Conservatism
Andreasson, S. (2014). Conservatism. In V. Geoghegan, & R. Wilford (Eds.),
Political Ideologies: An Introduction. (4th ed., pp. 47-70). London: Taylor and
Francis. Published in: Political Ideologies: An Introduction Document Version:
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date:18. Mar. 2017 1 Conservatism* Conservatism does not ask ultimate questions
and hence does not give final answers. But it does remind men of the
institutional prerequisites of social order. (Huntington 1957: 473)
Conservatism and change Whether conservatism is understood as the ideological
articulation of a reactionary tendency to defend establishment and social
privilege or merely a prudent manifestation of risk aversion and scepticism
towards grand schemes for improving society, it has coalesced into a body of
thought inseparable from the question of how to manage change. As emphasised in
a recent study by O’Hara (2011), conservatives do not simply reject and resist
all forms of change in social, political and economic arrangements of any given
society. Instead they accept that change is inevitable and have articulated a
distinct approach to identifying and understanding circumstances in which
change might contribute to resolving contradictions and discord in existing
arrangements. In doing so, conservatives aim to aid in the preservation of
institutions and practices, rather than rendering them unviable and thus
tearing them asunder by rejecting any change at all. As O’Sullivan (1976: 9)
puts it in his introduction to the ‘philosophy of imperfection’: [c]onservatism
as an ideology, then, is characterized in the first instance, by opposition to
the idea of total or radical change, and not by the absurd idea of opposition
to change as such, or by any commitment to preserving all existing
institutions. Willingness on the part of conservatives to accept change where
necessary must however be distinguished from accepting any change, or
generously promoting it. Neither the radical reactionary nor progressive
mind-sets capture the conservatives’ outlook on social change. In making any decisions
to alter, for instance, the basis for a monarch’s authority, the scope of
participation by citizens in parliamentary affairs or the extent to which
private * Forthcoming as Andreasson, S. (2014) ‘Conservatism’, in V. Geoghegan
and R. Wilford (eds.), Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 4th ed., London:
Routledge. 2 property can be taxed to provide public goods, a careful balance
must be struck between a need to adjust disequilibrium in existing social
arrangements and the importance of not overestimating the degree to which the
status quo might be improved upon, as opposed to create worse problems than the
ones already at hand: from the French to the Russian and Chinese revolutions,
history provides ample evidence of radical change to existing social
arrangements producing evils in some instances far surpassing those they
succeeded. From this point of view, conservatism is not a mere negative
reaction to social change, brought on in the modern era by the ideational and
socio-economic transformations of, respectively, Enlightenment and industrial
revolution. Burke, for instance, supported the claims of American colonists
against King George III and argued for the easing of the Penal Laws against
Catholics in Ireland partly for the purpose of maintaining the British Empire.
By compromise and accepting the necessity of some significant change to
existing arrangements, he aimed to protect an established order against further
disruption (O’Brien 1992). On this view, conservatism constitutes a positive engagement
with change to mitigate its destructive potential and to preserve established
ways of societies as they actually exist and wherein, in Burke’s words, the
living bear responsibilities not only to their own generation, and not merely
contractual ones, but to those of generations past and those still to come. In
this emphasis on obligations transcending the individuals immediately involved
in societal interactions we can perceive an early divergence within the
otherwise intertwined origins of conservatism and liberalism in Britain: key
conservative concepts such as social discipline, deference and corporate
solidarity were ones that, according to Wolin (2001: 55), ‘liberal thinkers
beginning with Hobbes and Locke and continuing in the English Utilitarians were
unable to generate from liberal assumptions about free, equal and consciously
consenting individuals’. The idea, then, is to conserve to the extent possible,
but not absolutely. Most notably, the preference for society as it actually
exists places in the conservative’s mind the burden of proof for showing how
the benefits of alterations to an existing order will outweigh the potential
costs of doing so on those who advocate change, whether they be Jacobin
revolutionaries or the social planners that Hayek expected would lead modern
society to serfdom. Oakeshott (1962: 196) speaks of ‘a world of fact, not
poetic image … a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be
reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions’. An existing society with all
its accumulated knowledge and 3 complexity cannot simply be judged by the
standards derived from abstract theories based on a priori assumptions of how
society ideally should function, a sentiment vividly invoked by Sir Walter
Scott: An established system is not to be tried by those tests which may with
perfect correctness be applied to a new theory. A civilized nation, long in
possession of a code of law under which, with all its inconveniences, they have
found a means to flourish, is not to be regarded as an infant colony on which
experiments in legislation may, without much danger of presumption, be
hazarded. A philosopher is not entitled to investigate such a system by those
ideas which he has fixed in his own mind as the standard of possible excellence
(quoted in O’Hara 2011: 64). Implicit in this attitude towards change is also
an ‘epistemological doctrine’ of conservatism (O’Hara 2011: 24). Unlike liberal
and, in particular, socialist approaches to social change, conservatives are
less inclined to assume that sufficient information required to successfully
undertake large-scale and top-down reforms is readily available to government
planners and social engineers. It is with Hayek, in the wake of World War II
and the emerging Soviet challenge to liberal order in the West, and with the
comprehensive reorganisation of British society by means of government planning
and intervention, that the question of epistemology is brought to the centre of
political analysis. While Hayek’s relationship to conservatism remains
complicated there is a similar epistemological scepticism present in Burke’s
notion of government being inevitably ‘shrouded in mystery’ and later also in
Oakeshott’s critique of ‘rationalist’ social engineers. An important
distinction must also be made between what Quinton (1978) and O’Hara (2011)
understand as two very different types of change: organic and artificial. The
former, which the conservative would be inclined to accept, refers to change in
societal arrangements that can be conceived of as bottom-up, in that it is
driven by voluntary decisions made incrementally by large populations, such as
the increasing acceptance in twentieth-century Britain of women’s role in the
work force and a multi-ethnic society. The latter refers to top-down change
implemented by a small number of political leaders or planners to which a
general population must, often in a relatively short period of time, simply
adapt, the archetypal example of which would be the Leninist notion of a
vanguard party – or a ‘New Class’ of experts, or technocrats – claiming for
itself the right to interpret and 4 implement the will of the people. Thus we
can conceive of organic change as ‘demanddriven’ and artificial change as
‘supply-driven’ (O’Hara 2011: 74); conservatives in Britain who in recent years
have attempted to legislate against the grain by, for instance, suggesting that
‘major behavioural trends’ such as the ‘permissive society’ and mass migration
ought to be reversed are therefore arguably reacting against organic change and
thus acting in a manner that is ‘futile, wrong-headed and ultimately
counterproductive’ (Ibid, 97). The temptation to legislate against the grain
finds some self-styled conservatives, including many Conservative Party
politicians in the Thatcherite mould as well as neo-conservative Republicans in
America, challenging rather than channelling a long-standing Anglophone
conservative tradition. The inherently sceptical attitude towards artificial
change is the reason why conservatives sometimes wish to eschew the very notion
that conservatism is an ideology. The (positive) definition of an ideology
suggests an a priori set of values from which general principles and even
specific societal arrangements can be derived, and on the basis of which politicians
and other decision-makers ought to act through relevant institutions and by
available means of persuasion in order to align society with those principles.
