with serious reservations about the conservative campaign against affirmative action.

Instead of moving forward, conservatism actually moved backward in the 1990s. Before Barry Goldwater, as George Nash recounts in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, conservatives were bitterly divided among libertarians, anti-majoritarians, and anti-Communists. Frank Meyer's contribution to the movement was to push for "fusionism," a way of uniting conservatives around key principles while avoiding the issues that drove Friedrich von Hayek--whose faith in free markets allowed little place for right-wing hostility toward progress--to write essays such as "Why I Am Not a Conservative." Such unity, always precarious, is now in complete disarray. The anti-Communist wing of conservatism has had no role to play since 1989. The gap between libertarians and Christian conservatives in the Republican Party is as wide, and as unstable, as the gap that once existed between Southern Bourbons and African Americans in the Democratic Party. If there are any anti-majoritarian aristocrats still thumbing their noses at the masses, they are irrelevant to a movement that now thinks of itself as populist. These days, conservatives can bear to be in the same room with each other so long as they never talk about ideas.

Some day the history of this great intellectual failure will be written. It will likely emphasize the paradox of success: conservatives got too much money, and too many votes, too soon. It may have been wise for conservative thinkers to avoid the universities--where no idea is ever too arcane--but think tanks proved to have problems of their own: worried about pleasing their funders, unable to resist the lure of talk shows and press conferences, and exacerbating ideology rather than sharpening it, conservative think tanks destroyed any possibility of serious intellectual work. And convinced that their ideas were winning support from the voters, conservatives saw no need to lead rather than to follow public opinion--until the Clinton imbroglio, when their invocation of Burkean theories of representation proved insincere.

But as important as such explanations may be, they do not go far enough. For the conservative failure may not be a matter of this decision or that. There is another possibility to be considered, which is that conservatism itself is an impossible idea, at least for the twentieth century. Twenty years of conservative excitement seemed to give the lie to the theory of Louis Hartz that no conservatism was possible in the United States; but the conservative failure in this decade suggests that Hartz may have been right all along.

II.

If conservatism is about anything, it is about balance. Poised somewhere between the radical's desire to move forward and the reactionary's insistence that backward is the only way to go, the conservative emphasizes proportion in all things. The trick is to get the mixture right: a sufficient amount of passion cut with just enough reason; a willingness to accept change in order that things be kept essentially the same; an appreciation of the particular without a total rejection of the universal; a reverence for tradition and faith set off against a defense of the market and its insistence on individual freedom. Yet balance is precisely what contemporary conservatives seem to lack.

This deformity may be due to their inheritance. Two great Europeans have disproportionately shaped contemporary American conservatism, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss. Almost nothing that one said could be balanced with anything that the other said. Even more importantly, neither could find balance in his own work. Oakeshott was a proponent of Little Conservatism--a disposition, he called it, as if all that being conservative required was the right psychology. Strauss taught a Big Conservatism; his ideas were rarely expressed in the revolutionary style of the manifesto, but anyone who took him seriously understood that the achievement of his ideals would require a radical reconstruction of the contemporary world. Yet there was one point on which the ideas of these two thinkers converged. If Little Conservatism left the world pretty much in place because it was resigned to defeat, Big Conservatism also left the world in place because its ambitions were utterly unrealizable.

Little Conservatism is temperamentally unsuited to risk or, in Oakeshott's terms, to the "dangerous and the difficult." One sees in Oakeshott's writings a hostility toward planning, a weariness with proclamation, a distrust of experts, and, above all else, a suspicion not only of grand schemes to change the world but also of grand ideas designed to understand the world. Oakeshott is to conservatism what Isaiah Berlin is to liberalism: an essayist rather than a systematizer, a conversationalist more than a sermonizer, a writer who, while not immodest about displaying his learning, also takes pains to make himself clear.

Human beings are not by nature conservative, Oakeshott believed. Fascinated by the new and the unknown, they are too quick to throw caution to the winds in the hope that they can find something better tomorrow than what surrounds them today. If it is to resist such trends, conservatism cannot seek its own goals too quickly or too ambitiously. "What makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible," Oakeshott wrote, as if to Strauss, "is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief ... that governing is a specific and limited activity."

