It’s interesting at times to consider the ways in which the words “conservative” and “liberal” have changed.
I’m reading Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (the seventh revised edition of his original 1953 book), in which you learn that Kirk’s conservative subjects had no love for John Locke.
Locke was — as John Hood has reminded us — a liberal in the true sense of the word, not a present-day statist. Through the passage of time, many of Locke’s liberal ideals have now become tenets of modern conservative thought.
That observation aside, the real reason for this post is to highlight a great passage from Kirk’s chapter on John Randolph of Roanoke and John Calhoun:
When a people begin to think that they can improve society infinitely by incessant alteration of positive law, nothing remains settled: every right, every bit of property, every one of those dear attachments to the permanence of family, home, and countryside is endangered. Such a people presume themselves to be omnicompetent, and the farther their affairs fall into confusion, the more enthusiastic they become for some legislative panacea which promises to cut all knots in Gordian fashion.
