A conservatism which tells government – or any other collective entity - to stay out of the lives of individuals isn't conservatism at all, but a classic statement of liberalism and its belief in the discrete, isolated self-owning, self-possessing, self-maximising individual whose claims remain prior to all social, institutional and moral entanglements. Conservatives, going back to Maistre, Bonald, Chateaubriand in France, and Burke over in Britain, emphasise the social and moral ties, the commitments and solidarities that connect the individual with others - often involving a belief in God and participation in the Church but also the full range of intermediary associations, building upwards according to purpose. Social proximity is key, building an intimate authority based on face-to-face interpersonal relations and fostering a small-scale practical reasoning. The case of such conservatives is that liberal modernity has emancipated the individual from claims and constraints focused on the social, political and ethical commons to give us the freedom of the abstract individual. In being thus unattached and unmoored, this self-choosing, self-maximising discrete individual is also unfree and anomic, normless and incapable of realizing larger, deeper ends in the absence of solidaristic connection with others (Durkheim is good on this). The opposition of small and big government is merely a false antithesis born of the liberal ontology and the way that it abstracts the individual and the social from one other and sets them in antagonistic relation.
Those who tell government to stay out of the lives of individuals are not necessarily conservative, but may well be classic liberals who identify each, any and every collective purpose as inimical to individual liberty. In other words, it's not just ‘government’ but all collective purposes that liberalism considers inimical to individual liberty. That doesn’t mean to say that liberals rule out all collective constraint, for there is a clear recognition of the necessity of law and government. But the liberty of the individual remains prior and ultimate. In the liberal conception, the free individual contracts into a collective constraint out of a commitment to protect individual liberty, not further a common good directly – individuals sacrifice a little self-interest under the terms of the contract out of a commitment to preserve individual liberty as a whole from the claims of others. That view needs to be set in the context of a liberal market society in which other others are considered competitors for scarce resources. That’s the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all,’ a society constituted by exploitative, instrumental relations in which, each uses the other as mere means to private ends, with the result that all become reduced to means subject to external power. Marx establishes this point in terms of a dualism between an atomised society as the sphere of universal antagonism below and the centralised political state affirming an abstract, illusory community above. Social atomism and political centralisation are twin aspects of the same diremptive society, the abstract individual of liberal philosophy bringing into existence its political counterpart in the form of the state as the abstract community. As Marx writes of the discrete individual of liberalism:
He lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers. The relationship of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e. it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where he is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality.
Marx EW OJQ 1975: 220-221
Marx proceeds to point out that ‘the bourgeois …. only takes part in the life of the state in a sophistical way … but this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself.’ (Marx EW OJQ 1975: 220-221). This division between the abstract individual and abstract community is inherent in the liberal ontology, giving rise to false antitheses such as ‘small’ versus ‘big’ government. This is not a true state or society, but merely a 'military alliance,', a mutual insurance pact, to quote Aristotle, who made politics integral to the creative self-actualization of individuals as social beings.
Conservatives may resist the encroachment of ‘big government’ in favour of the small scale, but fail to grasp the problem as a process of abstraction inherent in bourgeois social relations. The false antitheses, leaving the individual alone and powerless in a world governed by supra-individual forces, are generated by liberal philosophy, ontology and social relations. St. Augustine warned of the dangers of individuals who come to be curved in on themselves. If those claiming to be conservative are involved in a variety of intermediary associations and other such communities, then fine, but that participation in associational activity does not rule out participation in government nor government intervention, since on this premise government is something internal to human sovereignty, not external to it. To rule out ‘government’ as such betrays an ideological animus premised upon the primacy and ultimacy of individual liberty, that is, of the abstract individual, not the real, social, individual. Once we start from the premise that human beings are social beings, each requiring connection with others in order to be themselves, then we can conceive of collective constraints that are necessary and legitimate; government can be as much a part of that collective context as any other social body.
If I am right in this, then the conditions of reclaiming conservative themes in new forms is, well, something akin to socialism. Terry Eagleton describes liberalism as ‘an admirable ideal’ and ‘a deeply honourable political tradition,’ recognizing that the 'negative' freedoms it espouses have a vital place in any just society. But the space involved in richer human relations is rather more generous and more positive than this atomistic philosophy can allow. That space is constituted by the act of relationship itself, rather than being given from the outset on the basis of an individual liberty conceived as prior to society. This interrelationship joining the individual and the social is the vital precondition of human flourishing, creating a society in which each is enabled to realize his or her nature at its best, in a way which enables others to realize their healthy potentials, also. ‘And that means that you realize your nature at its best - since if the other's self-fulfilment is the medium through which you flourish yourself, you are not at liberty to be violent, dominative or self-seeking.’ (Eagleton 2003 ch 6). The political expression of this eudaemonist commitment is, Eagleton argues, socialism. But the way Eagleton describes this fits precisely my point that the realization of the conservative themes of a properly ordered society require new social forms taking us beyond the violence and tyranny of abstraction of the modern age:
When Aristotle's ethics of flourishing are set in a more interactive context, one comes up with something like the political ethics of Marx. The socialist society is one in which each attains his or her freedom and autonomy in and through the self-realization of others. Socialism is just whatever set of institutions it would take for it to happen.
Eagleton After Theory 2003 ch 6
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