Treating Liberal-conservative thought through Hume and Tocqueville

The rigid distinctions made between the forms of thought imply a totalistic-categorical uniformity that is an ideology, which defines a thinker as the representative of that thought. However ideologies as a uniform categorisation and definition depend on artificial and limiting distinctions. In this thesis we hold the position that a thinker who philosophizes cannot be enclosed to an ideological category which is a particular aspect not substantive aspect of that philosopher and then we read liberal-conservative thought through Hume and Tocqueville. In other words a philosopher is a person who philosophies not an ideologue, there is an unbridgeable gap between an ideologue and a philosopher. In dealing with liberal-conservative thought this study read it as a mindset or a mentality rather than as an ideology. Therefore as an attempt to apprehend liberal-conservative mindset requires in the first place an interpretation which goes beyond ideological formations based on rigid and synthetic boundaries. In an aim to reconsider liberal-conservative mind, David Hume (1711-1776) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) are two chosen thinkers. In their writings and thoughts, this thesis tries to grab political and philosophical dimensions and patterns of liberal-conservative mind while making clear why they cannot be encompassed by liberal either/or conservative ideology. In addition, liberal-conservative mind is studied within the concept of economic and market relations in regard with state intervention. At the end of thesis' discussions a synthesis of the political and economic contents of liberal-conservative mind is introduced. Around this discussion, a possibility of converging economic and political thought is assessed. Beyond liberal and/or conservative ideologies' synthetic and imposing limits, liberal-conservative mind's political and economic imagination can be apprehended as a consensual and conventional mind-set. In this sense, liberal-conservative mind is an effort to acknowledge the depth and width of thinking itself. Keywords: Liberal-Conservative Mind, Mediation, Hume, Tocqueville, Ideology, Politics and Market.