The Conservative Canon

A Synthesis, Analysis and Critique of Thirteen Thinkers

Burke · Adams · Tocqueville · Chesterton · Lewis · Hayek · Oakeshott · Kirk · Buckley · Kristol · Reagan · Sowell · Scruton

Introduction: One Canon, Four Traditions

The thirteen figures treated here — the ten of the original list plus John Adams, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, named as candidates for a stricter philosophical ranking — span nearly three centuries and do not form one tradition. They form at least four: a traditionalist line (Burke, Kirk, Scruton, Chesterton), a classical liberal or libertarian line (Hayek, Sowell, and arguably Tocqueville), a neoconservative line (Kristol), and a political-practical line (Buckley, Reagan), with Adams, Lewis and Oakeshott fitting awkwardly into all of them. What binds the canon is less a shared doctrine than a shared set of enemies: rationalist utopianism, central planning, and the belief that society can be redesigned from first principles.

That negative unity is the canon’s strength and its central weakness, and both are explored below. The method throughout is the one you asked for: synthesis first, then analysis of each thinker with attention to connections across fields, then criticism — including the strongest counter-arguments to the criticisms themselves.

Synthesis: What Holds the Canon Together

The epistemic argument: society as a knowledge store

The deepest common thread is an information-theoretic claim made long before information theory existed: societies encode more knowledge than any individual mind can articulate or any planner can collect. Burke defends “prejudice” as the distilled experience of generations; Chesterton’s fence says do not remove an institution until you know why it was built; Oakeshott distinguishes practical knowledge, which lives only in habit and apprenticeship, from technical knowledge, which can be written in books; Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” shows that prices compress dispersed, tacit, local information that no central authority could ever assemble; Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions extends the point into a general theory of institutions as knowledge-processing systems.

This is one argument in five dress codes, and it has remarkable cross-disciplinary echoes. It parallels Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge and Gilbert Ryle’s knowing-how; it anticipates the failure of rule-based expert systems in artificial intelligence and the discovery that competence often cannot be codified; it resembles the biologist’s respect for evolved structures whose function is not obvious; and in Bayesian terms it says that tradition is a strong prior earned by centuries of data, which a single generation’s reasoning should update only cautiously. Chesterton’s fence is now, unattributed, a standard maxim in software engineering: never delete code you do not understand.

The anthropological argument: the constrained vision

The second thread is a view of human nature — limited, passionate, status-hungry, not perfectible. Adams built constitutional architecture on the assumption that elites and mobs are equally dangerous because both are driven by the passion for distinction. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man argues that moral knowledge (the “Tao”) is objective and that attempts to engineer values produce “men without chests.” Kristol’s neoconservatism began as the sociology of unintended consequences: a “liberal mugged by reality.” Sowell named the whole divide in A Conflict of Visions: the constrained vision treats trade-offs as permanent; the unconstrained vision treats them as solvable. This is secularised original sin, and it anticipates by a generation the empirical political psychology of Haidt and others on how temperament drives ideology.

The sociological argument: mediating institutions

Third, all the traditionalists locate freedom not in the individual or the state but in the layer between: Burke’s “little platoons,” Tocqueville’s voluntary associations as schools of liberty, Kirk’s “permanent things,” Scruton’s oikophilia — love of home. The claim is that when intermediate bodies die, the lonely individual faces the state alone, and both despotism and anomie follow. Tocqueville’s “soft despotism” — a tutelary state that “spares men the trouble of living” — is the canon’s most prophetic single idea, and it connects forward to Durkheim on anomie, to Robert Putnam’s social-capital research, and to contemporary critiques of the therapeutic and administrative state.

The fault line: the market against the manor

Now the contradiction. The canon’s free-market half celebrates what Schumpeter called creative destruction; its traditionalist half mourns what destruction destroys. Hayek’s spontaneous order dissolves settled communities as efficiently as any commissar; the supermarket kills the village shop Scruton loved without a single bureaucrat lifting a finger. Hayek saw the problem clearly enough to append “Why I Am Not a Conservative” to The Constitution of Liberty. Kristol saw it too: capitalism runs on moral capital — trust, deferred gratification, bourgeois restraint — that it consumes but does not replenish. Buckley’s “fusionism” papered over this fissure for fifty years; the populist revolt inside the contemporary right is, on this reading, the fissure finally opening. Any synthesis of these thirteen must admit that they are, on the central question of what markets do to traditions, on opposite sides.