In the case of the Enlightenment ideologies, these are principles understood to
be universally applicable. Ideology thus implies positive action. Where for
O’Hara (2011: 6) ideology ‘mediates between philosophy and action’, for
MacKenzie (2003: 2) all ideologies embody accounts of reality and how it can be
bettered. The argument, for those reluctant to acknowledge that conservatism is
an ideology, is that conservatism does not entail or imply the derivation of
specific schemes for how society ought to be organised and that it entails a
negative rather than positive view of action. While, as suggested by
Huntington, conservatism gives us an idea about what institutional arrangements
are likely to ensure societal order (and, possibly, which ones will not),
implying furthermore that order is a fundamental requirement for any legitimate
polity, it lacks a positive vision. However, E H Carr noted that ‘[t]o denounce
ideologies in general is to set up an ideology of one’s own’ (quoted in Drolet
2011: 15). Indeed, it is possible to derive from conservatism a general set of
beliefs about social change – if any, it should be gradual – and about the
virtue of some social arrangements over others, i.e., those in tune with
tradition rather than those aiming to reject it. Because policy prescriptions
can be inferred from conservative values, just as from liberal and socialist
ones, conservatism can profitably be treated as a political ideology standing
alongside its main ideological competitors. 5 An examination of the historical
origins of modern conservatism in the wake of the Enlightenment and its
crowning achievement, the French revolution, and of a conservative critique of
grand schemes for social transformation based on assumptions of a melioristic
character of human nature and the existence of universal values, suggests a
consistent approach to change which sets conservatism apart from liberalism and
socialism, its rival ideological alternatives in the modern era. To discern the
defining features of a conservative body of political thought, they must be
examined in comparison with, and in contrast to, the ascendant radical and
progressive ideological forces of that era. At least five major schools of
radical thought have competed [with conservatives since Burke] for public
favour ... : the rationalism of the philosophes, the romantic emancipation of
Rousseau and his allies, the utilitarianism of the Benthamites, the positivism
of Comte’s school, and the collectivistic materialism of Marx and other
socialists (Kirk 1995: 9). Liberalism embraces, indeed it constitutes a core
component of, the Enlightenment and its attendant belief in an ability to
improve society by means of harnessing human capacity for reason, to identify
and clearly state universally valid principles and rights on the basis of which
an improved society can be organised – (individual) freedom and equality being
pre-eminent among these. A dominant strand of socialism conceives in a
teleological fashion of a perennial conflict between classes throughout history
as inevitably resulting in a final revolution that transcends previously
existing class-based societies, however vaguely the nature of that classless
end-state may have been articulated by socialists themselves. In contrast to
these two competing visions of how society could best be organised in
accordance with Enlightenment values, conservatives emphasise the inherent
value of existing social arrangements and the importance of ensuring that any
change is gradual, with those in charge clearly cognisant of the risks involved
in departing from what is tried and tested. The anti-revolutionary sentiment
When considering conservatism not only as a body of political thought, but as
an ideology with concrete implications for actual political developments across
time and space, there is 6 perhaps no other issue through which we can better
perceive the conservative ideology in action than in the conservative’s
response to revolutionary social change. Originating in the radical challenges
to established order in Europe, conservatism is for Huntington (1957: 458) ‘the
product of intense ideological and social conflict’ where ‘men are driven to
conservatism by the shock of events’ (470). The important role played by (the
prospect of) revolution in shaping conservatism is also central to Freeman’s
(1980) highly critical account of Burke and his defence of the Ancien Régime in
France. Huntington (1957: 470) is, however, arguing in a somewhat
counterintuitive manner about the origins of the conservative mind set when
insisting that ‘conservatism comes from the challenge before the theorist, not
the intellectual tradition behind him’, and as a consequence ‘conservative
thinkers of one age … have little influence on those of the next’. This
argument jars with a general conservative reverence for tradition whereby ‘one
generation links with another’, the necessity of which Burke so eloquently
spoke and without which ‘[m]en would become little better than the flies of a
summer’. This is, however, only a problem if one accords history unduly great
determining powers over future events. Clearly the past, i.e., actually lived
experiences transmitted over generations, is crucial for any conservative’s
considerations of whether a contemporary polity is good or bad, and whether
proposed change ought to be considered as promising or dangerous. But contra
Marx’s argument in The Eighteenth Brumaire, the history and tradition of dead
generations does not, for conservatives, have to weigh like a nightmare on the
minds of the living. Conservatives clearly cannot rely on the discounting of
history by means of which liberals can proceed to deduce from axiomatic notions
of the public good fundamental principles of how society ought to be organised.
But because conservatism is inherently pragmatic in terms of the social
outcomes produced by an established order, and because it also rejects
deterministic conceptualisations of history that hamper flexibility in
adjusting to new and unforeseen events that inevitably crop up, the
conservative is as capable intellectually to adapt to events as they occur as
he is to recognise the merits in what has gone before. Pace Tacitus, custom
does adapt itself to experience. The revolutionary vision stands in sharp
contrast to the conservative sentiment, is indeed its anti-thesis. Before
descending into a Reign of Terror, the French Revolution proclaimed the
universal Rights of Man and a future to be defined by liberty, equality and
fraternity. A new world order was to be ushered in, so complete in its rupture
with the 7 Ancien Régime that even a new way of keeping time had to be
introduced whereby the Gregorian calendar was replaced by a new Republican one.
The supposed tabula rasa created by revolution and regicide was designated Year
One (later echoed in Pol Pot’s Year Zero, marking the Khmer Rouge takeover of
Cambodia) to symbolise a total rejection of the past. Thus Jacobinism and the
French revolution was the very embodiment of radicalism as a means to
transformation, a persistent theme echoed in many revolutions since. Half a
century later, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto called on the working men
of all countries to unite in overturning the history of all civilisation, by
transcending past epochs of class struggle between freeman and slave, patrician
and plebeian, lord and serf, a struggle later conceived of as one between
capitalists and workers, to usher in the inevitable and classless society of
communism by means of a revolution to end all revolutions. Thus, the major
social and political ruptures of the modern era, beginning with the French
revolution in the late eighteenth century (if not already with the
sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation), transitioning through the abortive
European revolutions of the nineteenth century and culminating in the Russian
revolution of the early twentieth century, all constitute violent reactions
against established order that in each case were based on radical premises and
utopian aspirations. The modern revolution is, moreover, a peculiarly Western
phenomenon subsequently exported enthusiastically across the world.
