Rothbard’s critical comment on Samuel P. Huntington’s “Conservatism As An Ideology” examines whether a defense of existing institutions can dispense with substantive principles. He accepts Huntington’s definition of conservatism as situational—a defense of institutions against fundamental challenge—but disputes both its strategic effectiveness and Huntington’s consistency in applying it. Against the recommendation that American liberals suspend their ideology to resist communism, Rothbard argues that institutions require rational justification, not merely attachment to what exists.
The opening turns Huntington’s historical examples against his prescription. His four conservative mobilizations, defending estates, established religion, the pre-revolutionary order, and the slaveholding South, all failed in their stated purpose. Rothbard then proposes an explanation: conservatism emerges when an established consensus encounters a competing philosophy, yet answers that philosophy with habitual resistance rather than convincing principles.
Now, conceding to the enemy the monopoly of reason is fatal, for any ideology whatever can appeal to emotions alone.
The decisive asymmetry is not between emotional and unemotional politics, but between a movement capable of offering reasons and one that disavows the need for them. Since unfamiliar ideas can themselves become established, attachment to familiarity cannot secure any particular political order. Rothbard’s alternative makes institutional change compatible with the defense of liberal principles:
The proper answer to the radical challenge of a new ideology is to adopt not conservatism but a contrasting radicalism, to oppose reason with reason.
Liberalism should therefore answer communism by bringing American institutions closer to its own ideal. The relevant distinction is between defending institutions because they exist and defending or transforming them because they embody defensible principles.
The middle of the comment exposes the substantive commitments embedded in Huntington’s supposedly positional conservatism. Describing institutions as necessary conditions of human existence already advances a general argument about social order. Rothbard develops this objection through Huntington’s six-point conservative creed. Prescription and deference to settled government are situational; religion can sanction existing arrangements or support universal natural law against them. Claims about communal supremacy, human evil, inequality, and hierarchy are ideational. Their political direction depends on context: hierarchical principles, for instance, would be radical within an Israeli kibbutz.
The preference for habit and emotion over reason occupies a special position. Rothbard interprets it as a retreat from defending conservatism’s own substantive doctrines, rather than an innocent preference for experience. His proposed conceptual clarification is explicit:
The ideational strands should be separated out, and used to form a frankly ideational and radical system.
The moral test follows from this separation. If situational defense is intrinsically justified, it must apply to all established institutions, including Nazi and communist ones. Huntington’s exclusion of certain regimes as chaos imports a substantive standard that his definition cannot supply. Rothbard shifts the question from whether Americans should defend their institutions to whether the same approval extends to defenders of Soviet Russia, South Africa, and Yemen. Any selective endorsement requires principles beyond the status quo.
The closing section applies this distinction to the New Conservatives. Rothbard disputes Huntington’s claim that their enemy is obscure: he identifies their shared target as democratic socialism, encompassing state control, egalitarian mass culture, and the domestic New-Fair Deals as well as foreign totalitarianism. Their positive program, however, is genuinely divided among laissez-faire individualists, Tory feudalists, decentralists, monarchists, and others.
They are not really defending any more, if they ever did; they are fighting against trends which have already and increasingly prevailed.
Their unity is thus oppositional, concealing divergent projects of reconstruction under a misleading conservative label. Conversely, former liberals defending the prevailing order become conservatives in Huntington’s positional sense. Rothbard ends with the conditional warning that abandoning liberal argument for habitual defense may signal liberalism’s decline rather than preserve it. The comment’s lasting conceptual force lies in separating institutional allegiance from political principle: neither a movement’s inherited label nor its resistance to change establishes what it believes, what it would build, or why its preferred institutions deserve support.
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