The Thinkers: Analysis and Criticism

Edmund Burke (1729–1797)

Analysis. Burke is the fountainhead because Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) invented the modern conservative argument: society is a contract “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”; abstract rights detached from circumstance are dangerous; reform should proceed like repairing a ship at sea. Crucially, Burke was a reformer — he championed the American colonists, Irish Catholics, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings for imperial abuses in India. His conservatism is a theory of how to change, not a refusal to change. His defence of “prejudice” as latent collective wisdom reads today like proto-evolutionary epistemology, and sits comfortably beside Gigerenzer’s work on ecological rationality: heuristics outperform explicit optimisation in complex environments.

Criticism. Thomas Paine’s jibe still lands: Burke “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird” — his elegy for Marie Antoinette spares little grief for the peasantry the old regime starved. The deeper problem is the missing criterion: slavery, suttee and judicial torture were also traditions encoding generations of practice, and Burke offers no principled test for which inheritances deserve deference and which deserve abolition. His own record suggests the test was intuitive: he blessed the revolutions of 1688 and 1776 and damned that of 1789, distinctions a critic may call ad hoc. Mary Wollstonecraft added that his “wisdom of ancestors” conveniently belonged to ancestors who looked like him. The counter-argument: Burke never claimed traditions are infallible, only that the burden of proof lies on the innovator — a probabilistic, not absolute, claim, and one the Terror promptly vindicated.

John Adams (1735–1826)

Analysis. Adams is the canon’s constitutional engineer. A Defence of the Constitutions and Discourses on Davila rest on a single behavioural axiom: the strongest human passion is the desire for distinction — to be seen, ranked, admired. Since both aristocrats and majorities are driven by it, neither can be trusted with unchecked power; hence balanced government, bicameralism, and an independent executive. This is political science built on what we would now call evolutionary psychology — status competition as the engine of politics — and it gives Adams a claim to be the most empirically minded of America’s founders.

Criticism. The practice betrayed the theory: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, signed by President Adams, criminalised criticism of his own administration — the very concentrated power his books warned against. His suspicion of the people shaded into quasi-aristocratic sympathy that Jefferson exploited politically and that sits oddly in a conservative canon supposedly devoted to liberty. And there is a category problem: Adams was a revolutionary who helped overthrow his lawful sovereign — by Burkean standards, the Declaration of Independence is exactly the abstract-rights rationalism conservatives deplore. Defenders respond that the American Revolution was itself Burkean: a conservative restoration of violated colonial charters, not a Year Zero. The debate over that reading has never closed.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)

Analysis. Tocqueville is the canon’s social scientist. Democracy in America (1835/1840) treats equality not as policy but as a psychological condition that remakes everything: ambition, religion, family, language. His two great warnings — the tyranny of the majority operating through opinion rather than law, and “soft despotism,” the benevolent tutelary state that infantilises citizens — are the most-cited conservative predictions of the twentieth-century welfare state. His analysis of democratic envy and restlessness anticipates social-comparison theory and the modern literature on status anxiety; his method founded empirical comparative sociology.

Criticism. First, the appropriation problem: Tocqueville called himself “a liberal of a new kind,” and the left cites him as readily as the right; his presence in a conservative top ten is canon-building by adoption. Second, the evidence problem: nine months of travel, mostly among Anglophone elites, with slavery and Indian removal treated in asides — a thin empirical base for so vast a theory. Third, the Algeria problem: the theorist of liberty wrote reports endorsing France’s brutal conquest of Algeria, including razing of crops and seizure of unarmed civilians — a contradiction modern scholarship no longer politely ignores. Fourth, some predictions failed: the conformist America he feared became the most culturally combative society on earth. The rejoinder: prophecy is graded on a curve, and soft despotism describes the contemporary administrative state better than anything written since.

