Conservatives and the Free Marketrnby George WatsonrnWhen everyone “hastens through by-paths to privaternprofit,” Samuel Johnson remarked confidently in 1756,rn”no great change can suddenly be made.” So the market can bernconservative in its effects. The notion is startling, especiallyrnfrom the pen of an 18th-century Tory, and it hardly matters forrnthe moment whether the market Johnson had in mind was regulatedrnor free. It is startling because, in much of Europe, conservativesrnwere consistently suspicious of private enterprise longrnbefore socialism became a party of state, and for good reason. Arnconservative gentry is unlikely to welcome entrepreneurs whorntry to break into a social elite or who, with new enterprises likernfactories and mines, recklessly put wages up. Oddly enough,rnhowever, conservatives have recently turned back to somethingrnlike Johnson’s position, as if it were the most natural thing inrnthe world to think the market socially conservative. Suchrnclaims may still look a bit implausible. But in the confidentrnyears of the New Right in Europe and America since the mid-rn1970’s, that hardly mattered. If enough people think privaternenterprise is conservative, then conservative is what it will berntaken to be. Or so runs the wisdom of the age. The meaningrnof a word is its use.rnConservative competition, for all that, remains a paradox tornany thoughtful observer, and the paradox is doubled if, in a seriesrnof developments Johnson did not live to see, the market isrnfreed of tariffs and the economy turns global in scale. Nothing,rnand certainly not socialism, challenges old capital more threateninglyrnthan new capital; nothing endangers established interestsrnmore than the vulgar new entrepreneur with a clever idea,rna bank loan, and an eye for the quick buck. That is how old fortunesrnare destroyed. Socialism was no such threat, in its day.rnCapitalists could enrich themselves out of communism, andrndid; in his autobiography Hammer: Witness to History (1987),rnArmand I lammcr, whose father Julius once helped to foundrnthe American Communist Party, told how Lenin, soon after hernseized power in Russia, guaranteed him monopoly rights and arnGeorge Watson, who is a Fellow of St. John’s College,rnCambridge, is the author of The Idea of Liberalism, BritishrnLiterature since 1945, and Lord Acton’s History of Liberty.rnstrike-free workforce—something no democratic governmentrnon earth can offer a budding capitalist. Lenin’s ideas soundrnpretty conservative, by now, and after his death in 1924 the Sovietrnsystem he created became one of the most rigid and backward-rnlooking societies of modern history, ruled by an eliternv’hose lives were eased by country villas, boxes at the opera,rnchauffeured limousines, and even (as North Korea has recentlyrnillustrated) a hereditary succession for the head of state. Inrneconomies like that, where inflation was often negligible andrnstrikes rigorously banned, capitalists could make merry and did.rnIn fact, a cynic surveying the Soviet system that collapsed inrn1989 might be inclined to wonder why conservatives in thernWest were so unfriendly to it. The best answer, perhaps, andrnthe kindliest, is that democratic conservatives are democrats asrnwell as conservatives. At all events, and for whatever reasons,rnthey embraced protectionist private enterprise between the twornworld wars, both in Europe and the United States, and in thernmid-1970’s the free market. Which leaves one wonderingrnwhere in the world the true conservatives are now.rnIn his casual aside about private profit as a guarantee againstrnlarge and sudden change, Johnson might be thought to havernanswered just that, though I have not seen his remark quoted inrnrecent years in the writings of the New Conservatives on eitherrnside of the Atlantic, whether Reaganites or Thatcherites. Onernof Johnson’s sources, in a general sort of way, was John Locke,rnv’ho is not usually thought of as a conservative. But he hadrnonce made a conservative case for elective systems, and in hisrnfamous essay of 1690, which Johnson often quotes in his dictionary,rnhe had dared to defend the essential conservatism of freernelections. Democracy was still a century and more down thernti’ack, but Locke’s argument in his 19th chapter might be saidrnto anticipate the conservatism of the democratic idea. To thernfamiliar objection that it would be ruinous to “lay the foundationrnof government in the unstable opinion and uncertain humourrnof the people,” he wrote, in a work published a year afterrnthe English Revolution of 1689, there is a simple and reassuringrnanswer. “People are not so easily got out of their old forms asrnsome are apt to suggest,” wrote Locke, urging a renewed loyaltyrnto ancient constitutions. It is an argument that finds a sym-rn22/CHRONICLESrnrnrn