Revolutions, in the grand sense, are, as Friedrich says, “a peculiarity of
Western culture.” The great civilizations of the past – Egypt, Babylon, Persia,
the Incas, Greece, Rome, China, India, the Arab world – experienced revolts,
insurrections, and dynastic changes, but these did not “constitute anything
resembling the ‘great’ revolutions of the West.” [...] More precisely,
revolution is characteristic of modernization. It is one way of modernizing a
traditional society ... [and] is the ultimate expression of the modernizing
outlook, the belief that it is within the power of man to control and change
his environment ... (Huntington 1968: 264-5). Where revolutionaries succeeded
in bringing down existing order, radicalism habitually gave birth to terrors
greater than those which revolutionaries sought to end. As Madame Guillotine
terminated a moment of volatile freedom in France, so did Stalin’s Great Terror
(an intensification of activities begun by Lenin’s secret police) end the
dreams of those 8 who had hoped that Russians could free themselves from
centuries of autocracy and despotism they had hitherto endured. Similarly,
revolutionary premises would later underpin nationalist movements and waves of
decolonisation sweeping across the European empires in Africa and Asia. The
Congo’s first elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, proclaimed on the eve of
independence in 1960, less than a year before his murder at the hands of
Belgian and Congolese officers, the beginning of a new struggle for the
Congolese, and Africans generally, that would culminate in the fulfilment of
all that was aspired to in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Correspondingly grand proclamations, promptly betrayed, and with hindsight not
feasible to begin with, were articulated by leaders across the formerly
colonised world. As with previous revolutions, those who managed to cast off
the yoke of European colonialism often found themselves saddled with
governments and rulers every bit as oppressive as those they had previously
endured. Contemplating for instance the legacies of Amin, Bokassa and Mengistu
in Africa, and post-colonial leaders elsewhere similarly willing to employ
violence and provoke economic ruin in pursuit of personal power, it is not
difficult to argue that conditions indeed changed for the worse. At a
fundamental level, psychological as much as it is socio-cultural or political,
it is the sense of horror when contemplating revolutions degenerating into
destruction, even nihilism, which animates the conservative aversion to
radicalism and to those grand projects which promise comprehensive change and
an end to the ills of contemporary society. The conservative perspective on
social change does not hold that any and all change is necessarily ruinous. It
is possible to improve conditions of life, but the revolutionary road will not
provide deliverance. Indeed revolution becomes for the conservative something
‘unthinkable’, tantamount to, in Scruton’s (2001: 11) rather gruesome analogy,
‘murdering a sick mother out of impatience to snatch some rumoured infant from
her womb’. The origins of conservatism The roots of an Anglophone intellectual
tradition of conservative thinking – contrasting developments in Britain and
America with a more reactionary, and radical, form of conservatism emerging in
Europe in response to the French Revolution as represented by Maistre and the
other so-called Clerical philosophers, Bonald and Chateaubriand – are present
already in the Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker’s late sixteenth-century 9
magnum opus, the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Huntington (1957: 480) suggests
that in Hooker’s Laws, written two centuries before Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France, are ‘delineated every significant strand of Burkean
thought’. As demonstrated by Wolin (1953) and Quinton (1978), this is nevertheless
a conservative tradition most profoundly shaped by the eighteenth-century
Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, most palpably by his experience of the
ideational and societal transformations in Europe prompted by the Enlightenment
and culminating in the French revolution and the violent end to the Bourbon
monarchy of Louis XVI. In this sense, Burke’s Reflections stands as the seminal
contribution to what has become an Anglophone tradition of conservatism, the
exponents of which are ‘[united] in identifying Edmund Burke as the
conservative archetype and in assuming that the basic elements of his thought
are the basic elements of conservatism’ (Huntington 1957: 480). In its Burkean
form, O’Sullivan (1976) describes it as a tradition broadly characterised by
scepticism and pragmatism in its approach to political and social reform. It
constitutes, according to Kekes (1997: 356), a ‘via media between the dangerous
extremes of Utopian [and rationalistic] politics and the [fideistic]
repudiation of reason’ and stands in stark contrast to the universalism and
progressivism on which its rival ideologies, liberalism and socialism, are
based. While Anglophone conservatism is Burkean in its origins it must also be
recalled that this tradition contains within itself considerable variation,
even within its articulation in an English context. In tying his conservative
position in the Reflections closely to a specific time and place, Burke
espoused rather excited notions of the exceptional nature of the English and their
supposedly innate conservatism (and in contrast to the ways in which, on his
account, revolutionary fervour had debased the national character of the
French): Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold
sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our
forefathers. We have not ... lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the
fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We
are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire;
Helvetius has made no progress amongst us... We fear God; we look up with awe
to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with
reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility (Burke 1986: 181-2). 10 The
contrast between Burke’s grandiloquence and Oakeshott’s subtle elucidation of
merely a ‘conservative disposition’ almost two centuries on is significant. For
Oakeshott (1962: 183), conservatism is not in the end about any particular
religious belief in a providential order or an organic theory of human society
tied to a belief in ‘a primordial propensity of human beings to sin’. Nor is
it, in the English context, about an inevitable connection to Royalism and
Anglicanism. Oakeshott’s conservative disposition is about ‘certain beliefs
about the activity of governing and the instruments of government’. In its
concrete manifestation it becomes a politics averse to rationalist approaches
where ‘to govern is to turn a private dream into a public and compulsory manner
of living’. It is a vision of government as an umpire of interests in a plural
society and not an imposer of uniformity, whether this is uniformity along the
lines of a socialism concerned with equality in outcomes or that of a
liberalism deducing a system of government from a specific set of ideal values.
