The Nature of Johnson's Conservatism

In his recent book Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England, John Cannon refers to Johnson as “one of the founding fathers of mainstream conservative thought.” ¹ It is a judgment that re-echoes many recent assessments of Johnson’s thought in its many inter-connected areas, from politics to morality to lexicography: my own work, along with that of Allen Reddick, James Sack and others, have stressed the fundamentally conservative cast of Johnson’s mind. ² Indeed, even Donald Greene and J. C. D. Clark have not disagreed that Johnson was “conservative,” even if they reached sharply opposed conclusions about his political beliefs. Donald Greene conceded that Johnson could be called a “rational or skeptical conservative,” a tradition that also includes Hobbes, Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire. One can only imagine Johnson being exceedingly uncomfortable in the company of these men. Yet Greene pointed out that they shared a profound hostility to Utopian schemes of politics, stressing instead the inevitably imperfect nature of government. According to Greene, this tradition of conservatives must be distinguished from “idealistic or Romantic conservatives” like Bolingbroke, Burke, Coleridge and Disraeli, who painted glamorized pictures of the status quo or of a tragically eclipsed world of the past. ³ J. C. D. Clark has been wary of calling Johnson a “conservative,” feeling, with some justice, that this term is anachronistically applied to the eighteenth century. Yet Clark’s case for calling Johnson a Jacobite and Nonjuror, committed to the principle of divine right and the authority of the Anglican Church, has aligned him in important ways with what Anthony Quinton termed “religious conservatism,” a tradition from Hooker to Newman that celebrated the central role of religion and piety to the well-being of society. ⁴

In short, behind the controversy over Johnson’s alleged Jacobitism lies this further and, in my view, more fundamental question: “What was the nature of Johnson’s ‘conservatism’?” In seeking here to answer this question, I am aware that authors of Johnson’s day used the term “conservative” only in its original scientific sense. Johnson’s definition of “conservative” in the Dictionary, “having the power of opposing diminution or injury,” referred strictly to the laws of physics. ⁵ Nevertheless, historians of conservatism such as Quinton, Gilmour and Eccleshall are surely right to trace a long tradition in English political thought, beginning as early as Hooker and continuing into the work of Oakeshott, deeply opposed to radicalism, and characterized by epistemological and political scepticism, an instinct for moderation, and a reverence for traditional values and institutions. ⁶ And these, as I will argue, are foremost values in the writings and conversation of Samuel Johnson.

In considering these central pillars of Johnson’s political thought, moreover, we can make sense of what must otherwise seem perplexing contradictions in his statements about the Pretender and Jacobites. Johnson’s undoubted affection for the Stuart cause reflects his conservative devotion to stability and order, for he venerated a royal line that had some claim to popular loyalty besides political expedience. Growing up in the West Midlands in the early eighteenth century must have impressed Johnson with the depth of this loyalty to the Stuarts among common people, whose festive or militant displays of Jacobitism have been so well documented by Nicholas Rogers and Paul Monod. ⁷ On the other hand, the energies of popular agitation always stirred something like horror in Johnson’s heart, and there is no reason to believe that he made any exception for crowds festooned with plaid and white roses. It must surely have weighed heavily on his mind that the Stuart line could not be restored without creating precisely the social upheaval that he so feared. Ironically, then, Johnson’s conservatism may have dictated both his theoretical allegiance to the principle of uninterrupted succession, as embodied by the Stuarts, and his belief that support for the Stuarts had become not only personally dangerous but politically inadvisable.

It is this ambivalence that I will try to explain here. In order to do this, however, I must elucidate further how I understand Johnson’s political and social conservatism, beginning with a...