Robert Nisbet’s 11 Tenets of Conservatism

[Chris]

Nisbet was a paleoconservative I agree with.

Robert Nisbet’s 11 Tenets of Conservatism

...And just exactly what is conservatism? As already noted, Robert Nisbet offered eleven principles or tenets.

First, the conservative must deal directly with the very “nature of society.” Society is legitimate and constituted, never created. No two men came together and said through a social contract, let us construct society. They do that within society all of the time, but they do not do this at the beginning of all society. Rather, society “is an organic entity, with internal laws of development and with infinitely subtle personal and institutional relationships.” The individual will cannot create society, but it can pervert and distort it, mocking its very being.

Second, Nisbet claimed, conservatives understand that society is superior to the individual, in the sense that the individual cannot be understood except within the realm of the relational. The abstract individual does not exist, nor ever can exist. Instead, the person—that is, the individual in relationship—does.

Third, Nisbet believed, following from the first two points, conservatives recognized that the “irreducible unit of society is and must be itself a manifestation of society, a relationship, something that is social.”

Fourth is the recognition that all things within the social are interrelated and interdependent....

The author, Bradley J. Birzer, adds:

...Though conservatism arose as a reaction against the French Revolution, limped along in the nineteenth century, and came of age in the twentieth century, it had to rest on some previous standard, especially given its argument that the greatest human laboratory is human history. That model rested in the realities and the idealization of the Middle Ages.

For men such as Burke and Bonald, the French Revolution was but the culmination of historical process of social atomization that reaches back to the beginning of such doctrines as nominalism, religious dissent, scientific rationalism, into the destruction of those groups, institutions, and intellectual certainties which had been basic in the Middle Ages. In a significant sense, modern conservatism goes back to medieval society for its inspiration and for models against which to assess the modern world. Conservative criticisms of capitalism and political centralization were of a piece with denunciations of individualism, secularism, and egalitarianism. In all these historical forces, the conservatives could see, not individual emancipation and creative release, but mounting alienation and insecurity, the inevitable products of dislocation in man’s traditional associative ties.

[Calypso Jones]

What did you get out of this @Chris. I find it too abstract.

[Chris]

What did you get out of this @Chris. I find it too abstract.

Hmm. It is a bit philosophical. To simplify, it's the old conservative argument, from Burke to the modern paleoconservatives, against modernity and its individualism and overr-reliance on reason as the measure of all things.

[Calypso Jones]

Now for instance...read this. The guy is full of $#!^ but still.....short, ugly and to the point.

William Boernke

, former Professor of Biology at Nebraska Wesleyan University (1971-2007)
Answered January 11, 2019 · Author has 3K answers and 420.5K answer views



Liberalism is the result of the thinking of French philosophers during the Enlightenment. The two main tenets of liberalism are:

• Republics are better than monarchies and if it takes a violent revolution to get rid of a king, then this must be done. Liberalism produced both the American and French Revolutions because both revolutions ended monarchies and set up republican forms of government. Our Constitution sets up a republican form of government and what is in the Constitution is the result of the thinking of those French philosophers (amd also British philosophers; e.g., Hobbes and Locke). Jefferson got his notion of unalienable rights from the philosophy of Locke.
• Enlightenment moral philosophers used human reason to make moral decisions. The idea is that you can be good without God. Liberalism was responsible for our founders setting up a wall of separation between church and state. The Church in Europe was very conservative and opposed revolutions. Paul wrote in the Book of Romans that citizens must be subject to earthly governing authorities (Paul was talking about Caesar) because all authority comes from God. It was this conservative position that led to the notion of the divine right of kings to rule.

Diderot said, “We will only be free when the last king is strangled with the intestines of the last priest.

Liberalism in Great Britain was different because John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith (the most prominent British liberals) did not call for overthrowing a monarchy. Mill did produce utilitarianism—a moral theory based on human reason and not an appeal to the Bible. The British liberals were believers in liberty (Mill wrote “On Liberty”). Both Mill and Smith wanted laissez-faire capitalism (no government interference in the free market) because they thought it produced the most liberty.
The French Revolution was actually a revolution of class warfare because the peasants took land from the aristocrats and divided it among themselves. The Jacobins (the liberals who pushed for a violent revolution) sat on the left side of the Assembly and came to be known as leftists. Marx was radicalized when he lived in Paris and read the French philosophers and the history of the French Revolution. Communism is a leftist political philosophy because Marx got the idea of violent revolution and class warfare from the time he lived in France.

