Liberalism is essentially sentimental benevolence. Liberals are in love with their own feelings rather than the reality at which their benevolence is aiming

Russell Kirk and Ideology

by Gerhart Niemeyer

“Philosophy”—love of wisdom—is a word first used by Heraclitus. “Sophia” as listed in the dictionary means “perfect scientific knowledge, wisdom,” but a “sophist” is “a quibbler, a cheat.” And Plato made a sharp distinction between sophistes, philosophos, and the sophos, the sophistes being a person who, claiming that he possesses wisdom, takes money for teaching it. The philosophos, by contrast, knowing that he knows nothing, is one who all his life loves wisdom, seeking and striving for that which is truly possessed only by the gods. Aristotle, who was Plato’s student for twenty years, distinguishes between a philosophos arid a philomythos, while Plato already had set the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, off against the philodoxer, the lover of opinion. This shows how anxious the Greeks were to distinguish between the mind’s trustworthy productions and its treacherous ones. It is too bad that our language has not adopted “philodoxer” together with its cousin, “philosopher.”

But we are lucky to have the word “ideology,” enabling us to make a similar, and most important, distinction. It seems that Napoleon came across Destutt the Tracy who believed he could create a science of ideas as such, to be called “ideology.” Napoleon sarcastically rejected this plan as something unreal, bombastic, and dangerous, from which action “ideology” got a persisting negative meaning. Later on, Karl Marx devoted an entire book to what he called “The German Ideology,” intending to characterize German philosophy of his time as false thought concealing unworthy interests. When Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism appeared on the world scene, we were fortunate to have a word by which to distinguish philosophy from the idea system of political adventurers. Adventurers they were who assumed that, given total political power, they could change not only laws and institutions but, indeed, being itself, including the nature and destiny of man. Thus we learned to see the ideologies of our age not as something that one could take or leave, but as an abyss threatening mankind with total catastrophe. So much for the concept of “ideology” and its particular importance in our time.

Against this background, let us ask what, precisely, conservatives have against liberals. Liberal ideas may be said to have a characteristically benevolent character. Does benevolence deserve to be rejected? No, but sentimental benevolence does. Liberalism is essentially sentimental benevolence. Liberals are in love with their own feelings rather than the reality at which their benevolence is aiming. If conservatives find liberals repugnant for this reason it must be that they affirm life’s reality rather than their own emotions. It follows that conservatism cannot be a doctrine, as liberalism and socialism are. So it is true what Irving Kristol, accusing forefinger raised, has said about conservatism: It had and has no ideology. And it is true what William Buckley remarked in The Jeweler’s Eye, that conservatism cannot be defined because, in its essence, it is an attitude. One can only describe it empirically: “Look—this is a Conservative!”

Conservatives know each other by their intellectual openness toward reality: the immediate reality of social, economic, and political relations, and the divine reality beyond and above this world. Beyond this openness, conservatives cannot say much about themselves. They pretend no firm system of ideas about the means to deal with life’s troubles. If they prefer the body of individual reactions to state programs, as a response to life’s difficulties, they do so because individuals have concrete experiences of what troubles them, while the state as such has none. On the other hand, individuals, even associated in great numbers, are not as capable of conceiving and enabling programs to deal with such difficulties as the state. It follows that in our modern age there is no such thing as doctrines that are purely individualistic or purely collectivistic—the latter being quietly stealing away since 1988.

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