Government, then, as the conservative in this matter understands it, does not
begin with another, different and better world, but with the observation of the
selfgovernment practiced even by men of passion in the conduct of their
enterprises; it begins in the informal adjustments of interests to one another
which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual
frustration of a collision (Oakeshott 1962: 188). It is important to note also
that key contributors to this Anglophone conservative canon, from Burke to the
twentieth-century American political scientist Samuel Huntington, were not
primarily philosophers, nor were they straightforwardly conservative in their
political allegiances. Burke was immersed in the parliamentary politics and
intrigues of his day on behalf of the Whig Party. Indeed, Burke is more
appropriately thought of as a statesman, politician and orator than as a
philosopher per se. Lock (1985: 1) considered Burke ‘not primarily a writer or
thinker, but a party politician’ whose ‘rhetorical genius [and] ability to
generalise’ was such that his Reflections continue to be read ‘as a classic of
conservative political thought’. Even a sternly critical judge of Burke and his
intellectual legacy as constituting the primary obstacle to the realisation of
Enlightenment ideals, supposedly begetting even the twentieth-century fascist
reaction to liberal democracy, Sternhell (2010: 28) considers Burke ‘one of the
first great intellectuals to make a profession of politics’. Huntington
considered himself a strong defender of America’s explicitly liberal tradition
and his scholarship extended far beyond the realm of political philosophy into
11 historical and empirical studies of political change, most notably his
seminal study Political Order in Changing Societies (1968). Both Burke and
Huntington are emblematic of the eclectic and empirically rooted nature of
conservatism, by contrast to which a scientific theory of socialism or a
Rawlsian theory of justice are in their very exposition fundamentally alien to
the ways in which scholars have attempted to formulate the basic contours of
conservatism and key tenets of conservative political thought. The relationship
to liberalism To fully understand the emergence of a discernible body of
conservative political thought, and a conservative ideology constituting a
distinct political approach to social and political change, the relationship
between classical liberalism and conservatism and the important early linkages
between the two ideologies must also be examined. This remains in both the
British and American contexts a very complex relationship. One reason why this
relationship is often overlooked, and differences between the classical liberal
and the conservative often exaggerated in political discourse, is that
conservatism becomes conflated with Toryism, and liberalism, certainly in its
post-war incarnation, becomes defined primarily by its emphasis on
individualism and negative freedom. This tendency is in the case of liberalism
exaggerated by a selective reading of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations which
ignores important caveats to the abstracted individual (what in recent times
comes to define the ‘neo-liberal’ Smith) in his earlier and less widely read
Theory of Moral Sentiments. Hence Preece’s (1980: 3) reference to Smith as the
‘most commonly maligned and misrepresented of thinkers’. Understanding the
conservative tradition in Britain as merely defined by its dominant Tory
elements, i.e., its emphasis on organism, corporatism and collectivism combined
with a defence of monarchy, makes it difficult to understand the relationship
between (small-c) conservatism and a Conservative politics as championed by
many in the Conservative Party since the ascent of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1970s,
and by the New Right with which the Thatcherite project became associated in
the 1980s. Concepts like organism and corporatism are clearly discordant with
the neo-liberal tendencies of the New Right. Conversely, when conservatism in
America becomes defined as merely a laissez-faire liberalism based on an
abstracted reading of Locke (and Smith), ignoring the Locke who by invocation
of the ‘ever judicious [Richard] Hooker’ defends English medieval tradition
(Preece 1980: 16), it becomes difficult to discern the fact that British and
American strands of conservatism, each 12 with a complex relationship to, and
anchoring in, classical (Whig) liberalism, have more in common than is
generally assumed. It is this anchoring in Whig liberalism which, for Preece,
ultimately sets the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nations apart from other Western societies.
On this reading of the interwoven history of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ liberalism and
conservatism, the key historical context and ideological move out of which
conservatism emerges is the desire to conserve the (Whig liberal) values and
arrangements of the Glorious Revolution rather than those of the Ancien Régime
and absolutist monarchy. To conserve this settlement in Britain, a
proto-conservative like Burke was to some extent obliged to defend a set of
classical liberal values. In fact, English conservatives no less than English
liberals accepted the important role for Parliament established in the
settlement of 1689 – in their case more because they valued continuity than
because they had confidence in popular self-government (Lakoff 1998: 441). This
places Burke closer to Locke than his liberal detractors give him credit for
and remains insufficiently recognised by many conservatives in the modern American
tradition who trace the values of the American republic back to a controversial
and one-dimensional understanding of Locke’s liberalism. In this context,
Lakoff (1998: 442) argues that Burke, like Tocqueville, can best be described
as a ‘liberal conservative … leery of abstract dogmas and of all else that
smacked of l’esprit de système’. In Britain, where ideas of divine right had
held little sway […] what was being conserved was the orderly
institutionalization of Whig ideas of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 […] the
England which Montesquieu [for whom Burke expressed great admiration] had
described as the nation par excellence of constitutional liberty […] [E]ven the
most Tory Duke of Wellington recommended government “on liberal principles” and
numbered The Wealth of Nations among his favourite books (Preece 1980: 8).
Leading Tory thinkers of that time – Burke, the Marquis of Halifax, Lord
Bolingbroke – all ‘wrote in the new liberal context expressed most completely
by John Locke’ (Preece 1980: 9). What the exponents of this emerging
conservative tradition had in common was a 13 ‘desire to reconcile liberty and
authority’; they ‘admired … the principles of the Lockean constitution’ but
were also ‘concerned to limit its potential excesses’ (Ibid, 10). Concerns
shared by these British conservatives and Whig liberals are important as they
make it possible to understand how attempts by one ascendant grouping of modern
conservatives – ‘dries’ in Thatcher’s Conservative Party and neo-liberals in
Reagan’s Republican Party – to realign economic policymaking in Britain and
America more closely with classical liberal principles need not be understood
as a radical rejection of the status quo. That status quo being the
collectivist settlement emerging out of World War II, subscribed to in Britain
by both One Nation Tories and Gaitskellites, and the broad consensus in favour
of the New Deal in America emerging in the wake of the Great Depression and
attendant progressive policymaking following the war (during decades of
Democratic domination of Congress and the White House). The aims of these
modern conservatives were rather generated by a desire to rediscover classical
liberal principles originally shaped in symbiosis with industrialization and
expanding capitalist power, and on which stable democracy was deemed to
ultimately depend. Zuckerman (2008), in his recent study of the history of
American conservatism, is wrong to suggest that attempting to ‘subvert and
overturn’ the New Deal legacy in America is driven by radical rather than
conservative sentiments. After all, the New Deal emerged out of a modern
American liberalism manifested in the work of Dewey, channelling T.H. Green and
Hobhouse rather than Locke and Smith; a modern liberalism which, through
Bentham, becomes ‘a friend of radical rationalism’ and, through Mill, ‘an ally
of relativist social democracy’ (Preece 1980: 19). The ways in which the New
Deal era transformed the meaning of liberalism in America, from one denoting
its classical origin into one signifying egalitarian progressivism and even
social democracy, explains why the post-war conservative project in America is
considered more radical than it really is. This, even if aspects of the
Reaganite (as was the Thatcherite) programme was unduly influenced by the
‘rationalist version of Locke’s studiously complex philosophy’ as represented
by the French and American Enlightenment (20). The at times close affinity
between an Anglophone conservatism and strands of liberalism represented by
Lakoff’s ‘conservative liberals’ is furthermore illustrated by the Kantian
notion, popularised in a rather different liberal context by Isaiah Berlin, of
the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ which no genuine conservative would aim to
straighten. It 14 remains a complex and at times contradictory relationship, as
evidenced by both Conservatives and Republicans in recent decades aiming for a
radical restructuring of existing society and the socio-economic organisation
on which it is based. Therefore it is also necessary to consider the question
of whether Conservative Party politics following Thatcher, and Republican Party
politics following the ascent of the first Reaganites and then the
neoconservatives, can be considered legitimate heirs to the long-standing
tradition of Anglophone conservatism. Core components of conservatism To define
the nature of a conservative ideology it is necessary to confront a formidable
scholarly scepticism regarding the pedigree and merits of conservatism as a
coherent body of thought. This is a scepticism originating in the fact that,
according to Wilson (1941: 40), conservatism is a political ideology ‘weak in
its statement of purpose’. Disregarding at this stage political developments
specific to Britain’s Conservative Party and John Stuart Mill’s slight about it
being the ‘stupid party’ it is important to note that normative accounts of
conservatism, and of conservatism’s standing in the pantheon of political
thought, as put forth by conservatives themselves often begin on the defensive.
