We thank Professor James Stoner for his review of our book, The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Conservative Humanism and the Western Tradition. Though he has kind things to say, he also thinks it has conceptual weaknesses. The book, Stoner argues, functions only as a “camino” towards good conservative authors rather than being itself a developed conservative philosophy. Stoner finds no “systematic argumentation” for a conservative political philosophy. Hampering our efforts is the “traditionalist Catholicism that serves as their touchstone” which ensures that our “condemnation of liberalism goes too far.” We welcome the cut and thrust of intellectual debate. But we think Stoner misrepresents three crucial aspects of the book on the topics of the Enlightenment, work, and nationalism.

　　The Enlightenment

　　Despite our extensive use of the Scottish Enlightenment, Stoner seems to think our “traditionalist Catholicism” blinds us to the epoch´s evident goods. Perhaps Stoners most serious charge is the claim that we believe Western civilization must be defended from Enlightenment liberalism. Our consideration of the Enlightenment is not one of facile rejectionism. Rather we aim to sift the era´s complex contours to parse its relationship with the broader truths of the Western tradition.

　　Conservatism drawing on ancestral wisdom must reject any simple, linear progressivist notion of history (e.g. Condorcet)—a conception one might think modern history itself has refuted. But we offer praise for those positive elements in the liberal Enlightenment tradition—economic prosperity, religious toleration, humane legal reforms, and respect for freedom of conscience. Niall Ferguson has impressively shown how institutions associated with the Enlightenment—property rights, competitive mechanisms, the valorization of science and technology, inter alia—are responsible for the “Great Divergence” that made Western societies the most materially prosperous in the world.

　　But our pride in these accomplishments must be tempered with that Socratic and Christian wisdom that understands that material prosperity is a subordinate value to spiritual and moral goods. Liberalism´s conception of liberty risks becoming mere license if not tempered by those great moral virtues that the West´s classical and Christian traditions inculcate. This was recognized by Alexander Hamilton who saw the French Revolution´s attacks on Christianity as a mortal threat to the self-governing society for “morality overthrown (and moralitymustfall with religion) the terrors of despotism can alone curb the impetuous passions of man.” If this is right, then the strength of those intermediary communal institutions that our conservatism emphasizes—religion, family, and education—is particularly necessary to forge the moral bonds of a free society.

　　The most problematic issue to emerge from the most radical strains of the Enlightenment (D´Holbach, Helvetius) is a militant, secular humanism that presumes to exalt man by displacing God. It was this strain that was responsible for unleashing the violent anti-Christianity of the French Revolution from which the modern West still suffers. Trying to build humanism on the edifice of atheistic materialism is a fool´s errand, for by definition atheistic materialism denies any transcendent human dignity. This is admitted with great consistency by one of contemporary materialism´s most acclaimed spokesmen, Yuval Harari, for whom freedom is a Christian myth, another fiction like God, the soul, and human rights. This is a dangerous path for modernity to travel, since practice tends eventually to quadrate with belief.

　　Work

　　Stoner thus reads our book through the odd lens of the Enlightenment as a kind of revelatory event that stated the final truth about man and history, with all else a mere pre-figuration. Scanning the history books, we find no such Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century thinkers wrestled over the worth of the austerity of the Commonwealth republican tradition and the new enthusiasm for commercial luxury. Politically, there were riots, suppressions, and finally, revolutions as partisans of these positions sought ascendancy. We think human dignity is threatened by Victorian vitalistic accounts of capitalism. We see this in economism, the excessive exaltation of temporary economic value over family and spirituality.

　　Conservatism must reject both a cosmopolitanism that denies particularistic loyalties to family, community, and nation and a nationalistic tribalism that denies universal moral principles.

　　We include a chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment as part of the conservative humanist tradition because its treatment of commerce articulated a balance between personal freedom and solidarity. Stoner thinks our defense of establishment and privilege “will not sit well with democratic prejudices.” As we make very clear, time and again, by establishment and privilege we mean the social institutions and practices that embody and affirm the hierarchy of value. The division of labour, which Smith places at the heart of the Enlightenment understanding of the economy, is a case in point, as we explain.

　　Nationalism

　　Stoner thinks we have two “enemies:” one is Enlightenment liberalism, and the other is nationalism. But nowhere do we say that Enlightenment liberalism or nationalism are enemies. We do say that theextremesof liberal cosmopolitanism, which falsifies the hold of particular social loyalties over us, and nationalism, which can be claustrophobic and intolerant, are corrosive of good order. In short, we highlight a living tradition of conservative political philosophy that avoids these two corrosive political temptations. We observe that conservatives, like Burke, criticized dynamics within the Enlightenment tending to abstract, “geometric” thinking, a monism falsifying the geographical and historical communities that have served peoples well. Conservatives, like Metternich, also criticized nationalism for prioritizing particularism at the cost of transnational shared identities and common mores essential to diplomacy. Catholicism built Christendom, a phenomenon still marking out the geopolitical behemoth that is Europe and the value order of the West more generally. We believe this complex phenomenon is worth defending.Conservatism must reject both a cosmopolitanism that denies particularistic loyalties to family, community, and nation and a nationalistic tribalism that denies universal moral principles like the natural law.

　　As a tradition, conservative humanism has sought to balance the parochial and the universal. We grant the power of David Hume’s idea that human beings are partial to what is nearest and most familiar to them. This is the idea of home eulogized by Scruton and affirmed by the theological idea of the order of charity which argues that our loves are first for our families and nations, and then a general benevolence. It is also why we include a chapter on natural law. The order of charity is part of Aquinas’s juristic treatment of the inclinations, those appetites for human goods common to all peoples. Stoner laments that we present the “traditional” account of natural law rather than its updated version in John Finnis’s classic Natural Law and Natural Rights. We do not concede this presentism and, as we state, the point of the natural law chapter is both to show its historical place in the tradition of conservative humanism and to show that five common conservative criticisms of natural law do not work.

　　Finally, Stoner thinks we do not give an account of how, according to us, the humanistic ancestral wisdom in Western letters went sour in modernity. That question is left “pending,” he says. But nowhere do we contend that there was a Golden Age of conservative humanism. Rather, we argue that all political philosophy—ancient, medieval, and modern—experiences a double tension. All systems of thinking must wrestle with monism and pluralism. This is seen in the current tension between globalization and multipolarity. The former is the neo-liberalism of a one-size-fits-all enlightened bureaucracy of global governance and the latter is the now-gaining-momentum of nationalism, civilizational states, and polycentric orders. We propose conservative humanism as a needed force of moderation based on a balancing of polarities.