Conservatism Three By Three

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Road to the Middle Class

Thursday October 23, 2025

by Christopher Chantrill

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We do not live in the past, but the past in us. — U.B. Phillips1

The vision of a Greater Separation of Powers is the idea that the great centers of power in modern society ought to be kept separate, and forbidden to combine with each other to dominate the others. That is what Michael Novak argues in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. There are three power sectors in modern society, political, economic, and moral/cultural, that have condensed out of the compact social order of pre-modern society. They are the basis of our freedom and our prosperity. But they are also dangerous and their powers need to be curbed. But how? The three powers need to be kept separate, just like the three branches of government, and prevented from combining to gang up on the other sector. Novak dug out the hidden goal towards which modern conservatism has been struggling towards since its emergence in the late 18th century in the revolt of Edmund Burke against the French Revolution and its rule of Reason. The great systematic powers of the modern world, the powers that have emancipated us from rural idiocy, but have also enslaved us with their dominations, the three power sectors of politics, economy, and moral culture: they must be kept separate.

We do not mean by conservatism, as the critics charge, an unreflecting tradition that follows without thought the “way” of the ancestors. Nor do we countenance it as a cynical defense of the ruling class and its privilege. Conservatism, ever since Burke, has been a self-conscious culture of tradition, that is, a culture that recognizes that, whatever we know, whatever we have learned, we still see through a glass darkly, and not face to face. We do not know what in our traditions is essential and what is dispensable. Conservatives only want to balance tradition, the unconscious accumulation of social expertise, the lifeworld of the taken-for-granted and the always already familiar, with an evolutionary process of consciously righting wrongs and adapting to changing times. Thus, a century before Freud “discovered” the unconscious, the First Conservative inaugurated a program that balanced conscious wisdom and unconscious “always already” instinct, founding human society upon the basis of the natural social bonds between man and man. And conservatives also experience themselves in a partnership between the past and the future: “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”2

In a profound way, Edmund Burke’s four great campaigns marked out for all of us already the program of modern conservatism. On America, he urged the folly of trying to rule that continent from Britain; on India, he championed the end of the ages-old warrior culture of imperial pillage and plunder with his ten year campaign to impeach Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal; on Ireland, he championed the emancipation of Catholics; on France, he drove the first stake in the ground against the hegemony of reason and system. In homage to Burke let us take his four campaigns and rewind them into three strands of conservatism and illuminate each one.

First of all there is cultural conservatism, which finds its founding statement in Burke’s declaration that we, the generation of the living, have a contract both with our dead ancestors and with generations yet unborn. Then there is so-called economic conservatism that begins with Adam Smith’s declaration of the Invisible Hand, that there is a natural instinct for cooperation between people that directs them into socially beneficial actions even when they are merely seeking their own self-interest. Then there is the political conservatism that begins with Montesquieu’s doctrine of the three branches of government and the separation of powers.

To identify these three strands of conservatism is to express the irony of its name and its program: for it is not really conservative at all. While cultural conservatism is certainly conservative it accepts that the past not fixed for all time, but merely a challenge to the living generation to honor its legacy and build a world that honors the sacrifices of the past. Economic conservatism is not really conservative all all, but a radical break with a past that took it for granted that all economic affairs required detailed top-down supervision to prevent a chaos of economic free-for-all, that the bosses needed to tell the workers what to do and when. Instead it recognizes that economic actions begin with the radical uncertainty of divining and serving other peoples’ needs. And political conservatism is nothing if not radical in its faith in distributed power. It honors the natural aristocracy of talent and wisdom while deprecating the oligarchy of power.

The cultural strand began with Burke and his jeremiad against the mechanical culture of the Age of Reason, its reduction of everything to Newtonian mechanics and “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” and it continued in the 19th century with people like George Eliot, who argued for the dignity and the competence of ordinary people, from Adam Bede to Maggie Tulliver to Mary Garth and to Mirah Lapidoth. And that is to say nothing about the girl from rural Colorado, Thea Kronberg, in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Today, after the convulsions of 20th century totalitarianism, we have sadder, wiser leftists like Jürgen Habermas sidling towards a mitigation of the power of system, the domination of reason, by balancing it with the intersubjectivity, the reciprocity of the communicative lifeworld. We have Berger and Neuhaus arguing for the dignity of authentic self-governing mediating structures between the individual and the mega-structures of big government and big corporations. We have Lawrence Cahoone and his Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics working out the way in which ordinary people can live and cooperate in dignity, equality and freedom. And there is Charles Taylor, a liberal Canadian philosopher, who makes a liberal case for a society that refines the modern moral order of freedom, equality, dignity, and expressive creativity into a blend that balances ordinary flourishing with a yearning for a higher meaning. It is not just conservatives that have rebelled against the culture of the mechanical life. The Romantics rebelled famously against the sterility of reason; after them the Young Hegelians developed the notion of the alienation of modern life and their rebellion thrives today in the expressionism, existentialism, and environmentalism of early 21st century culture.

