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The disposition to preserve what one has attained, received, or inherited, and to defend against the losses that inevitably befall human beings in our time-bound existence, is undoubtedly observable universally in all times and places. This disposition to conserve, insofar as it is a natural response to contingent circumstances, is not conservatism. Conservatism is a self-conscious affirmation of this disposition with a self-conscious expression of resistance to the alternative, which welcomes change, by premeditated design, to the environment in which one finds oneself. Conservatism resists the readiness to explore, more or less adventurously, and the possibilities of an imagined, alternative future existence. Self-conscious conservatism theorizes the natural disposition to preserve, raising it to the level of a conscious affirmation that may lead to the formation of principles or rules that serve more or less as guides to one’s conduct in personal life and political views and activities. A conservative disposition often manifests itself as considered points of view, even doctrines, engaging in debate or argument with opposing alternative self-conscious doctrines. Today, common terms of political discourse such as conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism, and many other -isms, only reinforce the acutely self-conscious character of the modern age, which suggests that to be without such a doctrine is to be directionless and in need of guidance—a conclusion about which conservatives remain ambivalent.
Origins Of Conservatism
Traditionally, in histories of the concept, it is said that conservatism begins with Irish statesman and political theorist, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), especially in his critique of the French Revolution (1789–1799) in his celebrated Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). There is no doubt Burke’s critique was both powerful and prophetic about many of the consequences that would follow from the revolution’s upheaval in Europe, and his work figures centrally in the study of the development of conservatism. Alongside Burke, we recognize Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of Democracy in America (1835–1840), and his penetrating analysis of the French Revolution, as central to our understanding of these conditions.
However, prior to the French Revolution and Burke’s theories, conservatism was conceptualized parallel to Europe’s transformation from the Middle Ages in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the religious Reformation in the sixteenth century, to the birth of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These centuries saw the advent of a revolutionary era on every front, proceeding in varying forms in different regions and countries, but proceeding nonetheless to radically revise the reigning ideas of political order, symbolized profoundly in the emergence of the social contract theory with European philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and others.
Contrarian philosophy espoused a social order in which a community would be granted civil and social rights adhering to the rule of law of a political authority. The seventeenth and eighteenth-century social contract theories complemented and influenced Europe’s emerging modern commercial society and free market economy in what Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, its greatest theorist, called, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), the “system of natural liberty.” Smith proposed for the free, equal, and independent individual; the value of individual liberty as a common commitment; and the commitment to progress in terms of ever-expanding economic growth, all of which were increasingly accepted concepts in eighteenth-century Europe and the newly established America.
While conservatives were historically receptive with the evolving social contract theories and subsequent free market economics originating in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, conservatives were—and remain—ambivalent on these economic concepts, given their historic affinity to the ancient and medieval ideas of virtue and noble character. Such modern propositions, stating wealth and virtue can be complementary, increasingly challenged the ancient prejudice that wealth and virtue conflict. Essentially, when an individual or society’s wealth accumulates, the individual’s moral virtue decays. According to conservatives, although economic growth is good and required, materialism and ostentation threaten society’s moral virtue. Further, with the onset of advances in modern science and technology incited by Europe’s modernization, it became plausible human beings could begin to take their destiny into their own hands, causing persons to either reject old theological doctrines of God’s providence, or become self-determining agents who will fulfill that providence through creative renovation of human existence on earth. Conservatives have been historically reserved about such topics pertaining to science and religion.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were also witness to increasingly centralized political authority as the modern state came to be seen as the primary political agent of world history. The division between Catholics and Protestants undermined the traditionally independent authority of the medieval church, rendering claims to independent ecclesiastical authority ambiguous or suspect. The creation of the modern state was as revolutionary a development as any of the other events of the aforementioned periods. This modern state was established by the aggregation, centralization, and deployment of power, together with increasingly sophisticated bureaucratic management, to an extent unimaginable in the medieval world.