[Chris]

Now for instance...read this. The guy is full of $#!^ but still.....short, ugly and to the point.

William Boernke

, former Professor of Biology at Nebraska Wesleyan University (1971-2007)
Answered January 11, 2019 · Author has 3K answers and 420.5K answer views



Liberalism is the result of the thinking of French philosophers during the Enlightenment. The two main tenets of liberalism are:

• Republics are better than monarchies and if it takes a violent revolution to get rid of a king, then this must be done. Liberalism produced both the American and French Revolutions because both revolutions ended monarchies and set up republican forms of government. Our Constitution sets up a republican form of government and what is in the Constitution is the result of the thinking of those French philosophers (amd also British philosophers; e.g., Hobbes and Locke). Jefferson got his notion of unalienable rights from the philosophy of Locke.
• Enlightenment moral philosophers used human reason to make moral decisions. The idea is that you can be good without God. Liberalism was responsible for our founders setting up a wall of separation between church and state. The Church in Europe was very conservative and opposed revolutions. Paul wrote in the Book of Romans that citizens must be subject to earthly governing authorities (Paul was talking about Caesar) because all authority comes from God. It was this conservative position that led to the notion of the divine right of kings to rule.

Diderot said, “We will only be free when the last king is strangled with the intestines of the last priest.

Liberalism in Great Britain was different because John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith (the most prominent British liberals) did not call for overthrowing a monarchy. Mill did produce utilitarianism—a moral theory based on human reason and not an appeal to the Bible. The British liberals were believers in liberty (Mill wrote “On Liberty”). Both Mill and Smith wanted laissez-faire capitalism (no government interference in the free market) because they thought it produced the most liberty.
The French Revolution was actually a revolution of class warfare because the peasants took land from the aristocrats and divided it among themselves. The Jacobins (the liberals who pushed for a violent revolution) sat on the left side of the Assembly and came to be known as leftists. Marx was radicalized when he lived in Paris and read the French philosophers and the history of the French Revolution. Communism is a leftist political philosophy because Marx got the idea of violent revolution and class warfare from the time he lived in France.

I think he sees one classical liberalism when there were two. F.A. Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order gets it right--here's a summary: Two Types of Individualism. There was a French/Continental Tradition and a Scottish/British Tradition. It's not strictly a geographic division for Alexis de Tocqueville belongs in the Scottish but generally, Burke is taken as representative of the Scottish and Rousseau the French. The French tradition says the individual can be the source of man's perfection by changing society and removing the chains that bind; the Scottish tradition is more humble says man is too imperfect in reason to (re)design himself. The French tradition leads to Marx and modern liberal progressivism, the Scottish to modern conservatives and libertarians.

Nisbet and other paleoconservatives and more recently some more modern thinkers go further and argue the problem stems from individualism as an ideology. Man they argue is first and foremost a social animal. Individualism itself undermines all the social order, its institutions, traditions, and customs, and leaves individual man atomized and isolated with nothing standing between him and the state.

[Mister D]

Nisbet was a paleoconservative I agree with.

Robert Nisbet’s 11 Tenets of Conservatism



The author, Bradley J. Birzer, adds:

#1 is quite powerful.

Regarding Birzer, I do not think that is at all true of what passes for conservatism in the US which seeks to preserve some vague "Judeo-Christian ethic" but, far more importantly, the proper functioning of the market. Otherwise, I agree. We have members who can't wrap their minds around the fact that conservatism was not an ideology prior to the French Revolution.

[Chris]

#1 is quite powerful.

Regarding Birzer, I do not think that is at all true of what passes for conservatism in the US which seeks to preserve some vague "Judeo-Christian ethic" but, far more importantly, the proper functioning of the market. Otherwise, I agree. We have members who can't wrap their minds around the fact that conservatism was not an ideology prior to the French Revolution.

Today's conservativism, no. Paleoconservatism, of which, interestingly, Paul Gottfried was a part, was a reaction against the influx of Democrat liberals known as neoconservatives. But has ties back further. More on that in another thread...