The economic strand that begins with Adam Smith and his Invisible Hand was expanded with Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage. Then in 1870 came the marginal revolution that resolved the apparent dichotomy between the idea of exchange value and intrinsic value. Then in 1920 Mises demonstrated the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism: without a market you cannot have prices, and without prices you cannot know the cost of anything. This, if anything, exploded the conceit of Marx that a market for labor represented an alienation of social labor. If by getting rid of capitalism you do not know what your labor is worth to others then how can you decide whether you are alienated or not? Finally Hayek showed the impossibility of bureaucratic centralism: the man in Washington cannot hope to out-think the millions of consumers and producers. The idea that only a wise ruler can negotiate the conflicts of a people is shown to be impossible. People do better negotiating with each other than through a political middle-man from the government; a Barnacle or a Stiltstocking knows only How Not to Do It.

If Adam Smith invented the Invisible Hand, Max Weber extended it with the notion of work as a calling, the Protestant Ethic that informed the spirit of capitalism; then he found that the whole urban western tradition had developed a culture that dissolved the age-old loyalty to kindred and legitimized the possibility of trusting strangers. In the western city, he argued, Christianity taught people to live as individuals and to extend trust beyond the boundaries of kindred towards anyone that could be trusted.3 The community of neighborhood, church, association and nation replaced the community of the kindred. You can see Weber’s theory confirmed in the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali girl born into the ageless culture of clan and tribe. From clan daughter in Somalia she became against all odds an educated individual in Holland and an activist for women’s rights as individuals.4 Then the Frankfurt School extended Heidegger’s concern about domination into a critique of instrumental reason that looked forward in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action to a move away from system and reason and towards conversation and negotiation of truth values as a basis of community. In the 21st century we have George Gilder reformulating the workings of capitalism in terms of the communications theory of Claude Shannon, that each economic innovation is an incident of surprise in a sea of noise.

The political strand that begins with Montesquieu’s idea of the three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, was implemented with astonishing success by James Madison in the US Constitution. It remains unequaled in its approach to the political problem: how do you give government enough power to fight enemies, foreign and domestic, but withhold the power to oppress its legitimate domestic opponents? Today the majority politics of the founders is critiqued by modern public choice theory. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock showed in The Calculus of Consent that the only just basis of legislation is unanimous consent, for it forces the majority to pay the costs of the minority in order to get its support. The control of government power requires constant vigilance, and the 20th century ruling class betrayed the vision of the founders with the notion of a “living constitution,” a construction that broadly licensed the ruling class, through its control of the judiciary and the culture, to amend the constitution without ratification by the people.

But now comes the task to combine the three strands into an integrated social philosophy, and that is where Michael Novak comes in. He extended the separation of powers doctrine from Montesquieu’s rule about government to a philosophy about society as a whole, thus binding together the three strands of modern conservatism into a single rope. Differentiating society into three sectors, economic, political, and moral/cultural, he proposes what we have called here a Greater Separation of Powers. In this view the separation of church and state, specified in the First Amendment prohibition of an establishment of religion, is extended to the notion of a separation of powers between each of the three sectors: not just separation of church and state — the separation of political and moral/cultural power — but separation of economic and political power and separation of economic and moral/cultural power. Thus politics, economy, and culture are free to develop within their own sectors without subjection to the domination of a totalitarian combination of powers.

In Status Anxiety Alain de Botton rehearses the great moral stories that have been told about status, about rich and poor. Do the rich deserve to be rich, or are they crooks? Are the poor deservedly so, or are they held down by the evil rich? Let us appropriate his method of stories and deploy it here to rehearse the stories about the government and the people that reveal to us the moral framework of modern conservatism.

