Smith, Hume, and Burke as Policy Liberals and Polity Conservatives
by Daniel Klein
To understand renovations being made to a building, it is good to understand the kind of order that the renovator hopes to establish. Edmund Burke writes to a French correspondent in 1789: “Permit me then…to tell you what the freedom is that I love.” That freedom is liberal policy; and that is why he is so opposed to the goings-on in France: They will not conduce to “practical liberty” (1992, 7, 11). By understanding the sensibilities of Smith, Hume, and Burke in policy reform, we have a better sense of what their judgments would aim for, long-term, when they consider renovations to the polity.
But Smith, Hume, and Burke were conservative in a way that gave body and color to their liberalism. Smith, Hume, and Burke represent conservative liberalism.
In that expression, “liberalism” comes second, but it is primary: It is the noun. It communicates the moral life and the culture, and hence the institutions, including policymaking, they want lived in the house. In that house there are innumerable mansions. The modifying adjective, “conservative,” softens the punch of liberalism but enhances its wisdom and habits by moderating the claims made for the liberty principle, thereby making liberal principles more practical, pertinent, and robust. Conservative liberalism is a suitable name for the venerable political outlook of our three sages, a name that can span all continents, can connect back in time to the blessed arc of liberal civilization, and can endure through the ages. Hume, Burke, and especially Smith cap the original arc of liberalism and best represent classical liberalism.
I understand polity as something broader and more organic than the constituent parts of the government. Actions that significantly affect the polity raise issues of polity reformation. Dramatic reforms in immigration policy, for example, may significantly alter the electorate and norms surrounding the functioning of the polity, so mass immigration has a significant polity-reformation aspect to it. But most policy issues have a rather small aspect of polity reformation.
The polity conservatism of Hume, Smith, and Burke was not neutral. In matters of polity reformation, their liberalism would be favored, and the contrary disfavored. Still, the salient feature of their posture of polity reformation was conservatism.
My reading accords with the “three-sided comparison” of David Miller (1981, 196), which finds among the three men “substantial similarities in outlook…: a belief in economic freedom, a belief in social hierarchy, and a commitment to the political establishment of eighteenth-century Britain.” Hume, Smith, and Burke are repeatedly listed together by Friedrich Hayek as representative of the liberalism he espouses (Hayek 1948, 4-7; 1960, 55; 1967, 160).
“The Child of Jurisprudence Is Liberalism”
So says J.G.A. Pocock (1983, 249), and Dugald Stewart made similar remarks (1854, 26; cf. 183, 171).
Adam Smith maintained three senses of justice, one being commutative (Klein 2020b). Smith summarizes the basic precept of commutative justice as “abstaining from what is another’s” (TMS 269.10). He gives his most definite description of commutative justice’s “most sacred laws” (TMS 84.2) as not messing with other people’s person, property, and promises due. In the Treatise Hume copiously uses the word “abstain” in the same manner, and explains that the rules of commutative justice evolve to be precise and accurate (T 3.2.6.7-8; EPM 3.2.34 – 3.2.45). Hume and Smith are in these regards developing their own expressions of the natural jurisprudence tradition (Haakonssen 1981, 12; 1996, 27, 117-8; Buckle 1991, vii, ix).
Smith flips the duty of commutative justice (not messing with other people’s stuff) to state the correlated claim of right: Others not messing with one’s stuff. That principle operates in each of the two dimensions of his jural philosophy for modern civilization. That jural philosophy involves jural dualism, that is, two kinds of jural relationships, equal-equal, like you and your neighbor, and superior-inferior, or governor-governed (Diesel 2020a, b). Liberty is others, particularly the government, not messing with one’s stuff.
Smith speaks of “the violence of law” and related expressions in WN,[1] and in TMS of “fortunate violence” and “irresistible force”: we “submit,” “are taught to acquiesce” – not consent! – to “those superiors” (253.30). For Hume, the critic of social contract, it is the same, and likewise for Burke. Burke’s talk of “contract” and “compact” belongs to a rejection of contractarianism, for what he means is custom likened to a “virtual” contract (1992, 160), “by the spirit of philosophic analogy” (1999a, 122), and it is an assenting to God, not a consenting to any human political pact. The political theory of Hume, Smith, and Burke is conventionalist and not contractarian.
