What’s left to conserve?
by Scott Nelson
12 August 2019
The History of European Conservative Thought
by Francesco Giubilei
Regnery, 256 pp., $28.99
This review was published in Issue 16 (Summer/Fall 2019) of The European Conservative.
You could be forgiven for thinking that conservatism today is in a bad way. The lead article in the Economist’s 4 July 2019 edition was titled, “The global crisis in conservatism”. Seeking to disassociate conservatism from the populism of the ‘new right’, that article more or less placed classical liberalism and conservatism in the same basket: “Conservatism tempers liberal zeal; liberals puncture conservative complacency.” Or, to bastardize William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous saying: a conservative stands athwart history yelling “Stop!” whenever the Economist tells him to.
Conservatism does share some things in common with classical liberalism, and it certainly has a role to play in curbing the excesses of progressivism. But its intellectual tradition is far richer than that suggested by the Economist’s selective and over-simplified reading of a strand of British conservatism.
Francesco Giubilei’s latest work, The History of European Conservative Thought, translated from Italian by Rachel Stone, is a recent attempt to explore the diversity of conservative writers and ideas in several European countries since the French Revolution. Giubilei is an up-and-coming author, publisher, and professor in Italy — Forbes has even included him in its list of the 100 most influential people under 30 in Italy. Having made a name for himself with several books dealing predominantly with conservative thought in his home country, The History of European Conservative Thought marks Giubilei’s introduction to an international audience. Its scope is ambitious and its subject timely.
It begins with a survey of how various conservatives have conceptualized their philosophy and how it might be distinguished from related political ideologies such as liberalism and what he calls “reactionism”. To pin down a working definition of the term, Giubilei writes:
Conservatism was born in response to the French Revolution. It aims to protect the human person and his intermediary groups, groups that might be crushed by powers of centralized governments. Such governments tend to erode and sometimes intentionally attempt to destroy traditional values, as well as the idea of community itself. And they might succeed in doing so, were it not for conservatism and the strength of “the increasingly essential values, such as tradition (opposed to progress), prejudice (opposed to reason), authority (opposed to power), freedom (opposed to equality), private property (opposed to statism), religion (as opposed to morality), community (opposed to individual).”
What follows is an array of names and variations of conservative thought that emphasize one or more of those aforementioned values. For instance, liberal conservatives typically join hands with fiscal conservatives in their opposition to state involvement in the economy; but both tend to more progressive positions than social conservatives when it comes to issues of marriage and abortion. Neoconservatives place little emphasis on maintaining traditions, believing instead that it is of greatest importance to protect democracy above all else. In this they stand opposite to the paleoconservatives, who are sceptical of unfettered globalization and advocate social conservatism and isolationism. National conservatism, by contrast, “varies the most from one country to another … because every nation is characterized by different traditions.” Finally, conservatism is distinguished from “reactionism” on the one hand, by acknowledging that returning to a bygone age is impossible, and liberalism and libertarianism on the other hand, in emphasizing liberty as one of many values, and not necessarily the most important one.
Giubilei then proceeds to survey the development of conservative thought in separate chapters on Britain, Germany/Austria/Prussia, France, Spain, the United States (curiously understood as Britain’s heir), and Italy. He does so by writing concise sections on some of the most important conservative thinkers in each country since the French Revolution, although he is not particularly concerned with slotting the selected thinkers into the conservative classifications mentioned above. Instead, he prefers to paint a brief biographical portrait of them and their most important works. English-speakers will recognize some of the usual names — such as Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley Jr. The book’s strength, however, is in supplementing these writers with other, less familiar names, especially from the Continental European tradition, whose conservatism has been shaped by historical forces not found in the Anglo-American tradition.
Italian conservatism, for example, has had to contend with the “marriage between revolutionary and traditional beliefs … embod[ying] both the Risorgimento mentality and the Fascist mentality.” Unlike the romantic refusal of materialism and rationalism to be found in some conservative writers, such as Samuel Coleridge, “considered by many as the ‘purest’ conservative” or Stefan George, the “spiritual father of the conservative revolution”, Italian conservatism is tinged with a revolutionary streak: “it does not refuse modernity by searching for a return to the past, but rather looks with traditional values toward the future.” Where the French Revolution threw the baby out with the bathwater, the Italian Risorgimento was predicated on “innovation by conserving”.
At times one has the impression that Giubilei surveys European conservatism at breakneck speed precisely because of the ambiguities at the heart of the conservative tradition in his home country. The Italian conservative Leo Longanesi — the subject of one of Giubilei’s earlier books — once lamented: “I am a conservative in a country with nothing to conserve.” Unlike Britain or France,
Italy is a relatively new nation; its past was made up of many small autonomous states and the two encumbering presences of the church state and the Kingdom of Two Sicilies. Finding a historical reference point for the nation requires a closer look at Ancient Rome rather than the fragmented Italy of the late eighteenth century.
One might have expected the German conservative tradition to suffer from the same malady, were it not for Bismarck’s assiduous efforts to unify the country in the rigid and militaristic Prussian mold. In this he was aided by the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, whose writings advocated “a nationalist conservatism that distanced itself from Metternich’s traditional conservatism, which Treitschke considered too pacifist, too internationalist, and too tolerant toward Slavs and Jews.”