Resigned as he was to offering instructions in how to live properly, Oakeshott was not a theorist of a conservative road to power. If anything, he seemed to have anticipated the idea that conservatives might want to gain control of government in order to reform human nature--and warned against it. Conservatives do not win the battle for ideas by insisting on one right way to live and then trying to harness the force of the state to ensure that people live the way that conservatives believe they should live. Quite the contrary. Much like contemporary liberals from Habermas to Rorty, Oakeshott admired the conversation--"the greatest but also the most hardly sustained of all the accomplishments of mankind," he called it--as a model for political education. "In a conversation the participants are not engaged in an inquiry or a debate; there is no 'truth' to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought." This is a drawing-room conservatism, a high- table complacency, lacking the passions and the convictions that can stir masses to repudiate the decadent liberalism around them.

Strauss could hardly be said to have wanted to stir masses. If anything, Strauss clung to then-very-fashionable ideas about mass society that saw ordinary people as little more than "unintelligent, uninformed, deceitful, and irrational." But Strauss's Big Conservatism could not be further in sensibility or in ambition from Oakeshott's Little Conservatism. Many of Strauss's students insist that their mentor was not a conservative at all, that Strauss was, properly understood, a liberal--even, in his own way, a democrat. Strauss himself once said that the friend of liberal democracy should not be a flatterer of liberal democrats.

But these are unpersuasive definitions. If you are prepared to believe that liberalism is another word for "human excellence or being honorable and decent," and that liberalism existed in pre-Socratic Athens, and that one of the greatest liberals of all time was Lucretius, then, yes, Strauss was a liberal. But if you believe that liberalism is a political philosophy committed in one way or another to the proposition that individuals ought to have the autonomy to determine for themselves the appropriate morality to guide their lives, then Strauss must be understood as one of liberalism's most implacable critics.

Genuine autonomy could never be realized in a modern democracy, according to Strauss. In order to lead good lives, people needed a standard of excellence that could only be provided by a cultivated elite. The ancients had such standards, and, if properly read, their texts could offer guidance to those able to read between the lines to divine the truths that they contained. And while such capable readers do exist--Strauss left no doubt that he was one of them--modern people, attracted to the superficial and the vulgar, will surely be unwilling to heed them.

Like Oakeshott, Strauss had no interest in developing a plan to shape the world in the image of his ideas, though he did produce a number of disciples who pursued careers in the political world. Yet Strauss possessed a temperament far removed from Oakeshottian caution. His was the voice of didactic instruction: a one-way conversation, if a conversation at all. His goal was Truth--the one unambiguous standard for judging political action. Reading between his lines, one can detect hints of a mentality not altogether dissimilar from Lenin's theory of a vanguard party. Those blessed with the correct ideas just might come to serve as modern princes capable of leading their society, unbeknown to its members, to greater excellence. No wonder that for so many reading Strauss was an exhilarating experience. Here, in its cryptic way, was a chance to save the world.

American conservatism is torn between Oakeshott and Strauss, or torn between its psychology and its politics. If it lives by its principles of gradualism and moderation, it is prevented from offering a program bold enough to grasp history and bring it to a stop. If it seeks boldness in vision, it loses all connection with the sort of conservative temper that might prove attractive to ordinary people upset with the disruptions that modern capitalism has produced in their lives. The legacy of Oakeshott and Strauss is not a rich body of ideas upon which contemporary conservatism can build a philosophical and political worldview. What they have bequeathed to conservatism is a spectacular contradiction--a reminder of the impossibility of conservatism in the modern age.

III.

No wonder, then, that so many contemporary conservatives spend so much of their time attacking liberalism. Nobody has undertaken that task with more energy and zeal than the British philosopher John Gray, whose Post-Liberalism, in its shift from defending Thatcher to defending the Greens, remains consistent in its distaste for the liberalism that lies in between, Gray's admiration for Isaiah Berlin notwithstanding. A recent American version of this familiar genre comes from the philosopher John Kekes.

As Kekes acknowledges in Against Liberalism, there is no one easily identifiable thing that he can oppose; there have been many liberal writers, some of whose ideas are distinct from others. Still, Kekes believes that liberalism does promote certain fundamental values, and that the most fundamental of them is autonomy, which "requires the kind of control that involves an unforced choice among alternatives that the agent has reasonably evaluated in the light of sufficient understanding of the significance of choosing one among the available alternatives."

