Conservatism, Nationalism, and Ideological Innovation: The Cases of Strauss and Oakeshott

Abstract From a label that used to mean an ideological family in favor of customs and tradition, the meaning of “conservatism” has been recently changing to encompass more nationalistic and populistic connotations. Given this shift, I use two works to discuss what it means to label something as “conservative” and to talk about the nature and function of political labels in general. On the one hand, I use David McIlwain’s recent work on Strauss and Oakeshott as a gateway to discuss the meaning of this label and of political labels in general. McIlwain’s is critical of the idea that Strauss and Oakeshott are conservatives and he separates them as much as possible from conservatism’s “conventional” senses: reactionism, traditionalism, and free-market liberalism. In this essay, I argue that the significance of Strauss’ and Oakeshott’s conservatism is not found in any straightforward defense of reactionist, traditionalist, or free-market policies. Rather, Strauss and Oakeshott were ideological innovators who offered new concepts that enabled conservatives to redraw the limits of the conservative family – to conflate several disparate opponents as enemies of conservatism, and to exclude other conservatives as not being part of the conservative family. Then, and on the one hand, I look at how Oakeshott’s notion of “rationalism” entails a critique of religious defenses of conservatism. On the other hand, I describe how Strauss’ notion of “historicism” entails a criticism of Oakeshott’s style of contextualist conservatism. Finally, I use the ideas of this essay to look at a recent attempt at ideological innovation, i.e. Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism that tries to take conservatism in a nationalist direction. I show that Hazony’s conservative nationalism does not succeed. Contrarily to Strauss and Oakeshott, Hazony creates concepts that do not innovate conservatism, and that are absent in his critiques of other conservatives and of the opponents of conservatism.