G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936)

Analysis. Chesterton supplied conservatism with its best metaphors. The fence: reformers may remove a fence only after learning why it was put up. The “democracy of the dead”: tradition means giving votes to our ancestors rather than to the small arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. Orthodoxy (1908) defends inherited Christian doctrine as more rational than its rationalist critics, using paradox as a method of argument. His economic programme, distributism — property distributed as widely as possible, against both big capital and big state — connects forward to E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and to today’s localism and antitrust revival.

Criticism. Three charges. The anti-Semitism is real and documented — recurring tropes about Jewish financiers and a proposed requirement that Jews wear distinctive dress — and “man of his time” defences are weakened by contemporaries who wrote no such things. Distributism, second, has no mechanism: it specifies a desired distribution of property but no non-coercive way to reach or maintain it, which is why it has remained a literary movement for a century. Third, paradox as method can be sleight of hand — wit doing the work of argument, delighting readers without obliging them to check whether the inversion is true. The counter-argument: the fence principle needs no theology and has been independently rediscovered by systems engineers; an idea’s validity survives its author’s vices.

C.S. Lewis (1898–1963)

Analysis. Lewis enters the canon on the strength of The Abolition of Man (1943), the shortest and arguably most far-sighted book on this list. Its argument: moral values (“the Tao,” his term for the cross-cultural core of natural law) are objective; educators who teach that values are merely subjective produce “men without chests” — clever heads, trained appetites, nothing in between; and the final stage of man’s “conquest of nature” is the conquest of human nature itself, where a small class of conditioners remakes everyone else. Written before the genome was sequenced, it is now standard reading in debates on transhumanism, genetic engineering and AI alignment — Lewis saw that “man’s power over nature” is always, in practice, some men’s power over other men with nature as the instrument.

Criticism. Lewis refused political identification all his life and warned explicitly against yoking Christianity to a party; his conscription into a conservative canon is posthumous and arguably against his will. Philosophically, his most famous apologetic argument — the trilemma (liar, lunatic or Lord) — is a false trichotomy, and his argument from reason against naturalism was famously mauled by Elizabeth Anscombe in 1948, forcing him to rewrite it. The Tao itself is asserted by anthology — appendix excerpts from world traditions — rather than demonstrated; a sceptic notes that the excerpts were selected for convergence. The rejoinder: Abolition requires only that some moral knowledge is objective, a position now respectable again in secular philosophy, and his technological prophecy stands regardless.

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992)

Analysis. Hayek is the canon’s scientist and its most consequential twentieth-century mind. The knowledge argument (1945) is a genuine discovery: the economic problem is not allocating known resources but mobilising knowledge that exists only as dispersed, tacit, local fragments — and the price system is a telecommunications network that compresses this knowledge into a single signal. Socialism fails not from bad intentions but from information physics. His range was extraordinary: The Sensory Order (1952) sketched connectionist neural networks decades early; his “spontaneous order” generalises Darwinian selection to law, language, money and morals, linking him to modern complexity science. The Road to Serfdom (1944) made the political case that central planning erodes liberty by necessity, not accident.

Criticism. Begin with his own: Hayek appended “Why I Am Not a Conservative” to The Constitution of Liberty (1960), objecting that conservatism is a brake with no destination and cannot generate principles of its own — the canon includes a man who explicitly resigned from it. Empirically, the strong slippery-slope reading of Serfdom failed: Scandinavian mixed economies did not slide into totalitarianism; welfare states proved stable. Morally, his indulgence of Pinochet’s Chile — including the remark that he preferred a “liberal dictator” to a democratic government lacking liberalism — is a permanent stain on a philosophy of freedom. Theoretically, cultural group selection, the engine of his later work, remains shaky in evolutionary biology, and spontaneous orders are not automatically benign: cartels, corruption networks and mob violence are also emergent. The rejoinder: the knowledge argument survives every one of these objections untouched; it was vindicated by the Soviet collapse and needs neither Pinochet nor group selection.

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990)

Analysis. Oakeshott is the canon’s philosopher of disposition. “Rationalism in Politics” (1947) attacks the politics of the manual — the belief that technique can replace tradition. His distinction between civil association (the state as umpire under law) and enterprise association (the state as manager of a collective project) in On Human Conduct is one of the sharpest tools in political theory. To be conservative, he wrote, is a disposition: to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, present laughter to utopian bliss. His practical-versus-technical knowledge maps directly onto Polanyi’s tacit knowledge and explains in advance why rule-based expert systems failed and why apprenticeship survives every educational technology.

