The claim about the goals of liberals does not seem right to me. Liberals of the 19th century by and large did not object to a centralised state, but took the limited central institutions of the absolutist governments they overthrew and made them stronger. This is counterintuitive until you see how the scope of government actually increased as governments went from absolutist to liberal in the 19th century.

The drive for centralisation, rationalisation and uniformity was abundantly clear in the French Revolution, and we see it repeated again and again across Europe and also in our experience with the Red Republicans, called by this name by Catholic critics because of the resemblance they bore to Garibaldian liberals. The Italian case is a perfect example of how a monarchy allied itself with liberalism to create a far more centralised and uniform state than had existed in Italy in a very long time; the violence done to the society of southern Italy and Sicily was devastating. Liberals may have, as in the British case, insisted on a specific sphere in which those stronger institutions could act and they may have made a great show of their respect for law, but they were not attempting to check centralisation as such. Ever since Walpole, there had never been any great Whig or liberal desire to halt centralisation. All of their political and economic interests dictated that centralisation and concentration of wealth advance. In their constitutionalism, liberals were attempting to check a certain kind of state power that was inimical to their ideas of parliamentary government. But it was precisely because they faced so many obstacles in local institutions, councils and privileges that they sought as much as possible to concentrate power in the center–for the sake of reform and freedom, of course!

The story of Austrian and German liberalism is one of liberal centralism warring against the old local structures of Catholic and Slavic aristocrats; as part of the arrangements of 1867 the liberals in Vienna allowed the Magyars to retain their more aristocratic and decentralised constitution in the other half of the empire, but the impulse in Cisleithania was to strengthen central institutions and further attack traditional society and institutions, especially the Catholic Church.

One can probably find exceptional examples of liberals who feared or objected to the concentration of power in central government, but for the most part I think it is fair to say that liberals at their best focused on what the government could and could not do and did not focus keeping power broadly diffused. Centralisation was their ally, and it fit only too well with their desire for rationalising and regularising law across an entire territory.

If liberals held to a strict definition of what government could do, this impulse towards centralism might have been less damaging (however, by its nature, a highly consolidated state will tend to overstep its bounds and there will be nothing to stop it from doing so), but by the turn of the last century many liberals, especially in Britain, were conceding the need for more and more extensive government activism.

Liberalism, as much as any other religion or creed, does precisely this; it merely dissembles its objects under the symbols of autonomy, freedom, individualism, and etc. The reason for its success is that this dissimulation corresponds to, and resonates with, the corruption of our nature.

A quick comment on your comparisons of advanced societies as the “least religious societies on earth” with the third worlders, bringing up the rear, which you identify as “unwaveringly religious.” What you left out of that evaluation is what worldview was predominant in all the advanced countries you mention when they first attained that advanced position. All of the nations you mentioned, with the exception of Japan, were Christian. Not only so, but most of the nations you mention, having abandoned their Christian heritage, are also on their last legs. Europe, the remains of old Christendom, has about twenty years left before they go under the Islamic flood. In short, you have given us a picture of a cluster of prodigal sons, laughing in a tavern, spending their fathers’ money, buying drinks for the house. There is a difference between what it takes to make money and what it takes to spend it. The nations you mention became prosperous when they were under the strong influence of the Christian faith. They have abandoned that faith, for the most part, and we shall see how they will do. The checks are already starting to bounce.

What I am proposing in speaking of a conservative ethos is that a great many other things have the same sort of ethical and social significance that shape what kind of communities we have.

Mr. Suderman’s assertion that “Larison’s conservatism would be preached from the pulpit, infused in every minute and every decision of life,” is in some respects correct if I understand Mr. Larison’s ultimate foundation on which the principle of good order (eunomia is built. Order is one thing, but good order implies a morality and claim upon truth. What moral order is being promoted by “true” conservatism? If it is not the moral order on which Christendom was established, it is not worth conserving. What is preached from the pulpit (assuming it is in accordance with Biblical truth) should permeate the lives and decisions of citizens who consist within a well ordered society.

I appreciate your comments, but historically a larger problem seems to be how to keep traditional societies decentralized. In the 16th and 17th centuries in western Europe, at least, the traditional monarchies worked toward centralizing their control over societies. Certainly, as Eamon Duffy has shown in his writings, the success of the Protestant Reformation was largely due to the attraction the political aspects of the Reformation had for the Tudors. Becoming Protestant allowed the monarchs to gain greater and more direct control over English life.

Weren’t liberals responding to the crises of traditional socities? Traditional societes could not prevent the process of centralization. Thus liberals (at least some of them), by calling for a separation of state and society, were searching for a way to halt centralization. I agree with you, however, that the universalism of liberalism can lead to centralization. It ultimately depends upon which part of the liberal tradition you uphold — the separation of state and society OR the “universality” of spreading individual autonomy.