Enlightenment Political Theory and British Conservatism

Abstract

Social contract theory, as representative of a strand of natural law theory during the Enlightenment, displayed some common features, to which a conservative political movement would react. These theorists began their inquiries into the nature of legitimate political authority with myths of a beginning, evoking “states of nature” and postulating the laws therein as a function of reason. Reason revealed its critical force against the inherited traditions and dogmas of the Church, against the static hierarchies of the feudal system, and against the economic structures of the guild system, agrarian economies, and mercantilist policies. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the authoritarian and the libertarian respectively, were both exemplars of the strength of reason to erect systems meant to stabilize both the disorder of the English Civil War and to redress the transgressions of unlimited monarchical power, backed by the theory the divine right of kings. Reason, on this model of social contract thinking, gives us access to the laws of nature, which prescribe the way legitimate government operates. Reason also secularizes political discourse by attacking the divine right of kings and presenting criteria for legitimate government beyond the rule of inheritance.