Criticism. A politics of pure disposition cannot tell you what to do. Oakeshott offers no criterion for which “intimations” of a tradition to pursue — and his own examples (he cited the enfranchisement of women as following an intimation) suggest the doctrine ratifies whatever has already begun to happen. His scepticism is also indiscriminate: by his lights Thatcherism — an ideological project to remake Britain by design — was as rationalist as socialism, which makes him useless to the movement that claims him. Critics add that the ideal of politics as a “conversation” is the aestheticism of a comfortable don: those crushed by existing arrangements need more than an invitation to converse, and his work is nearly silent on justice. The rejoinder: Oakeshott never promised a programme; he offered a corrective, and correctives are judged by what they prevent, not what they build.

Russell Kirk (1918–1994)

Analysis. Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953) performed a remarkable act of intellectual archaeology — or invention. By tracing a line from Burke through Adams, Tocqueville and Hawthorne to T.S. Eliot, he gave postwar American conservatism what it lacked: a pedigree, a canon, and the confidence that it was a tradition of ideas rather than a reflex of interests. His “six canons” (belief in transcendent moral order, social continuity, prescription, prudence, variety, imperfectability) remain the standard checklist of traditionalist conservatism, and his emphasis on “moral imagination” made literature, not economics, the heart of the right. Methodologically he was a literary critic doing politics: canon-formation as movement-building.

Criticism. The irony is structural: Kirk’s tradition was itself constructed — a rationalist, selective assembly of authors who mostly never read each other, several of whom (Tocqueville above all) would have declined membership. A Burkean should be suspicious of a tradition invented in 1953. Substantively, the six canons are evocative but never operationalised; “the permanent things” functions as incantation rather than argument, and Kirk’s hostility to libertarians (“chirping sectaries”) did not stop the movement he inspired from fusing with them, suggesting his philosophy was ornament rather than architecture. His influence outside the American movement is slight. The rejoinder: all canons are constructed — the liberal Locke-to-Rawls genealogy no less — and Kirk’s candour about imagination over system is at least honest about what political traditions are.

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008)

Analysis. Buckley’s contribution was institutional, not theoretical. Founding National Review in 1955 (“it stands athwart history, yelling Stop”), he and Frank Meyer engineered fusionism — the alliance of traditionalists, libertarians and anti-communists that became the Reagan coalition. Equally important was his gatekeeping: he expelled the John Birch Society’s conspiracism and Ayn Rand’s atheist absolutism from respectable conservatism, defining the movement by its exclusions. As a case study in movement entrepreneurship — coalition design, brand management, the use of television (Firing Line) to make ideas glamorous — he has few equals in any political tradition.

Criticism. Three serious charges. First, he was an editor and impresario, not an original thinker; his inclusion in a list of thinkers confuses influence with thought. Second, the segregation editorials: “Why the South Must Prevail” (1957) argued the white South was “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail” because it was “for the time being, the advanced race.” He recanted decades later, but the episode shows the gatekeeper’s standards were, on the era’s central moral question, catastrophically wrong. Third, his lifework has not survived him: fusionism collapsed in the populist era, and his gatekeeping model depended on a scarce-media world that no longer exists — there is no editor’s desk on the internet. The rejoinder: institutions are ideas embodied, and for half a century his held; few philosophers can say as much of theirs.

Irving Kristol (1920–2009)

Analysis. Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism,” brought to the right the analytical training of a former Trotskyist and the sociology of unintended consequences. His definition — a neoconservative is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality” — captured the empirical turn: The Public Interest documented how Great Society programmes produced effects opposite to their intentions. His deepest idea, in Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), is that capitalism runs on borrowed moral capital — bourgeois virtue, religious restraint — which it erodes and cannot regenerate; the market’s cultural contradictions (a theme shared with his friend Daniel Bell) would be conservatism’s long-term problem, not socialism.