Symptomatic of this approach is Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism (2001).
He notes in the very first paragraph of this widely referenced text the
commonplace criticisms of conservatism as being devoid of genuine essence, core
beliefs and vision. According to such criticism, conservatism constitutes
instead an attitude of ‘mere reaction ... procrastination ... [and] nostalgia.
’ According to Honderich (1990), the conservative is ultimately lacking in
morality on account of his utter selfishness, an accusation echoed in
Eccleshall’s (2003: 54) claim that conservatives ‘all favour a society in which
certain inequalities are preserved, and in condemning purposive politics their
intention is to ridicule the egalitarian ideals of their opponents’. In
response, Scruton maintains that conservatism is in fact both coherent and
‘reasonable’, and not merely a poor substitute for a systematic theory of
politics – what Lionel Trilling (1950: ix), in reference to American
conservatives, memorably dismissed as ‘irritable mental gestures which seem to
resemble ideas’. 15 Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims,
formulaes and aims. Its essence is inarticulate, and its expression, when
compelled, sceptical. But it is capable of expression, and in times of crisis,
forced either by political necessity, or by the clamour for doctrine,
conservatism does its best, though not always with any confidence that the
words it finds will match the instinct that required them. This lack of
confidence stems not from diffidence or dismay, but from an awareness of the
complexity of human things, and from an attachment to values which cannot be
understood with the abstract clarity of utopian theory (Scruton 2001: 1). This
tendency to define conservatism in defensive terms, by arguing against its
purported deficiencies, implies an ideology quite distinct from both liberalism
and socialism. It suggests to a much greater extent a pragmatic and even
tentative approach, or, as Oakeshott would have it, disposition to politics and
societal organisation generally. This defensiveness comes about because,
arguably, conservatism lacks a ‘substantive ideal’, making it in Mannheim’s
(1952) memorable phrase ‘a politics without ideals’ (Wunschbilder). In a
similar vein, Huntington (1957: 457-8) suggests that ‘[n]o political
philosopher has ever described a conservative utopia’. For conservatives,
however, avoiding the articulation of any prescribed and specific order or set
of preferences that are universally applicable is not an inherent weakness.
Rather it equips conservatism with a sensitivity and adaptability which, as an
ideology, makes it particularly suitable to account for politics in culturally
and socially diverse settings very different from those in which the
Enlightenment ideologies arose and where, in a state of flux, momentous
decisions are forced. Indeed, the essence of conservatism is articulated more
forcefully and lucidly in times of crisis where the status quo is fundamentally
challenged, as in Burke’s Reflections and Huntington’s Social Order, perhaps
even in the cultural criticism of Scruton’s England: An Elegy. For
conservatives there is, in this sense, clarity in the inherent pragmatism of
their approach to politics which arguably provides an advantage in adapting to
changing circumstances and in remaining a relevant ideological approach across
a range of socio-cultural settings. Conservatism becomes particularly suitable
for accommodating cultural and political diversity in ways that, liberalism
and, especially, socialism, cannot. This is notably the case if we extend our
view beyond Western societies and examine conservatism as it applies to the
rapid changes that have transformed the formerly colonised world. 16
Postcolonial societies have in many ways remained resistant to modernisation. Despite
continual attempts at transformation, they are still in many important respects
characterised by traditional attributes such as deference to authority and
hierarchy, the imperatives of religious duties and familial obligations and a
lingering respect for traditional knowledge and ways of social and official
conduct. They retain conservative principles more so than they have ever come
to approximate ideals of liberal individualism, socialist collectivism or other
variations on the ideological and political themes of progressivism. Thus,
conservatism offers a framework for understanding and engaging with the
formerly colonised world that is very different from the liberal and Marxist
foundations on which Western thinking about colonialism initially depended, as
in the ambivalent views on imperialism found in the works of Mill and Marx and
in the unequivocal critiques by Hobson and Lenin. Compared to the liberal focus
on the (abstracted) rational individual and universal values, and the socialist
reliance on an inevitable march of history towards a communist utopia in the
context of a rationalist collectivism, conservatism can accommodate a wide
range of polities and societal characteristics where, for Kekes (1997), most of
the values constituting modern liberalism are actually incompatible with a
genuine commitment to pluralism. Conservatism’s ability, as a pragmatic rather
than universalist ideology, to accommodate diversity can be traced back to
Burke who: defended Whig institutions in England, democratic institutions in
America, autocratic institutions in France, and Hindu institutions in India.
Indian institutions, he warned, must be based upon “their own principles and
not upon ours,” denouncing those … who “subverted the most established rights
and the most ancient and most revered institutions of ages and nations” (quoted
in Huntington 1957: 463). But in order to move beyond the commonly acknowledged
scepticism and pragmatism, as well as a general aversion to radicalism,
inherent in conservatism as a ‘disposition’, the hallmark components of a
conservative ideology, without which we lack a clear and positive understanding
of the concept itself, must be identified. In synthesising a range of existing
definitions into a coherent whole, Huntington (1957) evaluates three theories
of conservatism: the aristocratic, the autonomous and the situational.
According to 17 the aristocratic theory, conservatism is fundamentally a
reaction to a unique historical moment, i.e., the reaction of the late
eighteenth-century ‘feudal-aristocratic-agrarian classes’ to the French
Revolution. The autonomous definition does not connect conservatism to any
specific class. Rather it defines conservatism as an ‘autonomous system of
ideas’ based on ‘universal values such as justice, order, balance, moderation’.
The situational definition, which is the one Huntington ultimately favours,
understands conservatism as originating in a ‘distinct but recurring type of
historical situation’ in which an established order is fundamentally challenged
and where conservatism ‘is that system of ideas employed to justify [that]
social order’ (Huntington 1957: 454-5). Lest this situational definition be
understood as a justification for any social order, we should note that
conservatives in the Anglophone tradition would and could not endorse
absolutist monarchy nor totalitarian rule in the way that Maistre and other
proponents in Europe of a reactionary anti-liberalism could in principle
justify the unfettered Divine Right of Kings and even theocracy (Maistre’s
ultramontanism). The origins of Burkean conservatism in a Britain shaped by the
Glorious Revolution effectively rendered meaningless any such justification for
absolutist rule. After all, Wood (1991: 98) described Britain as the European
monarchy with ‘the most republican constitution’ – what Montesquieu called ‘a
republic disguised under the form of monarchy’. The main advantages of the
situational definition is that it avoids the aristocratic theory’s inability to
accommodate forms of conservatism, including non-Western ones, unrelated to the
historical and cultural context of the French Revolution, and also the
difficulty arising with the autonomous definition which makes it impossible to
draw a proper distinction between conservatism and its rival ideologies on the
issue of universal values. What Huntington (1957: 456) identifies as six core
components of ‘the conservative creed’, and which he suggests also constitute
the ‘essential elements of Burke’s theory’, remain useful as a general definition
of conservatism and for evaluating its relevance as an analytical approach to,
and normative prescription for a conservative politics. Firstly, ‘[m]an is
basically a religious animal, and religion is the foundation of civil society’.
