Donald W. Livingston: David Hume ... The First Conservative

Donald W. Livingston is professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author of Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy.

The conservative political tradition is usually thought to begin with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke observed that the Revolution did not aim at reforming society but at overturning the entire social and political order and replacing it with one grounded in man’s natural “reason.” He offered this quote from a leader in the National Assembly: “All the establishments in France crown the unhappiness of the people: to make them happy they must be renewed, their ideas, their laws, their customs, words changed … destroy everything; yes destroy everything; then everything is to be renewed.”

Burke saw that total criticism demands total transformation, which demands total control. All the horrors of the “totalitarian” regimes of the 20th century were intimated in Burke’s insight into the French Revolution. If conservatism is to have any intellectual content—if it is to be something other than a disposition to look with suspicion on serious change to the status quo (which would mean that any regime in power is “conservative”)—it must be resistance to the spiritual and intellectual pathology Burke put his finger on.

Later thinkers would deepen Burke’s critique, notably Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, Albert Camus, Gerhart Niemeyer, and especially Eric Voegelin. But it was the Scottish philosopher David Hume, writing some 50 years before Burke’s Reflections, who first identified the pathology. And unlike Burke, whose criticism was mainly rhetorical, Hume worked out a systematic philosophical critique that explained the roots of the pathology, its origin in human nature, its psychology, and its destructive exemplifications in modern culture...