Criticism. The two cheers became three in practice: Kristol promoted supply-side economics while admitting, with startling candour, that he “was not certain of its economic merits but quickly saw its political possibilities” — placing political utility above truth, the cardinal sin of the intellectual. The Straussian streak — religion endorsed instrumentally as social discipline for the masses, whatever the elite privately believes — is an esoteric elitism corrosive of the honesty conservatism claims to defend. And the movement he fathered supplied the doctrine of democratic transformation that led to Iraq: exporting institutions by force is precisely the abstract rationalism Burke and Oakeshott spent their lives warning against — neoconservatism as the unconstrained vision wearing a conservative lapel pin. The rejoinder: Kristol himself was more sceptical than his heirs, and the moral-capital thesis looks stronger every year.

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004)

Analysis. Reagan’s inclusion concedes that translation is a form of thought. He converted the canon into a governing majority: Hayek and Friedman became tax cuts and deregulation; the anti-communism of the movement became “we win, they lose”; Winthrop’s “city on a hill” became a national self-image. As a study in how ideas acquire power — rhetoric as the interface between philosophy and electorate — he matters to the history of conservatism as Pericles matters to Athenian democracy: not as theorist but as embodiment.

Criticism. The inclusion is a category error: a list of thinkers containing Reagan measures power, not thought, and thereby concedes that the canon is a movement’s honour roll rather than a philosophical ranking. The record also contradicts the legend: federal spending and deficits grew, government employment grew, he signed the 1986 amnesty, raised taxes repeatedly after 1981, and withdrew from Lebanon after the Beirut bombing — pragmatism his admirers airbrush. Deeper still, several scholars note that Reagan’s sunny perfectionism — America as endless dawn — is temperamentally progressive; Burkean melancholy about human limits is wholly absent. He may have been the unconstrained vision’s most charming salesman. The rejoinder: prudent improvisation under constraint is exactly what Burke and Oakeshott prescribe, and the gap between rhetoric and record is the gap they would have approved of.

Thomas Sowell (1930– )

Analysis. Sowell is Hayek’s system-builder. Knowledge and Decisions (1980) recasts all institutions — markets, courts, families, armies — as mechanisms for transmitting knowledge under constraint, asking always: who decides, with what knowledge, facing what feedback? A Conflict of Visions (1987) is the canon’s best piece of meta-politics: ideological conflict persists because the constrained and unconstrained visions disagree about human nature itself, so the same minds line up on opposite sides of unrelated issues — an insight that anticipated the empirical psychology of ideology by twenty years. His trilogies on race, culture and migration argue that human capital — skills, norms, habits — explains group outcomes better than discrimination or exploitation, and his signature maxim — “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” — is constrained-vision epistemology in seven words.

Criticism. The visions dichotomy, useful as taxonomy, is unfalsifiable as theory: any thinker can be sorted post hoc (where does Marx go, with his hard-nosed account of capitalism’s laws? Sowell’s answer — a “hybrid” — saves the scheme by weakening it). The culture-first account of group disparities risks circularity — culture explains outcomes, and outcomes are the evidence for culture — and critics argue it underweights mechanisms of discrimination that field experiments (audit studies of identical CVs with different names) continue to document. His later books grew polemical, citing congenial evidence and bypassing the strongest opposing scholarship, and he has largely avoided peer-reviewed engagement with his academic critics for decades. The rejoinder: his international comparative method — testing claims about one country’s minorities against the same group’s fate elsewhere — is a real methodological contribution his critics rarely match.

Roger Scruton (1944–2020)

Analysis. Scruton rebuilt philosophical conservatism for a secular age on aesthetic and phenomenological foundations. The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) broke with Thatcherite economism: the conservative cause is not the free market but the home — “oikophilia,” the love of a shared, settled place — and its enemy is “oikophobia,” the intellectual’s repudiation of his own inheritance. His aesthetics (architecture, music, wine) argue that beauty is a human need and ugliness a moral failure; his Green Philosophy claims environmentalism as natively conservative — conservation is what conservatives do. The biography matters: he ran underground philosophy seminars in communist Czechoslovakia at real personal risk, for which the Czechs decorated him. He is the only figure on this list to ground conservatism in Kant and Husserl rather than in Burke alone.