The conventionalist nature of their political theory pertains to the American identity. The Declaration of Independence and the rebel side of the War for Independence may have been imprinted, opportunely and perhaps opportunistically, with John Locke, Cato’s Letters, and Thomas Paine, but the Constitution and Federalist Papers bore, opportunely but not opportunistically, more the spirit of men like Hume and Smith, who rejected social contract.
There is a historistic element in liberty. However, it is pinned down within any modern jural-dualistic society by what I call the jural logic of one’s own: A type of action in the superior-inferior jural relationship is an initiation of coercion if (and only if) such action in equal-equal jural relationships is an initiation of coercion. Yes, what counts as initiation of coercion among equals varies with historical context, but whatever any particular jural-dualistic context recognizes as initiation of coercion among equals will, on the jural logic of one’s own, pin down what counts as such when done by the jural superior. This logic takes the historistic element onboard, and domesticates it.
The Liberty Principle and the Liberty Maxim
The liberty principle says: In a choice between two reforms (one of which may be no reform at all), the one that rates higher in liberty better serves universal benevolence. But Smith did not maintain the liberty principle as an axiom. Rather, it is defeasible. Smith, Hume, and Burke held that the principle holds only by and large, making a maxim. Thus, they give liberty a presumption, which like any presumption can be overcome when the prosecution overcomes the burden of proof. Some of the exceptions come because the greater direct-liberty option has indirect effects and ramifications that over time result in less liberty overall (Klein and Clark 2010, 2012). Many of Smith’s exceptions have an indirect-reduction-in-liberty element to their justification (Clark 2010).
Liberty enjoys a presumption, but so does something else, the status quo. The two presumptions are in tension for liberty-augmenting policy reforms, and they must moderate one another. The matter of how much of a presumption to give to the status quo makes another contextualization for a meaning of conservative; this “conservative” in policy reform relates to but should be distinguished from “conservative” in polity reformation. Hume, Smith, and Burke were conservative in polity reformation, but I would not assess them to have been particularly conservative in policy reform.
Liberal in Policy Reform
Dugald Stewart (1982, 311) wrote that works such as Smith’s Wealth of Nations “have aimed at the improvement of society, —not by delineating plans of new constitutions, but by enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Many scholars write explicitly of Smith’s pro-liberty “presumption” or “burden of proof.”[2] Almost all of Smith’s exceptions are endorsements of status-quo policy.
Hume says that after “fixing and observing” the rules of commutative justice “there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord” (T 3.2.2.12). Hume was not dogmatic; thus Roger Emerson says that Hume’s “laissez faire was one with qualifications” (28). But the assessment of Russell Hardin (2007) ought not be controversial: “[Hume] thinks that government should be kept small and not intrusive, as he argues in his varied essays on economics” (200).[3]
In policy reform, Burke too was a liberal. His posthumous “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” is his only work focused on political economy, and it is plainly and strongly favorable to the presumption of liberty and free markets. He speaks of government intervention as “coercion” (1999c, 61, 70; 1992, 161), saying that beneficial “timely coercion” is something that government owes to the people. Russell Kirk (1997) said that Burke “steadfastly opposed all policies calculated to reduce private liberties” (147), and he repeatedly calls Burke a “liberal” (161; Kirk 1960, 20, 22, 214). Samuel Huntington (1957) wrote: “[I]nsofar as Burke had views on the desirable organization of society, he was a liberal, a Whig, and a free trader” (461). Yuval Levin explains that Burke the parliamentarian “was, above all, a reformer,” and suggests that Burke represents what he calls “conservative liberalism” (2014, 9, 229; Levin 2019).
On the word liberal, Burke was in the post-1776 Smithian semantic fold.[4] In the 1777 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol he spoke of “the liberal government of this free nation” (p. 16). In a 1778 letter he writes that “the prosperity which arises from an enlarged and liberal system improves all its objects: and the participation of a trade with flourishing Countries is much better than a monopoly of want and penury” (1961, 426). In 1778 Burke speaks of the “liberality in the commercial system” (1999c, 33). In the Reflections he speaks significantly of “a liberal descent,” (1999a, 123), a moment that Gertrude Himmelfarb aptly seizes as liberal in our sense (1986, 167-173). Burke declaims against the new revolutionary assembly in France: “Their liberty is not liberal” (1999a, 174); and: “It is a vile illiberal school, this new French academy of the sans culottes” (1992, 299).