From archetypal conservatives like Burke to modern ones like Alasdair MacIntyre
and Robert George, legitimate social order is sanctioned by the divine. The
anchoring of society in a divine order serves to check the inevitable hubris
encouraged by (Enlightenment) ideologies placing mankind at the centre, or on
top, of an order which man himself ultimately sanctions. 18 Secondly,
‘[s]ociety is the natural, organic product of slow historical growth’. When
deformed by revolutionary fervour and thus divorced from the accumulated wisdom
of the ages – Burke’s ‘bank and capital’ – institutions lose legitimacy and
cannot last. Likewise ‘[r]ight is a function of time’ in the sense that rights
cannot simply be proclaimed, as have been rights proudly issued forth by
supranational organisations like the United Nations and the European Union. As
Scruton (1991) argues, legitimate and therefore enduring rights can only be
derived from the traditions and customs of a society in which people live and
which they can therefore hope to properly understand and genuinely accept. For
conservatives, the local and national tend always to carry more weight than
does the supranational and universal. This in turn has important implications
for conservatives’ preferences as regards international politics and foreign
policy in an increasingly globalised world, of which Britain’s persistent
scepticism towards the EU project and America’s tendency towards unilateralism
are recent examples. Thirdly, ‘[m]an is a creature of instinct and emotion as
well as reason’. The excessive faith placed by Enlightenment thinkers in
rationality provokes hubris and encourages reforms doomed to fail as they are
predicated on unrealistic and overly optimistic assumptions about a human
nature which is inherently fallible and characterised by a propensity for evil
(Kekes 1990). The fallibility of human nature is for most (Western)
conservative thinkers rooted in the Christian teachings of the Fall of Man and
Original Sin, reflecting a perennial pessimism about human nature that is characteristic
of the conservative mind set and evident in works as diverse as Sophocles’s
Antigone, Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, Machiavelli’s The
Prince and Discourses, Montaigne’s Essays, Bradley’s Ethical Studies and
Santayana’s Dominations and Powers (Kekes 1997). ‘Prudence, prejudice,
experience, and habit’ are, according to Huntington, superior foundations on
which to build a durable social order because ‘[t]ruth exists not in universal
propositions but in concrete experiences’. Fourthly, ‘[t]he community is
superior to the individual’. Because ‘rights of men derive from their duties’,
it is not possible to pass judgement on any social arrangement merely by asking
how it conforms to a set of universal ideals. Rather it is the case that each
society, each regime and each particular situation must be judged on its own
merits, that is, in the context of its specific historical development and in
the context of the duties and obligations, as well as rights and expectations,
inherent in that historical context. 19 Fifthly, ‘[e]xcept in an ultimate moral
sense, men are unequal’. Social arrangements inevitably produce complex
hierarchies (formal and informal) including classes, orders and groups. These
are, pace Michels’s ‘iron law’ of organisations an inevitable characteristic of
all social organisations. Political philosophies that cannot accommodate
inequality are unable to account for societies as they actually exist and
always have existed. Contra Eccleshall, this recognition is not primarily about
vindicating inequality but about the ability of conservatism, as an ideology
and as politics, to engage with perennial features of human societies as they
exist through the ages. Sixthly, following Burke ‘[a] presumption exists “in
favour of any settled scheme of government against any untried project”’.
Because, as Wilson (1941: 42) so succinctly states, ‘[m]an’s hopes are high,
but his vision is short’ it is necessary to accommodate an intrinsic risk
aversion in any account of social action and proposed reform of an existing
order. The higher the reach of ambition and the bolder the promise of
improvement, the greater is the risk of failure. While arguments in favour of
changing the world, as famously Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach, can certainly
be justified they must be based on realistic, as in empirically grounded and
historically sensitive, expectations and not an a priori reasoning from which
derives abstractions such as Homo Oeconomicus and the Rights of Man. The
language and terminology preferred by conservatives has changed, as have modern
societies. The religious tenor has faded, but the conservative’s concern about
how to forge legitimate order in societies inhabited by fallible human beings,
and where grand projects for improving life’s conditions are bound to fail,
remains the key concern. Thus, it is within the broad historical and ideational
parameters of this Anglophone conservatism as outlined by Huntington that a
diverse range of British and American conservatives attempt to articulate a
conservative politics in the twenty-first century. Conservatism today With
massive social change throughout the twentieth century, produced by
technological advances, world wars, decolonisation and secularisation, came
inevitably also significant changes to modern interpretations of conservative
traditions, including conservative politics in Britain and America. These two
strands of modern conservatism are useful for illustrating how conservatism has
remained a complex and sometimes contradictory body of political thought as it
has adapted to changing social and political circumstances on both sides of the
20 Atlantic. The main challenge for British and American conservatives has
revolved around how it is possible to articulate a vision for a supposedly
radical reorganisation of society and the economic foundations on which it is
based, i.e., the neo-liberal and market-driven reforms associated with
conservative politics during the Thatcher and Reagan eras onwards, while at the
same time claiming the mantle of conservatism and the centuries-long tradition
on which it is based. While in some instances there has been continuity in
sentiments and policies, there have also been sharp breaks with traditional
conservative beliefs. Writing in the dying days of Major’s Conservative
government, when a terminal crisis of British conservatism was regularly
predicted and which the subsequent landslide election victory of Blair’s New
Labour in 1997 seemed to confirm, Gamble (1995) argues that modern conservative
policies since Thatcher have undermined the very pillars of a Tory hegemony
which had ensured that the Conservative Party dominated British politics for
most of the twentieth century. This was a Tory hegemony defined by a defence of
state (which included in the post-war years its substantial provision of
welfare and security), union, property and empire, its ‘characteristic
ideological themes’ being constitutionalism, unionism, anti-socialism and
imperialism (Gamble 1995: 9). For Gamble, the defeat of Heath and ascent of
Thatcher resulted in a likely irreversible repudiation of this tradition, thus
‘hollowing out’ the very pillars of Tory England. The new Conservatives showed
much less inclination than did their Tory predecessors ‘to be bound by
precedent and convention’, turning instead established state institutions into
a major target for reform. They paved the way for devolution and saw the
electorally important link with Ulster Unionists crumble, thus placing the
future of union under a cloud of uncertainty. Their sharp turn towards
neo-liberal economic policies produced not only confrontation with the
political opposition and public sector workers but caused internal rifts inside
a Tory party often in the past inclined towards protectionism and the ‘corporatist
bias’ characteristic of Macmillan’s and Heath’s One Nation Toryism. The already
pronounced decline of empire forced the Thatcherites into a difficult position
internationally, attempting a fine balance between an increasingly subordinate
reliance on its crucial alliance with America and an increasingly difficult
relationship with Europe. These developments makes it increasingly problematic
to claim that British conservatism as defined by Conservative Party policies
represents, rather than breaks, with a 21 greater Anglophone tradition of
conservatism. And it is not at all clear whether there is a way back from this
break, to reconnect with that longer-standing tradition. The old trajectory of
Conservative politics is burnt out and cannot be revived. Thatcher was right in
her perception of this. What is not clear is whether her fifteenyear reign over
the Party has provided the basis for an alternative tradition that can in the
future restore Conservative political hegemony. The Thatcherite revolution may not
have been radical enough. Many of the old institutions were assailed but few
were fundamentally changed. Most are still in place and are hostile towards the
Thatcherite project. But the strength of the Thatcherite legacy is that,
although it is now strongly criticized from almost every side, there are few
coherent programmes for undoing it or going much beyond it (Gamble 1995: 24).
