Liberal-Conservative: The Real Controversy

Abstract

What, really, is at issue between theorists who identify themselves as liberals and theorists who identify themselves as conservatives? That question has been the subject of much perplexed discussion. Jerry Z. Muller, for instance, points to the very wide range of ideas associated with the term “conservative,” so wide that some have been associated instead with the idea of liberalism. Muller observes that “Conservatives have ...defended royal power, constitutional monarchy, representative democracy, and presidential dictatorship; high tariffs and free trade; centralism and federalism; a society of inherited estates, a capitalist, market society, and one or another version of the welfare state.”1 We find a hodge-podge of programs and platforms billed as liberal or conservative, and it is remarkable how much they overlap. Features said to make a program conservative nevertheless crop up in the opposite camp, counting as liberal. Consider, for example, the principle of utility, proposed by the harbingers of liberalism, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Yet Joseph de Maistre, one of the famed figures of conservatism, opened a chapter on “the best species of government” with a statement that could have been penned by Jeremy Bentham. “The best government ... is that which ...is capable of producing the great possible sum of happiness and strength, for the greatest possible number of men, during the longest possible time.”2