van den Haag observes libertarianism

The National Review (via Potowmack Institute) ^ | June 8, 1979 | Ernest van den Haag

[tpaine]

Good luck. He never proves anything. - roscoe-lies 

You claim to, roscoe? You are a pitiful blowhard. A twister of 'cites' to fit your gungrabbing, WOD agenda. Every day you are caught in your lies about our constitutional rights. You ignore all proof & continue on. You have no honor.

[Roscoe]

You ignore all proof

You've never been able to provide proof for your positions. All you ever do is beg the question.

[tpaine]

All you ever do is beg the question. - roscoe

And all you ever do is claim that I "beg the question".

Get some new lines.

[Roscoe]

"For Hayek, like Burke, believed that the institutions of freedom he cherished emerged from an undesigned and spontaneous evolutionary process utterly dependent upon the distilled knowledge embedded within inherited traditions and institutions. He was captivated by the wondrous order-within-complexity generated by this suprarational social process and wished to defend it against that rationalistic mentality which refuses to comprehend the significance of tradition and custom."

http://www.nhinet.org/raeder.htm


Very nearly the opposite of the ignorant reductionism called "Libertarianism."

[tpaine]

Thanks for the link. I was hoping that Hayek might further explain his objection to the term 'libertarian'. -- I see below that you did not think of him as a libertarian, although Untenured did. - Any new thoughts on this issue? - Here's your old exchange:

To: untenured

I doubt if Hayek would have reversed himself and picked up the label of Libertarian. Remember this ol' thread?
But, yes, this essay, in the main does an exquisite job of showing our parents the weaknesses of 50s and 60s conservatism.

13 Posted on 07/03/2001 22:05:55 PDT by KC Burke
[ Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | Top | Last ]

To: KC Burke

That was a great thread. I have it bookmarked myself, and will use that article in a class next year.

I don't think Hayek would be an LP member (the LP being pretty much a non-serious money machine IMHO), but I believe he would feel compelled to call himself a small-l libertarian now, -- given the tendency of conservatives (especially after Reagan and Thatcher) to uncritically accept the idea that free enterprise is systematically flawed.
- Untenured

[f.Christian]

The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot (1953)


National Review's List of the Top 100 Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century (85)
Author Info:
Russell Kirk
1918-1994
To understand the historic import of this book, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, it is perhaps helpful to note that a year after it came out, Lionel Trilling, in his book The Liberal Imagination, would maintain that :

[I]n the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.... It is
the plain fact [that] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation...[only]...irritable mental gestures
which seem to resemble ideas.

Though the sentiment is obviously inane, Mr. Trilling's hubris, and that of liberals in general, was perhaps understandable in light of the fact that he wrote at the precise midpoint of the long liberal interregnum that prevailed from the presidency of Herbert Hoover (1928) until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The position of Left intellectuals of that day seems somehow reminiscent of the famed little old lady who told a physics lecturer that all he had said about the heliocentric universe was rubbish because :

'The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.'

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'

'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'

Trilling and company, perched on the middle tortoise, assumed it must be tortoises all the way up and down. As Russell Kirk amply demonstrated, they were as wrong as she.

Mr. Kirk begins his survey of Anglo-American conservative thought (he is even credited with bestowing upon this philosophy the term conservative) by defining what it generally consists of :

Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few portentous phrases;
he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals. Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma,
and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time. As a working premise,
nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions.
Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors...; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a
spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.
[...] I think there are six canons of conservative thought--

(1) Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links
great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. [...]

(2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity,
egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems. [...]

(3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts
at levelling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation. [...]

(4) Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic levelling is not economic progress.
Separate property from private possession and liberty is erased.

(5) Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters and calculators.' Man must put a control upon his will and his appetite,
for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason. Tradition and sound prejudice provide
checks upon man's anarchic impulse.

(6) Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it
is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual
renewal; but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency
of Providential social forces.

He contrasts these core beliefs with those of conservatism's opponents on the Left, the radicals of all stripes, who believe in :

(1) The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive
legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity
toward violence and sin.

(2) Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social
welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and a variety of anti-Christian systems
are offered as substitutes.

(3) Political levelling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed
radical ideal. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for
centralization and consolidation.

(4) Economic levelling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals;
and collectivist radicals hack at the institution of private property root and branch.

Thus, the playing field. He then goes on to an erudite, idiosyncratic and altogether beguiling discussion of the chain of men who have defended conservative ideas and resisted radical impulses from Edmund Burke, the sine qua non of the Right, to T.S. Eliot, the great poet and critic. Among the others whose thought he surveys are : John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Randolph, John Calhoun, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, Orsestes Brownson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, Henry Adams, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana. Their styles, their particular concerns, their errors, their failures, their successes all vary widely, but the core principles that they seek to vindicate remain, unchanging. Pluck Edmund Burke from the mists of time and plop him down on Meet the Press this Sunday and he'd voice the same concerns about our society as he voiced about his own in the 18th Century. On the other hand, put Karl Marx on the Today Show and even Katie Couric would tear him apart. The enemies and the fetid ideologies that the conservative mind had to contend with were ever changing, a vast array of utopian daydreams discarded one after another by a Left that never admits the error of its ways, but merely moves on to the next destructive iteration of radicalism, secure in the delusion that this next attempt will achieve a "perfect" society, right here on Earth, while instead leaving piles of corpses in its blood-soaked wake.

