“Tory” is among the worst insults of the American political tradition. Thomas Jefferson used the term, for example, to denigrate his conservative opponents among the Federalists. Later, critics of Andrew Jackson’s unilateral application of executive power would often accuse his populist movement of “Toryism.” In both historical cases, and many others since, the charge was meant to convey an un-American devotion to monarchy, and perhaps even give a whiff of disloyalty – or, worse still, Catholicism.
“Whig,” by contrast, has almost always been a label of high praise. The Founders who fought and won the Revolution, after all, were Whigs. Their vision of liberty was constitutional, in the sense that it valued limits on the state to defend individual rights, and progressive, in that it saw those rights as the culmination of a long historical process. These are the liberal ideals not only of the American Founding, but also the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which inspired it – and they still continue to manifest our identity as a “Whig Republic” today.
But this classical view of liberty seems to be fading from American public life. The revolutionary left seeks to deconstruct the Whig commitment to progress, and the postliberal right maintains constitutionalism is too weak to preserve the nation. Like the great Whig Macauley’s Horatius at the bridge, many able defenders of Whiggism today have nobly remonstrated against both these critiques. And yet their opponents continue to advance almost inexorably. Given these somewhat dismal conditions, how can we hope to conserve the freedom we hold dear?
Tonight, I contend that one way we could is to revive the old tradition of Toryism. Slighted as it may have been throughout American history, the Tory attachment to the permanent things can teach us much about how to protect our inherited liberties. Without necessarily embracing a reactionary royalism, let alone repudiating our Founding, conservatives can learn from our Tory forerunners the importance of reverence and order, realism and romance, and ultimately the poetry that is the soul of our civilization.
The greatest exemplar of this kind of high conservatism is undoubtedly Russell Kirk. In 1964, he published a collection of essays and reflections in a sort of fragmentary autobiography, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory. On the surface, the title seems to be something of a contradiction. What could an eminent conservative have to do with the counter-culture that was just beginning to emerge in the 1960s? In the introduction, Kirk answered that a Tory “is a man attached to orthodoxy in church and state” and “a bohemian is a wandering and often impecunious man of letters or arts, indifferent to the demands of bourgeois fad and foible.” These two attitudes, Kirk maintained, “go not ill together: it is quite possible to abide by the norms of civilized existence, what Mr. T.S. Eliot calls ‘the permanent things’ and yet to set at defiance the soft securities and sham conventionalities of twentieth-century sociability.”
Kirk’s conservatism is rooted in the conviction that modernity puts those “permanent things” at risk. The stark rationalism of the Enlightenment and the totalitarian ideologies it justified, he understood, threaten to overturn everything that makes Western civilization worth loving. “Mine was not an Enlightened mind,” he wrote, “it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.” For Kirk, conservatism is a kind of “Gothic faith” in the immortal continuity of civilization and the undying truths it preserves.
Although Kirk was always a patriotic American, he confessed that he fully discovered the ways in which this sense of tradition becomes incarnate in society during his time in Scotland and England as a graduate student. “British society and the face of Britain were for me,” he wrote, “the expression of… the past ever blending with the present, so that the fabric continually renews itself, like some great oak, being neither wholly old nor wholly young.” British institutions, from the monarchy and the established church to the village green and the local pub, essentially preserved a way of life over long centuries of change and disruption.
The love of person and place Dr. Kirk admired so deeply was intimately linked with the Tory tradition. As he pointed out in The Roots of American Order, the word “Tory” was first meant by their Whiggish opponents as an insult hinting at disloyalty and Jacobitism. Derived from a Gaelic cry meaning “Come, o king!” those who felt an abiding loyalty to the English church and monarchy quickly adopted the word to describe themselves and remove its sting. According to Kirk, “the Tories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thought of society as a network of personal attachments” that were expressed in our sense of duty. Modern conservatism certainly takes elements from both the Whig and Tory traditions, but it was this Tory conception of society as something more than a mere contract or “cash nexus” that Kirk thought the movement most needed to represent.
The thinker Kirk believed best articulated this kind of conservatism was Edmund Burke – who for much of his career, we must not forget, served in Parliament as a Whig. Burke was indeed a partisan of the Glorious Revolution that placed a Protestant king on the English throne and reformed the British constitution. But he was no advocate of “perpetual revolution” or what C.S. Lewis called the “chronological snobbery” which defined the Whig narratives of history later liberals would advance. Instead, he maintained that inviting William of Orange to take power from James II was but “a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of regular hereditary succession” done out of necessity to defend the broader inheritance of English society.
