Book Review: Dart, Ron (2016). The North American High Tory Tradition. New York: American Anglican Press.
The rise of Donald Trump has put thoughtful conservatives on both sides of the border in an awkward position. The time is ripe for sophisticated and responsible articulations of conservatism in thought and action. Ron Dart’s The North American High Tory Tradition combines the timeliness of thoughtful conservatism in the age of Trump with the timelessness of an old and near-forgotten Canadian tradition with roots stretching back to before confederation in 1867. The High Tory Tradition, as Dart calls it, can be summarized by the following ten principles:
- The wisdom of tradition.
- Passion for the common good.
- Economics cannot be separated from ethics.
- Protection of the environment against abuse for the sake of profit.
- State and society are not in opposition.
- Concern for the commons, against the classical- and neo-liberal emphasis on private property.
- The purpose of education is to ground the student in the best that has been thought in the past, not to impart skills.
- Human nature is imperfect, finite, and fallible.
- Ethics and religion are the foundation of a healthy state.
- Reality consists of nuanced gradations of better and worse, and cannot be reduced to simplistic absolutes.
The North American High Tory Tradition consists of 25 short chapters which are best described as variations on a single theme. Throughout these 25 chapters, using a disparate collection of scholars, artists, and activists, Dart frequently circles back to the distinctiveness of the Canadian Nationalist-High Tory emphasis on “Peace, Order, and Good Government” over against the American idealization of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Whether comparing Noam Chomsky’s Anarchist-Leftist critique of American foreign policy with a Tory critique of the individualism underlying the Left and Right of American politics, or highlighting similarities between George Grant and Stephen Leacock, Dart gives the reader an unmistakeable sense of the frame of mind from which the High Tory tradition emanates.
The table is set with an analysis of misused American power abroad; St. Augustine is used to expose the hypocritical classification of terrorists that sanctions their being treated differently than state-based perpetrators of violence. A few other highlights are worth noting. The relatively long twelfth chapter compares the Toryisms of C.S. Lewis and George Grant, who participated in Lewis’ Socratic Club while at Oxford. The value of this chapter lies in the fact that little work has thus far been done on either their differences or similarities. Dart’s analysis reveals their similar outlooks, though Lewis left his political thought relatively underdeveloped. Chapter sixteen provides a seven stage history of the liberal principle of the freedom of the individual from external constraints and authorities. It closes by pointing to liberalism’s problematic failure to be critical of its own intellectual standards, constraints, and assumptions. Finally, Dart’s introduction to Tory thinkers and activists is biographical such that we are treated to the many personal connections between them as well as their ideas themselves.
At the level of ideas, this book presents much that is agreeable and little that is prima facie questionable, which paradoxically points to its biggest omission: its tendency to refrain from sustained exposition of either the general principles of High Toryism or of individual Tories themselves. Dart’s exposition of Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice will serve, in this instance, to illustrate this overall tendency.
Leacock’s text embodies at least seven of the ten principles of High Toryism (i.e. #2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, and possibly 4), but The North American High Tory Tradition gives very little exposition of Leacock’s economic and moral arguments themselves. For example, Leacock demonstrates that the economic laws of supply and demand alone will not result in just wages, and that the Liberal faith that they will ignores the role of unequal power in economic relationships (Leacock, ch. 3-4). This speaks to the danger of evaluating economics apart from ethics and points to the moral purpose of the state, namely to equalize imbalances of economic and social power. Leacock then argues in favour of the moral obligations between rich and poor citizens (ch. 7), and suggests that fallible human nature will necessarily disrupt any communist system (ch. 5-6). His solution is the classical High Tory one: a via media between full communism and completely unregulated capitalism. It is not that Dart misrepresented Leacock, just that his presentation of the High Tory way would have benefited from thicker descriptions of the political arguments of Leacock, Forsey, Grant, and others. What High Toryism means in practice would have been clearer if arguments like Leacock’s had been presented and brought to bear on contemporary political issues.
In sum, Dart gives us an important vision of a timeless conservatism for the 21st century, and in so doing initiates the reader into some of the central conversations within the High Tory tradition. The strength of the book is its depiction of the High Tory attitude in practice, in conversation with other political visions. This strength could possibly have been even stronger had there been a closer connection drawn between this attitude and the specific political and economic arguments and prescriptions of the North American High Tory thinkers.
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