EDMUND BURKEPeter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, has written a wonderful 16-page description of Edmund Burke’s thinking, entitled Burke Between Liberty and Tradition. You can access it here.
When I sat down to read the piece, I wasn’t sure how I would react. I know Peter slightly. We lunched together once with a mutual friend, and I liked Peter immediately. He’s a very smart and engaging person, and someone you can disagree with and still enjoy. We discussed the Mideast more than Burke at that lunch; but I suspected that although Peter and I both admire Edmund Burke, we might read him differently.
Peter’s article is adapted from his new book, Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government and Political Moderation. Although I haven’t yet read Peter’s book, the flyleaf describes it as attempt to bring libertarians and social conservatives together. My view (described here) is that Burke’s philosophy is at war with both libertarianism and social conservatism. So if Peter thinks that Edmund Burke’s thinking supports libertarianism or social conservatism – or neoconservatism for that matter – we have fundamentally different views about Burke. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that I agreed with nearly everything Peter wrote in Burke Between Liberty and Tradition, and can recommend it wholeheartedly.
My only quibble is with the last sentence of Peter’s article, which states that The Federalist Papers constitutionalize “the conservative brand of liberal self-government.” By liberal self-government, Peter means liberalism “in the large sense,” which he defines as believing the goal of politics is to secure liberty, and which he associates with Adam Smith, Tocqueville, and Mill, as well as with Burke. Peter defines the conservative side of the liberal tradition as believing that “free societies expose individuals to influences that corrode moral and political order and enervate the virtues on which liberty depends.” Thus, Peter thinks that conservatism places a high premium on nurturing virtue. I agree with Peter’s definition about the liberal tradition in the large sense, and also agree with him about there being conservative and liberal sides to that tradition, though – because he doesn’t define the liberal side, at least in this article – I don’t know whether we’d differentiate the two sides the same way. But speaking more broadly, I do not believe the Federalist Papers constitutionalize a conservative or liberal position. Let’s remember that when they met at Philadelphia, the Founders wildly exceeded their mandate to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. They completely scrapped that structure – which they believed was fundamentally flawed because the states were too strong and the national government too weak – and wrote an entirely new Constitution. Moreover, they decreed that the new Constitution was to be ratified, not by the existing Congress and the state legislatures, which as things then stood had the authority to pass upon this new proposal – but by newly-formed conventions in at least nine states. (Madison defends what the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention did in The Federalist No. 40.)
I am not arguing that the Constitution is a liberal as opposed to a conservative document. I believe that the Constitution and the Federalist Papers belong to modern-day liberals and conservatives alike, and equally. As a liberal who revers the Constitution and The Federalist Papers, it rankles me when conservatives seem to think that these documents somehow reflect the philosophies of Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, or Milton Friedman. I’m not suggesting that’s what Peter Berkowitz is saying, of course, and though I disagree with that last sentence, it certainly doesn’t rankle me. With my caveat about that one sentence stated (and perhaps overstated), I recommend Peter’s article to readers of this blog.