Is conservatism a disposition or a political philosophy? The brilliant mid-twentieth-century English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott thought it was the former: a disposition to accept the world as one finds it and to enjoy its varieties and its vagaries, casting a skeptical eye upon political programs of wholesale reform and rebuking ideologically driven utopian projects. Graham James McAleer and Alexander S. Rosenthal-Pubul, in The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Conservative Humanism and the Western Tradition, undertake to articulate a conservative political philosophy, but to this reader at least, the book’s charm—and indeed its cogency—depends on their elaboration of the conservative disposition rather than on systematic argumentation.

Like Oakeshott and the late Roger Scruton, with whom they begin, McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul call attention to the achievements of Western civilization, which they genuinely appreciate and capably expound. “Conservatism is the defense of ancestral tradition,” they write, and specifically based, they explain, on “a trinity of tradition: religion, family, and education,” defended as their own, to be sure, but also as objectively good. “Religion” is meant to be broad enough to include not only the traditionalist Catholicism that serves as their touchstone but also traditional forms of Judaism, Confucianism, and even Islam. “Education” means principally humanistic education, based on a canon of works that extends back to classical Greece and Rome. In fact, “conservative humanism” is the term they use to define their position.

The enemies against whom Western civilization must be defended come from two directions: on the one hand, Enlightenment liberalism, whose rationalism and individualism deliberately undermine the traditional institutions mentioned above, but on the other hand, nationalism, which offers a welcome critique of liberalism but goes too far in repudiating the humanistic inheritance.

McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul make Francis Fukuyama the spokesman for liberalism and sometimes seem to consider self-evident the failure not only of his “end-of-history” thesis but of liberal cosmopolitanism as a whole, and therewith also of progressivism (including transsexualism and “woke capitalism”), which “is merely a variation of Fukuyama’s liberal commercial internationalism.” Their spokesman for nationalism, by contrast, is Alexander Dugin, the contemporary Russian/Eurasian theorist, whose work they situate as a development of Martin Heidegger’s thought and his critique of modern Western commercial and technological society. They clearly find this critique attractive but dangerously indeterminate and therefore too readily hijacked by fascist dictators, the ultimate anti-humanists.

Looked at metaphysically—a term the authors use in the Heideggerian sense—the issue turns on the interplay of “angelism” and “vitalism,” on whether human beings should be understood as spirits whose bodies are malleable accidents (and whose minds are not necessarily individuated) or as biological entities driven by a life-force that “reason” may sublimate but cannot govern. As they mean to situate their conservative humanism between liberalism and nationalism, so they seem to want to situate themselves between angelism and vitalism, defining the human being as Aristotle’s and Thomas Aquinas’s “rational animal” while only hinting at, not arguing for, the metaphysic of substantial forms.

What is conservative humanism as a collection of ideas? In the first place, McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul explain its stages, beginning with classical Greek paideia, progressing through Roman humanitas and the study of rhetoric, then maturing in the Christian humanism of medieval Europe and especially the Renaissance. They write, “The significance of Christology for Western humanism is that it imparted a transcendent foundation for human dignity. … We could never understand ourselves thereafter as mere stolid parts of nature, but as something altogether exotic and febrile.” They cite Nietzsche on the Christian development of human inwardness and in general seem to write about conservative humanism as a cultural phenomenon, even though they are better versed in and more sympathetic towards Christian theology than most cultural analysts, favorably citing Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis. Nevertheless, like Nietzsche, they see Christian humanism growing into modern humanism, which added such notions as the conquest of nature, the idea of progress, the rights of man, and finally secular humanism.

Secular humanism underlies the liberalism they repudiate, but while they hold no brief for the Enlightenment, they do not explain how good humanism could lead to bad: Was it corruption of a humanism that was intrinsically stable and thus might have persisted but for some unnamed accidents, or were the seeds of decay present in what appeared most perfect? One might think that, from the Catholic perspective, the authors would attribute corruption to human sinfulness and draw a fundamental contrast between a humanism that sees man as the imperfect image of God and a humanism that relies on man alone, making the decay of humanism inevitable only as sin is inevitable and thus seeing decay as reversible with recourse to Christ’s redemption. But as their intention is to advise conservatism, not to invoke theology to refute historicism, they leave the question pending. The Burkean conservatism they admire is not against all change, only precipitous change, yet one wonders whether a clearer accounting of what was good and what was bad in the Enlightenment might not be needed to explain how humanism can be now the source of decline, now the source of salvation.

Besides a humanistic foundation, what constitutes the conservatism McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul are promoting? Establishment and privilege, natural law, economic enterprise, moderate nationalism, and liberty properly understood, they say. Each of these five topics merits a chapter, and the discussions are at once insightful and idiosyncratic, the latter quite self-consciously, for conservatism, they write, is opposed to the spirit of the Enlightenment, which is “to flatten the queerness of the world.” “Establishment” refers to the institutional infrastructure of society, built upon the idea that “reality [is] saturated with values,” an idea “made famous by [phenomenologist Max] Scheler.” Values exist in hierarchies and are instantiated by privileges, which the authors define by reference to Aurel Kolnai as “value-bearing social formations.”