Given these revolutionary changes in a relatively limited time span, it is not surprising that, as historical and philosophical assessments of what was happening evolved, extraordinary efforts to theorize the significance of these transformations appeared, either embracing or lamenting the events. Regardless of the responses, the changes between the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries were irreversible, as the democratic age supplanted the aristocratic age in Europe, America, and the European colonies worldwide. The American Revolution (1876–1883) and the French Revolution are revelatory of the implications of what had been developing over a long time. Notably, it can be understood conservatism was a response to this modern age—not merely as a rejection of the modern age, but as a response to certain terms and concepts of the modern age. Therefore, conservatism is a distinctly modern intellectual and political phenomenon.
Conservatism In Politics
Self-Conscious Conservatism
Burke did not use the term conservatism, as the word first came into use around 1819 by French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, following the rise and fall of French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Burke does offer, however, a deliberate or self-consciously chosen view—affirming the intention to conserve and, while allowing for necessary adjustments as circumstances alter, to respect traditional ways—more commonly referred to as self-conscious conservatism. A primary theme of self-conscious conservatism is requiring prudential judgment; it cannot be merely antiquarian or simply set in its way since with all modern conditions, conservative ideals must deal with the need of adjustment and alteration as one’s environment and issues evolve. Conservatives must develop theoretical statements about what is to be preserved, or what it will mean to preserve something. Increasingly, it became difficult to be merely conservative in politics; one must be prepared to be “programmatically conservative.” This indicates how the shape of modern life constrains what it can mean to be conservative, making it difficult to defend inherited practices without supplying arguments defending such inheritances, with the arguments themselves eliciting counterarguments.
Conservatism And Gauging Centralized Authority
Conservatism as a political argument involves skepticism about the aggregation of power in governments, and a warning against diminishing the independence of traditional intermediate groups and influential organizations that soften or mitigate the power relation between the apparatus of the modern state and individuals and families who are subject to increasingly minute regulation from central governments. Further, conservatism involves respect, even veneration, for traditional manners and forms of living; an acceptance of the lives and the loyalties to groups and associations that were not created by, nor originally dependent on, the good will of the sovereign state; and to respect them simply because they are there and accepted by those who live in them. The enemy of this conserving attitude is the view that no practices or institutions should be accepted which are not thought through and given an independent rationale such that they could make sense even to those who have not lived within their terms. Such a rationale, of course, potentially undermines the independence of any entity in question because it is now eligible for assessment by those outside it as well as by those within. The age of acute self-consciousness demands to extend its self-consciousness to even more remote corners of human existence. A tradition’s appeal cannot continue to rest solely on the fact that there are those who enjoy it. This stimulates what has been described as the “disenchantment” or “demythologization” of the modern world by such modern thinkers as Karl Marx, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, T. S. Eliot, and Russell Kirk. Conservatives regret this obscuring of a sense of the transcendent or sacramental character of heritage, and so far as possible they wish to revivify that sense.
Politically speaking, a fundamental, recurrent conservative issue regarding modern political life has been, and continues to be, a debate over the scope of governmental power: What are governments supposed to do? Questioning the limits or scope of governmental power has become perennial and contentious. The social contract theory, in its numerous variations, has established itself as a primary device for testing the legitimacy of governments because it has taught us that political authority must rest on the consent of those over whom the authority will be exercised. No one, either by divine appointment or by natural authority, is entitled to rule. The revolutionary implication is that all governments not based on consent are inherently illegitimate and must be rectified by revolution or gradual reform. In this sense, the “democratic principle” seeks universality and remains unsatisfied to the extent that it has not yet achieved universality. However, even if conservatives express agreement on the democratic principle as the basis of political legitimacy, there is far less agreement on the scope of power to be exercised even by legitimate governments. While democracies can limit the exercise of political power, democracies can also serve as a plebiscite to empower governments to act virtually without limit.