The problem, for Kekes, is that evil exists in the world. If we allow individuals to be autonomous, then they may use their unfettered powers to do evil things. Under such conditions, liberals face an impossible dilemma: if they insist on autonomy, they enhance the amount of cruelty in the world, but if they demand the diminishment of cruelty first, they undermine their commitment to autonomy. Much of liberal thought, says Kekes, is devoted to unsuccessful attempts to avoid this dilemma. When liberals argue backward from the fact of evil to the view that anyone who commits such an act could not have been "really" autonomous, for no autonomous person would choose an evil course, they are attaching preconditions to agency which, whether they admit it or not, reduce the agent's autonomy to establish his own conditions, and in this way compromising themselves philosophically.

And other values prominently identified with liberalism face similar internal inconsistencies, in Kekes's account. Liberals believe that a person cannot be autonomous if his conditions of life are so unequal with respect to others that he is unable to develop his capacities for autonomy. Yet programs designed to help him achieve such equality, because they require takings from others, will reduce autonomy elsewhere. Worse, a commitment to equality means taking resources away from those whose lives manifest important virtues such as self-control and giving them to those whose lives, for better or worse, have been marked by vice. Hence liberalism, despite its self-proclaimed affinity with justice, is really unjust, since it is incapable of honoring the real meaning of justice: arrangements which allow individuals to get what they deserve. Finally, Kekes argues that liberals are correct to insist on the importance of pluralism, but that their single-minded pursuit of the goal of autonomy, which is viewed as trumping any and all other considerations, gives liberalism an excessively monist character.

Kekes believes that if one can simply point out the logical inconsistencies of liberalism, then its unworkability will become apparent. But political philosophies are not developed to meet tests of scrutiny developed by academic philosophers. Any comprehensive set of ideas whose purpose is to guide individuals and societies to do the right thing could, of course, strive for consistent principles; and if it achieved perfect consistency, it might, depending on one's taste, be attractive as a moral philosophy. But it would be useless as a political philosophy. The realm of politics is a realm of inconsistencies--between values, goals, strategies, persons, groups, states. If there were only one way to attain justice, liberty, or equality-- or if those terms referred to the same good called by different names--then there would be no clash of people trying to achieve those ends, and therefore no need for all those institutions--parties, leaders, representative bodies, interest groups, and campaigns--that exist to adjudicate between competing ends.

This does not mean that we ought to celebrate political philosophies for their incoherence. But surely it is a primary fact for any philosophy of politics that human beings are complicated creatures who often desire mutually exclusive ends. For this reason, political philosophies developed to guide the actions of human beings need to be concerned with the actual consequences, and the peculiarities of human psychology, and the variations of time and place, and the likelihood of unanticipated consequences. Conservatism, at its most attractive, welcomes contingency over consistency. That is what makes it so odd for Kekes, in the name of conservatism, to criticize liberalism because its worldview leads to dilemmas that in turn demand political choices. To charge liberalism with incoherence in this sense is really to acknowledge its strength.

Still, there are some very unattractive varieties of contemporary liberalism, and Kekes has properly identified them. One winces, for example, to read Ronald Dworkin on abortion and euthanasia. He begins in good liberal fashion by appealing to moderation and reason, and he concludes by defining his principles in a way that works to the advantage only of those who support his version of what liberalism requires. His liberalism is a rigged liberalism. Yet the problem with such versions of liberalism is that they strive for precisely what Kekes demands of a political philosophy: a relentless commitment to principle. It may be true, as Kekes points out, that they fail to achieve that commitment; but what makes such versions of liberalism illiberal is that they try in the first place. Liberalism remains essentially an unfinished project. Its tenacity would be impossible without a certain protean quality that is bound to frustrate its critics. Against such a target, Kekes's bullets cannot even wound.

Paul edward gottfried, like John Gray and John Kekes, is a conservative who cannot help but include liberalism in the title of his book. After Liberalism begins, as do so many of these kinds of books, by acknowledging that the philosophy to which it is opposed takes many forms: once identified with individual freedom against the designs of the state, liberalism has become a defense of statism. Whatever form they take, however, all contemporary versions of liberalism, or so Gottfried wishes to show, are committed to a particular version of the good, and they are not averse to forcing people's adherence to that version when they are otherwise inclined. Sometimes this element of coercion is hidden; Rawls, according to Gottfried, never discusses power, and shies away from any realistic consideration of what form the difference principle should take in practice because "liberals do not want to be seen as imposing their will upon others." At other times, liberals are quite content to reveal their debts to statists such as Hegel, for they have been the most explicit advocates for the emergence of an administrative class determined to insure obedience to its vision.

