Abstract
Conservatives need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports the conservative commitment to liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and reason. The intellectual vitality of conservatism in the twenty-first century will depend upon the success of conservatives in appealing to advances in the biology of human nature as confirming conservative social thought.
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Notes
For elaboration of my reasoning, see Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2005).
For criticisms of my reasoning, see Carson Holloway, The Right Darwin? (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2006);
and John G. West, Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2006).
Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 154–178;
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 159–161.
Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).
Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1, Rules and Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 22–23.
Alan Ebenstein, Hayek’s Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 6.
I have defended Darwinian evolution in debates with Michael Behe, William Dembski, and other conservative proponents of “intelligent design.” See Larry Arnhart, “Conservatives, Darwin, and Design,” First Things, 107 (November 2000): 23–31; “Evolution and the New Creationism,” Skeptic 8, no. 4 (2001): 46–52; and “Assault on Evolution,” Salon.com, February 28, 2001, www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/02/28/idt/print.html.
Hayek, Constitution, pp. 54–70; Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), pp. 283–305.
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), pp. 87, 157.
Paul Rubin, Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origins of Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
James Bernard Murphy provides the best account of this trichotomy of order in his book The Moral Economy of Labor: Aristotelian Themes in Economic Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993) and in “Nature, Custom, and Reason as the Explanatory and Practical Principles of Aristotelian Political Science,” The Review of Politics 64 (2002): 469–495. See also Larry Arnhart, Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the “Rhetoric” (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1981), pp. 102–105; Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls, 3rd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2003), pp. 97–98.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1871), 1: 70–106, 158–167; 2: 390–394.
David Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), pp. 6–7, 42–49.
For examples of coevolutionary theory, see Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998);
and Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. xi, 153–176.
See Ronald Hamowy, “F. A. Hayek and the Common Law,” The Cato Journal, 23 (Fall 2003): 241–264.
For elaboration of this point, see James Bernard Murphy, “Nature, Custom, and Stipulation in Law and Jurisprudence,” Review of Metaphysics 43 (June 1990): 751–790.
See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), pp. 77, 87, 142;
and David Hume, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” in Writings on Religion, ed. Antony Flew (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1992), pp. 228–229, 240–242, 246–247.
See Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp. 36–44, 56–58;
John T. Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980);
and Frans de Waal, The Apes and the Sushi Master (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
See A. Whiten et al., “Cultures in Chimpanzees,” Nature 399 (1999): 682–685;
William C. McGrew, The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
See, for example, Antonio Damasio, Descartes’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994);
and Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George R. Mangun, Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 445–576.
See Paul Glimcher, Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Sensory Order (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1952).
See Donald Brown, Human Universals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); and Pinker, Blank Slate, pp. 435–439.
See Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1908), 2: 1–71; and Brown, Human Universals, pp. 139–140.
Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 65–88.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 1: 25.
See Haim Ofek, Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
See Bruce L. Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State (San Francisco, CA: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990), pp. 11–36; and “Customary Law as a Social Contract: International Commercial Law,” Constitutional Political Economy 3 (1992): 1–27.
See Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Friedrich Hayek, “Origins and Effects of Our Morals,” in The Essence of Hayek, eds. Chiaki Nishiyama and Kurt R. Leube, (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), pp. 318–330.
Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 22–23.
See Arnhart, “Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right”; and “The Incest Taboo as Darwinian Natural Right,” in Incest, Inbreeding, and the Westermarck Effect, ed. Arthur Wolf and William Durham, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 190–218.
See Martin Ottenheimer, Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
See Gary Johnson, “The Evolutionary Origins of Government and Politics,” in Human Nature and Politics, ed. Joseph Losco and Albert Somit (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1995), pp. 243–305.
See Steven Goldberg, Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1993);
and Arnold Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002).
See, for example, Pinker, Blank Slate, 283–305; Mark F. Grady and Michael T. McGuire, “The Nature of Constitutions,” Journal of Bioeconomics 1 (1999): 227–240;
and Paul H. Rubin, Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, No. 51 (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1937), 337–339.
See George Anastaplo, The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1–12;
and Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
See Charles Thach, The Creation of the Presidency, 1775–1789 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).
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Arnhart, L. (2007). Friedrich Hayek’s Darwinian Conservatism. In: Hunt, L., McNamara, P. (eds) Liberalism, Conservatism, and Hayek’s Idea of Spontaneous Order. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609228_7
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