This verdict remains instructive to this day, not least in the sense that
leading British politicians, from Blair and Brown to Cameron and Clegg –
‘Thatcher’s children’ as Simon Jenkins famously styled them – have been seen to
maintain rather than challenge the new political landscape forged during the
Thatcher years. The Conservative Party’s electoral fortunes have since of course
revived, bringing the party back into power in 2010, albeit in coalition with
Liberal Democrats. But two years into the first Conservative-led government
since the New Labour victory in 1997, after which followed the longest period
in modern times for Conservatives in the political wilderness, it remains
difficult to see exactly how Cameron’s Conservatives could effectively
reconnect with that older tradition of British conservatism which in the past
ensured political dominance. The fact that the Conservative Party is at present
reliant on the Liberal Democrats for staying in government makes the likelihood
of such a prospect even less clear and further serves to confirm the notion
that post-Thatcher politics have become increasingly ideologically muddled. In
America, the recent tribulations of the Republican Party, and of the eclectic
and wide-ranging forms of popular conservatism from which it draws its main
electoral strength, suggests a similarly confusing situation as regards the
future of a coherent and distinct American conservative ideology. Long before
the upheaval caused in Republican ranks by the populist and ideologically
incoherent Tea Party movement, as well as by the increasing rightward shift of
Republicans in Congress which has been the primary cause of increasing
political polarisation in Congress over the last decade, American conservatism
has 22 experienced a series of important shifts and transformations. President
Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal constituted a watershed moment in American
politics, heralding a generation of Democratic and progressive domination of
national politics and transforming the social and political landscape in the
process. The traditional conservatives of the ‘preNew Deal’ era, most
prominently represented in the staunch opposition to the New Deal by Senator
Robert Taft of Ohio, receded from the forefront of national politics. For
conservatism to make a comeback at the end of the turbulent 1960s, amidst
cultural counter-revolution at home and war abroad in Vietnam, it would have to
reinvent itself. While it important to acknowledge a shared cultural and
historical heritage of British conservatives and their counterparts in the
American colonies, as most notably chronicled by Kirk’s The Conservative Mind
(1955), it is also important to recognise the vast differences between the
socio-cultural contexts in which a conservative ideology develops on either
side of the Atlantic, thereby avoiding attempts to crudely graft a British Tory
tradition onto a wholly different society in America. Beyond some similarities
in sentiments, vastly different social circumstances inevitably made for
divergent intellectual and, especially, political developments in Britain and
America in the twentieth century. Charting the American conservatives’ quest to
identify a ‘viable heritage’ on which to draw strength intellectually and to
thereby promote a plausible political ideology, Nash quotes the conservative
German émigré William Schlamm on the immense task facing American conservatives
in this respect: The specifically American experience of life … is indisputably
a fierce yen for institutionalized “progress” by utopian legislation and
industrial gadgetry. Individual Americans, like Calhoun and Adams, may have
known better; the American species (to the extent that there really is such a
thing) is, of course, populist rather than conservative – and for this very
forceful reason: America happens to be the only society in creation built by
conscious human intent, … and developed, by Europeans tired of Europe’s ancient
commitments, and determined, … each in his own way, on a “new beginning” (Nash
2006: 291). As such, the American soil was never suitable for a mere
transplantation of the British conservative tradition. 23 Key events in reshaping
and defining the modern American conservative mind-set, producing by the late
twentieth century a near-hegemonic and ideologically heterodox neoconservatism,
are for Drolet (2011) the great social and economic changes ushered in with the
New Deal in the 1930s and culminating in the counter-cultural eruption of the
1960s whereby the very foundations of America’s society seemed blatantly
challenged by radical progressives and socialists, civil rights activists,
anti-war protestors and others advocating a subversion of the (conservative)
social norms characterising the, by comparison, socially stable 1950s. Whereas
conservatism up until World War II can primarily be characterised by a
combination of localism and populism at home and isolationism in its approach
to international affairs, coexisting rather tenuously with an East Coast big
business or ‘country club’ conservatism (later the so-called Rockefeller
Republicans), it grew increasingly radical from the 1960s onward. Indeed, when
considering the post-war development of a modern American conservatism, it
makes sense to think of it as ‘counter-revolutionary’ (Nash 2006: 295-6) given
that American conservatives aimed to roll back the progressive (as opposed to
classical) liberal state erected since the New Deal. In this sense, modern
American conservatives share an attitude towards politics, as well as a
rationale for action, that is comparable to that of Thatcherite conservatives
in Britain attempting to radically reform or uproot the collectivist institutions
and Keynesian intellectual underpinnings of the British post-war settlement.
However, the introduction of a significant libertarian strand of politics into
American conservatism with Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s Republican primary
election triumph against the moderate New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in
1964 (although followed by a disastrous presidential election in which he lost
by a landslide to the incumbent Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson), and
the subsequently successful conservative populism of the Nixon and Reagan
administrations, lacks any similarly powerful counterpart in British politics,
even when considering the fundamental challenge to Tory tradition posed by
Thatcher and her co-ideologues. The neo-conservatism of the G. W. Bush
administrations of the early twenty-first century, as well as the recent impact
of the Tea Party in producing a more combative conservatism amongst the
grass-roots activists across the country and in Congress, further exemplify the
distinctness, if also increasing ideological incoherency, of an American
conservatism today. While too marginal a phenomenon to triumph electorally,
conservative libertarianism remains influential as evidenced by the significant
minority of 24 conservatives supporting Texas Congressman Ron Paul in his
presidential bid during the 2011-12 Republican primary campaign. Finally, it is
also necessary to recognise an important European link to modern American
conservatism, distinguishing America from a British context in which One Nation
Toryism and an Oakeshottian ‘disposition’ exerts a residual influence even into
the era of the New Right. Post-war American conservatism became profoundly
influenced by European émigré scholars who had fled the demise of liberal
democracy in Weimar Germany and across Europe in the interwar years. Leo
Strauss is perhaps the most important among these émigrés considering his
significant intellectual and political influence on a whole generation of
American ‘neo-conservatives’, many of them influential in the foreign policy of
Republican administrations from Reagan to G.W. Bush (cf. Drolet 2011). The
ranks of these neo-conservatives were bolstered by a Trotskyist Left
disillusioned by Stalinism, and also by anti-communist Democrats like Norman
Podhoretz and Jeanne Kirkpatrick who abandoned a Democratic party they saw as
increasingly weak in the face of the Soviet threat abroad and ‘anti-American’
cultural subversion at home. The neo-conservatives infused American
conservatism with a more radical and perhaps even crypto-reactionary character.