Whether Burke was a Smithian liberal in policy reform is a question that would have to consider not only his discourse but all of his activity as a politician, issue by issue. I attempt a first pass in Klein (2020a). Burke’s exceptions seem to be related to the needs of practical politics or to his polity conservatism. Gregory Collins (2017) mounts a case for Burke as an economic liberal and concludes: “While these objections show that Burke did not promote abstract natural rights theory animated by orthodox laissez faire doctrine, they do not contradict Burke’s endorsement of market freedom” (588).
Conservative in Polity Reformation
Burke in his last years saw polity radicalism run amok in France and surge as “armed doctrine…in every country” (1999b, 76). In attacking polity radicalism – which makes men “little better than the flies of summer” (1999a, 191) – he expounded a polity conservatism, in Reflections, Appeal, Regicide Peace, and lesser works (Burke 1992). As for Hume and Smith, I think that polity conservatism can be said to go for them, too.
There are general arguments for polity conservatism:
(1) Established ways have been through a historical process, of selection and survival and adaptation, that reflects, albeit highly imperfectly, functional goodness. “Our patience will atchieve more than our force” (Burke 1999a, 275).
(2) To some extent goodness is historistic and established ways are good because they are established.
(3) The citizen’s knowledge is slight, as is that of the social theorist or reformer, and such knowledge is highly conditioned by experience and practice; the consequences of a proposed polity innovation, or even its true nature, are scarcely known. Political projectors are subject to “innumerable delusions” (WN, 687.51). Rampant delusion throws politics into the hazards of collective foolishness and opportunistic abuse.
(4) Happiness depends on tranquility, which depends on confidence. Confidence in living depends on rules certainty and stability. Every reformation excuses, arouses, and inspires a next reformation, reducing certainty, stability, confidence, and the quality of life.
(5) Bad reformations are not easily corrected: Their badness enjoys plausible deniability and is stubbornly denied (Burke 1992, 92-93). Also, they breed interest groups who stoutly defend them.
Yet Smith, Hume, and Burke were ready to take up the burden of proof and espouse reformations. In the regular course of things the changes are conceived as adaptations and improvements, not transformations. “I would make the reparation as nearly as possible in the style of the building” (Burke 1999a, 363).
Polity conservatism has its starkest contrast in polity radicalism. But another contrast might be called polity loutishness. In former days I did not think enough about the dependence of liberty and liberalism on stable and functional polity; I did not much consider the polity-reformation dimension. In proud consistency to a too-simple assemblage of principles, and in an unwillingness to face up to humankind’s susceptibility to atavistic cohesionist politics, polity loutishness might tend toward inappositeness, indifference, denial, dupedom, or appeasement in the face of polity recklessness, mischief, or radicalism, when what is called for is recognition and, often, forthright opposition. Burke excels in calling out polity louts.
Concluding Remark
Conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians see today that, in politics, even in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, one cannot take basic functionality and procedural fairness for granted. And we have seen that, since the Nobel heyday of Hayek and Friedman, the merits of individual liberty and small government have not won mass popularity and favor, and the academic class is mainly adverse. I think that Hume and Smith sensed that “the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice,” “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way” (WN 664.3) would always face deep-seated, instinctual mass opposition, and Burke perceived “a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France” (1999b, 76, 157). The polity will always be pervaded by immense factions who, in their denial and self-deceit, work willy-nilly towards greater governmentalization of social affairs. The conservative liberalism of Smith, Hume, and Burke is as relevant in our day as it was in theirs.
References
Buckle, Stephen. 1991. Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Burke, Edmund. 1777 [1904]. Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol. Ed. J.H. Moffatt. Philadelphia: Hinds, Noble & Eldredge.
Burke, Edmund. 1961. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Vol. III. Ed. G.H. Guttridge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Burke, Edmund. 1992. Further Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. D.E. Ritchie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Burke, Edmund. 1999a. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. E.J. Payne, F. Canavan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Burke, Edmund. 1999b. Letters on a Regicide Peace. Ed. E.J. Payne, F. Canavan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Burke, Edmund. 1999c. Miscellaneous Writings. Ed. F. Canavan. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Clark, Michael J. 2010. The Virtuous Discourse of Adam Smith: The Political Economist’s Measued Words on Public Policy. PhD dissertation, George Mason University Department of Ecnomics. Link
Collins, Gregory M. 2017. Edmund Burke on the Question of Commercial Intercourse in the Eighteenth Century. Review of Politics 79: 565-595.
