Was the founder of the Liberal Party a liberal or conservative?

Following the defeat of the Howard government in 2007, Liberal Party members and supporters appeared generally to be suffering a loss of confidence in who they were and what they stood for. A number of prominent Liberals and media commentators began castigating the party for straying from its philosophical foundations. Straying from true 'liberal' foundations - the ideas of R.G. Menzies - was a major factor in the government's defeat, it was increasingly claimed. As expected, the media gave plenty of space to confused Liberals and left-wing commentators - the latter keen to sermonise on how their enemies should be more like them. Melbourne's feminist Age played its usual role in this. Their contention was that the founder of the Liberal Party was a liberal - that is why it is called the Liberal Party - and that the Party's foundations were the principles of liberalism. Thus the alleged move to the 'right' was a self-harming departure from the Liberal Party's foundational principles. With the usual shameless pretence, some leftist commentators claimed further that the shift to the right was a betrayal of the Party's founder, Sir Robert Menzies.

Tony Abbott dealt with the issue of foundational principles in chapter five of his book Battlelines. The chapter is headed 'What's Right?', with its evident play on words. The chapter is an excellent discussion of those principles and of Abbott's understanding of philosophical conservatism. I am including below an excerpt that deals with what Abbott sees as the 'liberal' and the 'conservative' elements in the Liberal Party and their relationship with each other. Most of what he says I would take no issue with. There are, however, a few important clarifications to be made. I will keep it brief, intending to devote a longer piece on Robert Menzies' political philosophy at a later date.

In the last twelve months I've read Menzies' two post-public life memoirs, Afternoon Light (1967) and The Measure of the Years (1970). Before reading the two memoirs, my impression had been, especially since my academic work on Edmund Burke, that Menzies was philosophically conservative - more precisely a Burkean conservative. My reading of his memoirs confirmed that impression. Indeed, there were passages that were almost a paraphrasing of Burke's important ideas. Then why did Menzies call his party the 'Liberal Party'? The answer is straightforward for those familiar with the full scope of Burke's writings, with which Menzies was clearly familiar.

For many years during his lifetime Burke was considered a 'liberal', and an authoritative articulator of liberal principles. This had to do with his compelling defence of the Americans in their fight with the British government, a fight that led to the American Revolution. A little over a decade later many of Burke's admirers were shocked and uncomprehending that he began a furious campaign against the French revolutionaries, a campaign that culminated in what could be seen as Burke's political and philosophical manifesto, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a manifesto that became more or less the manifesto of most modern conservatives. He was accused then and since of inconsistency. Some even accused him of venal and opportunistic motivations. But there is no inconsistency - and certainly no venality. Indeed, in all the great battles of his political career he was astonishingly consistent in the application of his guiding principles. There is even evidence in his youthful writings of those principles in development, especially as regards basic metaphysical and epistemological questions.

Burke's starting point, philosophically and politically, was the British constitution - what it was and how it came to be. In the American conflict he accused the British government of denying to the American colonists the liberty guaranteed to them in the British constitution. The British government in denying to the American British their constitutional rights - their freedoms - was undermining the social order created and guaranteed by the Constitution. Personal and communal freedom inhered in that social order. Without that order freedom could not exist. Here we have the crucial import of what he called 'rational liberty'.

Burke's arguments for and explication of the British Constitution applied more broadly than the British Constitution. In defending the [British] Americans and later attacking the French revolutionaries he enunciated a metaphysical and epistemological framework by which any actual government could be assessed. So, whereas he defended the Americans against constitutional vandalism by the British government, he attacked the French revolutionaries for a denial of the fundamental nature of people, state and society, without an acknowledgment of which no society could be cohesive or have stable government. Without a properly ordered society freedom could not exist. The French, he said, were not in the act of establishing a republic; under the pretence of popular sovereignty they were establishing a tyranny. Burke's predictions of where the French Revolution would lead were unerring. The French citizen's security was dependent on the whim of the ideologues who had usurped power and authority with specious reasoning about liberty. The political-class tyranny that followed was of a cold calculated savagery that Burke claimed had not been witnessed before in Christian Europe.

Burke's philosophical conservatism was not an abstract political theory in the atomised sense, in which one starts with a few fundamental propositions and goes on to build an ever swelling abstract theory of government. His conservatism was rather a framework of elements that were called upon to assess political problems. At the centre of that framework were considerations of 'rational liberty' and how it could be maximised in the circumstances of a particular people.