Criticism. The oikophilia/oikophobia pairing has a rhetorical trapdoor: it can pathologise internal criticism as disloyalty, converting disagreement into diagnosis — the mirror image of the progressive habit of medicalising dissent. His 1980s writing on homosexuality in Sexual Desire defended positions he later softened but never fully repudiated, and his 2019 dismissal from a government commission — though triggered by a deceptively edited interview about Soros and Islamophobia, for which the New Statesman was forced to apologise — drew on adjacent things he had actually said. Politically, his is a conservatism of elegy: exquisite on what has been lost, thin on what is to be done, consolation rather than programme; and the defence of fox hunting and high culture invites the charge that the “home” he loved was a class position. The rejoinder: someone must say what is being lost, and the elegist who risked prison for Czech students cannot be reduced to an apologist for privilege.

Criticising the Canon Itself

What the list excludes

The list is Anglo-American by construction, and the exclusion is not innocent. It omits the continental counter-revolutionary line — Maistre, Donoso Cortés, Carl Schmitt — whose authoritarianism is also part of conservatism’s genealogy. A canon containing only the liberal-friendly conservatives flatters the tradition by amputating its darker lineage; a critic will say the list is an exercise in reputation management. It also contains no women and no non-Western thinkers, and only one Black thinker — facts that matter less as quota arithmetic than as evidence of who got to do canon-formation, and when.

Category trouble

Strictly, perhaps five of the thirteen are conservatives: Burke, Chesterton, Kirk, Oakeshott, Scruton. Hayek formally renounced the label; Sowell calls himself a classical liberal; Tocqueville called himself a new kind of liberal; Lewis refused political identity; Adams was a revolutionary; Buckley was an editor; Reagan was a politician; Kristol’s neoconservatism was, by Burkean lights, a rationalist heresy. The canon coheres only if “conservative” means “opposed to the twentieth-century left” — a definition by enemy, which is what Oakeshott would call a symptom of ideological thinking, not an escape from it.

The internal contradiction, restated

The synthesis section identified the deepest problem: the canon’s economic and cultural halves are at war. If the traditionalists are right that settled communities, religious habit and inherited loyalty are the preconditions of a good life, then the creative destruction the free-marketeers celebrate is a solvent of everything conservatives value — and Amazon has done more to close the village shop than any socialist ever managed. If the Hayekians are right that spontaneous orders must be left to evolve, then the traditionalists’ desire to protect particular inherited forms is just another planner’s conceit. Each half’s diagnosis indicts the other’s prescription. Kristol saw this; Bell named it; the current civil war on the right is its political expression.

The strongest counter-arguments

Three defences deserve a fair hearing. First, every tradition curates: the liberal canon (Locke, Mill, Rawls) is just as constructed, just as selective, and just as quietly embarrassed by its members’ views on empire and race; singling out conservative canon-formation applies a standard no tradition survives. Second, incoherence may be the wrong test: if Oakeshott is right that conservatism is a disposition rather than a doctrine, then demanding doctrinal consistency from these thirteen is like demanding a single theorem from a temperament — the unity is in the cast of mind (sceptical, anti-utopian, attentive to what exists), and that unity is real. Third, the epistemic core — dispersed knowledge, the limits of design, trade-offs over solutions — has been repeatedly vindicated by events (the calculation debate, the Soviet collapse, the failures of high-modernist planning that James C. Scott, a man of the left, documented in Seeing Like a State) and by disciplines (complexity science, evolutionary theory, AI) that owe these thinkers nothing. A canon that keeps being proved right about its central claim has earned its inconsistencies a hearing.

Verdict

Read as a philosophical school, the thirteen fail: they contradict each other on the market, the state, religion and human perfectibility, and several would refuse the membership card. Read as a sustained, three-century argument about the limits of human design — an argument conducted with the unconstrained vision as constant interlocutor — they are formidable, and their epistemic insight is among the most consequential and best-confirmed ideas in modern social thought. The honest summary is Burke’s own method applied to his heirs: keep what has proven itself — the knowledge argument, soft despotism, mediating institutions, the fence — and reform the rest without embarrassment.