Collins, Gregory M. 2019c. Burke’s Political Economy Reconsidered. Law & Liberty, November 21. Link
Diesel, Jonathan H. 2020a. Two Superiors, Two Jural Relationships in Adam Smith. Adam Smith Review, forthcoming.
Diesel, Jonathan H. 2020b. A Call to Embrace Jural Dualism. Society, forthcoming.
Emerson, Roger. L. The Scottish Contexts for David Hume’s Political-Economic Thinking. In David Hume’s Political Economy, eds. Carl Wennerlind and Margaret Schabas. London: Routledge: 10-30.
Griswold, Charles L. 1999. Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Haakonssen, Knud. 1981. The Science of a Legislator: The Natural Jurisprudence of David Hume and Adam Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haakonssen, Knud. 1996. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hardin, Russell. 2007. David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1948. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayek, Friedrich A. 1967. Studies in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1986. Marriage and Morals among the Victorians. New York: Knopf.
Hollander, Samuel. 1973. The Economics of Adam Smith. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Hume, David. 1983. The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. Edited by W.B. Todd. 6 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Hume, David. 1994. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Hume, David. 1998. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hume, David. 2007. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Huntington, Samuel. 1957. Conservatism as an Ideology. American Political Science Review 51(2): 454-473.
Kirk, Russell. 1960. The Conservative Mind. Third ed. Chicago: Regnery.
Kirk, Russell. 1997. Edmond Burke: A Genius Reconsidered. Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Klein, Daniel B. 2020a. Conservative Liberalism: Hume, Smith, and Burke as Policy Liberals and Polity Conservatives. GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 2020-07SSRN paper, submitted to special issue of Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Link
Klein, Daniel B. 2020b. Commutative, Distributive, and Estimative Justice in Adam Smith. Adam Smith Review, forthcoming. Link
Klein, Daniel B. 2019. Liberalism 1.0. (A PowerPoint file and video presentation as part of a debate with Helen Rosenblatt at Timbro, Stockholm, May 2019). https://www.facebook.com/tankesmedjantimbro/videos/389066258485074/
Klein, Daniel B. and Michael J. Clark. 2010. Direct and Overall Liberty: Areas and Extent of Disagreement, w/ M.J. Clark. Reason Papers 32, Fall: 41-66.
Klein, Daniel B. and Michael J. Clark. 2012. Direct and Overall Liberty: Replies to Walter Block and Claudia Williamson, w/Michael Clark, Reason Papers 34(2): Oct.: 133-143.
Klein, Daniel B. and Erik W. Matson. 2019. Mere-Liberty in David Hume. A Companion to David Hume. Ed. Moris Polanco. Guatemala City: Universidad Francisco Marroquin. Link
Levin, Yuval. 2014. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. New York: Basic Books.
Levin, Yuval. 2019. Burke and the Nation. Law and Liberty Blog, July 19. https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/07/19/burke-and-the-nation/
Miller, David. 1981. Philosophy and Ideology in Hume’s Political Thought. Oxford: Clarendon.
Otteson, James. 2016. Adam Smith and the Right. In Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, ed. by R.P. Hanley, ch. 29. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pocock, J.G.A. 1983. Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-century Social Thought. In Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), 235-52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pocock, J.G.A. 1985. Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Adam. 1976. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Adam. 1976. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Craig. 2013. Adam Smith: Left or Right? Political Studies 61: 784-798.
Stewart, Dugald. 1854. Dissertation: Exhibiting the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy, Since the Revival of Letters in Europe. In The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, vol. 1, William Hamilton (ed.). Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co.
Stewart, Dugald. 1982. Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, LL.D. In Smith’s Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W.P.D. Wightman: 265-351. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Viner, Jacob. 1927. Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire. Journal of Political Economy 35(2): 198-232.
Young, Jeffrey T. and Barry Gordon. 1996. Distributive Justice as a Normative Criterion in Adam Smith’s Political Economy. History of Political Economy 28(1): 1-25.
