Hayek Wrote Why I Am Not a Conservative, and He Had a Point Worth Facing

Imagine being invited to a dinner party in your honor, and the guest of honor's speech turns out to be a polite explanation of why he is not one of you. That is roughly the position conservatives have occupied since 1960, when the most admired economist on the right appended a postscript to his great book and titled it "Why I Am Not a Conservative."

Most conservatives have handled it the way a family handles an awkward uncle: by quoting the nice parts and ignoring the rest. I think that is a mistake. Hayek was a friend of liberty, he was wrong about what American conservatism is, and he was right about two or three things we should hear. Let me state his charges fairly, answer the ones that miss, and concede the ones that land.

The book and its postscript

The Constitution of Liberty was published in 1960, in Chicago and London. It is Hayek's long defense of liberty under law: what freedom is, why it matters, how the rule of law protects it, and what the welfare state does to it. At the end he added a postscript, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," because he worried the book's friends might assume he stood with the political right.

He did not. He called himself an Old Whig, after Burke and Macaulay, and in the postscript he said that the term liberal, in its original sense, was the right name for his position, though in America it had been taken by others. He drew a triangle: socialism, conservatism and liberalism sit at three corners, and while the socialist and the conservative differ, both, in his view, are willing to use state power for ends the liberal would restrain.

Define the terms, because the quarrel depends on them. By conservative, Hayek meant a temperament that resists change and defers to established authority. By liberal, he meant the tradition of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Madison and Acton: a belief in individual liberty under general rules.

His charges, stated at their strongest

Here is the indictment as a fair-minded Hayekian would put it.

1. Conservatism has no direction of its own. It is by nature a brake. It can slow the drift, but it does not say where to go, so it lets the other side pick the destination and merely haggles about the speed. A brake does not steer.
2. It fears change as such. Conservatives distrust new ideas because they are new, and hence cede the future to those who are not afraid of it.
3. It is comfortable with power in friendly hands. The conservative objects to the state's coercion when the wrong people wield it, but not on principle. If the right people hold the lever, arbitrary power is acceptable.
4. It lacks a political philosophy. It has moral convictions about good and bad, but no principles for dealing with people who hold different ones. It tends to impose its morals by law rather than rely on persuasion.
5. It is suspicious of ideas, of the intellectual, of the abstract. And so it fails to answer ideas with ideas, or to defend the open society against those who would close it.
6. It is tempted by nationalism and by hostility to foreigners. And it slides toward a protective, paternalist economics.

That is a serious list, and every item has a real-world example somewhere in the history of the right. A conservative who cannot recite it fairly has not earned the right to answer it.

Where the charge misses

The indictment fits European conservatism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries better than it fits American conservatism, and the reason is a historical fact that Hayek mentions himself. In America, what there is to conserve is a liberal founding.

Think about what the American conservative actually defends. A written Constitution of enumerated powers. Separation of powers. Federalism. A Bill of Rights guaranteeing speech, religion, press, property and trial by jury. Freedom of contract and private ownership. The rule of law, with government itself under it. The Declaration's claim that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. Every item on that list is Old Whig liberalism, written down in 1776 and 1787.

So when Hayek complains that conservatives merely resist change without a direction of their own, the answer is that the American conservative's direction is the founding's: toward limited government, individual liberty and equal rights under law. The European conservative defended altar and throne; the American defends the charter of liberty. Same temperament, entirely different cargo. That dissolves a large part of the quarrel. Frank Meyer, a former Communist who became a founder of modern American conservatism, built exactly this synthesis in the 1960s, which we trace in Frank Meyer, the Ex-Communist Who Married Liberty to Virtue.

Take the charges in turn.

• No direction. Wrong for America. The direction is the founding's: limited government, enumerated powers, rights that precede the state.
• Fear of change. Here the conservative answers with Burke. He did not oppose change; he opposed change by theory and by upheaval. In the Reflections he wrote that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. The test is not whether a thing is new but whether it has been tried, and whether those who propose it can say what will fail if they are wrong. We make that case in Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing and in Tradition Is Not Nostalgia, and Five Other Myths About Conservatives.
• Suspicion of ideas. Fair for some conservatives some of the time, but not for the tradition as a whole. Conservatism's best thinkers, Burke, Tocqueville, Chesterton, Weaver, Kirk, were all idea people. They simply insisted that ideas be tested against human nature and experience.
• Nationalism and protection. A real temptation, and a real quarrel inside the right. But a conservative who believes in the rule of law and ordered liberty has a principled reason to resist both, as we discuss in Ordered Liberty Is Not a Contradiction, It Is the Only Kind That Lasts.

Where the charge lands

Now the concessions. A debater who gives no ground loses the room.