In recent years public administration has lost much of its luster, as it became identified with cumbersome public planning and governmental inefficiency. But other forms of liberal statism survive, as Gottfried reminds us. Liberals, for one thing, are strongly committed to a form of therapeutic politics. In theory, therapeutic ideals are pluralistic in the sense that, unlike forms of religious absolutism, they insist on a relativistic stance toward competing conceptions of the good. But in an age in which the state has gained the power that the church has lost, pluralism is a sham, for it will inevitably side only with those conceptions of the good which have the power of the state behind them--and those will be liberal conceptions.

Since the managerial state and the ideology of pluralism have been "the defining features of contemporary Western life," liberalism is, as Gramsci would have put it, hegemonic. It is true, Gottfried acknowledges, that people want what the liberal state provides; they have not exactly demanded a full rollback of the welfare state. Yet Gottfried has no doubts that the price of liberalism's hegemony is huge. For we have been taught, by thinkers from Cicero to Carl Schmitt, that the subject of politics is the majesty of power. It should reward the virtuous and punish the wicked. Its vast powers should be used sparingly but purposively to "shape and reshape people's lives." The liberal state, with its vast reach of powers, certainly shapes people's lives, but without the majesty, and without sufficient checks. Hiding its coercive capacities behind a language of caring, liberalism (this is Gottfried speaking) is both adrift and power-hungry, an unstable combination bound to carry out fantastic damage before its powers can be brought under control.

In their own way, Kekes and Gottfried are fighting the war between Little Conservatism and Big Conservatism that was begun by Oakeshott and Strauss. Gottfried writes in the apocalyptic tones of Big Conservatism. He makes no attempt to apply the tools of analytic philosophy to an examination of liberalism's incoherence, as if modern philosophy were a part of the problem with which liberalism is inevitably linked. Gottfried harkens back to an even older version of American conservatism than Straussianism, to an older tone (it is Richard Weaver's tone) of hopeless rage against the modern world. It is almost refreshing to read a writer so reactionary that he is willing to defend the authors of The Bell Curve, to explain away the anti-Semitism of Jean-Marie Le Pen, to describe the racist Southern League as a "populist- regionalist movement," and to characterize writers such as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and myself as socialist.

Gottfried is so far outside the mainstream of conventional thinking that his book, for all its quirks, is actually quite interesting. He is correct to see Mill's On Liberty as a transitional document in the transformation of liberalism into an administrative force, for that short book does, alas, elucidate a "vision of a new clerisy crafting and directing a democratic order." Similarly, Gottfried quite rightly sees a tension in the writings of John Dewey between his proclaimed commitment to pluralism and his admiration for administrative planning. (It is not a contradiction that can be resolved by such Deweyan deceptions as faith in science.)

Unlike many American conservatives, moreover, Gottfried is multilingual, and he brings to the attention of his readers obscure European writers who are as offbeat as he is. Still, there is no way that Gottfried can overcome the fact that his book feasts off the liberalism it denounces. Citing the work of Stephen Holmes, Gottfried points out that liberalism survives by attacking its enemies. Yet Holmes's tone is the exception among liberals, whereas Gottfried's is the rule among conservatives. Finding fault with liberalism continues to substitute for the conservative understanding of the modern world that never seems to issue from the pens of conservative writers.

IV.

Recognizing that something must be said about what conservatism is, John Kekes published A Case for Conservatism as a follow-up to Against Liberalism. As the reader might suppose from his philosophical criticism of liberal principles, Kekes believes, unlike Oakeshott, that it is possible to offer a systematic treatment of what it means to be a conservative. Yet Kekes's conservatism remains Little Conservatism, for in his effort to show that one can "articulate the basic beliefs of conservatism, show that they are true, and defend them against criticism," he robs conservatism of high historical and intellectual drama.

