On Being A Conservative - by Cass Sunstein

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On Being A Conservative<br>Lessons from Friedrich Hayek

Cass Sunstein<br>Jul 19, 2026

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Friedrich Hayek is a great hero to conservatives, and rightly so. He revered traditions. He despised socialism. He favored free markets.<br>Cass’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Hayek helps to define modern conservatism. And yet one of his most interesting and vivid essays has this title: Why I Am Not A Conservative.<br>Well, why wasn’t he? And what might we learn from his clear desire to distinguish himself from conservatives?<br>In the relevant essay, written in the late 1950s and published in 1960, Hayek rejected the idea that socialists are on the left, conservatives on the right, and liberals in the middle. He didn’t like the idea of some kind of line from left to right. He wrote: “Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third.” Three corners, not a straight line.<br>Hayek had plenty of nice things to say about conservatives and conservatism. His essay is written in sadness, not in anger. (It was apparently started as a paper delivered to the Mount Pelerin Society in 1957, sharply critical of the traditionalism associated with Russell Kirk, who apparently delivered an extemporaneous response at the time. That must have been quite an occasion.<br>In tribute to conservatism, Hayek said this: “To their loving and reverential study of the value of grown institutions we owe (at least outside the field of economics) some profound insights which are real contributions to our understanding of a free society.” Hayek shared with conservatives that reverence for grown institutions, the beneficial products of social processes, not of any individual designer.<br>With that justified reverence, conservatives “did show an understanding of the meaning of spontaneously grown institutions such as language, law, morals, and conventions that anticipated modern scientific approaches and from which the liberals might have profited.”<br>This understanding was central to Hayek’s own thinking. It was even defining. Liberalism, as Hayek understood and championed it, shares that reverence, and hence is deferential to traditions. It never sneers at them. This is a close connection here between Hayek and Burke (and on Hayek’s account, Adam Smith as well).<br>Divergent attitudes toward traditions help to explain Hayek’s split from John Stuart Mill (and from other liberals). In Hayek’s telling, Mill was a rationalist who thought that human reason could be used to challenge traditions. Hayek did not like that at all. He thought that it was a “fatal conceit.” Hayek well knew that many contemporary liberals follow Mill, and he lamented that. Hayek’s preferred form of liberalism, which he believed to be the truest form of liberalism, treasures not arrogant reason, but invisible hands, undesigned orders, the common law, the rule of law, and customs.<br>Designs without designers - they are fundamental to Hayekian liberalism and to conservatism alike.<br>Hayek did not want to freeze any status quo, but like conservatives, he tended to favor incrementalism rather than large-scale change. He greatly admired Burke. “There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed strong. “<br>In 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr., a defining American conservative, wrote that his new magazine, and the conservative movement as he would like it to be, “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”<br>That’s a great line. It’s exactly what Hayek rejected. I don’t know if Hayek knew of the line, but I suspect so. You can see his essay as a direct response to it.<br>Hayek identified the following as “the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such”: “by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving.”<br>Sure, “It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing.”<br>For Hayek: Ugh. We might say that in Hayek’s view, conservatism lacks a theory. It’s mostly a red light. By contrast: Focused on freedom, spontaneous orders, traditions, and free markets, Hayekian liberalism has a theory. It tells us where to go. It’s a path.<br>Hayek complained that conservatives want to freeze things. They do not want to allow free markets to do their work, or to permit freedom to have its way, or to see what surprises the...