This sense of inheritance was central to Burke’s entire thought. As the Irishman wrote in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, the English liberty Whigs sought to secure was “an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity.” Although he affirmed the existence of a natural law and even certain natural rights, he felt that appeals to those abstract concepts were a kind of strong medicine which could lead to social chaos and undo the very foundations of a just constitution. Elsewhere, in his 1791 “Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” he would explicitly contrast the wisdom of the Glorious Revolution with the ideological fervor of the French Jacobins:
“Both Revolutions profess liberty as their object; but in obtaining this object the one proceeds from anarchy to order, the other from order to anarchy. The first secures its liberty by establishing its throne; the other builds its freedom on the subversion of its monarchy. In the one, their means are unstained by crimes, and their settlement favors morality; in the other, vice and confusion are in the very essence of their pursuit, and of their enjoyment.”
In standing firm for liberty as an inherited good, then, Burke justified his Whig sentiments in a way that increasingly resembled Tory arguments for social order. Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution, in fact, led to a division within the Whig party itself; his supporters abandoned the radical Foxite Whigs to stand in solidarity with William Pitt’s Tory party against first the Jacobin Republic and then the Napoleonic Empire. In another essay, Kirk argued that this conservative fusion of Whiggish principles with Tory attitudes therefore made the English “the defenders of civilization against the enemies of order and justice and freedom.”
But Burke was not the only eighteenth-century conservative mind who inspired Kirk. Throughout his writings, he frequently praised Samuel Johnson – a friend of Burke’s, but an arch-Tory nonetheless who insisted that “The first Whig was the Devil.” That kind of hyperbole marked much of what Dr. Johnson said about Whigs and Whiggism. Whig ideology, he held, posed a certain danger to the established social order of England that needed to be restrained and checked.
All the same, Kirk insisted that Johnson and Burke shared many first principles. Against the insipid social contract theory of John Locke and the terrible “general will” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, let alone the bloodless utilitarianism of the nineteenth-century liberals, these two men stood as “Pillars of Order.” “Both Johnson and Burke,” Kirk wrote, “subscribed to the wisdom of the species, were attached to custom and precedent, upheld the idea of the Christian magistrate, and adhered to the venerable concepts of Christian charity and community.” Despite their differences about partisan politics, and even their different ways of thinking about political questions, both Burke and Johnson stood for a particular order in the face of Revolution’s gaping maw.
For Kirk, Johnson’s conception of the principles shared by Tories and Whigs was most clearly articulated in a note he wrote to his biographer James Boswell:
“A wise Tory and a wise Whig, I believe, will agree. Their principles are the same, though their modes of thinking are different. A high Tory makes government unintelligible; it is lost in the clouds. A violent Whig makes it impracticable; he is for allowing so much liberty to every man, that there is not enough power to govern any man. The prejudice of the Tory is for establishment; the prejudice of the Whig is for innovation. A Tory does not wish to give more real power to Government; but that Government should have more reverence.”
This Tory sense of reverence is perhaps Johnson’s most important contribution to modern conservatism. As Burke wrote of the French Revolution, the Enlightenment Johnson strove against sought to rudely tear off all the “decent drapery of life” that could be found in “the wardrobe of a moral imagination.” Social contract theory – the notion that government comes into being merely by consent of the governed – undermines the divine sanction that always defined Christian society. Modern thought’s materialist tendencies promote a kind of individualism which is inimical to the spiritualized conception of man’s place in the “great chain of being.” As the Tories’ greatest man of letters, however, Johnson undertook to restore some perception of society’s theological origins.
One notable example of this is a brief 1761 pamphlet titled “Thoughts on the Coronation of His Present Majesty, King George III.” In the piece, Johnson argued in favor of a grander and more public ceremony marking a monarch’s accession to the throne to remind the British people of their great inheritance. He began by writing that, “As the wisdom of our ancestors [a phrase Burke also frequently used] has appointed a very splendid and ceremonious inauguration of our kings, their intention was, that they should receive their crown with such awful rites, as might for ever impress upon them a due sense of the duties which they were to take, when the happiness of nations is put into their hands.” The pamphlet itself argued that George III erred by processing to Westminster Abbey for his own coronation with too little pomp and ceremony. For Johnson, kingship was not a bureaucratic office, but rather a deep spiritual trust. The sacramental service of coronation was a visible sign of the unwritten English constitution.
Although Johnson’s ideas about political reverence may strike our American ears as somehow too monarchist or too foreign, the Founders themselves understood how important it is to maintain a good society. As our first president, no less a personage than George Washington himself sought to define the highest constitutional office with a spirit of reverence not unlike that which Johnson commended in this pamphlet, by, for example, holding levees like the courts of European monarchs. And throughout The Federalist, Publius often argued that one of the strengths of the new U.S. Constitution is that it would inculcate reverence among both rulers and the ruled. In Federalist 17, for instance, he wrote that it was necessary to cultivate “affection, esteem, and reverence towards the government” if it was to effectively secure Americans’ rights and promote their prosperity. Of course, it was not only the people who ought to partake of this piety; “sacred reverence,” he wrote in Federalist 25, “ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country.”
