True blue response to a red threat

It is a persistent mistake in the discussion of political doctrines to assume that they are all the same kind of theoretical animal. Because socialism, for example, advocates a variety of policies, so all doctrines must have their programmes for change. Putting conservatism down to sleep on this Procrustean bed produces some odd results.

Some of them may be seen in Robert Devigne's study of the "recasting" of conservatism. British Conservatives in the Victorian era, for example, are taken to advocate what he calls a "thick society". A thick society, however, is what they then had; no need for advocacy. No doubt Conservatives saw a need to defend this traditional form of life, given that liberal theory and industrial development were pushing Britain towards a thinner kind of individuality. But advocacy - no.

It might well be objected that to defend a condition of things is logically on the same level as a proposal to change it, but this is mistaken. To take one's political bearings from current circumstances is a different kind of politics from asserting some moral desirability and advocating that the power of the state should be used to achieve it.

Devigne's study would have been more coherent if he had considered this point. Certainly his treatment of Michael Oakeshott would have benefitted. Devigne recognises at some points that Oakeshott, as a philosopher, is not an advocate, but he soon forgets this caution in his passion to make all his characters speak the language of practical involvement.

At one remarkable point, the ideal mode of association which Oakeshott called "civil" and carefully distinguished from the real world is identified with the currently actual state, often referred to here as "the central state".

This curious expression results from Devigne's master idea, which is that British conservatism stands for the untrammelled authority of a unified sovereign, while American conservatives, for a variety of reasons, seek to defend a balance between local and central power. British conservatives are said to be "unwilling to share authority with other institutions in society", the other institutions in the case being exemplified by local government, local education authorities and trade unions. It has however been precisely the irresponsibility of these bodies in their unreformed condition which exercised the Thatcher government. By no means is it the case that contemporary conservatism favours an absolute central authority; rather, in the modern world it is difficult to know quite how to respond to what people want.

Devigne's first chapter on British conservatism is a remarkably clotted piece of uninformative theoretical prose. Odd expressions picked up from random sources make unexplained appearances - "programmatic group interests", for example, or Giovanni Sartori's "garantise constitutionalism", which is explained some time after it is introduced. Things improve markedly when Devigne turns to the American scene on which he is notably more sure-footed. Straussians and neo-Conservatives (including, possibly to his surprise, Dan Bell) are shown responding to - well, to post-modernism.

This idea is central to the kind of crisis Devigne thinks he is analysing, but it imports a further element of indeterminacy into what he writes. Oakeshott, Hayek and Strauss certainly had no idea that they were "recasting" conservatism against the threat of post-modernism. If we assimilate postmodernism, a strictly academic phenomenon, to the Straussian idea of a third wave of modernity, then we might, just, see the dissolution of traditional morality - which certainly is at the heart of what worries modern conservatives - as following from such an arcane intellectual fashion.

The more obvious interpretation, however, is to see conservatism as responding to socialism, communism, and any other version of the idea that the power of the state should be used to impose some desirable moral vision on those it rules. Much to which Conservatives object in the modern world derives directly from Marxist ideas popularised during the 1960s. No doubt all of these things are part of the grand kaleidoscope of western experience in this century, but if a claim is to be made that there is something new in contemporary conservatism, then there should be a little precision about what such a novelty responds to.

The real problem, I suggest, is that the basic conservative instinct, which limits government to the role of responding legislatively to an active society, finds that an activist state has now so enfeebled many of its citizens that nothing but a positive destruction of much of the state's suffocating power can recover the moral world we are losing. Hence the paradox of conservative radicalism so conspicuous in Margaret Thatcher.

Modern Conservative governments have attacked this problem, with only patchy success. In some areas, they have actually made things worse. It does not even help that they can make common cause with other political dispositions hostile to the march of managerial technology. We seem to be facing the kind of problem that provoked the cry of pain Oakeshott expressed in his mid-century preoccupation with rationalism. But this is not a part of Oakeshott to which Devigne pays much attention.

Kenneth Minogue is professor of politics, London School of Economics and Political Science.