The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order: Defending Democracy against Its Modern Enemies and Immoderate Friends by Daniel J. Mahoney

ISI Books, 221 pages

Reviewed by Michael Wagner

Liberal democracy is widely regarded as the best political system and understandably so. No other political system has provided so many people with freedom and economic prosperity. However, there are plenty of people in the world who don’t support liberal democracy, and even some of those who do support it fail to understand its philosophical underpinnings. Such a failure of understanding contributes to tendencies that would ultimately weaken liberal democracy itself.

With this in mind, Daniel Mahoney of Assumption College in Massachusetts has written a book to defend modern liberal society by reminding us all what it is and how we get here. In this context, of course, the word “liberal” is used in its older meaning: a society that protects individual rights and personal freedom, rather than the current North American usage that equates it with quasi-socialism. (Historically, “liberal” was an admirable word identified with the struggle for freedom, but in our time it has unfortunately degenerated into an epithet hurled by conservatives at moderate leftists.)

Liberal democracy did not arise in a vacuum. It arose within the particular cultural context of the Christian West. The nations of Christendom shared a basic metaphysical foundation that supported particular concepts about human dignity and the role of the state that led to modern liberal society. Mahoney puts it this way: “Western liberty in practice took shape from the fruitful coming together of the ‘neutral’ liberal state and the Christian nation in a way that moderated the pretensions of early modern political philosophy to begin the world anew.”

The cultural values transmitted by Christianity led to a virtuous citizenry capable of supporting a self-governing society. This cultural inheritance provides the “conservative” foundation of liberal society. In making this argument, Mahoney battles those on the left who use democracy to justify emancipating human beings from traditional cultural and moral restraints. Problematically, such “emancipation” undermines liberal democracy and lead to its collapse.

Unfortunately, according to Mahoney, there is a kind of tension between democracy and its conservative foundation. That is to say, certain aspects of democratic thought can begin to undermine the cultural basis necessary for democracy itself. Alas, democratic ideals do contain the seeds from which leftist weeds can grow. For example, in liberal societies individuals are encouraged to choose their own morality and find their own bliss (to quote a now dead historian). They are to live in accordance with their own concept of the good life. But over time this erodes the virtues necessary for citizens in a democratic polity, such as self-restraint, law-abidingness, and patriotism. Mahoney worries that authorizing every citizen to pursue his own good in the private realm risks turning into a new command to ignore the pursuit of truth and goodness; usually, this happens in “the name of respecting the equality of every human being’s subjective judgment.”

Or, put another way, the “democratic order is not self-sufficient and depends upon a precious civilizational inheritance that it has trouble renewing and that it sometimes actively undermines.” This could reasonably serve as a thesis statement for the book.

One way to demonstrate that point is to examine in detail the philosophical and religious texts upon which Western democracy is based. One could then show how they differ from the streams of contemporary democratic theory. However, that would be a heavy task. Instead, Mahoney looks at the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, Winston Churchill, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and French philosopher Raymond Aron to glean support for his basic point.

Tocqueville provides a considerable amount of material here. He recognized the significant role that religion played in eighteenth century American society. Religion provided Americans with the personal virtues necessary for the proper functioning of a democracy. At the same time, however, the practice of democracy influenced the nature of American religion. Mahoney refers to this phenomenon as the “Tocquevillian conundrum” which he summarizes thusly: “liberal democracy needs the wisdom, self-restraint, and elevation provided by religion, but over time democracy tends to democratize all the contents of life, including religion itself.”

Having completed his analysis of Tocqueville, Mahoney next moves to consider Winston Churchill, the heroic statesman of the Second World War. Churchill inspired countless citizens of Britain and the British Dominions with his oratory—he was a man of both words and deeds. In his efforts to encourage resistance to Nazism, he relied on the traditional sources of Western civilization as well as the modern notion of democracy. Mahoney points out that in Churchill’s great wartime speeches, the wartime prime minister appealed to both liberal democracy and Christian ethics as the indispensable moral bases of resistance to Nazi tyranny. In this way, Churchill acknowledged that the historic, cultural foundation of Western society was vital to the defence of democracy.

This book is short, so there are inevitable limitations to what it can be expected to accomplish. Still, it even lacks a concluding chapter that would tie the previous chapters together. When one finishes the final chapter (on Raymond Aron), there’s an unsatisfactory sense that something is missing. The philosophies of Tocqueville, Churchill, Solzhenitsyn, and Aron do share a recognition that there are certain pre-modern conceptions necessary to sustain modern liberal democratic societies, so Mahoney is not wrong to place them together. Yet explaining this point in a tied-together whole would have strengthened the book and made its theme more explicit, especially helpful for those who are unfamiliar with political philosophy. The book, which begins strong ends weakly, going out with a whimper as opposed to a bang one might say.

Yet, this book presents a vital challenge to the modern reader. Many people assume that the religious and philosophical perspectives that dominated the West a few decades ago are no longer relevant. Mahoney asserts otherwise and leads the reader to demonstrations that buttress such a claim. “The conclusion is clear,” Mahoney writes, “liberty must be ‘liberty under God’ if it is to do justice to the spiritual nature and limitations of human beings.”