There is a particular brand of conservatism, sometimes called traditionalist conservatism — but which we prefer to call real conservatism, the conservatism of throne and altar, of de Maistre and Bonald — which is staunchly opposed to the idea of “rights”. This conservatism is particularly hostile to any assertion of natural rights, which are viewed as forming the abstract ideology of the “demagogues” of the Enlightenment. The reasons for this opposition are worth investigating, if for no other reason than that it is quite iconoclastic in our time, our “age of rights,” as Norberto Bobbio has called it.
Perhaps the most unusual fact about this variety of conservatism is that it has its devotees even in the United States. Traditionalist conservatism, in this country, originated during the 1950s and ’60s, as a reaction to the growth of new social movements and the democratic and egalitarian energies they represented. Against this tendency towards “leveling” in moral and political life, the traditionalists declared equality anathema and expressed their desire to restore “the permanent things”: traditional social institutions such as the state, the church, and the family.
“The permanent things,” for conservatives, incarnate the allegedly ineradicable oppositions that structure life: the rich versus the poor, law versus opinion, and so on. Universal and inalienable rights, and particularly the extension of rights to groups that had previously been denied them, do not fit into this schema of oppositions. Conservative denunciations, apropos of this subject, can be quite starting. Thus, for instance, Thomas Fleming:
Among the most dangerous of our theoretical illusions are the political fantasies that can be summed up in words like democracy, equality, and natural rights; the principle of one man, one vote and the American tradition of self-government. No one who lives in the world with his eyes open can actually believe in any of this.
Most conservatives defend their opposition on the grounds that “rights” are nothing but the fictions of an abstract ideology, the sterile rationalism of the Enlightenment. I have a different explanation. Conservatism, so far as I can discern, rejects the idea of rights not because it is suspicious of a priori claims — it is all too happy to make these with regard to religious topics and human nature — but because rights represent real, and successful, historical challenges to the conservative idea of a society fonded upon immutable oppositions.
“The permanent things” are not the state, the church, and the family. At most, these are the empirical incarnation of ideal concepts: the concepts of a just society and of a free society. In human social life, the permanent things are not institutions, but exhortations: the will to realize justice and the need to preserve liberty. Around the tension between these two ideal concepts, social and political life takes shape.
To defend rights does not necessarily mean to think of them as “natural,” or as God-given. It is also possible to conceive of rights as the guarantees of liberty that condition any possible attempt to realize justice. This is a possibility, certainly, that the conservatives do not admit. And since it undermines the foundation of the conservative idea, we can understand why.
A fantastic insight.
Rights represent real challenges not to society in general, but the rings of the conservative elite. And I say elite because I think conservatism is grounded in its own breed of classism, in that successful conservatism is wholly dependent on the suppression of everyone else.
Thanks. Rights, I agree, are subversive precisely because they overwhelm the oppositions that conservatives (of the traditionalist variety) consider immutable.
This post will be the first in a series on the different right-wing intellectual groups at Georgetown. That’s how the idea originally came to me, and I think I’ll follow through with it. So, having written about the “real conservatives,” I’ll move on to conservative Catholics (not a very vocal group, so far as I can tell) and right-wing (economic) liberals.
As a left-wing Catholic, I am anticipating your next post!
From what I’ve read, I think right-wing Catholics were much more vocal in the past on campus.
I’m very interested to hear what, from a Catholic perspective, you have to say. I think you’re right about that latter point, too — I’ve heard the decision to put crucifixes back in all the classrooms, during the ’90s, was one of the high points of the Catholic groups’ activity.