 Does Burke follows Hume’s notion of custom, which may be regarded as irrationalist or even nihilist? For Burkean conservatives, “reason” operates only relative to or within a prior “non-rational stabilisation of belief” in habit or prejudice—a stabilisation necessary to avoid scepticism in the traditional philosophical sense. For Hume and Burke this is a customary framework; for religious thinkers such as Cardinal Newman it is fideistic, appealing to the extra-rational authority of religious doctrine. Prejudice is normative; the inability to subsume particular actions under a universal law does not imply radical relativism (Vannatta 2014). For the classical liberal, in contrast, reason precisely does not operate within customary frameworks.