First: power in friendly hands is a real temptation. Charge 3 is the sharpest. Conservatives complain bitterly about executive overreach when the other party holds the White House, and discover its virtues when their own party does. A principle that is invoked only when it helps is a tactic. The test of whether you believe in separation of powers is whether you defend it when your side is the one being limited. The founders designed institutions for the possibility that your side would hold them, and that the other side would hold them next. Bad rules do not become good because the right people operate them.

I will say this plainly: a conservative who cheered an overreaching executive order in one administration and condemned it in the next has no standing to quote Madison. The remedy is to decide, in advance and in writing, which powers you think belong to which branch, and to hold that line whoever is in office. That is simply the rule of law, of which we list the marks in The Rule of Law Has Eight Marks, and Lawmakers Can Fail at Every One.

Second: conserving what exists is not automatically right. Some existing institutions are bad. Slavery was an existing institution, and the conservative of 1850 who said it should be left alone was wrong, and was in the position Lincoln and the Declaration condemned. The American conservative has to say what is worth conserving and why, and the answer has to be a principle, not a habit. The Declaration supplies it. A conservatism that cannot distinguish the Constitution from a bad statute is simply attachment to the familiar.

Third: persuasion over compulsion. Hayek is right that moral convictions are best spread by example, argument and voluntary institutions, rather than by law wherever possible. Conservatives who reach for the state first, to settle every cultural disagreement, are borrowing the progressive method and hoping for a different outcome. Some matters rightly belong to law, the protection of life and of the family among them. But the burden of proof belongs on the one asking the state to act, and the first resort should be the platoons discussed in The Little Platoons Passage From 1790 and What It Asks of Us Now.

A worked example: the same rule, two administrations

Here is a hypothetical, labelled as one. Suppose a President of one party uses a stretched reading of an old statute to order a sweeping new regulation without a vote in Congress. His party applauds; the other party calls it a constitutional crisis. Four years later the White House changes hands, and the new President uses the very same stretched reading to order a sweeping regulation of the opposite kind. Now the applause and the alarm swap seats, in the same words, about the same legal theory.

Count what happened. Neither party defended a principle. Each defended a result. The only thing that stayed constant was the precedent, which now sits in the drawer for whoever wins next. Hayek's third charge describes exactly this, and the cure is not complicated: argue the question of which branch holds which power in the abstract, before the names are filled in. A rule you would accept with your opponent holding the pen is a rule. Anything else is a preference with a legal costume. The founders knew this, which is why Madison in Federalist No. 51 wanted each department to have the means and motives to resist encroachment by the others, whoever sits in them.

The deeper point about knowledge

There is one more thing Hayek got right, and it is the thing he cared about most. Institutions such as language, law, markets and families contain more knowledge than any person can hold, and they are the result of trial and error across generations. This is, in fact, a conservative insight, perhaps the most conservative thing Hayek ever wrote. We explain it in Nobody Designed the English Language, and Hayek Called That Spontaneous Order.

That is why his quarrel with conservatives is smaller than he thought. The man who warns against redesigning institutions from a blueprint and the man who says tradition carries accumulated wisdom are making the same point in two vocabularies. Hayek granted in the postscript that conservatives are right to value what has grown up. What he feared was that the respect would turn into a refusal to see which growths were healthy.

On that, we can agree with him. The point of conserving is to keep what works and mend what does not. Sorting one from the other is the whole job.

The verdict

Charge by charge, then:

1. No direction: false in America, because the founding is the direction.
2. Fear of change: false of Burke, true of some of his followers.
3. Friendly power: true of too many, and the conservative's own responsibility to fix.
4. No principles about differing views: partly true, answered by consistency and by preferring persuasion to coercion.
5. Suspicion of ideas: true in moods, false in the tradition.
6. Nationalism and protection: a temptation conservatives should resist on their own principles.

Hayek did not leave the right. He wrote a letter to it, and what the letter says is: know what you are conserving, and keep your hands off the lever. We would do well to read it the way a good student reads a tough but honest grade.

The case in brief

1. Hayek's 1960 postscript charged conservatives with having no direction, fearing change, tolerating power in friendly hands and neglecting principle in dealing with those who differ.
2. In America the quarrel largely dissolves, because what an American conservative conserves is a liberal founding: limited government, enumerated powers, individual rights and the rule of law.
3. Burke opposed change by theory, not change itself, so the charge of fearing the new misreads the tradition.
4. Hayek is right that conservatives are tempted to approve of power when their friends hold it, to mistake the familiar for the good, and to reach for law where persuasion would do.
5. The remedy is consistency: decide which powers belong to which branch before knowing who holds office, and defend the founding's principles on their merits.

What you can do: pick one executive power you resent when the other party uses it, ask honestly whether you would object if your own side used it, and write your representative a note stating the rule you want kept either way.