Tradition

Tradition, for the conservative, is the inheritance through which a community has its bearings. It includes language, law, religion, custom, manners, family forms, and the constitutions — written and unwritten — by which political life is conducted. To be born into a tradition is to receive a great deal before one has chosen anything. The conservative claim is that this inheritance is not a constraint on the free person but, in large measure, the medium through which freedom and personhood become possible.

The English word tradition descends from the Latin traditio — a handing over. The image is apt: a tradition is something passed from one set of hands to another. It is preserved by being received, not stockpiled.

Key takeaways

• Tradition is the transmission across generations of beliefs, practices, and institutions whose authority rests partly on their having been handed down and partly on their having been tested by experience.
• The classical statement is Edmund Burke’s argument in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that society is “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”¹
• Tradition is not mere custom but, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrase, “an historically extended, socially embodied argument” — the conservative defends not all traditions but the disposition that takes inherited form seriously as a source of knowledge.²

History and context

Although conservative attention to tradition runs through the whole tradition (Aristotle on customary norms; Cicero on the mos maiorum, the usage of the elders), the modern conservative position takes shape in opposition to the Enlightenment programme of subjecting all inherited authority to the tribunal of individual reason.

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is the founding statement. Against the National Assembly’s attempt to remake French society on rational principles, Burke argued that “we are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”¹ Tradition, on Burke’s view, is the accumulated practical wisdom of many generations under conditions no individual could fully reconstruct.

The 19th century saw conservative defences of tradition under pressure from both democratic revolution and rapid industrialisation. Coleridge in England, Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald in France, and the Slavophiles in Russia each developed traditionalist arguments. In the 20th century, the central figures are T. S. Eliot, whose essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) articulates a literary-cultural version, and Russell Kirk, whose six canons of conservative thought name adherence to “custom, convention, and continuity” alongside belief in a transcendent moral order.³

The most philosophically rigorous treatment in the late 20th century is Alasdair MacIntyre’s, particularly in After Virtue (1981) and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). MacIntyre argues that traditions are not opposed to reason but are the social settings in which extended rational inquiry into the good takes place. A living tradition is “an historically extended, socially embodied argument… an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.”² This formulation has reshaped the philosophical defence of tradition by showing that the choice is not between rationality and tradition but between rival traditions of rational inquiry.

The conservative position

Three claims constitute the conservative position on tradition.

First, inherited form has presumptive moral weight. The mere fact that a practice or institution has endured across generations is, for the conservative, prima facie evidence that it has met some genuine human need or solved some genuine problem of social coordination. The presumption is rebuttable but not arbitrary. It rests on the observation that most live traditions are the survivors of long-running social experiments whose failures have already been pruned.

Second, traditions are received before they are chosen. The conservative rejects the contractarian image of free individuals coming together from a position of pre-political detachment to construct social arrangements. Persons are born into specific languages, families, religions, and political communities; the question is not whether to be embedded but how to honour, criticise, and extend the embeddedness one has.

Third, the alternative to tradition is not enlightenment but ideology. Burke’s thesis, developed by Oakeshott in “Rationalism in Politics” (1947), is that when inherited practical knowledge is rejected wholesale, what fills the vacuum is not pure reason but a brittle, abstract substitute that mistakes itself for reason.⁴ The 20th century furnished extensive evidence for this thesis.

Differing positions

Liberal political philosophy has historically been suspicious of tradition as a source of authority, treating it as the residue of pre-modern hierarchies that liberal political settlement was meant to overcome. John Stuart Mill’s argument in On Liberty (1859) that mere “custom” is not a sufficient defence against the claims of individual reason is the canonical statement.⁵ Most contemporary liberals are more nuanced: they grant traditions a role in identity and meaning while insisting that public political reasoning be conducted in terms accessible across traditions.

The radical and progressive traditions have generally treated tradition as the legitimating ideology of an unjust status quo. Conservatives reply that this conflates the conservative defence of tradition (as a source of moral knowledge) with conservative defence of any particular tradition (which is always specific, contestable, and revisable). MacIntyre’s “tradition-constituted enquiry” framework is the most developed conservative reply.

Within conservatism itself, libertarian and rationalist strands sit uncomfortably with traditionalism. Friedrich Hayek occupies an interesting middle position: his account of “spontaneous order” defends inherited rules and practices on broadly empirical grounds — they encode tacit knowledge — while remaining wary of the more reverential traditionalism of Kirk and Scruton.⁶

References

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 90, 96.
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), 222.
3. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2001 [1953]), 8; T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932), 13–22.
4. Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics” (1947), in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 5–42.
5. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), ch. 3, in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
6. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973–79), vol. 1, ch. 1–4.