“Individualism,” like “capitalism,” is a word coined by the socialists. By it, the nineteenth-century socialists meant to imply that while the socialist is concerned with “society”—that is, the welfare of everyone—the conservative is an “individualist,” selfishly concerned only with himself. This caricature of the conservative has done much mischief. I think it is important to understand what the real conservative believes about human individuality and private rights.
The word “individualism” is very loosely used nowadays in the United States, and some people of conservative opinions do themselves and their cause harm by speaking and writing as if the conservative indeed were selfish on principle, as the socialist says the “individualist” is. As a term of political science, “individualist”—that is, a person who subscribes unreservedly to “individualism,” the political ideology—means a disciple of William Godwin, Thomas Hodgskin, and Herbert Spencer. Now Godwin and Hodgskin were doctrinaire radicals, and Spencer—though there are conservative elements in some of his writings—never would have thought of calling himself a conservative.
An Individualist of the school of Godwin and Hodgskin believes that every man is a law unto himself, that established social institutions—particularly the established forms of private property—are irrational, that traditional religion and traditional morality are mostly nonsense, and that every man should do in every respect just as he pleases. Now whatever may be said of these notions, they certainly are not conservative; and so Americans of conservative inclinations who call themselves “Individualists” run the risk of confusing the whole discussion and bringing conservatism into disrepute. They may play directly into the hands of the socialists, who declare that the conservative is a heartless individualist, and therefore devoted to ruthless competition, perfectly selfish, and hostile toward everything charitable and venerable in the world. A real conservative, however, cannot be a real individualist. The thoroughgoing individualist, in the strict sense of that term, is hostile toward religion, toward patriotism, toward the inheritance of property, and toward the past. A conservative, on the contrary, is a friend to religious belief, to national loyalty, to established rights in society, and to the wisdom of our ancestors.
I have been speaking above of the strict meaning of the political term “individualism.” The conservative, however, is an individualist in the sense that he believes in the primacy of the individual, the right of the human person to be himself. When there is a conflict between overweening claims of the political state and the rights of individuals, the conservative is on the side of the individual. He is opposed to the theory of Hegel that the State somehow exists independently of the individual human persons who make up society. The conservative believes that government is a contrivance of human wisdom, under Providence, to provide for human wants. The chief of those human wants are justice, order, and freedom. If a political state begins to neglect the rights of individual persons, and sets up some system of “dictatorship of the proletariat” or “democratic despotism” or “mass state,” then the conservative sets his face against this usurpation of authority. For the conservative thinks that a just government guarantees to individuals all the liberty that is consonant with justice and order. The function of the just state is to increase personal freedom under law, not to decrease it. If, in the name of an abstract “general welfare,” the state reduces the ordered liberty of every citizen, then the conservative takes up the cause of individuality, with resolution.
I think, in short, that the conservative is all in favor of individuality, private rights, variety in society; and that the conservative is equally opposed to “Individualism” as a radical political ideology, and to political systems that would make the individual merely a servant of the state. The wise government, in the conservative’s view, tries to insure two great principles relative to human personality. The first of these principles is that the men and women of remarkable minds and abilities ought to be protected in their right to develop and unfold their unusual personalities. The second of these principles is that the men and women in the ordinary walks of life, who do not have the ability or the wish to accomplish remarkable things, ought to be protected in their right to proceed in the placid round of their duties and enjoyments, unoppressed by the people of remarkable abilities. These two principles, the conservative thinks, are calculated to shelter and nourish true and healthy individuality. The conservative believes that men and women, though equal before the law, are very different in their capacities and their desires. Some men and some women are filled with ambition, energy, and remarkable qualities of mind and heart; these people ought to be allowed to develop their talents to the full, provided that they do not infringe upon the rights of other people. But other men and women—and these are the majority of mankind—prefer to live quietly, regularly, and securely; and these men and women ought to be allowed to live as they like, provided they do not try to force the energetic or talented people to submit to their tastes and their pleasures. When the rights of both these groups are secured, then a society has a just government, and human individuality is properly recognized.
So, the real conservative is neither a selfish “individualist” (in the invidious phrase of the socialist), trampling on the rights and wishes of his neighbors; nor is he a dull collectivist, intent upon reducing all men and women to some dead-level of mind and condition. The conservative wants people to be different; for a world in which everyone was the same would be infinitely boring, and would sink down to its own destruction. There are some things, however, in which people ought to be substantially the same. They ought to subscribe to the same general moral principles, and they ought to pay a common respect to the legacy of their civilization, and they ought to feel a common loyalty to the social institutions which give them justice and order and freedom. The conservative is not afraid of being called a “conformist” in these great matters. And when the radical revolutionary or the rootless bohemian endeavors to subvert these moral and social conventions, then the conservative does not hesitate to condemn an “individuality” which would end in the destruction of civilized life.
