A guiding light

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by Kevin Saylor

At the Congress, Lady Thatcher presented the prize to the winner in a competition for the best essay on translating principles into political practices. The competition, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, was limited to writers under 25 years of age. The winner, chosen by a panel of judges, was Mr. Kevin Saylor. His essay, excerpted here, will be published in full by the Intercollegiate Review.

The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws. -- Russell Kirk

RUSSELL Kirk's description of the good society, from The Roots of American Order, can serve as a summary of the essential principles of Margaret Thatcher's thought. This concurrence should not surprise us, since both claim Edmund Burke as their "ideological mentor," in Lady Thatcher's words, and both base their "whole political philosophy" on "what are often referred to as 'Judaeo-Christian values."' In order to outline the political philosophy known as Thatcherism, I will take up each of these three principles -- order, justice, and freedom -- keeping in mind that they are not discrete entities, but parts of an interrelated and mutually reinforcing whole.

There are two distinct but related types of order to which any genuinely conservative political philosophy must be committed --metaphysical order and existential order. Metaphysical order refers to the transcendent arrangement of the cosmos which determines the very structures of existence. It includes what is known as "natural law." Existential order refers to the particular arrangement of a specific historical society. It is regulated according to civil laws and, frequently, a constitution. Margaret Thatcher's Christianity commits her to a particular vision of metaphysical order -- which affected the way in which as a politician, she designed policies to shape and maintain the civil social order. Maintaining this order is the prime concern of government. As she has written, "the role of government in a free society should be . . . to establish a framework of stability -- whether constitutional stability, the rule of law, or the economic stability provided by sound money -- within which individual families and businesses were free to pursue their own dreams and ambitions." Thus, order means more than just keeping the peace; it also means providing continuity. In order to plan for the future -- or even to enjoy freedom in the present -- people must know that the government will not make arbitrary decisions that will radically alter the rules for participating in civil and social affairs.

Stability, however, must be balanced by justice. Stability "should not be used as an excuse for upholding a status quo that is itself inherently unstable because it suppresses social forces that cannot ultimately be contained." Thus, government, while limited, must have sufficient power to promote changes which will increase the freedom and justice afforded the people.

Lady Thatcher has never offered a philosophical definition of her conception of justice, nor does she really need to. Essentially, justice means adhering to one's principles -- in her case, the principles she gained from her solid Methodist upbringing. For example, she says, regarding the welfare state, that "to treat those who make an effort in the same way as those who do not is unjust."

Justice, as we have seen, takes precedence for her over simply maintaining the order of the status quo. Likewise, justice must sometimes take precedence even over peace, for "peace is not enough without freedom and justice and sometimes . . . it [is] necessary to sacrifice peace if freedom and justice [are] to prevail." Thus standing up to aggressor nations -- whether it be Argentina or the mighty Soviet empire -- is not only a matter of prudently maintaining international order; it is also, perhaps more significantly, a matter of fulfilling one's moral duty. Of course, holding to one's principles sometimes means refusing to compromise. In The Downing Street Years, Lady Thatcher writes: "To me consensus seems to be: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner, 'I stand for consensus'?"

The basic tenet in the Thatcherite understanding of freedom is the right of individuals and nations to self-determination -- but within the constraints of law and with the recognition that "every power implies responsibility, every liberty a duty." For that reason, once individuals or nations step outside the recognized limits of the law, they lose their right to self-determination. If we would not have others restrain us, we must restrain ourselves. We must foster ordered liberty rather than license, because "freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework."