Very Incomplete Six Core Beliefs Of Conservatism

Posted: 7/10/2018

Just received by e-mail the Six Core Beliefs of Conservatism thanks to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Motto: Education for liberty).

The Six Core Beliefs of Conservatism excerpted from Russell Kirk (“The following is excerpted from The Essential Russell Kirk, a collection of his finest essays and writings.”)

The funny thing is that the word liberty is mentioned only once, words like freedom or free society a total of 2. Individual liberty is conspicuously absent from this document.

Very regrettable! Very disappointing! One of the biggest mistakes conservatives can make!

Friedrich Hayek wrote a famous essay titled “Why I am not a conservative”, which is part of his book titled “The Constitution of Liberty” (originally published 1960). A few appropriate excerpts from this essay here (emphasis added):

1. “The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is need for a “brake on the vehicle of progress,” I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake. What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative.”
2. “But, as the socialists have for a long time been able to pull harder, the conservatives have tended to follow the socialist rather than the liberal direction and have adopted at appropriate intervals of time those ideas made respectable by radical propaganda ”
3. “This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead.”