Can you be a libertarian and a conservative?

Before we start, let’s get a couple of things clear. The question is not can you be a libertarian and a member of the Conservative party – of course you can be, although quite why you would want to join or proactively support Cameron’s mob is utterly beyond me. Likewise, I would not deny that there is much to be gained from libertarian/conservative alliances – temporary or otherwise. Indeed, one of the few rays of light in the dark, depressing Brown years was the ability of libertarians and conservatives to put their differences to one side to point out the numerous shortcomings of Britain’s worst Prime Minister in living memory. Rather, what I want to consider is whether there are inherent contradictions in the idea of a libertarian conservative.

Of course, there are immediate problems with definitions here. “Libertarian” and “conservative” are big terms that could potentially encompass many different definitions. So for the purposes of this discussion I’d call someone who wants to maximise freedom as much as possible is a libertarian (someone like Hayek, for example) and someone who resists attempts to transform or plan society according to an idealistic blueprint is a conservative (such as Burke or Oakeshott, for example). No doubt some people would contest these definitions, but that’s the very nature of both politics and political philosophy.

Immediately, there are points of agreement between libertarians and conservatives. Economic freedom would be one of those points. A libertarian wants to reduce the tax burden and to limit government intervention in the economy because both are encroachments on individual freedom. A conservative might use similar rhetoric to justify their own resistance to state control of the economy – I also suspect that they would point out that state intervention in the economy is a relatively new phenomenon that denies the basic conservative truth that humans are fallible, and therefore their interventions in the economy will be equally fallible. Indeed, one of the points of agreement between the two political mindsets during the Brown era was that man’s hamfisted and utterly counter-productive attempts to manage the economy.

There is also a certain pragmatism inherent in both libertarian and conservative positions. Both proactively engage with reality to the extent that they accept that real life is messy and often involves uneasy compromises. This is clearly distinct from many socialist or anarchist positions, where the argument is that the creation right set of circumstances will lead to either a better form of humanity and/or a better society. Conservatives and libertarians do not slip into the idealistic utopian trap.

Yet there are clear points of departure. Firstly, libertarians offer a radical political position. They talk about a fundamental redress of the balance between state and individual power. A genuinely libertarian state would be a radical departure from any political settlement that has gone before. Conservatives, however, would be more likely to argue for a return to a previous political settlement – one where state intervention in some aspects of life was more limited.

Another, and perhaps the most fundamental, difference between conservatives and libertarians is in the realm of the private rather than the public. Here conservatives tend to look towards traditional views when it comes to issues such as gender roles and sexual orientation. A libertarian, however, would ignore such traditional ideals and leave what is private to the individual concerned, perhaps within the limitations of a very loose reading of the harm principle. Therefore, a conservative might buy into a campaign such as Major’s Back to Basics, whereas a libertarian would almost certainly tut at yet another example of a government attempting to tell us how to live our lives.

So can you be a libertarian conservative? Personally I struggle to see how, unless you are such a liberal conservative that the word conservative starts to lose all of its meaning. For me conservatism offers only a limited attempt to extend freedom, and misses the point that the purpose of maximising economic freedom is to maximise freedom in as many other areas of life as possible.