Liberals argue that rights, justice, and equality come first, while other conditions--prosperity, security, or order--come later, if at all. But conservatives, according to Kekes, believe in the value of all these goods. They do not establish one or two of them as always "trumping" the others. Instead they resolve conflicts among the values temporarily, based not on principle but on what works in specific circumstances to maximize all of them. This makes conservatives reflective rather than traditional. They cannot merely defend what exists, or what used to exist; they must show that certain sets of arrangements actually do work to permit as many people as possible to lead good lives. Kekes's conservatism is decidedly Humean. It does not set itself up in opposition to the Enlightenment. It understands itself as offering a more realistic way of achieving Enlightenment goals than theories of utopian perfectibility.

In theory, Kekes continues, conservatism is open to many ways that good lives can be realized, but it is prepared to rule out of bounds possibilities that would make leading good lives impossible. Hence conservatism is a philosophy of limits. There will be certain freedoms that people will claim which, for conservatism to be possible, will have to be denied. Lest we assume that conservatism stands for repression, however, we first must recognize that what is permissible and what is not permissible exists on three levels. There are certain things that are universally true--for example, that murder or slavery so violate human dignity that they cannot be allowed. Other things are permissible or not, depending on societal considerations: what is not tolerated in some places--say, homosexuality--may be tolerated in other places. Finally, there is an individual level of morality. Each person, by participating with others around him, will or will not find a match between the forbidden and his own conceptions of good character. Since conservatism recognizes these three levels, Kekes argues, it is more committed to pluralism than is liberalism. "Conservatives can readily acknowledge that some particular beliefs hold on one level and go on to deny without inconsistency that it holds on another level." The philosophical incoherence that he denounces in liberalism magically becomes flexibility when it appears in conservatism.

As he would be the first to acknowledge, Kekes's version of conservatism is not one that all conservatives would share. If one considers the problem historically, indeed, very few would have shared this version, for conservatism developed as a defense of those social classes, customs, and ideals that were left in the dust by the rapid development of capitalism--and, eventually, the democracy which followed in its wake. "I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad," wrote James Fitzjames Stephen in 1874. Those Strauss-like sentiments, it seems to me, constitute true conservatism, and Paul Gottfried, who quotes this sentence longingly, is a conservative because he admires them.

Thinkers who preferred some kind of natural aristocracy to modern democracy could be more readily be found in Europe, where there was an aristocracy, than in the United States. In his useful anthology Conservatism, Jerry Z. Muller provides a well thought-out selection of classical texts, from the obvious choices of Hume, de Maistre, and Burke (though not Coleridge) to the more obscure. Among the latter was Justus Moser (1720-94), who, in arguing against a well-meaning Habsburg ordinance giving illegitimate children the same rights as legitimate ones, sounds eerily contemporary when he writes that "in some states more has been done for whores and their children in recent decades than for wives in the last millennium."

Muller does include some Americans in his book--James Madison, Rufus Choate, Irving Kristol--and he could have chosen others: Irving Babbitt or the Southern Agrarians. But in defending the notion that one can properly speak of an American conservatism, Muller also acknowledges the central fact that what American conservatism tries to conserve are the fruits of a constitutional system won through revolution. For this reason, the reader comes away from his anthology convinced that conservatism, if it means anything distinctive at all, means the defense of an order that never really took hold in the United States.

This impression is reinforced by Muller's introductory attempt to offer a definition of conservatism. Rooted more in sociology than in moral philosophy, Muller defines the essence of conservatism as "historical utilitarianism." The very survival of an institution is a reason for believing that it must serve some purpose which ought to be defended. Familiarity, as Muller puts it, breeds comfort, not contempt. Such a definition would seem to make little room for Hayek, for the market is a relatively young institution. Still, Muller points out, it evolves in a Darwinian sense as the most efficient mechanism for what it does, and in that sense it represents a form of historical utilitarianism. Once we understand the premium that conservatives place on historical survival, we can also understand why conservatives are skeptical of human reason. "If there you wish to conserve all, consecrate all" : de Maistre's dictum has its own power. Institutions that have survived historically are likely to be revered only if we do not ask how they came into being and whether they still work.

Muller argues that conservatism is not necessarily an anti-Enlightenment phenomenon. There were, as he puts it, many Enlightenments, some more hospitable to conservatism than others. But his inclusion of de Maistre and thinkers like him also makes clear the degree to which conservatism finds unacceptable one particularly powerful form taken by modernity: the notion that popular majorities using their own mental powers can choose for themselves the political and social arrangements under which they will live. To assemble the best conservative writers, as Muller has done, is to raise the awkward question of whether elites in Western history have done enough to justify deference to their once-unquestioned privileges. Voters who have observed those elites lead the twentieth century into one disaster after another are not apt to vote for platforms which ask them to accept their own intellectual inferiority.

