CONSERVATISM IN BRITAIN
5..7
This having been said, a certain number of vital qualifications
and discriminations must be made. In the first place, the most im–
portant single force working for skepticism in Great Britain today
and intellectually both the most reputable and the most formidable–
by which I mean linguistic and analytical philosophy-has absolutely
nothing to do with conservatism. Critical as it is of traditional values,
indeed of the whole notion of 'a traditional value,' insistent (in what–
ever form we take it) on the overriding importance of individual
choice or taste in the adoption of values, it has quite rightly always
been regarded by the Right with extreme suspicion and disfavor.
Furthermore, as a historical fact, nearly all the practitioners of the
subject have been on the Left. One of the most-read .and most–
discussed philosophical books of recent years,
T.
D. Weldon's
V,o–
cabulary of Politics,
in which the implications of linguistic philosophy
for politics are drawn out into the crudest and most uncompromising
skepticism, is the work of a socialist. Indeed, it might be said that
if one was looking out in England for survivors of that dying species,
the
homme de gauche,
I do not know a group or profession among
which one would do better than academic philosophers. Readers of
the
New Statesman,
it is true, may well have formed a different im–
pression, for that periodical has for reasons best known to its editorial
staff been carrying on for a number of years now a sporadic ven–
detta against what it insists on calling "Logical Positivism," which
it regards as the natural harbinger of reaction and fascism. These
effusions are however on about the same level as Catholic outbursts
against Freemasonry, .and should be treated as belonging to the
bondieuserie,
rather than to the serious literature, of the Left.
Secondly, the skepticism that does go toward conservatism falls
into two broad categories, depending on its source or origin. On the
one hand there is the skepticism that is the application to politics of
a yet more general skepticism: on the other hand, there is the skep–
ticism that is narrowly political, being the counterpart of a devout
fideism elsewhere. The very real division between these two kinds of
skepticism has been overlaid and obscured by the common service
into which both are pressed and by a number of other factors, fore–
most among which is the almost legendary respect in which the name
of Edmund Burke is held in both camps. Of course it is, strictly
speaking, only skeptics of the second kind who are entitled to claim