I mean that the conservative is not an anarchist. He believes that just government—like the constitutional government of the United States, with its checks and balances and its guarantees of private rights—is a great force for good. The signers of the Declaration of Independence and the members of the Constitutional Convention were not individualists—emphatically not—in the sense of believing that men and women are made free or happy simply by destroying all old moral and political institutions. On the contrary, the Founding Fathers designed to establish “a more perfect union” in which individual personality would thrive precisely because good constitutions and prudent government would restrain the anarchic impulse in human nature. Simply doing as one likes, without respect for the rights and wishes of one’s neighbors, is not true freedom; and it does not lead to real development of the higher human personality, but leads instead to a primitive state of life, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
And I mean, further, that the conservative is not a collectivist. He believes that men and women are free in proportion as they are able, and are expected, to make their own choices in life. He does not want an insect-society in which the wills of the great mass of people are made subject to the decisions of an oligarchy. He thinks that the state exists to provide for the justice and order and freedom of individual human persons—not that individuals exist simply to serve an abstract state. He thinks that men and women never are truly human if their decisions are made for them by an omnipotent political authority. He desires to see the rich, invigorating, interesting variety of a society in which every man or woman—subject only to the moral law and to the moderate restraints of a limited government—is able to be “his own potty little self.”
The conservative knows that freedom without any restraints may lead to oppression or anarchy, just as government without any restraints may lead to collectivism. But he believes the best and most effective restraint upon anarchic individualism to be obedience to moral law, the private conscience, rather than a regular and vexatious exercise of the police-power of political authority. He does not think that government, of itself, can successfully regulate selfishness, egoism, and the lust for power in human hearts. We might pass a most complicated bill giving the state authority to interfere in every walk of private life so as to eliminate selfishness, vainglory, and power-hunger; and yet such a code probably would simply aggravate the evils it was intended to repress. For a society is good only in proportion as the individuals within it are good and truly free, under the moral law.
Individuality without moral restraints or just laws often has led to selfish excess; there are many such instances in the history of our country. Yet the conservative prefers to try to bring about the reform of “ruthless individualism” by operating upon the private conscience rather than by calling into operation a police state. The only way to check selfishness, Aristotle says, is “to train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more.” And the only real way to check envy is to remind the mass of men and women that unusual talents have their rights, as well as ordinary talents. Irving Babbitt, a generation ago, expressed the conservative’s view in this matter with a high dignity:
The remedy for such a failure of the man at the top to curb his desires does not lie, as the agitator would have us believe, in inflaming the desires of the man at the bottom; nor again in substituting for real justice some phantasmagoria of social justice. As a result of such a substitution, one will presently be turning from the punishment of the individual offender to an attack on the institution of property itself; and a war on capital will speedily degenerate, as it always has in the past, into a war on thrift and industry in favor of laziness and incompetence, and finally into schemes of confiscation that profess to be idealistic and are in fact subversion of common honesty. Above all, social justice is likely to be unsound in its partial or total suppression of competition. Without competition it is impossible that the ends of true justice should be fulfilled—namely, that every man should receive according to his works. The principle of competition, as Hesiod pointed out long ago, is built into the very roots of the world; there is something in the nature of things that calls for a real victory and a real defeat. Competition is necessary to rouse man from his native indolence; without it, life loses its zest and savor. Only, as Hesiod goes on to say, there are two types of competition—the one that leads to bloody war and the other that is the mother of enterprise and high achievement.
Thus the conservative is dedicated to true individuality, the right and the duty of men and women to be themselves; the conservative seeks enlightened competition, differences of rank and station and wealth, life with variety and even with risk. But he does not seek a doctrinaire “Individualism” that favors selfishness, private illicit ambition, and “devil take the hintermost” on principle. He does not seek this any more than he seeks a stifling collectivism. He thinks that society ought to foster true individuality, and that the proper checks upon a ruthless individualism are private conscience and good constitutions, not constant and direct political surveillance of our economy and our private lives. The conservative is not an ideologue; that is, he does not yearn for complete moral and political anarchy, or for a total “welfare state” opposed to individual variety. He thinks that our old established American society, in which private ambition and public order are reconciled and mutually checked, offers us the general solution to the problem of the individual versus the state.
No society ever puts an end, once and for all, to the conflicting claims of ordered government and private ambition. The best we can hope for is a society in which men and women recognize the general principle that the superior natures are entitled to develop themselves, and that the average natures are entitled to live in tranquility. There was a time, in the history of our country, when it seemed that ruthless individualism might overthrow this principle. But that time is gone by; and at present, the danger is rather that the state may repress true individuality in the name of a leveling “social justice.” Nowadays, therefore, the prudent conservative endeavors to redress the balance by supporting, with all the strength at his command, the rights of the individual against the arrogant demands of the mass state.