Conservatism is skeptical about expanding the scope of governmental power beyond what is minimally required to maintain law and order. Since there is no fixed definition of the limits to governmental power, hence modern political life evidences incessant debates on what the limits are, and, since these debates are central to the way in which modern people understand political life, there can be no conceivable end to them. Conservatism is thus a manner of participating in these debates, and not simply a fixed and settled doctrine, as at times mistakenly characterized. The question for conservatives is not necessarily whether change is desirable, but a question about the means employed to affect change, coupled with skepticism about exaggerated claims as to how much good will result from change. It is precisely because conservatives understand that change is inevitable—there is no static world—which explains why conservatives tend to refrain from excessive enthusiasm about change. The conservative is sensitive to loss as well as gain, and believes that whatever the gains, there will be loss as well.
Varying Degrees Of Conservatism
Case Study: United States Of America
To be conservative thus poses a choice either to opt out or to engage the modern game of politics with all of its uncertainties and open-endedness, and we see today that many conservatives are no less prone to reform and programmatic public policy than are their “liberal” and “radical” opponents. Today, in America the so-called pale conservatives otherwise known as old-fashioned, antiquarian, and traditionalist tend to disdain the political scene; they criticize movement conservatives, or those who are oriented towards political success by gaining electoral office through compromises with their liberal opponents, and neoconservatives, proponents of an American welfare state, using U.S. resources to enforce improved social conditions globally. The latter term denotes, in America, reconstructed New Deal liberals, or former socialists, who take a more sober view of governmental power than they did in their earlier progressive days, who reject the left-wing of the Democratic Party especially on foreign policy issues, and who often have abandoned the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. How far conservatism can be identified with the Republican Party is itself a matter of debate among conservatives. There is in addition a divergence between those neoconservatives who focus on distrust of the growth of governmental power in domestic policy, and those who emphasize the projection of power in American foreign policy. To the degree that conservatism traditionally expressed skepticism about foreign involvement, there is tension between traditional conservatives embracing isolationist policies and neoconservatives purporting foreign intervention.
Evolutionary conservatism is a profound feature of the American political tradition. It is also a source of intellectual controversy because there is a recurrent debate as to whether America even has a genuine conservative tradition at all. Such commentators as Louis Hartz, in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), argued that there is in America no significant conservative tradition. However, Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind (1953), demonstrated such a tradition based on John Adams’s American version of the Burkean idea and traced its path into the twentieth century. These are two classic expressions of the modern debate over the American political tradition. In addition, the word tradition can be, and is, appropriated by conservatives and liberals alike. Liberalism, too, has its traditions. One might conclude, then, with respect to America, there remains an amalgamation of traditional and enlightenment ideas such that America is both old and new, both conservative and liberal, at the same time.
Edmund Burke
Burke’s conservatism, which was for med in the different conditions of the late eighteenth century in contrast to present times, was moderate in that he recognized the unavoidability of reform while seeking to keep it within limits. He was a reformer himself, not a “reactionary.” For example, he acknowledged the legitimacy of the claims of the American revolutionaries as he rejected the aspirations of the French revolutionaries. While in Burke’s view, the Americans appealed for their traditional rights as English citizens—and Burke respected this because he was devoted to defending liberty against the encroachments of governmental power—the French sought to remake the whole of society from the ground up, and this impelled their increasing use of greater force to overcome the natural resistance to wholesale change. Indeed, the American Revolution is often described as a “conservative” revolution precisely because it did not seek to reconstruct the whole of existing society, and in the framing of a new constitution in 1787, Americans preserved a certain skepticism about centralized government. This is most profoundly expressed in The Federalist Papers (1788–1789), especially those composed by James Madison, America’s fourth President.
Burke’s was not the only form of conservatism at his time. A variation on the theme is found in Joseph de Maistre (1753– 1821), and in the romanticism of Chateaubriand (1768–1848). Here is conservatism as reaction against the transformation of modern Europe. Both embrace tradition in response to the upheavals of their time, but their emphasis differs from Burke’s. Maistre and Chateaubriand regret the loss of the traditional forms of authority that accept a ruling elite and the authority of traditional, especially Catholic, religious figures.