Though the terminology is rather foreign to Americans—doesn’t the First Amendment to our Constitution begin with a prohibition of religious establishment?—the authors seem to mean that conservatives respect authority when rightly distributed throughout society, on the basis, say, of knowledge, experience, judgment, skill, and understanding, not only on the basis of wealth or credentials or popularity. Besides, conservatives know how to exercise what authority they possess. McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul know that this account of social structure, however evident, will not sit well with democratic prejudices, and so they soften it by an extended metaphor to gardening and by reference to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as the popularization of the idea, going so far as to conclude “establishment is the vox populi,” since it ensures the dignity of every social role and is presumed to have won tacit consent.

Natural law is the next card in the conservative deck, which they describe, like “establishment,” as “a realist moral theory.” They ground it in Aquinas and Vitoria, but present it commonsensically—ignoring, for example, John Finnis and others who develop philosophically its contemporary meaning—then defend their traditional idea against critics such as Carl Schmitt and Dugin who would not limit the state; against Leo Strauss for assuming that, in contrast to natural right, natural law draws upon theology; against Heidegger’s rejection of the concept of nature; and, curiously, against Johns Hopkins University, Google, Walmart, and other corporate entities that would establish private police forces.

Turning to markets, McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul make the case for free enterprise without reference to Friedrich Hayek, sparing themselves the task of addressing such questions as whether he was right in his critique of central planning and whether value relativism is essential to his theory. Instead, they strangely refer to Eric Voegelin, whose concept of differentiation they think is sufficient to support market complexity, though they acknowledge Voegelin neither developed nor used that concept to explain economic life. Their paradigmatic business firm belongs to fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli, whose principles of “fair profit, dignity at work, and tending the land”—not to mention beauty and style—readily enough capture the conservative imagination, even if his products’ pricing (e.g., $1,990 for a woman’s sweater or $4,200 for men’s slacks) might not fit every conservative’s budget, much less provide a model for a modern economy as a whole.

Moderate nationalism—a via media, they write—is their preference for the world of nations, something between Fukuyama’s liberal cosmopolitanism and Dugin’s integral traditionalism. Again they express their attraction to Dugin’s and Heidegger’s critiques of liberalism, seeing cosmopolitan universalism as a form of Western imperialism, but write that these critics go too far, not that they are fundamentally mistaken. Yoram Hazony’s Virtue of Nationalism is praised, not critiqued, but perhaps because they are uncomfortable with his preference for Protestant establishments rather than Catholic empires, they don’t endorse it. Instead, they speak well of Viktor Orban’s nationalist Hungary while warning against the neopaganism of the French New Right. As for the concept of liberty, they think that it has been distorted by modern liberalism, turning to Christian authors and especially Edmund Burke for a correct understanding, where liberty is seen in the conquest of self-centered passions, that is, in the achievement of virtue.

In the penultimate chapter, the authors yet again return to Dugin, and again express their distance from his thought, as he is said to promote “reprimitivism” or “primordialism”:

We think this is a terrible strategy for conservatism. We have defended within limits native loyalties, but we are acutely conscious of the danger of atavistic or pagan tribalisms that have proven so destructive. And if we have critiqued the technoscience of the Enlightenment, we do not deny for a moment that many elements of the Enlightenment form part of a worthy development of humanism. Ours is a conservatism of the via media.

They appeal to Pope Benedict XVI, explaining here and in the final chapter that “his political sensibility is very much ours.” Benedict’s praise of Europe—both medieval and Enlightenment Europe—was for its dedication to reason, both in the understanding of the world and in its governance. McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul do not reject reason, but they seem to lack confidence in its authority, hence their attraction to Heidegger and Dugin and the peculiar attention they devote to psychoanalysis, particularly as expressed by Jacques Lacan and detective fiction.

McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul’s framework is limited by their neglect of modern science, the great achievement of modern reason. It alters the way human beings understand the universe and our place in it in ways that certainly need to be considered by any humanism. “Techno-ontology” and “technoscience” are denounced in The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, but ultimately the question of the proper use of nature depends on knowing nature, particularly if natural things include ends among their causes, not just material and efficient causation. If the conservative disposition involves not only respect but also wonder, then it points beyond itself to philosophy, even if not to philosophic politics.

One more thought. If the authors intend to lead readers who are well disposed to conservatism on a path (camino?) towards Benedict’s Catholic humanistic synthesis, I wonder what they think happens if one turns around and heads back in the opposite direction: Must a Catholic humanism lead to political conservatism? Or does the path from Catholicism bifurcate as one moves between faith and political life, and if so, does it divide in both a liberal and a conservative direction?

Perhaps that would require a very different book, maybe one they would not be inclined to write, maybe one that would require them to rethink, if not their condemnation of liberalism, at least the cold shoulder they seem to give to Western constitutionalism, which recognizes partisan differences within a shared framework committed to justice and the common good. It is a virtue of the book that McAleer and Rosenthal-Pubul did write that it provides many pointers to thinkers worth reading, even if in the end it is more a signpost than a guide.