Fundamentally, there is a kind of Tory logic to the argument Washington made in action and The Federalist made in print. “No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected, without being truly respectable,” Publius wrote in Federalist 62, “nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.” The eighteenth-century figures Kirk considered essential to the conservative mind, on both sides of the Atlantic, strongly believed that political leaders must be guided above all by duty. The persons entrusted with power have a noblesse oblige to use it for the sake of the common good, and the people have an attendant responsibility to obey the dictates of justice.
Despite this emphasis on political reverence and public duty, neither the Founders nor Dr. Johnson were advocates of absolute power. “There runs through Johnson’s works a strong vein of disillusion and doubt of human powers,” Kirk wrote, and “a sense of the vanity of human wishes.” For all his high expectations of the tone a strong government could set for society, he was nonetheless realistic about the fallenness of man. Like his near contemporary John Adams, Johnson admired the English constitution for the checks and balances it imposed on authority. He certainly hoped for “enlightened statesmen,” but he knew that they “will not always be at the helm.”
As a man of letters, then, Dr. Johnson did not simply rest content by trusting institutions to defend liberty – he also set out to give the public mind a perception of his Tory skepticism about men and motives. In a 1774 pamphlet titled “The Patriot,” for instance, he warned that demagogic politicians often seek to use love of country as an excuse for abusing the public weal. He denounced this pretended patriotism as a “species of disease,” spreading unnecessary dissension and delusion. As Johnson famously put it to Boswell once, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” when it becomes a mere “cloak for self-interest.” A Tory writer’s duty, he believed, was to puncture these pretensions and expose the partisan’s true nature in defense of genuine patriotism.
In our era of nationalism and fanatic ideology, a measure of Johnson’s Tory skepticism would be nothing short of a political tonic. Without either the ironist’s bitterness or the enthusiast’s mania, Johnson was able to defend the true basis of the English constitution – a task not unlike that laying before conservatives today. But Johnson’s own conception of his vocation was by no means limited to politics; in fact, it might be said that he most excelled not as a political writer but as a literary man.
No other critic has done more than Johnson to shape the taste of the English-speaking peoples. In part, this is because he was simply a brilliant writer who mastered several genres: the sermon, the essay, plays, novels, poems. But it is also because he understood the ethical dimension of literature. For Kirk, one of the exceptional things about English writers is that, for the most part, they have believed “the writer lies under a moral obligation to normality: that is, explicitly or implicitly, he is bound by certain enduring standards of private and public conduct.” Dr. Johnson’s Tory criticism is partly responsible for this, especially insofar as he worked to distance English literature from the egoism of the French Enlightenment.
Although this normative tendency can be found in all of Johnson’s criticism, it achieves its greatest profundity in his writing on William Shakespeare. He praised the Bard for being “above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature.” One of Burke’s most famous axioms is that “The individual is foolish, but the species is wise.” For Johnson, one of the Bard’s marks of genius is that “In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.” In his plays, Johnson wrote, Shakespeare manages to make his characters “act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated,” thereby teaching wisdom by dramatizing the stuff of life itself.
Demonstrating that Tories can healthily respect the past without seeking to preserve it in amber, Johnson also admired Shakespeare’s poetic ability to imagine new uses for the English language itself. He worried, though, that the general public would lose their ability to understand his writing without some kind of critical intervention – namely, his extraordinary dictionary. “Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas,” he wrote in its preface; “I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.” This sentiment is the height of the Tory cultural aspiration. “We have long preserved our constitution,” he would go on to write, “let us make some struggles for our language.” The preservation of the Word is the ultimate conservative mission.
Tories do not merely rest content with preservation, however. Dr. Kirk often cited a passage from Walter Bagehot to define the Tory mindset. “The essence of Toryism is enjoyment,” the eminent Victorian wrote, and therefore “the way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs.” Though he struggled with depression and other mental illnesses, Johnson himself was exceptionally capable of this kind of joy, telling jokes and holding court in every setting, from the most refined salons to ribald taverns. With Falstaff, he cried “Give me life!”
“Over the ‘Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight,” Bagehot wrote; “there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy at an old feast.” It is this spirit that most recommends the old Tories to conservatives today. We do not need more droning homilies about the excellencies of our political system, nor monotone lessons about basic economics. Whig ideology alone is not the answer to our present discontents. As the West’s greatest statesmen and writers have always known, rather, we must first understand that freedom is a kind of adventure. The Bohemian Tories, from Johnson to Kirk and beyond, invite you to come along.
