Three Things Conservatives Could Learn from Richard Hooker

By W. Bradford Littlejohn (Source)

For those of us who still self-identify as “conservative” but who have a bit of appreciation for history, modern “conservatism” presents a pretty sorry spectacle. The great tradition of Burke, Disraeli, and Kirk now boasts as its heroes Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, or for the more discerning, libertarian agitators like Rand Paul. A movement once known for its patient statesmanship and policymaking would now contemplate national default as leverage for repealing unwanted policies. In its individualism, its apocalypticism, its contempt for established institutions, its short-termism, and its elevation of principle at the expense of prudence, it resembles much more what would once have been called “liberalism” or even “radicalism” than any real conservatism. For a political philosophy long renowned for its great intellects , conservatism in America today seems impoverished and adrift, with few voices to attend to beyond the strident and myopic punditry of talk radio and the news media. If conservatism is to be salvaged, it will only be by looking back—not with rosy-spectacled nostalgia to the “good ol’ days,” but with a humble and self-critical eye, ready to be tested at the bar of history .

Few thinkers might assist in such an exercise of self-criticism better than Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan theologian and political philosopher, whose prose style C.S. Lewis called “perhaps the most perfect in English.”[i] Of course, in claiming Richard Hooker as an ancestor of conservatism, I am making what is at least an anachronistic claim. Edmund Burke, certainly a father of conservatism but still a “Whig,” would claim Hooker as an inspiration, and so would the early liberal, John Locke; in the context of his own day, Hooker could make almost as many claims to be progressive as to be conservative. But that is part of my point: an authentic, living conservatism must be a progressive conservatism, not a stick-in-the-mud, fetishistic commitment to “the old ways.” But rather than try to vindicate this thesis in advance, let me turn to an exposition of Hooker, which will, I hope, make clear both why he may be seen as a conservative, and of what sort.

 (1) A True Respect for History, not Nostalgic Attachment to the Past

Perhaps one of the quintessential features of “conservatism” is its commitment to history, its conviction that we must respect and learn from the past, rather than blindly following the god “Progress” into the unknown (but sure to be better) future. Conservatism has an instinctive concern to “remove not the ancient landmarks,” to remind us that change for the better might equally well prove change for the worse. So it is that in contemporary America, conservatives will always appeal, in reverential terms, to “the Founders” and “the Constitution,” critiquing policies often based solely on their departure from these historical foundations, while liberals argue for a constitutional tradition that evolves with the times, a readiness to jettison history in conformity to the new spirit of the age.[ii]

Hooker was certainly a true conservative in his forthright contempt for novelty; indeed, his critique of the Puritans firmly puts the burden of proof on those who would reject the status quo in favor of something heretofore unheard-of.[iii]

Long acceptance of a practice, argues Hooker, constitutes a prima facie argument in favor of that practice, since we are to respect the judgment of wise men in ages past.

However, the problem with an appeal to history is that history is always moving, so that a mere appeal to a particular moment in the past cannot but be arbitrary: why, for instance, should we appeal to the Founding Fathers of the 1780s as our touchstone and not the British Loyalists of the 1760s? Hooker was well aware that to appeal to history is at the same time to acknowledge the necessity of change, and that to praise any particular historical custom or law is to praise it as well-suited to the needs of its time. Indeed, Hooker would no doubt agree with Michael Oakeshott that conservatism should be seen first as an attachment to the present, rather than the past per se: “[the conservative] delight[s] in what is present than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone.”[iv]

Accordingly, such respect for the present means that if the present has changed in some relevant and important way, the laws too must undergo some change; indeed, failure to do so would actually be a dishonor to our prudent forefathers, who devised our current laws in response to the demands of their present. To assume that change is automatically bad, says Hooker, is the “error of the common multitude”; instead, we must “search upon what ground or consideration the change might grow.”[v] “We cannot be ignorant,” he says, “how sometimes that hath done great good, which afterwards, when time hath changed the ancient course of things, doth grow to be either very hurtful or not so greatly profitable and necessary,”[vi] so that the law must change. Not that the general end of the law is abandoned, but

laws are instruments to rule by, and … instruments are not only to be framed according unto the general end for which they are provided, but even according unto that very particular, which riseth out of the matter whereon they have to work. The end wherefore laws were made may be permanent, and those laws nevertheless require some alteration, if there be any unfitness in the means which they prescribe as tending unto that end and purpose.[vii]

Hooker thus offers a sharp challenge to the nostalgic Constitution idolatry that characterizes much rhetoric on the contemporary American Right, and a critique of the romantic clinging to an older model of “States Rights” in an increasingly globalized world, where even national boundaries are increasingly porous. Hooker’s challenge to those who would today call themselves “conservatives” could also apply to fairly narrow issue areas associated with the American Right; for example, the militant gun rights lobby may be more nostalgic than genuinely conservative in its strident refusal to acknowledge that society might have changed a bit since the Second Amendment was passed. In fact, to posit some original Golden Age to which we must conform, no matter what has happened since, is more often the mark of utopian radicalism than of true conservatism.

