The conservative capture of anti-relativist discourse in postwar America.(Report)

The years during and immediately following World War II were not only a time of ideological reconfiguration in American politics, but also a time of reflection on the relation between philosophical assumptions and political ideals. The war and its attendant horrors caused both sides of the political divide in America to rethink their fundamental views of human nature and knowledge. (1) On one side, many liberals repudiated the Deweyan instrumentalism that had dominated liberal thought over the previous decades for the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, while conservatives moved toward adopting the premodern tradition of metaphysical realism as their own. I focus in this paper on the epistemic shift in the meaning of conservatism that occurred during those years and, specifically, on those conservative intellectuals who captured philosophical anti-modernism for their movement by rejecting both Niebuhr's tragic liberalism and Dewey's sunnier liberalism for a return to the metaphysical truths they believed could be obtained through timeless natural law or time-tested tradition. They associated pragmatic experimentalism with the cultural disarray and political dissolution of the Weimar Republic, and believed that, in order to stand up to the new totalitarian threat posed by Communist Russia, society would have to reject the philosophical "relativism" that they attributed to liberalism and turn instead to the metaphysical certainty of infallible truths.

Because this analysis is made difficult by the imprecision of the term "conservative," distinguishing between the cultural and political conservatism of these years is helpful. Cultural conservatives of the time wished to retain a premodern philosophical stance while political conservatives opposed Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and wished to return to a premodern laissez faire political economy. For example, well-known intellectuals such as Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, and various New Humanists were widely considered conservative, yet their conservatism was almost wholly confined to the cultural sphere, as they rarely engaged issues of public policy. (2) Rather, such figures sought to conserve the premodern Platonic dualism they felt was under attack by positivism, pragmatism, and other schools they considered "monist" and "relativist." These prewar cultural conservatives sought to defend the duality of human nature against Dewey's philosophical naturalism, but did not tie their philosophical position to a particular political stance. Their desire to conserve premodern philosophical foundationalism did not naturally translate into a desire to conserve premodern laissez faire politics.

At the same time, political conservatism was largely unconcerned with the philosophical concerns of cultural conservatives. It is common to link philosophical foundationalism with right-wing politics in the current era and assume that those who believe in eternal verities are naturally political conservatives, but this has not always been the case--the modern joining of anti-statism and philosophical foundationalism began to develop in the mid-to-late 1940s and early 1950s. (3) We tend to assume that conservatism has always existed in its current form, but this reflects our tendency to project our present political paradigms onto the past and thus overlook the protean nature of ideologies and their transformations.

If anything, the prewar conservative political tradition had tended more in the direction of philosophical fallibilism than metaphysical realism. The founder of modern conservatism--Edmund Burke. himself--relied on tradition and longstanding institutions precisely because of his distrust of the ability of human reason to apprehend the kind of eternal truths upon which the French revolutionaries based their political program. Hence, many political conservatives, following in the tradition of Burke, demanded a limitation of state growth because of a focus on epistemological uncertainty.

Such prewar proponents of laissez-faire as Friedrich Hayek, H.L. Mencken, Max Eastman, and Ludwig Von Mises adhered to philosophical views similar to Dewey's. For Dewey, knowledge did not imply the possession of timeless principles; rather, knowledge was contingent, fallible, and tied to problem solving-conceived broadly as the practice of inquiry to resolve problems confronted in any domain, whether scientific, religious, or aesthetic. Likewise, Mencken, a self-proclaimed Nietzschean, scoffed at the idea of eternal truths while the philosophy of the Austrian school economists (Hayek and Mises), with its emphasis on epistemological contingency and the importance of testing ideas by their practical consequences (seen most clearly in Mises's "praxiology"), had much in common with Dewey's instrumentalism. Journalist Walter Lippmann similarly based his 1937 critique of the New Deal on the inevitable limits to knowledge that prevented effective economic planning. (4) The most notable advocate of laissez-faire in the early twentieth century, Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner, favored limited government for reasons of economic expediency, but, under the influence of Darwinian biology, explicitly rejected the natural law tradition promoted by cultural conservatives. Furthermore, two of the major European theorists of epistemological fallibilism of the time--Karl Popper and Michael Oakeshott were led to conservative political positions by their beliefs in the limitations of human knowledge. One of the earliest and most prominent critics of the New Deal, philosopher Max Eastman, was also a committed Deweyite, who defended his instrumentalist mentor in both his early radical days and later anti-statist phase. (5)

Although certain figures, such as conservative theologian J. Gresham Machen and novelist Ayn Rand, simultaneously embraced metaphysical realism as well as political anti-statism, their atypical stance only serves to underscore the magnitude of the transformation conservatism underwent at mid-century. (6) Around 1945, the cultural and political brands of conservatism began to converge, as conservative intellectual leaders began tying their anti-statist views to a philosophical position that had previously been largely independent of politics. (7) This gave conservative political ideas wider appeal, but also created a contradiction within conservative thought: in claiming absolute truth, conservatives often rejected the free exchange of ideas as an appropriate method, leading them to support government suppression of certain "wrong" viewpoints and censorship of disreputable ideas even as they maintained their longstanding opposition to any state interference in private affairs that would infringe on individual liberty. (8)

To mask this contradiction, conservatives couched their views in oppositional terms. Finding it easier to attack relativism than to defend an alternative position, many on the Right spent their energies pointing out liberal shortcomings. In particular, they assailed the doyen of pragmatists--John Dewey--as exemplar of the liberal mentality. Political conservatism aimed for a higher intellectual cachet through spokespersons like William F. Buckley Jr., Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and Whittaker Chambers, but they resorted to superficial attacks on liberals as amoral relativists whose ideas were responsible for genocide and war. Buckley believed that the liberal concern with method showed a lack of attention to the ends to which that method should be put. They promoted a philosophical belief in the "ephemerality" of truth. (9) The relativism implicit in liberal doctrine, added Kirk, made it a continuation of Jacobinism and other destructive persuasions. (10) Although conservatives at times attempted to define their movement in positive terms using the language of universal truth, they lapsed into default denunciations of liberal relativism and largely failed in this pursuit. They did, however, succeed in attracting many to their political movement--Americans of various backgrounds fled the "relativism" associated with political liberalism for what they perceived as the more truth-friendly political conservatism. (11)