First Story:

Government is force and force destroys society; you must limit government if you desire to reduce force and exploitation.

How do you limit force so that people are “forced” to solve their problems without force? You limit government with the political conservatism of Montesquieu and the founders. You hive government away from a corrupt condominium with the economic sector and the temptations of crony capitalism; you keep government away from leaking into the moral-cultural sector following the temptation of an established religion to force its moral vision upon others.

Second Story:

Politics is violence and division and turns people against each other; you must limit political power if you want people to stop fighting each other and start cooperating.

Cultural conservatism teaches that it is religion and culture that teach cooperation and mutual assistance. Modern totalitarian secular religions, on the contrary, start with a declaration of irreconcilable differences that can only be resolved by force. Marxism must start with the notion that the workers are exploited and that nothing short of political revolution can fix it. Modern progressivism must start with the notion that certain groups are permanently marginalized and that they must fight the rest of society to get their rights. Modern elite liberals must find a worsening economic inequality to justify their resort to ever more government programs to redistribute income. Unfortunately, their tactics confirm their faith in force. If you mobilize to fight a holy war against the bosses, chances are the bosses will organize to fight right back; if you organize the marginalized to fight for their rights against the racists, sexists and homophobes, you force racists, sexists, and homophobes to push back. Modern secular religions that campaign for a collapse of the separation between the sector of force and the sector of meaning must end up by creating a totalitarianism that enforces meaning with government coercion. Cultural conservatism teaches people to think first about what they can contribute to society and do something about it before they ask what society owes them.

Third Story:

System is domination and sets the powerful over the powerless; you must limit system to give the powerless a defense against power.

The authoritarian delusion implemented in the welfare state is that ordinary people just don’t have the information or the knowledge to manage their own health care, to educate their own children, to buy safe and reliable products. Economic conservatism shows that they are wrong. The unconscious organism of the price “system” automatically selects desirable health plans that most people like; it automatically prefers schools that most people want to send their children to; it penalizes producers that sell defective products. This does not require that each individual possess encyclopedic information about all options; it merely demonstrates that the collective impact of millions of individual decisions based on partial knowledge adds up to a wealth of knowledge that a corps of policy analysts in Washington DC can never approach.

A world illuminated by this triple conservative vision is one where people can live independent and free under institutions that will protect freedom while encouraging social cooperation and punishing freeloading. With cultural conservatism the bonds of tribal loyalty are sundered and people are socialized within moral/cultural associations such as churches and mutual-benefit associations. With economic conservatism people are freed from the cramped limitations of the family economy and economically socialized to work that benefits the stranger. In political conservatism people are socialized for and protected by a state with powers limited to the essential tasks for which force is required.

Now all we need is the implementation. And that starts, after the horror of Obama, with persuading the American people to abandon the welfare state’s Battle of the Benefits, the reduction of social life to a political scramble for entitlement loot, and in that act of renunciation transform America from its current shame as a robber band of Takers into a land that is first of all a society of Makers and Givers.

1Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, quoted by Thomas Sowell in Conquests and Cultures, Basic Books, 1998, p.3.

2Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Collier, 1937, p.232.

3Max Weber, The City, Free Press, 1958, p.100-103.

4Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel, Free Press, 2007.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.christopherchantrill.com.

print view

Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Government and the Technology of Force
If you scratch a reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government

Business, Slavery and Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

Humanity’s Big Problem: Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history has lacked religion.

A Critique of Human Mechanics
When governments tried to govern on mechanical principles.

The Paradox of Individualism
People that believe in individualism experience individualism as an advanced form of socialization.

From Multitude to Civil Society
Softening the hard edge of instrumental reason.

The Answer is Civil Society
Civil Society: the joint development of the market, civil society, and nationalism.

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power you must limit power.

Conservatism Three by Three
Balancing tradition with adapting to changing times.

Imagining a Culture of Involvement
You must suggest an alternative.

The Poor Without the Welfare State
What would happen to the poor without a welfare state?

The Middle Class Without the Welfare State
Can the middle class thrive without the supervision of the welfare state?

Liberals and the Welfare State
Liberals ought to be equal to the task of living lives of creative endeavor without political power.

From Freeloaders to Free Givers
But are we too wedded to freeloading?

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

Why We Fight
We must fight for our “shining city on a hill”

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