Abstract

Neo-conservative talk about authority, tradition and ritual must have come as a surprise to all those enlightened ethicists who had to struggle in order to emancipate themselves from authority and traditional morality — all the more since the representatives of the neo-conservative tendencies are obviously not trying to obey any official authority, but are mostly independent academics.Invoking the image of a pendulum to describe this ethical turnaround, would neglect a significant feature by which the ‘new’ conservative philosophers and theologians might be distinguished from ‘classical’ conservative thinkers. Though both encourage greater respect for tradition and authority, the reasons for choosing such conservative virtues rest on quite different epistemological presuppositions. If this is not taken into account, then the question how it is possible that philosophers and theologians such as Hauerwas could be tempted by such apparently conservative language, will be unanswerable.It goes without saying that epistemological presuppositions are seldom made explicit, and when they are, they often prove to be extremely complicated. Nor is it possible to fit them into clearly circumscribed categories without paying a certain price. Nevertheless, in order to shed at least some light on the current epistemological alternatives and their consequences, I would like to describe two positions which, for the sake of convenience, I will denote by the terms ‘classical’ and ‘new’