Relation to others· Society and history
Conservatism
Axis: Tradition and transformation — Should we preserve the legacy of our institutions, or transform society in the name of progress?
Inherited institutions condense an accumulated wisdom that no individual reason can replace. Reforms must be prudent and gradual: seeking to refound everything at once risks destroying fragile and precious balances.
Movements 1
Confucianismexplicit
Human order has already been realized once, by the sage-kings of antiquity (Yao, Shun, the Zhou): there is therefore an accomplished model to recover, not a Way to invent from scratch. The present is in disorder precisely because it has broken with that model, hence the task: to transmit and revive the inherited rites (li 禮) rather than replace them. This trust in the legacy sets Confucianism apart both from naturalism, which would undo the artifice of the rites to recover the spontaneity of the , and from innovation, which grounds order on new laws indifferent to the past. For the Confucian, moral authority is not decreed: it is received from a tested tradition.
Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 7.1 · Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 3.14
Philosophers 7
Confuciusexplicit
The premise is that the was already fully realized by the sage-kings and the li 禮 (rites) of the Zhou dynasty, and that the disorder of the age stems from their decay, not from a want of novelty. If the good has an accomplished precedent, the rational task is to restore and transmit it, not to invent: to call oneself a transmitter and not a maker is therefore not modesty but a thesis, the refusal to ground the norm in present invention. The normative reference is the exemplary past, which makes him a in the strong sense, against any faith in progress.
Analects, VII, 1 (I transmit and do not create, I love and trust the Ancients) · Analects, III, 14 (Confucius follows the Zhou)
Michel de Montaigneexplicit
If our laws rest not on reason but on , the reformer who would remake them in the name of truth risks, in shaking the edifice, more harm than he cures, as the Wars of Religion show. Montaigne draws from this a paradoxical conservatism: one should obey the laws "because they are laws", not because they are just, for their authority lies in their antiquity, not in their foundation. This is not love of the established order but distrust of novelties, whose certain cost outweighs their uncertain gain. A skeptic in politics is readily conservative, for want of any certainty to justify the risk of change.
Essays, III, 13, "Of Experience" and I, 23, "Of Custom"
Show inferred positions (5)
Schopenhauerinferable
No faith in moral progress or political reform: human nature does not change, only the muzzle can be better or worse fitted, and history merely varies the same. Frightened by the 1848 revolution, he lent his opera glass to the soldiers taking aim at the rioters and left part of his fortune to the fund for wounded soldiers, a gesture in which his pessimism turns frankly counter-revolutionary.
Parerga and Paralipomena; correspondence and biography
Sextus Empiricusinferable
Having no truth in whose name to reform the established order, the skeptic regulates himself by default on the laws, customs and received institutions of his country, which he observes without dogmatic belief. This conformism is conservative by abstention rather than conviction: not love of tradition, but the absence of any criterion that would justify overturning it. The position thus leans conservative, but without the value-grounding a Burke would give it.
Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 17 and 23-24 (following law and custom)
Humeextrapolated
Holding the established order to be a product of custom and tested utility, Hume distrusts reforms driven by abstract principles and enthusiasms (religious or factious enthusiasm). Without being a reactionary, he prizes the stability of institutions and prudence: a rather conservative sensibility, wary of abrupt change.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (esp. "Of the Original Contract" and "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences")
Laoziinferable
Laozi does not believe history climbs toward the better: the proper movement of the Dao is return, and civilization has made the human fall from his original simplicity. But his aim is not the conservation of institutions, rites and hierarchies, which he criticizes just as much: it is a primitivism that would go back behind tradition itself, which places him on the side of refusing progress without making him a conservator of established forms.
Dao De Jing, ch. 18, 19 and 38 · Dao De Jing, ch. 16 and 25
Rousseauinferable
Rousseau is neither a progressive who expects salvation from civilization, nor a conservative who venerates established tradition. He rejects the century's central idea that the progress of enlightenment carries that of morals, and takes natural man as a critical yardstick for the present; yet he calls for a radical political refounding, not the maintenance of the old order. Hence a position drawn back from Enlightenment progressivism, without tipping into conservatism.
Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts · Rousseau, The Social Contract
- PrescriptivePolitical & legalIs what lasts thereby good?
Does an institution's endurance prove its worth, what has held having proven itself, or does "it has always been so" also shelter injustices that have lasted just as long?
a tradition - Descriptive Thought experimentThe wisdom of ages, or reason?
Does the inherited order condense a knowledge no individual reason can match, calling for prudence, or can reason audit institutions and correct the injustice that has crept into them?
the inherited order - PrescriptivePolitical & legalReform or refound?
Even when change is called for, should we reform step by step, at the risk of a slowness that lets injustice endure, or refound all at once, at the risk of undoing balances we never understood?
social change - PrescriptivePolitical & legalThe living, or the inheritance?
Do the living have the right to rewrite what the dead built, "the earth belongs to the living", or are we the trustees of a legacy we must hand on to the generations to come?
the generations