By Edmund Fawcett
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Pp. xv, 525. $35 hardcover.
In recent years conservatism has returned with a vengeance. But which conservatism is it? Edmund Fawcett tells a tale of two conservatisms: a liberal conservatism disposed to cooperate with liberal democracy, and an illiberal conservatism disposed to speak directly to “the people.” Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition follows Fawcett’s earlier effort Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (2nd ed., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018). Whereas the earlier work “aimed to show what we risk losing,” the present work “is the other half of the story” (p. xi). As its subtitle indicates, it is a story that depicts conservatism at war with itself as much as with liberalism.
Although Fawcett describes himself as “a left-wing liberal” (p. xiii), his overarching argument is conservative. “To survive, let alone flourish,” Fawcett announces in the book’s first sentence, “liberal democracy needs the right’s support” (p. xi). Fawcett apparently agrees with John Stuart Mill, who writes, “a party of. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2015, p. 47). Without the equilibrating force of conservatism, the life of liberalism’s idea eventually dissolves into what Edmund Burke called the “dust and powder of individuality.” But conservatism cannot serve a liberal democratic order, as Fawcett observes, “[w]hen, as now, the right hesitates or denies its support” (p. xi). The health of liberal democracy depends on the support of a conservatism.