This remains a serious and frequently raised accusation which has its origins
in the intellectual indebtedness of Strauss to Carl Schmitt, the prominent and
later infamous scholar of Weimar and Nazi Germany. It is in post-Cold War
American foreign policy that the legacy of a much popularised (and vulgarised)
Straussian neo-conservatism might best be discerned. While this aspect of
modern conservatism is less relevant for understanding foreign policy
developments in Britain, given the decline of empire, it constitutes a vital
ideological component of America’s rise to superpower status in the context of
the Cold War, of the triumphalism defining the post-Cold War era and of the
‘War on Terror’ following the terrorist attacks of ‘9/11’. It has been said
that, for neo-conservatives, ‘it is always 1939’, suggesting an urgency and
determination in the American disposition and conduct of foreign policy that is
shaped by a traumatic historical experience and has promoted a tendency towards
American ‘exceptionalism’ characterised by a ready reliance on military might
and unilateral action in international affairs. The ideological ambiguity that
has come to characterise both British and American conservatism was perhaps an
inevitable outcome of the eclectic and historically contingent nature of
conservatism both as a body of political thought and a political ideology. Even
25 though conservatism can be considered as an approach to managing change and
preserving tradition, rather than a mere vindication of inequality, it remains
by comparison to liberalism and socialism hampered by lack of a positive vision
according to which the ideology can be clearly evaluated and which contributes
to a sense of ideological, if not necessarily intellectual, elusiveness.
Whether or not this is the case, conservatism’s historical lineage is well
established, its judgement on revolution and radicalism for conservatives
themselves vindicated by history and its import as an alternative understanding
of modernity and social change to those offered by the triumphant ideologies of
the Enlightenment undeniable. Further reading Three seminal contributions that
are useful introductions to conservatism and the history of conservative
political thought are O’Sullivan’s (1976) Conservatism, Quinton’s (1978) The
Politics of Imperfection and the sections on ‘the adaptability of conservatism’
in Freeden’s (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory. Green’s (2004) Ideologies
of Conservatism is the more recent analysis of conservatism in the twentieth
century which also belongs to a core of texts anyone wishing to familiarise
themselves with conservatism ought to read. Scruton’s (2001) The Meaning of
Conservatism ranks among the most vigorous and important defences of (an Anglo-Saxon)
conservatism by a self-styled conservative thinker, whereas Honderich’s (1990)
Conservatism is one of the most accessible critical accounts rejecting the
essential arguments put forth by conservative thinkers. Holmes’s (1996) The
Anatomy of Antiliberalism and Sternhell’s (2010) The Anti-Enlightenment
Tradition are particularly illuminating accounts of reactionary undertones in
conservative thinking, and in anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment thought more
generally. While these accounts target primarily the reactionary conservatism
emerging in Europe, and therefore speak less directly to the pragmatic
Anglophone tradition of conservatism outlined in this chapter, they are
valuable in that they highlight key liberal concerns about a slippery slope in
conservative ideology towards reaction. Given Burke’s prominence in Anglophone
conservatism, his biography is central to the development of conservative
political thought. O’Brien’s (1992) The Great Melody is an unconventional and
empirically rich biography providing important insights into Burke’s thoughts
on colonial Ireland, America and India. Lock’s (1985) Burke’s Reflections on
the 26 Revolution in France engages with Burke’s thought in the context of the
arguably most important, formative event in the history of conservatism as
ideology – the French Revolution. A longer perspective on conservative politics
in Britain is provided in Charmley’s (2008) A History of Conservative Politics
Since 1830 and Bale’s (2011) The Conservative Party, charts the transformation
of the Conservative Party from the Thatcher years to its return to power under
Cameron’s leadership. Jenkins’ (2007) Thatcher & Sons is a valuable account
aimed at a broader readership of the legacy of Thatcherism as manifest in the
politics not only of the Conservative Party but also of New Labour. O’Hara’s
(2011) Conservatism contains a recent elaboration on the conservative worldview
that can be traced from Burke to Oakeshott, emphasising the central task of
conservatism as that of managing change. Özsel’s (2011) edited volume,
Reflections on Conservatism, contains an up-to-date examination of the
intersection between conservative thought and politics from a pan-European
perspective. In the American context, Kirk’s (1995) The Conservative Mind attempts
to produce a ‘canon’ of conservative thinkers from Burke to Eliot that can
ground and therefore give meaning to a conservative mindset in the New World.
Nash’s (2006) The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America explores
important developments in post-war American conservatism. These two books
remain the pre-eminent contributions to the history of conservatism in America.
Gottfried (2009) provides a provocative and heterodox account of a
traditionalist American conservatism which has been eclipsed by the
neo-conservatism characterising recent Republican administrations and post-New
Deal politics more generally. Drolet’s (2011) American Neoconservatism provides
an up-to-date history of neoconservatism, its philosophical foundations and its
implications for politics beyond America’s borders. References Bale, T. (2011)
The Conservative Party From Thatcher to Cameron, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Burke, E. (1986[1790]) Reflections on the Revolution in France, London:
Penguin. 27 Charmley, J. (2008) A History of Conservative Politics Since 1830,
2nd ed., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Drolet, J-F. (2011) American
Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of a Reactionary Idealism, London:
Hurst & Company. Eccleshall, R. (2003) ‘Conservatism’, pp. 47-72, in R.
Eccleshall, A. Finlayson, V. Geoghegan, M. Kenny, M. Lloyd, I. MacKenzie and R.
Wilford (eds.), Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 3rd ed., London:
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Clarendon Press. Freeman, M. (1980) Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political
Radicalism, Oxford: Blackwell. Gamble, A. (1995) ‘The Crisis of Conservatism’,
New Left Review 214: 3-25. Gottfried. P. E. (2009) Conservatism in America:
Making Sense of the American Right, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Green, E. H.
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Conservatism, London: H. Hamilton. Holmes, S. (1996) The Anatomy of Antiliberalism,
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(1985) Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, London: George Allen
& Unwin. MacKenzie, I. (2003) ‘The Idea of Ideology’, pp. 1-16, in R.
Eccleshall, A. Finlayson, V. Geoghegan, M. Kenny, M. Lloyd, I. MacKenzie and R.
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