Since conservatism began as a protest against modern capitalistic democracy, it faces dilemmas as unresolvable as liberalism's dilemmas. The conservative dilemma, in Kekesian terms, is this. For conservatives to believe in any transcendental values against which actual societies ought to be judged, they have to assert the priority of first principles. But the first principles that conservatives have historically asserted--God's will, natural right, rule of the aristocracy, racial supremacy--all render them irrelevant to societies in which popular rule is viewed as a preciously guarded asset. Conservatism can be faithful to its historical roots, it can be intellectually elegant and bursting with philosophical integrity--and completely irrelevant to the actual societies which exist in the world today. Or it can be a significant force in the modern world, but only by becoming opportunistic, unwilling to assert its true agenda, and eventually transforming itself into the very liberalism it claims to detest.

Kekes's A Case for Conservatism is a valuable book because it demonstrates how far one self-described conservative is willing to go in the latter direction. Consider Kekes's treatment of the question of what moral beliefs and practices a society ought to permit. At his universal level, no problem exists, since a society seeking to make good lives possible would make illegal those practices that violate human respect and dignity at all times and in all places. But once we move from the universal level to the societal, the issue becomes dicier. At that level, Kekes argues, the limits of what is permissible and what is not permissible ought to be guided by the moral traditions of the particular society in question, for those traditions have become a "second nature" deeply embedded in the consciousness of those who live in that society. Yet the traditions of some societies at some times have included barbaric, immoral practices.

May a conservative criticize the traditions of his society if those traditions violate human dignity? Kekes answers in the affirmative. He is not one of those who believes that if you like Sicily, you must like the Mafia. One can--though Kekes does not say how--separate out the bad from the good without damaging the tradition. And even good moral traditions, when they are "unresponsive to technological, demographic, or other changes in the non- moral circumstances of life," can be criticized, and so can traditions that " may be too inflexible to incorporate changes suggested by contact with other traditions." In contrast to those conservatives who insist on the need to reinforce virtue, Kekes would not have society abolish practices associated with "racists, anti-Semites, creationists, paedophiles, pornographers, and so forth." The proper conservative attitude toward those "who live according to their beliefs without violating any required conventions" is to tolerate them without extending them any respect.

Kekes's little conservatism is so paltry that it is unwilling to assert any first principles at all upon which conservative morality can be grounded. And this reluctance extends not just to social traditions. Kekes is not a fideist; his conservatism is based on reason, not faith. One finds in A Case for Conservatism no defense of aristocracy as a way of life better able to inculcate conservative values than a society organized by the market. Indeed, Kekes does not even offer as a primary justification for conservatism the most liberal of possible justifications: meritocracy. All that is left is the sense that justice consists in rewarding people for working hard and obeying the rules, a principle which, according to Kekes, is violated by the redistributive policies of the modern welfare state. Thus a book that wants to uncover the "basic beliefs" of conservatism and to prove that they are " true" offers instead a menu designed to avoid the indigestible in favor of bland tastes unlikely to offend anyone except the most doctrinaire liberals.

The problem in all this is not that conservatism is philosophically incoherent, that it is forced to choose between its principles and programs that violate its principles. Ambiguity gives political philosophies, whether liberal or conservative, their character. No, the problem is that the dilemmas that structure conservative choices--especially among those writers, including contemporary Straussians, who have a bit more conservative spine than Kekes--are illusory. It is difficult to choose between liberty and equality, individual freedom and respect for law, oneness and diversity. Modern society forces upon its citizens one situation after another in which their basic beliefs are in conflict. But all these very real choices are between one liberal value and another. Americans are not asked to choose between a theocracy and a state committed to the separation of church and state; between legalizing slavery and abolishing it; between restricting the vote to property-holders and expanding it to all adults.

Both Gottfried and Kekes praise conservatism for its realism. It has, they claim, an essentially pessimistic outlook on the world. Yet the idea that conservatism is identified with a tragic view of life, and that liberalism is given to Candide-like optimism, is long gone. Since the tragic choices that modern people have to make are between competing liberal goods, it is liberalism which wrestles with the actual realities of politics in the modern world.

