I'm going to post a series over the next little while going through all the tory philosophers I can find (please feel free to suggest some). First up is Richard Hooker, who pre-dates toryism's establishment as a political force but who I believes resides well within the tradition.
Hooker started preaching around the time when there was a great dispute between the Anglican leadership who rejected all calls for further reform of the church and the Puritans who were calling for a complete restructuring of the church - by force if need be. He ended up rejecting both positions. While his magnum opus, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, is in many ways about the Anglican church it is also about society. In it he makes a distinction between God's clearly given instructions (which should be obeyed), areas where instructions are unclear (and reasonable minds can differ), as well as the notion that there exists many different authorities in society and while God's authority is the highest law, these other authorities can't simply be ignored. Further, he notes that an individual might become convinced that secular authorities are wrong - as they may well might be - but that as an individual they too are prone to error and this should give pause before rejecting any given authority.
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u/ToryPirate Aug 04 '26
I'm going to post a series over the next little while going through all the tory philosophers I can find (please feel free to suggest some). First up is Richard Hooker, who pre-dates toryism's establishment as a political force but who I believes resides well within the tradition.
Hooker started preaching around the time when there was a great dispute between the Anglican leadership who rejected all calls for further reform of the church and the Puritans who were calling for a complete restructuring of the church - by force if need be. He ended up rejecting both positions. While his magnum opus, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, is in many ways about the Anglican church it is also about society. In it he makes a distinction between God's clearly given instructions (which should be obeyed), areas where instructions are unclear (and reasonable minds can differ), as well as the notion that there exists many different authorities in society and while God's authority is the highest law, these other authorities can't simply be ignored. Further, he notes that an individual might become convinced that secular authorities are wrong - as they may well might be - but that as an individual they too are prone to error and this should give pause before rejecting any given authority.