It seems certain that the Left will never bring itself to reckon with the conservative critique of the whole liberal impulse, but after Russell Kirk's book, no one can honestly argue that such a critique does not exist. The very endurance and continuing relevance of conservative ideas suggests that, in fact, when the intellectual history of the West is written, it will be conservatism that is found to have been the most powerful philosophical tradition that our culture created. Whether that history is written by a free and decent human being may well depend though on the ultimate success of the conservative mind.

(Reviewed:05-Feb-02)

Grade: (A+)

Buy The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot from Amazon.com

[tpaine]

You're dreaming roscoe. I see no 'opposite'.

Libertarian principles mesh perfectly with Hayeks thoughts.
He was a small 'l' libertarian, and in effect said so in his quoted essay. He just didn't like the term, - the word. - I don't either.

Why does this bother you so, roscoe? Could it be that you admit to Hayek's genius, but cannot/will not admit to his being a libertarian?

[Roscoe]

Libertarian principles mesh perfectly with Hayeks thoughts.

Not at all.

"For Hayek, like Burke, believed that the institutions of freedom he cherished emerged from an undesigned and spontaneous evolutionary process utterly dependent upon the distilled knowledge embedded within inherited traditions and institutions. He was captivated by the wondrous order-within-complexity generated by this suprarational social process and wished to defend it against that rationalistic mentality which refuses to comprehend the significance of tradition and custom."

[f.Christian]

Define... conservatism!

[A.J.Armitage]

I admit this is another peeve of mine, but Hayek did not call himself a "libertarian" in that essay, as Nick gamely suggests. In fact, he explicitly rejected the label, calling it "singularly unattractive."

But of course his actual words are in this thread, and he absolutely did not reject libertarianism, the thing. He rejected "libertarianism", the word. He wanted the thing to be called something else.

[Roscoe]

Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters and calculators.' Man must put a control upon his will and his appetite, for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason. Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man's anarchic impulse.

A central element of Conservative thought.

Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected and a variety of anti-Christian systems are offered as substitutes.

Libertarianism in a nutshell.

[Roscoe]

he absolutely did not reject libertarianism

"For Hayek, like Burke, believed that the institutions of freedom he cherished emerged from an undesigned and spontaneous evolutionary process utterly dependent upon the distilled knowledge embedded within inherited traditions and institutions. He was captivated by the wondrous order-within-complexity generated by this suprarational social process and wished to defend it against that rationalistic mentality which refuses to comprehend the significance of tradition and custom."

[Roscoe]

Libertarians rely on the rationality of individuals, thought of as rational economic calculators — actually on the rationality of the living— to supply all the bonds and norms that are presently generated and enforced by the traditional social institutions.

That bears repeating.

[Virginia-American]

Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors.

Some concrete examples would be in order, most of the libertarians I know are Constitutionalists who have utter contempt for things like FDR's social engineering and welfare.

[Roscoe]

most of the libertarians I know are Constitutionalists

You should invite them to post on FR.

[f.Christian]

Up until that post on the other thread...'Defining Conservatism'---

I'm not sure if I ever heard of Russell Kirk before...amazing!

Liberterianism and evolution are the two sides of the pod these nuts hatched out of!

[KC Burke]

Even seperating big "L" Libertarian Party adherents from little "l" libertarians and Liberty Caucus people doesn't begin to show the variety of libertains. Would you have thought from the libertarians of the '70s era, that we would now have Bible-based libertarians that we see today? Few envisioned that. So to answer the question of would Hayek be a "libertarian" today is too open to interpretation about what is the core libertain. Heck, we can't even get you and OWK on the same page some of the time>

It is better, and easier I think, to get to the root of what Hayek believed about government systems and their development. And the best understanding for me was reached by reading the fourth (I think its the fourth) chapter of the Constitution of Liberty. Therein, he condemns the Rationalist Totalitarian Democracy forms and commends the evolutionary Old Whig forms. And he explains why.

If he were on one of our threads, while he was certainly one who spoke of the "freedom from coercive force" we would see him opposed to analyzing every thing from a "one simple principle" rationalism. Of that I am sure.

If I take the thinkers of our tradition that have spoken to me in my deepest core, the Hayeks, the Kirks, the Weavers, the Sowells, the Burkes and the Nisbets, why they are none of them people that are to be pigeon holed and I've felt that neither should I allow myself to speak against or for libertarians, neo-cons, paeleos, or any of our variety of broad conservative without looking at the specifics of each and every issue discussed. I hope to continue in that manner. If that means I side with a libertarian one day and a "paleo" the next, well then so be it. Ideolgy is the thing that is inconsistant, not conservatism in general.

[KC Burke]

You want some Kirk? How about Ten Conservative Principles

[aconservaguy]

That's because you don't know the actual doctrines of the three groups mentioned, especially the first two.

i'll admit that i'm not familiar with the history of each doctrine -- if you wouldn't mind pointing out the similarities between whiggism and libertarianism so that i know why the doctrines are so similar. thanks.

[aconservaguy]

that makes sense. it seems directed toward rothbard's way.