Notes
[1.] For “violence of law” and like remarks see WN 525-526.4-5, 248.9, 285.31, 342.30, 372.32, 422.16, 586.52, 653.28, 647-8.17
[2.] E.g., Viner 1927, 219; Hollander 1973, 256; Young and Gordon 1996, 22; Griswold 1999, 295; C. Smith 2013, 796; Otteson 2016, 508.
[3.] On Hume as a policy liberal, see Klein and Matson 2019.
[4.] On the Smithian semantic “liberal” fold, see Klein 2019.
This was originally published in Liberty Matters.
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But Smith, Hume, and Burke were conservative in a way that gave body and color to their liberalism. Smith, Hume, and Burke represent conservative liberalism.
In that expression, “liberalism” comes second, but it is primary: It is the noun. It communicates the moral life and the culture, and hence the institutions, including policymaking, they want lived in the house. In that house there are innumerable mansions. The modifying adjective, “conservative,” softens the punch of liberalism but enhances its wisdom and habits by moderating the claims made for the liberty principle, thereby making liberal principles more practical, pertinent, and robust. Conservative liberalism is a suitable name for the venerable political outlook of our three sages, a name that can span all continents, can connect back in time to the blessed arc of liberal civilization, and can endure through the ages. Hume, Burke, and especially Smith cap the original arc of liberalism and best represent classical liberalism.
I understand polity as something broader and more organic than the constituent parts of the government. Actions that significantly affect the polity raise issues of polity reformation. Dramatic reforms in immigration policy, for example, may significantly alter the electorate and norms surrounding the functioning of the polity, so mass immigration has a significant polity-reformation aspect to it. But most policy issues have a rather small aspect of polity reformation.
The polity conservatism of Hume, Smith, and Burke was not neutral. In matters of polity reformation, their liberalism would be favored, and the contrary disfavored. Still, the salient feature of their posture of polity reformation was conservatism.
My reading accords with the “three-sided comparison” of David Miller (1981, 196), which finds among the three men “substantial similarities in outlook…: a belief in economic freedom, a belief in social hierarchy, and a commitment to the political establishment of eighteenth-century Britain.” Hume, Smith, and Burke are repeatedly listed together by Friedrich Hayek as representative of the liberalism he espouses (Hayek 1948, 4-7; 1960, 55; 1967, 160).
“The Child of Jurisprudence Is Liberalism”
So says J.G.A. Pocock (1983, 249), and Dugald Stewart made similar remarks (1854, 26; cf. 183, 171).
Adam Smith maintained three senses of justice, one being commutative (Klein 2020b). Smith summarizes the basic precept of commutative justice as “abstaining from what is another’s” (TMS 269.10). He gives his most definite description of commutative justice’s “most sacred laws” (TMS 84.2) as not messing with other people’s person, property, and promises due. In the Treatise Hume copiously uses the word “abstain” in the same manner, and explains that the rules of commutative justice evolve to be precise and accurate (T 3.2.6.7-8; EPM 3.2.34 – 3.2.45). Hume and Smith are in these regards developing their own expressions of the natural jurisprudence tradition (Haakonssen 1981, 12; 1996, 27, 117-8; Buckle 1991, vii, ix).
Smith flips the duty of commutative justice (not messing with other people’s stuff) to state the correlated claim of right: Others not messing with one’s stuff. That principle operates in each of the two dimensions of his jural philosophy for modern civilization. That jural philosophy involves jural dualism, that is, two kinds of jural relationships, equal-equal, like you and your neighbor, and superior-inferior, or governor-governed (Diesel 2020a, b). Liberty is others, particularly the government, not messing with one’s stuff.
Smith speaks of “the violence of law” and related expressions in WN,[1] and in TMS of “fortunate violence” and “irresistible force”: we “submit,” “are taught to acquiesce” – not consent! – to “those superiors” (253.30). For Hume, the critic of social contract, it is the same, and likewise for Burke. Burke’s talk of “contract” and “compact” belongs to a rejection of contractarianism, for what he means is custom likened to a “virtual” contract (1992, 160), “by the spirit of philosophic analogy” (1999a, 122), and it is an assenting to God, not a consenting to any human political pact. The political theory of Hume, Smith, and Burke is conventionalist and not contractarian.