Thus - and this is the critical point - at one time he could be defending freedom against the excesses of government and thus be seen as 'liberal', at another time defending freedom against the excesses and errors of 'democratic' movements - and then be seen as 'illiberal, both of which happened. This explains the fundamental ignorance that political rationalists show in their comments about philosophical conservatism. Because conservatism does not show the signs of the sort of abstract theory of government that sparked and later calcified their (leftist) minds, they accuse conservatives of having no 'vision' or consistency of thought. The reality is that philosophical conservatism draws from an extremely rich source of philosophical contemplation going back to Plato and Aristotle, and is demanding in terms of intuitive judgment, rational capacity and experience of the political process.

In saying the above I can hear the echo down through the decades of the accusation that Menzies had no vision, allowed state and society to float in the fifties, and was responsible for no new policy initiatives. (Menzies vigorously challenged that last accusation in The Measure of the Years.) Such judgments clearly issue from a presupposed theoretical position (that's called question-begging) and simply ignore Menzies' philosophical views that were responsible for an astonishing period of well-being, growth, prosperity and communal optimism. It is strange, indeed contradictory, that many of those attributing a liberal political philosophy to Menzies also level the above accusations to discredit him. Obviously you cannot have it both ways.

As for his alleged liberalism, when we read that he considered himself a 'simple Methodist' and are reminded of his affection for British tradition and the monarchy, and for our heritage of British law and parliamentary democracy, we could hardly think of him as a Millian liberal, the sort of liberal in the Liberal Party, I suggest, who is accusing the party of straying from its liberal roots. J.S. Mills' liberalism, I emphasise, was rooted in a materialist metaphysics, the opposite of the classical realism presupposed by Burke in his writings. Menzies could not have been, even on the superficial evidence, a liberal in the Millian mould. Those members of the Liberal Party who are motivated by J.S. Mills' theories are fantasising if they think Menzies was that sort of liberal. Then why, I asked again, did he call the political party he founded in 1944 the Liberal Party?

Menzies called his new party the Liberal Party, it seems to me, for historical and philosophical reasons. The historical reasons were that he wanted to gather together the non-Labor parties and organisations, some of whom were undoubtedly motivated to varying degrees by Millian liberalism, to take a stand against socialist political theory and atheistic socialist movements. Millian liberals and Burkean conservatives had common ground in the particular circumstances prevailing at the time.

The philosophical reasons were that from the standpoint of Menzies' overwhelmingly Burkean outlook, the great threat at that time was from communist/socialist governments and agitators. The communist threat loomed large and it was necessary to emphasise the enormous threat to the freedoms guaranteed to Australians in their constitution, traditions, and established social order. While the communist threat was there in the unions and sections of the Labor Party and in academia, the common ground hid the differences in political philosophy between liberals and conservative in a government that was in reality driven by conservative principles. It remained so until the end of the Menzies era when it appears in retrospect that many of Menzies' successors had little idea of his political and philosophical motivations. As often happens, success bred complacency and suppressed self-reflection.

One would be dull not to see the parallels with the end of the Howard era. John Howard was not entirely right when he called himself the most conservative person in the Liberal Party: he was the most Burkean conservative of his colleagues. Like Menzies he often paraphrased key Burkean ideas.

These are the reasons, then, that Menzies appropriately called the new anti-socialist party the Liberal Party. It was a term that had a relational meaning. The relation could be compared with that between the British government and the American British whom Burke defended from what looked like a modern liberal point of view. It now follows logically that if Menzies had faced different circumstances in the 1940s, circumstances in which there existed a threat to Australia's established social and political order (one comparable to the threat of the French Jacobins) he might have called his party by a different name. I suggest that if Menzies were alive today he would not call a gathering together of parties fighting the present threat to Australia's social order and its historical heritage a 'liberal' party. The great object of the moment for the Liberal Party is to preserve Australia's social and political inheritance.

In the following excerpt, Tony Abbott is for prudential reasons concentrating on the division between liberals and conservatives in an apparent bid to reconcile the two views and show how the party can exist with the division, as it has done. What he has not done - and I acknowledge it was not within his purpose - is to state clearly the meaning of Menzies's legitimate liberalism as opposed to those who have a more Millian orientation.

