As a hardcore Popper-ist/ian/ite there is a philosophical concept I want to introduce before continuing with a lengthy article on neoconservatism.

I am surprised how often I take up the stance of the logical positivism and deny the existence of anything which cannot be properly defined using physical terms. Thus I was always sceptical to values like freedom, love, rule of law etc, since they are not reducible to physical sciences. But yesterday night, it dawned on me that freedom, love etc. might be on a higher level of complexity and it was impossible to describe them using physical concepts since they are emerging properties.

Popper (peace be upon him) stated that new levels of complexity might have new properties wich cannot be reduced to the underlying levels. He called that emergence.

Freedom, for example, is a concept which can only be explained using legal, sociological and economical terms, but physics would fail. The fact that physics cannot explain freedom does not mean that it does not exist. It means that freedom is a property which is on a higher level of complexity than physics.

Some might argue that freedom etc. do not have exact definitions as physical terms have. That is based on a wrong conception of science. It is only a recent development (since Galileo) that science became mathematicised and quantified, and even after this, many terms had different definitions. Water for example would not be described as H_{2}O before the advancement of chemistry and must therefore have had a different definition if not given as self-evident. Force, although universally represented as mass times acceleration, might be defined or described differently in regard to the discipline in which it is used. (It is silly to believe physics is fully reducible to mathematics and F = m a is a complete representation. Physics is a whole mess if all these terms are not precisely defined or agreed upon by all members.)

Therefore, I think, it is justified to use terms like freedom, tradition etc. as proper and well-defined terms, although the precise definition might vary in the context it is used.