Kekes is careful to say that he did not write his book to influence conservative politics in the world around him, and Gottfried barely seems to care whether his version of conservatism could ever be made electorally appealing. Yet both books help us understand why conservatism never emerged as a true governing philosophy in the late twentieth century. Conservatism is a choice between two conceptions of the good one of which can never be chosen. It is not merely that we cannot go back to a system of Greek virtue or aristocratic privilege; we cannot even discharge a president who committed adultery. With no anchor on one side, conservatism lacks, as liberalism did in its nineteenth-century utopian visions, a sense of responsibility, a Weberian understanding of the ways in which power can obtain some objectives only by foreclosing others.

Kekes demonstrates the irresponsibility of having no real choices to make by redefining conservatism so that it is most things for most people. Gottfried, by contrast, offers a vision of conservatism so austere as to be of almost no interest to any people. Both responses betray an unease with the actual business of governance, and it may well be this that makes conservatism in modern form unappealing to large numbers of voters. They want to elect politicians who are cognizant of the realities of power. All too often conservatives, the first in the Western political tradition to write openly and honestly about power, fail to convince them that they can be responsible in the exercise of it. Fifty years after Oakeshott and Strauss, conservatism remains unable to decide what it really is about.

V.

The best argument for conservatism with which I am familiar comes from Virginia Postrel, the editor of Reason magazine. One should not assume that because Postrel's magazine is libertarian in origin, and because libertarians are sometimes thought of as being on the right, she writes in defense of conservatism. The Future and Its Enemies is a no-holds-barred attack on all forms of conservatism. But at a time when at least some conservatives have more in common with liberals than they are prepared to admit, it takes a true opponent of conservatism to reveal its potential strengths; and one cannot find a temperament more opposed to stasis than Postrel's.

Postrel divides up the way we think and act in the world into two categories. There is stasis and there is dynamism. Stasists seek to keep the world as it is; or, if they adhere to a reactionary version, to take the world back to some place it was. They come in all political colorations. Pat Buchanan, The Weekly Standard, Leon Kass, William Bennett, Ross Perot, and John Gray, all of whom are or were on the right end of the spectrum, are stasists. So are Benjamin Barber, Daniel Bell, Jeremy Rifkin, Al Gore, Christopher Lasch, The Nation, and Kirkpatrick Sale, all of whom are usually classified, in one way or another, as being on the left. Their urges, Postrel asserts, are uniformly repressive. It matters less what they want to ban or to limit--foreign competition, Wal-Mart, Big Macs, rock music, shopping malls, ski mobiles, pornography, genetic engineering, hedonism, or immigrants--than their certainty that they know the one best way to bring order to a chaotic world.

Dynamists are less well known, says Postrel, because most of them are doers rather than thinkers. They are the people who develop the Web, understand how species evolve, restructure companies, subvert government regulations, flout racial and ethnic categories, play beach volleyball, and invent new technologies. Opponents of inflexible systems are unlikely to write treatises, but their understanding of how the world actually works can be seen in the writings of Esther Dyson, Hernando de Soto, Tom Peters, and Jonathan Rauch. Dynamists, says Postrel, are "the party of life." Celebrating systems that have no closed ends, they recognize that rules must be kept as simple as possible because nobody can predict unanticipated consequences. They are not against order, but they are against design. Systems will find their own ways to reduce complexity, and we are better off allowing them to do so than imposing artificial restraints. A dynamic world is not built top-down based on expertise. It is created bottom-up based on local knowledge. There is no one best way. There is only trial and error.

Postrel's dynamist manifesto is, appropriately, a lively, engaging, and thought-provoking book. She is surely correct that temperamental factors such as the fear of change transcend the political categories of left and right. She is also correct to note that we seem to be going through something of an intellectual revolution: in biology, ecology, economics, computer science, and demography, scholars and theorists are voguishly emphasizing unplanned dynamic change.

Still, translating all this ferment into an appealing political outlook is no easy task. Postrel fails at it. For there is no compelling evidence that the way systems evolve in nature or in technology holds any lessons at all for understanding how societies grow or people develop. And to the degree that we know anything about the goods that people value, we know that temperaments not only vary between people, they vary within people. Nearly everyone wants closure about some things some of the time, which is why they are unlikely to give their assent to a vision of the world that asks them to take risks all the time in everything that they do.