The conventionalist nature of their political theory pertains to the American identity. The Declaration of Independence and the rebel side of the War for Independence may have been imprinted, opportunely and perhaps opportunistically, with John Locke, Cato’s Letters, and Thomas Paine, but the Constitution and Federalist Papers bore, opportunely but not opportunistically, more the spirit of men like Hume and Smith, who rejected social contract.
There is a historistic element in liberty. However, it is pinned down within any modern jural-dualistic society by what I call the jural logic of one’s own: A type of action in the superior-inferior jural relationship is an initiation of coercion if (and only if) such action in equal-equal jural relationships is an initiation of coercion. Yes, what counts as initiation of coercion among equals varies with historical context, but whatever any particular jural-dualistic context recognizes as initiation of coercion among equals will, on the jural logic of one’s own, pin down what counts as such when done by the jural superior. This logic takes the historistic element onboard, and domesticates it.
The Liberty Principle and the Liberty Maxim
The liberty principle says: In a choice between two reforms (one of which may be no reform at all), the one that rates higher in liberty better serves universal benevolence. But Smith did not maintain the liberty principle as an axiom. Rather, it is defeasible. Smith, Hume, and Burke held that the principle holds only by and large, making a maxim. Thus, they give liberty a presumption, which like any presumption can be overcome when the prosecution overcomes the burden of proof. Some of the exceptions come because the greater direct-liberty option has indirect effects and ramifications that over time result in less liberty overall (Klein and Clark 2010, 2012). Many of Smith’s exceptions have an indirect-reduction-in-liberty element to their justification (Clark 2010).
Liberty enjoys a presumption, but so does something else, the status quo. The two presumptions are in tension for liberty-augmenting policy reforms, and they must moderate one another. The matter of how much of a presumption to give to the status quo makes another contextualization for a meaning of conservative; this “conservative” in policy reform relates to but should be distinguished from “conservative” in polity reformation. Hume, Smith, and Burke were conservative in polity reformation, but I would not assess them to have been particularly conservative in policy reform.
Liberal in Policy Reform
Dugald Stewart (1982, 311) wrote that works such as Smith’s Wealth of Nations “have aimed at the improvement of society, —not by delineating plans of new constitutions, but by enlightening the policy of actual legislators.” Many scholars write explicitly of Smith’s pro-liberty “presumption” or “burden of proof.”[2] Almost all of Smith’s exceptions are endorsements of status-quo policy.
Hume says that after “fixing and observing” the rules of commutative justice “there remains little or nothing to be done towards settling a perfect harmony and concord” (T 3.2.2.12). Hume was not dogmatic; thus Roger Emerson says that Hume’s “laissez faire was one with qualifications” (28). But the assessment of Russell Hardin (2007) ought not be controversial: “[Hume] thinks that government should be kept small and not intrusive, as he argues in his varied essays on economics” (200).[3]
In policy reform, Burke too was a liberal. His posthumous “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” is his only work focused on political economy, and it is plainly and strongly favorable to the presumption of liberty and free markets. He speaks of government intervention as “coercion” (1999c, 61, 70; 1992, 161), saying that beneficial “timely coercion” is something that government owes to the people. Russell Kirk (1997) said that Burke “steadfastly opposed all policies calculated to reduce private liberties” (147), and he repeatedly calls Burke a “liberal” (161; Kirk 1960, 20, 22, 214). Samuel Huntington (1957) wrote: “[I]nsofar as Burke had views on the desirable organization of society, he was a liberal, a Whig, and a free trader” (461). Yuval Levin explains that Burke the parliamentarian “was, above all, a reformer,” and suggests that Burke represents what he calls “conservative liberalism” (2014, 9, 229; Levin 2019).
On the word liberal, Burke was in the post-1776 Smithian semantic fold.[4] In the 1777 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol he spoke of “the liberal government of this free nation” (p. 16). In a 1778 letter he writes that “the prosperity which arises from an enlarged and liberal system improves all its objects: and the participation of a trade with flourishing Countries is much better than a monopoly of want and penury” (1961, 426). In 1778 Burke speaks of the “liberality in the commercial system” (1999c, 33). In the Reflections he speaks significantly of “a liberal descent,” (1999a, 123), a moment that Gertrude Himmelfarb aptly seizes as liberal in our sense (1986, 167-173). Burke declaims against the new revolutionary assembly in France: “Their liberty is not liberal” (1999a, 174); and: “It is a vile illiberal school, this new French academy of the sans culottes” (1992, 299).
