David Stove - Political Philosophy

Political Philosophy

After a brief flirtation with Marxism, Stove abandoned the left. His views were summed-up well in his paper, "Why You Should be A Conservative" (reprinted in part as "The Columbus Argument"). His main argument in this paper was that just as there are many more ways to make a television set worse than those which will make it better, so there are many more ways to make society worse than to make it better. If we think otherwise that is only because we have been fed "a one-sided diet of examples", such as Christopher Columbus, Nicolaus Copernicus and Abraham Lincoln rather than Pol Pot, Maximilien Robespierre, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. So the odds are that change will make things worse, not better. Hence it is rational to be cautious and conservative about proposed changes. Stove concluded that there is more reason to discourage innovation than encourage it.

Stove believed that proposed changes should not be radical, that they should be very carefully considered, and should have very good supporting evidence on their side before they are implemented. However, according to Stove, current opinion believed the opposite: the very fact that an idea is an innovation is an argument in its favour, and that we even have an obligation to take innovations seriously simply because they are innovations.

Stove also regularly derided the Enlightenment view of progress. This is the view which John Maynard Keynes attributed to Bertrand Russell: that

"human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally".

There were many people in modern times, Stove thought, who hold such beliefs - that in the past the world was a dark place run according to foolish principles, but that from now on things will be run properly and the world will be vastly improved as a result. But, he asked, what reason do we have to think that darkness is about to suddenly give way to light? Why is it that we will be so much better at running things than past generations? "Education" is the answer that is often given in reply to this question, but Stove was deeply skeptical about the effectiveness of education in making the world a better place. Stove felt that learning has great value in itself, but unlike Plato did not think that the more educated a ruler is the better he will be at ruling.