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In the Western world, conservative parties are traditionally the parties of landed interest. They generally represent the preservation of traditional moral teaching and a belief in a transcendental order, a denial of uniformity and equalitarianism, an acceptance of the organic structure of society, and a subscription to evolutionary rather than revolutionary change in societies. In short, rather than being an ideology, conservatism represents a way of life or accumulation of values as opposed to those ideologies that emerged after the French Revolution (1989–1799) and Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Origins Of Conservatism

The term conservatism is often used to describe tradition and traditional values, beliefs, and institutions. Although the origins of some conservative parties, such as the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, can be traced back to the seventeenth century, the term conservative is exclusively modern, having developed after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution with its reactionary tone to occurrences in rapidly industrializing Western societies.

Anglo-Irish statesman and theorist Edmund Burke developed a conservative view against the Enlightenment and its reason-based progressive, utopian, and inorganic views, insisting on the importance of inherited values and customs in the survival and continuation of any given society. According to Burke, the proper formulation of government does not come from abstract views or individually developed ideologies, but from time-honored development of the state, piecemeal progress through experiences, and continuation of important societal institutions such as family and the church. Accordingly, tradition is experienced and deeply rooted in a society and has much more value and importance than abstract metaphysical assertions because it is tested by time and various people’s experiences. Reason, on the other hand, may be a mask for the preferences of certain people or the untested and unreliable wisdom of only one generation. Therefore, change should come via organic methods rather than revolutionary movements because, in this conservative understanding of society, human society is not an aggregation of atomized individuals—it is an organic unity.

In Western political theory, there have not been systematic treaties about conservatism similar to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan or John Locke’s Two Treaties of Government, or even Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Therefore, conservatism is considered to be less a political doctrine than a habit of mind, a way of living or a mode of feeling. Traditionally, conservatives strongly support the right of property. For example, as Burke famously declared, nothing was more sacred to eighteenth century Whigs than property rights.

Conservative Variants: Cultural, Religious, And Fiscal

Many contemporary parties also represent conservative views that may very well be informally referred to as conservative parties, even if they are not explicitly named so. These parties have conservative agendas but represent a variety of conservative views in association with their country’s historical development and cultural background. For example, conservative parties in the Western world have more or less adopted the Enlightenment ideas of the separation of church and state, while conservative parties in the Islamic world, such as the ruling Justice and Development Party in Turkey and Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, proved to have problems with the Western notion of secularism. Conservative parties in the West also distinguish themselves from far-right ideologies and parties that often have a xenophobic and racist agenda. In Europe, conservative parties often ally with centrist and, in some cases, leftist parties rather than xenophobic far-right parties. However, some anti-immigration policies of the conservative parties in Europe often conflict with their free market economy views.

Among parties that do explicitly identify themselves as conservative, it is necessary to distinguish three different conservative approaches—cultural conservatives, religious conservatives, and fiscal conservatives—in order to understand the structures and contents of various conservative parties in the world. Instead of relying on universalistic moral codes, cultural conservatives rely on the moral values of their culture and argue that old institutions particular to place or culture should persevere. However, religious conservatives may support or be supported by secular establishment, or they may find themselves at odds with the culture in which they live. In any case, their point of reference is mostly religious texts and people, and thus, unlike cultural conservatism, religious conservatism is not necessarily organic. Moreover, there is no clear-cut separation between these two conservative approaches, so they can intertwine, influencing conservative movements and parties accordingly. British prime minister John Major’s back-to-the-basics campaign is an example of this. During the draft of the European Union’s constitution, a conservative movement sought to imprint certain conservative values in the constitution.

Fiscal conservatism, on the other hand, reflects a prudent approach in government spending and debt. According to this approach, governments do not have the right to accumulate large debts and expect the public to pay them. Since this fiscal conservatism is an economic approach that has nothing to do with traditional values, beliefs, and institutions, a party can therefore be a fiscally conservative one that does not pursue a conservative agenda in its political action. However, from an economic perspective, many of today’s conservative parties have adopted a neoliberal economic agenda. The term liberal often refers to free market policies outside the United States, and the term liberal conservative has become acceptable in the politics of many European countries. In fact, in today’s era of globalization, conservative and neoliberal parties are allied against many common enemies, such as socialism.

The Enlightenment And Contemporary Conservatism

Many Enlightenment ideas and events, such as the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution, invariably affected many countries’ traditional ways of living and thinking. Therefore, conservatism today cannot be considered an isolated approach immunized from the premises and approaches of other ideologies and modern movements. Accordingly, most conservative parties support the sovereign nation and patriotic values of duty and sacrifice, which are basically a result of the Enlightenment and subsequent events.

Bibliography:

Beyme, K.Von, and E. Martin. Political Parties in Western Democracies. Aldershot, UK: Gower Publishing, 1985.
Blake, R. The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher. London: Methuen, 1985.
MiddleBrook, Kevin J., Conservative Parties, the Right and Democracy in Latin America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Muller, Jerry, Z. Conservatism, an Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Seruton, Roger. The Meaning of Conservatism. London: St. Augustine Press, 2002.