Paul Smith on Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

“[H]e had small taste for theorising, and did not set out to be a political thinker in any large or systematic sense. Yet his fundamental feelings and beliefs, if they were never consciously organised into a political philosophy, were necessarily prime determinants of his political action. Moreover, they represent very well an important strain of Conservative thought. It is not, despite large elements in common and a virtual identity of practical outcome, typical Toryism: Salisbury was too utilitarian, too lacking in reverence for authority, prescription, and tradition, too cynical and pessimistic perhaps, for that. It is an intellectual and sophisticated Toryism, which employs an apparatus of close empirical reasoning to support the conclusions at which it is programmed by instinctive predilection to arrive. It is, or desires to be, a clear, hard, logical creed, realistic and sceptical, seeking an argumentative basis for resistance to radical change not in the sentimental or mystical idealisation but in the rational justification of the existing order. It is, in short, Toryism for the clever man.”

“Salisbury's ideas on international society and politics were just as much influenced as his views on internal questions by his pessimism about human nature and his overriding desire for stability and security. He started from the observation that international relations were something like a Hobbesian state of nature, the nations existing in a condition of virtual anarchy, without a common law. It was this that made it ridiculous and dangerous to follow what he lampooned as "the preaching school of politicians" in wishing to direct the country's foreign policy according to the mild and precise morality that was properly applicable to the conduct of individuals... So-called international law helped to mitigate disputes, but it could not stop aggression... A nation had to look after itself: its policy had to be egoistical, and the statesmen who conducted that policy held a trust to act accordingly, even if this meant pursuing in the interest of the state a course of selfishness which their principles would preclude in private life. Salisbury saw that the central factor in international politics was power, and expressed his vivid contempt for the type of thinking about external relations common among his political opponents, which, lulled by years of apparent insular security, had become so abstract and moralistic that it was doubtful whether it could grapple with the hard problems involved in maintaining England's position in an era when her relative physical force in the world was declining.”