Burke, in embracing traditional English liberties, for example, accepts the economic revolution that produced free markets and Adam Smith’s system of natural liberty, rejecting government control of the economy as another perceived means in which governmental power will exceed its justifiable authority. In this respect, Burke maintains a strong defense of limited government, and is more compatible with what developed as classical liberalism in the nineteenth century, with its emphasis on free markets and international free trade. Today there is a strong affinity between classical liberals who defend free markets as the principal safeguard of liberty, and conservatives who, while prone to attack materialism, nevertheless acknowledge the importance of civil society and its foundation in the rights of private property and self-determination.
There is also a greater degree of individualism in Burke, and, ultimately, an acceptance of the need to come to terms with the new world post-1789; he is not a nostalgic, longing for a return to a vanished world; he deals with the new without glorifying it. In this sense, Burke’s counterparts are John Adams in America, Alexis de Tocqueville in France, and Winston Churchill in England.
Conservatism As Pragmatism
Conservatism combines discernible characteristics in varying ways, with varying emphases, by different exponents. Conservatism, in its political skepticism, reflects the Augustinian Christian notion of original sin, sometimes expressed in theological terms, and sometimes transposed into more secular terms. Religious and secular conservatives can agree on human limitations, even though they may disagree on the importance of religious belief for a well-ordered society. Conservatism exhibits a moral imagination which, implicitly or explicitly, acknowledges a transcendent reality that is beyond human control; thus, scientific and technological innovation is to be treated with restraint because conservatives know that we can initiate many things but we cannot know in advance what all the consequences will turn out to be, nor how much we will like the results even of our successes. Untested innovation should be approached with caution. Conservatives typically stress to enjoy the opportunities of the present moment, to diminish the anxieties that follow from obsessive concern for, or guilt about, the past and, in addition, to restrain anxiety about what the future may bring.
This bespeaks a certain disposition of gratitude for what they have—defying resentment, envy, or alienation. This further suggests either a capacity for enjoyment of life, or Stoic patience with the human condition, or elements of both at once. It is these very characteristics that are criticized or commonly misinterpreted as complacency, as indifference to the plight of others, or as an unmerited sense of superiority or self-righteousness.
However, in the conservative’s opinion, this is, rather, to acknowledge that human action is never complete by design. Conservatives deny political action can be made entirely rational to all of its public-serving interests. Therefore, the goal of the conservative is neither to be deceived nor to engage in self-deception and wishful thinking. If, as a result, conservatives are sometimes perceived as too reticent about change, conservatives will defend their stance citing it is because their opponents are too enthusiastic about claims, which allege to know more than they actually know or can potentially achieve. Abstracting parts of the past from the whole—unavoidable, perhaps, as a condition of arguments for reform and perfection—carries always, as the conservative sees it, an unreliable optimism, which the record of human history teaches us to treat with considerable suspicion.
Popular Conservative Beliefs
Right To Property
Conservatism also defends the right of private property as fundamental. Conservatives take private property to be a bulwark against centralized power and an essential factor in the defense of the individual right to make something of one’s self. Conservatives are not ashamed to possess property and, in principle, they do not resent that others have property, indeed even more property than they themselves have. Conservatives, while believing in the universal dignity of human beings, tend to value liberty more highly than equality. In their view, a society of free individuals will inevitably produce mixed results from the efforts of individuals to live for themselves. There will be successes and failures, and inequalities in outcomes, and the price of liberty is to accept responsibility for oneself, and to mind one’s own business.
Organic Aristocracy
For those like John Adams, there is a natural aristocracy. The natural aristocrat demonstrates excellence not by holding high rank in a hierarchical social order based on inherited status. Indeed, except by convention, a member of an aristocratic class may not be excellent at all. A natural aristocrat is an individual of talent and energy who might spring from any social location, and a good society is one in which there is opportunity to show one’s self, and to be acknowledged and rewarded for proven accomplishments. This distinction between two ideas of the aristocrat shows also the essential modernity of the idea of natural aristocracy. Conservatism does not necessarily defend classes or hierarchies, but it does defend the rewards that derive from accomplishment, protecting liberty from an excessive and destructive preoccupation with egalitarianism. Conservatives resist social leveling as a recipe for mediocrity. Thus, conservatives tend to emphasize the republican form of government, which incorporates the principle of equality in consent in a system of representative government wherein the natural aristocracy has the opportunity to achieve office and govern. In contemporary terms, they support liberal democracy, which symbolizes the primacy of liberty tempered by democratic consent.