German and Italian conservatism faced the same problem of newly formed nation-states having to invent a properly national tradition. Hence the attempts of writers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Count Arthur Gobineau, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain to trace the lineage of 19th century Germans back to the rugged and virtuous Germans of Tacitus’ Germania. Italy saw a similar movement, for example, in the works of Giuseppe Mazzini and the deeds of Premier Francesco Crispi, imbued as they were with a sense of Romanità and the burning desire to build a third Rome.
The increasingly authoritarian nature of these regimes; their bristling at the power and success of the materialist, bourgeois democracies, Britain and France; the need to invent traditions that could encompass the entire nation — all of these factors could make conservatives especially vulnerable to the exasperated ramblings of a Duce or a Führer. While many of them found the resources within their conservatism to resist the fascist pull — be it respect for spiritualism (Stefan George, Thomas Mann), the need for “intermediary bodies and the aggregation of individuals” in society (Arthur Moeller van den Bruck), or simply opposition to scientific racism (Othmar Spann) — others, most famously Carl Schmitt, fell prey to fascism’s allure.
These historical particularities go some way to accounting for the differences between German and Italian conservatism on the one hand, and British conservatism, for instance, on the other. But must conservatism be a defence only of the particular, or can it also defend the universal? By examining the trends in conservative thought since the French Revolution, it is easy to pit the particular, concrete customs and traditions of various European countries against the abstract, universal claims of the Revolution. This is, after all, one of the cornerstones of Edmund Burke’s opposition to the Revolution. But buried within Giubilei’s study is the acknowledgment that some forms of conservatism could be based on something more fixed and universal than the mutable traditions of any particular country. This is implicit in Giubilei’s inclusion of American conservatism, which, as F. A. Hayek once observed, seeks to preserve ideals commonly understood to be ‘liberal’ in the European sense. However, despite repeatedly referring to the Austrian economist, Giubilei omits any sustained analysis of the “liberal-conservative” Hayek, thus precluding a conservatism whose edifice could be built on the foundation of Hayekian liberty.
The other fixed and universal foundation to which Giubilei often alludes, though without systematically exploring its significance for conservatism, is Catholicism. Many of the conservatives examined in the book are converts to Catholicism. Karl Ludwig von Haller, Joseph von Radowitz, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Karl von Vogelsang were all originally Protestants who became Catholic. Haller considered Catholicism to be “the only religion with an anti-subversive and hierarchical character.”
He was far from the only thinker to find a bulwark of stability in the Catholic Church. A century after Haller, Charles Maurras “considered the church to be the guardian of the nation’s order. His penchant for Catholicism rose from a virulent anti-Protestantism. According to Maurras, the Lutheran Reformation was nothing more than an anticipation of that which was to come during the French Revolution.” For Giubilei, the conservatism of almost every French writer studied in the book is strongly connected to their Catholicism.
One of the reasons why so many conservatives were drawn to Catholicism can perhaps be found in Giubilei’s assessment of Joseph de Maistre:
[De Maistre] describes the authority of the church as capable of combining spiritual infallibility and temporal sovereignty. Infallibility and authority are united within the pontiff, who holds an authority similar but superior to temporal sovereignties, thanks to the universal character of the faith. As the church is one and universal, the infallibility principle sits naturally within the Catholic faith. Maistre dreamed of a union of every Christian sovereignty in a universal republic, under the supremacy of a spiritual power in the pontiff: a society of Christian nations, in which earthly solidity is guaranteed by a single, superior, and impartial power.
Unlike the plurality of Protestant sects and the multitude of nation-states with their different customs and traditions, Catholicism offers unity and universality. Unlike temporal regimes, Catholicism offers the steadfastness of eternity and the divine. And yet, what makes parts of The History of European Conservative Thought so elegiac is the realization that so few of even the Italian conservatives, in comparison to their French counterparts, are attached to the universal and fixed creed that was born on their soil. This faith has been challenged by a liberal doctrine that conforms to De Maistre’s conditions: it is equally universal in scope and supremely empowering in locating authority and sovereignty within each individual.
It may be that liberalism, much like Catholicism, has answered a deep need within the human spirit, which has made it all the more difficult for the Church to resist. Marcel de Corte’s concerns about the progressivism of the Church continue to be echoed today by scholars, such as the American political scientist Daniel J. Mahoney in his most recent book, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.
The book ends on a note of loss: “[t]he conviction that one is not ‘from this era’; the longing for a world forgotten, a culture forsaken, a history lost; and the call to remind one’s contemporaries of all that has been inherited: these are the spiritual markers of every true conservative.” Conservatives could go the way of Alexis de Tocqueville, resigned to the passing of the old regime. In this case they would serve the purpose accorded to them by the Economist: as a brake on progressive excess. They could adopt the position of some American conservatives and defend liberalism, rightly understood. They could dig in their heels and assert the primacy and perfection of the Catholic faith. They could honour the particular prejudices and traditions of their respective countries. All these approaches have been eloquently defended by conservatives of various sorts. Giubilei’s book is a celebration of their work. A true conservative, he is indebted to the greater thinkers of the past.
