Traditionalism with reference to conservatism

Introduction

Traditionalism is the attitude that places inherited customs, institutions and beliefs at the centre of political judgment. Conservatism is its main political form, which is why the question asks about traditionalism with reference to conservatism.

Traditionalism in conservatism

For conservatives, history is essentially experience, and legitimacy is the work of history. History is expressed not in a straight chronological line but in the persistence of structures, communities, habits and prejudices across generations. Tradition represents the accumulated wisdom of the past, and its institutions have been tested by time; conservatives defend them for the benefit of the living and of those to come, in Burke's picture of a partnership of the living, the dead and the unborn. Hence the conservative preferences: the familiar to the unknown, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded. Traditionalism rests on a view of human nature as imperfect and of reason as limited, so inherited practices carry a wisdom that abstract reasoning cannot replace: as Nisbet says for the conservative, "prejudice has its own intrinsic wisdom". Society is organic, authority arises naturally, and religion and morality bind it together.

Burke and Oakeshott

Edmund Burke. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) has been taken as the defining statement of modern conservatism, opposing radical reform drawn from abstract principles and pleading for established, evolved institutions. He argued that the violence and the uprooting of tradition in the Revolution outweighed its liberating ideals, that efforts to remake complex modern states on metaphysical doctrines lead to despotism, and that stability and prosperity depend on established institutions. Yet Burke was not against all change: he held that one should change in order to conserve, at a gradual and not a revolutionary pace, and within his conservatism he showed a reforming side. Burke's admiration for liberty joined to order completes his view.

Michael Oakeshott. His conservatism proceeds from a critique of rationalism. Rationalist ideology is for him only an abridgement or index of a tradition of behaviour; political activity springs from existing traditions and consists in amending arrangements by exploring what is implied in them. To be conservative, in his essay On Being Conservative, is to choose the known over the strange, what has worked over what is merely untried, the actual over the possible, the near over the distant and the convenient over the perfect; stability is more valuable than improvement and if change is unavoidable it should be small and slow. Critics find his definition of tradition so wide that it means little.

Criticism

1. Reverence for custom cannot be the whole ground of obedience: people keep traditions only while they serve a purpose and drop them when they no longer do, and a purely traditional theory would even ask people to accept long-standing unjust laws. Oakeshott's wide account of tradition, as continuity that is steady and never wholly at rest, has been criticised as so broad that it means little. (2) It tends to defend the interests of elites and the status quo and finds it hard to support gender justice. (3) It can slide into reaction, which wishes to return to a vanished order. (4) It clashes with liberal and socialist attempts to free individuals from inherited constraint.

Conclusion

Traditionalism is the core of conservative thought: it supplies caution, a sense of continuity and respect for institutions. Its weakness is that it cannot tell the tradition worth keeping from the one that should be reformed, so it needs the critical tests of reason and justice that liberal and egalitarian thought provide.