(2) A Rejection of Individualism

Another classic conservative commitment, though one would hardly know it from the state of contemporary conservatism, is to the intrinsic sociality of mankind. Historically it was liberalism that trumpeted individual rights and liberty, and conservatives who pointed out that no man is an island, that we all come into the world enmeshed in families and networks of kinship, in civic communities and with national identities, in relationships of authority and obedience. A key task of government, in this worldview, is to help maintain this ordered social structure of human life.

Richard Hooker lays great stress on the social condition of human life, and its implications for human government:

But for as much as we are not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of things needful for such a life as our nature doth desire, a life fit for the dignity of man: therefore to supply those defects and imperfections, which are in us living single and solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek communion and fellowship with others.[viii]

This natural inducement, he argues, was the foundation of “politic societies.” And yet in our fallen state, man’s will is “inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature . . . little better than a wild beast” so that we strain against and tear these bonds of sociality with our selfishness. The laws of politic societies, therefore, must restrain this willfullness, “to frame his outward actions that they be no hindrance unto the common good for which societies are instituted.”[ix]

Nor is it merely the particularly depraved that Hooker is worried about. Rather, he recognizes that mere private virtue is no guarantee that someone will be able to get along well in society with others and contribute to the public good:

“Many men there are, than whom nothing is more commendable when they are singled. And yet in society with others none less fit to answer the duties which are looked for at their hands. Yea I am persuaded that of them with whom in this cause we strive [the Puritans], there are [those] whose betters amongst men would be hardly found, if they did not live amongst men, but in some wilderness by themselves.”

Hooker explains that the reason why “their disposition so unframeable unto societies wherein they live” is that they elevate their own private convictions over public laws: “by following the law of private reason, where the law of public should take place, they breed disturbance.”[x]

Hooker thus recognizes that anarchy—even anarchy founded on virtuous intentions—is as great a threat to society as is tyranny, and wryly pronounces, in words that may serve as a gentle rebuke to some contemporary conservatives: “I am not of the opinion that simply always in kings the most, but the best limited power is best.” He elaborates: “the most limited is, that which may deal in fewest things; the best, that which in dealing is tied unto the soundest, perfectest, and most indifferent rule; which rule is the law.”[xi] In other words, our ambition should not necessarily be to “get government out of our lives,” thinking that the further we can contract its sphere of authority, the more we have secured liberty, but rather to ensure that its authority is not arbitrary, but restrained by the rule of law and principles of justice.

 (3 ) The Rule of Law

This leads to our third point: the importance of the rule of law. Classically, conservatism has always stood for the importance of the rule of law as that which ensures historical continuity and binds society together, and has looked askance at utopian radical movements that want to suspend law and authority in pursuit of a supposedly greater justice. Moreover, lovers of liberty throughout the centuries have championed the rule of law as the greatest bar to tyranny and arbitrary authority, the greatest safeguard of the liberty of the people. It is only in recent decades that this trend has reversed, and those who are loudest in their enthusiasm for “liberty” have turned against the law as itself an instrument of tyranny.

Richard Hooker provides a rich resource for the recovery of a right reverence for the rule of law. Hooker is under no illusions, of course, that laws will always promote justice or be well-conceived. Laws may become the tools of tyranny, and he recognizes that there will come times when a subject must withhold his obedience from human laws that directly defy the laws of God and of nature. But effective opposition to unjust laws requires a commitment to just laws, rather than grumbling against law in general as a restraint on personal freedom. Those who put too high a value on individual liberty or private judgment will come to assess the merits of any law solely on how well it comports with their convenience and how well it can be justified by their own reason. Thus they will come to think that no laws are really binding upon them except those that they have personally approved, and once they are of this mind, they will find few indeed that meet their exacting standards.

To such a discontent Hooker offers the rejoinder: “A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.”[xii] In other words, if we want to claim the rights and benefits of membership in a particular polity, we have to accept the laws as our laws as well. Bad laws, perhaps, but still ours, and still warranting patience and respect. Such a mindset is careful to draw a distinction between the truly wicked law, which may call for civil disobedience, and the merely bad law, which remains valid until overturned by due process. Given Hooker’s respect for history and corporate judgment, he lays a very heavy burden of proof on the individual citizen or band of agitators to demonstrate that we are faced with a genuinely wicked law. Just as importantly, however, by insisting that “the law is the deed of the whole body politic” he seeks to advise us as to the proper form of political opposition, which should separate the true conservative from the radical or revolutionary. In campaigning against established laws, says Hooker, the opposition is engaged in a task of persuasion and deliberation, seeking to correct the deed of the whole—their own deed—not a task of civil war, in which the supporters of the law are treated as alien oppressors to be overthrown, by fair means or foul. Indeed, this is perhaps Hooker’s most important lesson for contemporary conservatism in America: the more you conceive of the law as a priori an instrument of oppression, to be remedied more by resistance than persuasion, the less genuinely free you become, however loud you may be in your praise of liberty.

Ironically, to the extent that contemporary conservatism has jettisoned an earlier vision of our social identity in pursuit of a vision of individual liberty, it has ensured that we will feel ever less free, seeing in law only the policeman’s baton, the authority of raw coercion, and able to assert our freedom only in unilateral acts of defiance or withdrawal. Such a conservatism, it should be clear by now, is not really going to be conserving anything. It has little future and as little real respect for the past. It’s high time for those of us who call ourselves conservatives to go back, in search of a better way, in order that we might again go forward.

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