Burke had to be rescued from Morley, Buckle, and others because the very expediency, relativism, and prudential quest for utility which they attributed to and praised in him is part of the modern menace of bolshevism, whose most grievous barbarity is its renunciation of absolute moral values, at least those of the Christian, now capitalist, West. Enter Burke the theorist of natural law. Based upon the meager evidence of Burke’s Indian speeches and the towering intellectual influence in the conservative intellectual community of Leo Strauss, who was much more cautious in seeing Burke as classical natural-law thinker than they were, the cold war conservatives packaged a Burke foursquare in the tradition of Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas. Kirk, Canavan, and especially Stanlis see Burke as turning upon the apostasy of the liberal Hobbes and Locke, who had betrayed the true classical and Christian concept of natural law in their philosophies of egocentric natural and individual rights. Far from the philosopher of expediency, Burke emerges now as the philosopher of fixed eternal principles, of the moral laws of God that enjoin certain actions and require others.

Another intellectual movement for which Burke is of central importance is neoconservatism. He is of use to it not in a crusade against world revolution but in a more pragmatic response to the politics of domestic American liberalism. Whereas the cold war Burkeans were by nature or creed conservatives to the core, many neoconservatives were formerly liberals or radicals who have moved to the right in reaction to the militancy of blacks, students, women, and war protestors in the 1960s, or those who have come to conservatism after disillusionment with the Great Society’s efforts to eliminate poverty and prejudice from the American scene. From their ivy-covered campuses, their prestigious think tanks, and the pages of Commentary and The Public Interest, the neoconservatives may not always refer to Burke or invoke his name and principles, but their reflexes are Burkean, and as the new conservative mood spreads and deepens, conscious credit is increasingly being given to Burke as the inspirational source of what is basically a politics of skepticism.

Echoes of Burke are clearly discernible in the new conservatism’s cult of complexity, for example. Nathan Glazer writes that what he learned from a stint of government service was that there were no simple solutions and that society was complex:

It was a big country and it contained more kinds of people than were dreamed of on the shores of the Hudson. I learned in quite strictly conservative fashion, to develop a certain respect for what was; in a world of infinite complexity some things had emerged and survived.

Radical social programs, he writes, are misguided because their naive authors have no sense of “the lineaments of modern society.” In the face of this impenetrable complexity their simplistic solutions are the heights of presumption and arrogance. They assume that they “understand the causes of our ills,” and that they know “how to get them right.”57 It may well be that we know neither, replies the deradicalized realist Glazer.

Burkean wisdom lives on in the writings of Irving Kristol as well. Burke had argued that radicals often cause more harm by efforts to remake society than existed in the evil they were reacting against. Kristol agrees. “I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.” Behind radicalism, Kristol, like Burke, sees both a conspiracy of critical, naysaying “men of letters” and the decline of religious faith, fueled in part by a self-proclaimed cultural and intellectual elite. Like Burke, Kristol faults these “men of letters” for their naive utopianism, their simplistic conviction that the world can be made right:

I also regard the exaggerated hopes we attach to politics as the curse of our age.... To think we have it in our power to change people so as to make the human estate wonderfully better than it is, remarkably different from what it is, and in very short order, is to assume that this generation of Americans can do what no other generation in all of human history could accomplish.58

Kristol acknowledges his agreement with Burke on how fortunate it is that most people refuse to question their society and merely accept it as given.

In the context of American politics, the neoconservative rejects the role of government as problem solver or perfection planner because he knows that in a complex world some problems cannot be solved and in a sinful world perfection is an illusory goal. The political scientist Edward Banfield cautions against governmental intervention, suggesting that if you do not know what you are doing, do not do it at all. The problems of the inner city cannot be solved, so leave them be.59 Daniel Patrick Moynihan argues, similarly, to get government out of race relations. By raising expectations unrealistically more evil is done than good. The problem is unsolvable, or will conceivably fix itself; what is needed is benign neglect.

But there is one area in which neoconservatives plead for more government action—crime control—and this is because of their very sense of man’s inherent baseness. It is evident in the writings of James Q. Wilson, for example, and his insistence on a stronger governmental role in curbing crime. Such a view revives the classic conservative model of the state as represser of evil passions. The liberal is naive in his belief that good men are rendered criminal solely by environment and society. The modern conservative appreciates that some men are by nature evil or sinful and that the law-and-order state must actively punish them, less as a deterrent than as external just deserts for their internal failure to curb themselves.60

But even today Burke’s most enduring legacy is his skepticism. His conservative disciples envision government as primarily an act of management and administration. Burke’s theory of “prudential management” as the true art of government has been stated most succinctly in the contemporary age by Michael Oakeshott, the late English political philosopher. Oakeshott calls upon political leaders to take the ship of state to no particular port of call, no abstract or ideological ideal. Their task is to manage wisely the crises that arise out of day-to-day developments—to keep the ship afloat: “in political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter, nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel.”61 Such skills, of course, require men of a high quality and character not found among the democratic citizenry.

Skepticism also involves a specific orientation to change.