Jordan Peterson’s “A Conservative Manifesto” Is Not Conservative

“It is instead Hayekian liberalism delivered with a Calvinist grimness.”

Jordan Peterson recently recorded “A Conservative Manifesto,” to lay out what he views as a viable political philosophy for, one surmises, the American right. One has to surmise this because the manifesto is completely lacking in the socio-cultural and political-economic specificity integral to conservatism up to the mid-20th century. This tendency is on full display in Peterson’s attempt at a philosophical framework. The result is a grab-bag so mixed that neither Russell Kirk nor the elegist of Canadian Toryism, George P. Grant, would recognize it as conservative. It is instead Hayekian liberalism delivered with a Calvinist grimness.

Conservatism

Given this essay’s contention is that Peterson’s vision is not conservative, what is a conservative worldview? For Yoram Hazony, conservatism “refers to a standpoint that regards the recovery, restoration, elaboration, and repair of national and religious traditions as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time.” Conservatism is the effort to receive and maintain an inherited way of life. As Paul Gottfried has said, the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim saw conservatism as “the fashioning of a worldview relating to an existing social situation.”

Thinkers such as Edmund Burke, his continental contemporaries, and their descendants into the early 20th century were defending a particular way of life under attack from various forms of revolutionary rationalism. Those who participated in this conservative “way of thinking” wrote and spoke in favor of social hierarchies and “took aim at the materialist scientific approach to government and to economics embodied by the rising bourgeoisie.” Abstract, universalist propositions divorced from the historical and cultural context of the society in question were, at best, useless and, at worst, dangerous. Any moral universality could only be apprehended and attained through the particularity of historical circumstance.