The [Liberals' present] task is to prioritise the country's most pressing problems and to devise practical remedies that reflect the party’s enduring values and principles. The Liberal Party has a natural preference for freedom. Still, the extent to which the contemporary party is relatively ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ will best be determined by considering the policies that it develops rather than by arguing over what it ought to be in the abstract. As Menzies pointed out in his memoirs, ‘there was to be nothing doctrinaire about our policies. If I were to become the leader of a great non-Socialist party, I must look at everything in a practical way’. This, I'm sure, is what the then Liberal leader John Hewson was driving at when he declared, in his 1990 Menzies Lecture, that ‘liberalism…the search for freedom, means very little unless it is firmly placed in the context of real problems faced by real people’.

Although all its most important leaders have discussed the party’s principles, none of them have been prescriptive about their pecking order. Certainly, the Liberal Party would not have been so politically successful if it had simply been ‘liberal’. A century ago, [Bruce] Smith’s ‘pure’ liberalism (as he saw it) meant opposing government involvement in poverty relief, education and most public works. For all freedom’s resonance, an ideological commitment to minimal government, come what may, would be of limited electoral appeal.

In an oft-quoted passage from his memoirs, Menzies recalls the party’s formation: ‘We took the name “Liberal” because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary, but believing in the individual, his rights and his enterprise’. This passage is often cited as a conclusive argument against those Liberals whose orientation is more conservative. It’s worth noting, though, that Menzies, in his very next sentence, goes on to differentiate his sense of what ‘liberal’ means from its meaning in America, where, he says, ‘the word “liberal” is used in contradistinction to “conservative”’.

Even though Menzies himself never used the term ‘conservative’ to describe the party he formed, he clearly did not intend it to be anti-conservative in the sense that an American ‘liberal’ is typically anti-conservative. As well, there is little doubt about the presence of a strong conservative streak in Menzies’ own political character. He stressed the ‘creative genius of the individual’ but also the need for the individual to be ‘assisted and sometimes controlled by the government in the general social interest’. It was the responsible, not the irresponsible individual who was the ‘real basis of a truly free society’. Likewise, he believed in a ‘free and encouraged private enterprise’ but not ‘irresponsible enterprise’. In his famous Forgotten People radio broadcasts, Menzies spoke of ‘homes spiritual’ and ‘homes material’. In his 1949 election launch, he said that the ‘real freedoms are to worship, to think, to speak, to choose, to be ambitious, to be independent, to be industrious, to acquire skill, to seek reward…for these are of the essence, of the nature of man… Are we for the socialist state…or are we for the ancient British faith that governments are the servants of the people, a faith that has given fire and quality and direction to the whole of our history for 600 years’. On such evidence, the former journalist, Hewson biographer, and Liberal staffer Norman Abjorensen characterises Menzies as a ‘consensual conservative’, at least as a means of distinguishing him from John Howard. In a fine speech delivered to the SA Liberal Party in 1980, Malcolm Fraser explored the necessary relationship that liberalism had with conservatism as well as the tensions between them. ‘Once liberal institutions are installed in a society, a government which wishes to preserve them must be in some sense conservative’, he said. Liberalism, he said, ‘always emphasises the freedom of the individual and the absence of restraint… Conservatism, on the other hand, stresses the need for a framework of stability, continuity and order not only as something desirable in itself but as a necessary condition for a free society’. Fraser concluded that ‘the art of handling this tension, of finding that creative balance between the forces of freedom and the forces of continuity which alone allows a society to advance, is the true art of government in a country like ours’.

Although Australians had long spoken of the ‘conservative side of politics’, Fraser seems to have been the first Liberal prime minister to allow his government to be described as a ‘conservative’ one. The governor-general’s 1980 address to the opening of parliament described a government that was ‘liberal in its principles’ but ‘conservative in its distrust of abrupt and sweeping changes’.

Tony Abbott, Battlelines, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 60/62

One of the most outspoken recent critics of the Liberal Party has been former Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser, so much so that with great resentment he threw in his membership of the party, implying that the party had become corrupted. Malcolm Fraser has sadly undergone a radical change since he left public life. The degree of change is evident in his unambiguous enunciation of a key conservative idea (freedom inhering in social order) when in public life, and in his present inability to see the enduring significance and application of that idea.

The ideas and propositions I have outlined above about Edmund Burke's philosophical conservatism will be explained in detail in my book: EDMUND BURKE: KNOWING AND REASONING IN POLITICS (due later in 2010). For more detail see a brief description.

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com