Conservatives: Know Your Burnham

The Hungarian intellectual Ferenc Hörcher recently lamented that conservatism suffers from a dearth of serious theorists. This is not, it must be admitted, a new problem, if it is a problem at all. “It is commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think, or even if they merely sit,” the historian F.J.C. Hearnshaw wrote in his 1933 book Conservatism in England. Thoughtful conservatives have, in fact, often cautioned against too much political theorizing—against what Michael Oakeshott called “rationalism in politics” and the speculations of those Edmund Burke identified as “sophisters, calculators, and economists.”