For a book designed to influence how people ought to live, there is relatively little in Postrel's book about how people actually do live. To be sure, Postrel cites Jane Jacobs and Joel Garreau on cities, but these are thinkers for whom cities are not just interesting places but also metaphors for the human condition. And that is the problem with Postrel's many examples of dynamism from the worlds of technology, nature, and migration: they are all metaphors. It is interesting to know that popular music or slang evolve because practitioners refuse to follow strict rules, and prefer to apply their own creativity and initiative to the materials available to them. But does this mean that we should pay no attention to time-honored conventions as we worship God, raise children, choose friends, search for moral principles, or decide what to read? Life as it actually is lived--by real people, in communities, bound through generations, searching for identity--bears little if any relationship to the ways in which species evolve or weather systems develop. Chaos theory is fine for numbers. As a principle for how humans ought to live, it is extremely unimpressive.

Indeed, it may be that people crave stability and predictability in some parts of their lives because other aspects of their lives have become unstable and unpredictable. Compared to the security sought by the generation that experienced world war and depression, younger Americans are certainly more open to innovation and circumstance. But they also hedge their bets. People may vote for Republicans in Congress to stimulate the economy, but then they also elect Democratic presidents to protect Social Security. They will invest in high-growth stocks, but they will also put something in government bonds. They may be open to sexual adventure, but they usually calm down and form lasting relationships. They still buy insurance and take out thirty-year mortgages when interest rates fall.

Postrel cites the economic historian Joel Mokyr's warning that periods of technological dynamism rarely last a long time: "Sooner or later the forces of conservatism, the 'if-it-ain't-broke-don'tfix-it,' the 'if-God-had-wanted- us-to-fly-He-would-have-given-us-wings,' and the 'not-invented-here-so-it- can't-possibly-work' people take over and manage through a variety of legal and institutional channels to slow down and if possible stop technological creativity altogether." Postrel calls this a "pessimistic" vision. I call it a realistic one. Human beings are temperamentally complex. They need consolidation as much as innovation. If they followed Postrel's advice, the time for consolidation would never come.

Conservatism--understood more as the Oakeshottian temperament than as the Straussian dramaturgy--enables us to consolidate the risks that are taken when we are younger. The young and the childless are rarely conservative, but they are often libertarians. Libertarianism is a political philosophy for Peter Pans, an outlook on the world premised on never growing up. It will never become a major political force because most of us do grow up. In Postrel's world, the future is the enemy of the stasists. This may be true for society as a whole; but for individuals, the future is the enemy of the dynamists. It is because we think we might have a future that we become reluctant to be risk-takers in the present.

And that is why the failure of conservative thinkers and conservative activists to develop a meaningful political philosophy is such a wasted opportunity. Any political philosophy in tune with the rhythm of life will appeal to Oakeshott's conservative temperament, whether it calls itself conservative or not. Conservatism, in this construction, has a natural advantage over its rivals. To the degree that liberalism leans toward libertarianism--as it does in Mill's On Liberty--it cuts artificially against the life-cycle; for the emphasis that Mill places on eccentricity and genius seems less attractive the more people look backward to the life that they have actually lived. We need conservatism because life is so rich that we become desperate to protect it against uncertainty.

All of this, I think, helps to explain why neo-conservatism became popular when it did. It was a movement of consolidation, the correction of a liberal course. The 1960s, after all, were truly a destabilizing period, in which institutions and traditions of all kinds were asked to justify themselves-- and many could not. Since they represented a cultural revolution, the decades of the 1960s and 1970s demanded a stabilizing reaction, and this is what the neo-conservatives were the first to understand and to offer. One need not agree with everything that they said to acknowledge one's debt to the neoconservatives for helping to stop certain destructive social trends in their tracks.

Yet our debt to the neo-conservatives is really our debt to liberalism. For if conservatism is an impossible ideal, then the best that conservatives can do is to force liberalism, when it goes awry, back in the right direction. The neo-conservative movement of the 1980s is one more confirmation of Louis Hartz's insistence on the ubiquity of American liberalism. Having performed a historical service to the liberal order of the United States, neo- conservatism retreated from the stage, the latest in a long line of modern conservative defeats. All these bitter attacks on liberalism only make one realize just how embedded in the American way of life liberalism truly is. We really have progressed, and we have no reason to regret it.

(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)