Whether Burke was a Smithian liberal in policy reform is a question that would have to consider not only his discourse but all of his activity as a politician, issue by issue. I attempt a first pass in Klein (2020a). Burke’s exceptions seem to be related to the needs of practical politics or to his polity conservatism. Gregory Collins (2017) mounts a case for Burke as an economic liberal and concludes: “While these objections show that Burke did not promote abstract natural rights theory animated by orthodox laissez faire doctrine, they do not contradict Burke’s endorsement of market freedom” (588).
Conservative in Polity Reformation
Burke in his last years saw polity radicalism run amok in France and surge as “armed doctrine…in every country” (1999b, 76). In attacking polity radicalism – which makes men “little better than the flies of summer” (1999a, 191) – he expounded a polity conservatism, in Reflections, Appeal, Regicide Peace, and lesser works (Burke 1992). As for Hume and Smith, I think that polity conservatism can be said to go for them, too.
There are general arguments for polity conservatism:
(1) Established ways have been through a historical process, of selection and survival and adaptation, that reflects, albeit highly imperfectly, functional goodness. “Our patience will atchieve more than our force” (Burke 1999a, 275).
(2) To some extent goodness is historistic and established ways are good because they are established.
(3) The citizen’s knowledge is slight, as is that of the social theorist or reformer, and such knowledge is highly conditioned by experience and practice; the consequences of a proposed polity innovation, or even its true nature, are scarcely known. Political projectors are subject to “innumerable delusions” (WN, 687.51). Rampant delusion throws politics into the hazards of collective foolishness and opportunistic abuse.
(4) Happiness depends on tranquility, which depends on confidence. Confidence in living depends on rules certainty and stability. Every reformation excuses, arouses, and inspires a next reformation, reducing certainty, stability, confidence, and the quality of life.
(5) Bad reformations are not easily corrected: Their badness enjoys plausible deniability and is stubbornly denied (Burke 1992, 92-93). Also, they breed interest groups who stoutly defend them.
Yet Smith, Hume, and Burke were ready to take up the burden of proof and espouse reformations. In the regular course of things the changes are conceived as adaptations and improvements, not transformations. “I would make the reparation as nearly as possible in the style of the building” (Burke 1999a, 363).
Polity conservatism has its starkest contrast in polity radicalism. But another contrast might be called polity loutishness. In former days I did not think enough about the dependence of liberty and liberalism on stable and functional polity; I did not much consider the polity-reformation dimension. In proud consistency to a too-simple assemblage of principles, and in an unwillingness to face up to humankind’s susceptibility to atavistic cohesionist politics, polity loutishness might tend toward inappositeness, indifference, denial, dupedom, or appeasement in the face of polity recklessness, mischief, or radicalism, when what is called for is recognition and, often, forthright opposition. Burke excels in calling out polity louts.
Concluding Remark
Conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians see today that, in politics, even in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, one cannot take basic functionality and procedural fairness for granted. And we have seen that, since the Nobel heyday of Hayek and Friedman, the merits of individual liberty and small government have not won mass popularity and favor, and the academic class is mainly adverse. I think that Hume and Smith sensed that “the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice,” “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way” (WN 664.3) would always face deep-seated, instinctual mass opposition, and Burke perceived “a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France” (1999b, 76, 157). The polity will always be pervaded by immense factions who, in their denial and self-deceit, work willy-nilly towards greater governmentalization of social affairs. The conservative liberalism of Smith, Hume, and Burke is as relevant in our day as it was in theirs.
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Notes
[1.] For “violence of law” and like remarks see WN 525-526.4-5, 248.9, 285.31, 342.30, 372.32, 422.16, 586.52, 653.28, 647-8.17
[2.] E.g., Viner 1927, 219; Hollander 1973, 256; Young and Gordon 1996, 22; Griswold 1999, 295; C. Smith 2013, 796; Otteson 2016, 508.
[3.] On Hume as a policy liberal, see Klein and Matson 2019.
[4.] On the Smithian semantic “liberal” fold, see Klein 2019.
This was originally published in Liberty Matters.
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