Conservatives also argue that, while the promotion of equality is not in and of itself undesirable, efforts to equalize the conditions of individuals risk involving more and more government intervention (i.e., expanding government scope), taking away from some individuals for the sake of others, and that this will finally produce, in the name of liberal reform, a nonliberal society. In modern times, the compromise of the moderate welfare state is the practical approach to reconcile the claims of liberty and equality. This may not appeal to radical libertarians or to socialists, and it may irritate conservatives, but it is the meeting ground, wherein conservatives and modern liberals deal with each other—and it is the locus for the debate over the scope of governmental power, which is believed to be at the heart of modern politics.
Advocating Rule Of Law
Further, conservatives celebrate the rule of law and constitutional government. The rule of law is first and foremost a fundamental principle expressing a vision of how individuals should be formally organized in relation to each other. The principle suggests individuals should live in relation to each other as law-abiding citizens, free to enter into voluntary agreements with each other in pursuing their self-chosen lives. There need to be rules of this game. The rules are primarily procedural in character, as they do not tell individuals what to do; rather, they establish a set of limitations by informing individuals, whatever they are doing, to conduct themselves in a certain manner in the course of doing it. A classic and obvious example would be the rules of the road. The rules of the road do not tell one where to travel or, indeed, whether to travel at all. They do prescribe that, wherever one decides to go, one should observe basic procedures designed to facilitate getting there safely. All are equally subject to these rules; they do not favor one traveler over another, nor do they specify destinations.
As such, these rules are compatible and with a wide range of differing socioeconomic conditions among individuals, complementary to a modern world characterized by continuous diversity. These rules are practical implementations of the idea of the rule of law, meaning how individuals of widely differing backgrounds and interests may nevertheless interact with each other safely while pursuing what are often entirely different goals and aspirations. Adherence to the law is a fundamental idea in the conservative moral disposition.
For conservatives, the primary purpose of government will be to maintain the rule of law, to safeguard property rights, to provide a judicial structure for adjudicating disputes, and to provide a national defense. Of course, there must be an enforcement power to punish those who do not live up to the responsibility to be law-abiding. Law enforcement faculties are to focus on maintaining the rule of law, not to engage in imposing social changes deemed desirable by some, and not by all. As commonly associated with conservatism, the rule of law of the state should be strong but its scope limited and in contrast to the idea of the administrative state. An administrative state emphasizes the use of political power to renovate and perfect the social order, involving the supersession of rules by the exercise of discretionary judgment entrusted to bureaucratic agencies seeking to implement the goals of various policies in detail. For conservatives, this poses significant perils: first, forgetting or downplaying the limits to human wisdom and insight, and the danger of enabling specific persons to determine what is best for everyone else; and secondly, the aggregation of power to micromanage the manner in which individuals conduct their lives, compromising individual liberty for the potential but unlikely perfection of the social order.
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- Meyer, Frank S. In Defence of Freedom and Related Essays. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1996.
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- David Hume to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
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- Nisbet, Robert. Conservatism: Dream and Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
- Oakeshott, Michael. The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996.
- Rationalism in Politics. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1991.
- Pieper, Josef. Tradition: Concept and Claim, translated by E. Christian Kopf. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2008.
- Schneider, Gregory, ed. Conservatism in America Since 1930. New York: New York University Press, 2003.
- Stelzer, Irwin, ed. The Neocon Reader. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
- Weaver, Richard. Ideas Have Consequences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
See also:
- How to Write a Political Science Essay
- Political Science Essay Topics
- Political Science Essay Examples
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