Essay on the intellectual evolution of conservatism

Introduction

This essay follows conservatism from its origins as a reaction to the French Revolution through its changing forms, and ends with its present limits. The tradition is one of the four of Unit III.

Meaning and background of conservatism

Conservatism rests on a defence of traditional institutions and practices. The word was popularised in 1818 when Chateaubriand named his journal Le Conservateur, and the doctrine took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a reaction to the pace of economic and political change set off by the French Revolution. It gives weight to what has been historically inherited over what is abstract and ideal, takes an organic view of society, as a living body of interdependent members rather than a heap of individuals, and holds that government should serve the existing ways of life. It differs from reaction, which wants to restore an order that has become outmoded: the conservative wishes to preserve what exists, the reactionary to roll back.

Writers on conservatism distinguish three usages: temperamental (a disposition to resist disruptive change, resting on habit, inertia, fear and emulation), situational (opposition to disruptive change in the social, legal, religious or political order) and political (the defensive aspirations of parties and movements that value inherited morality and tested institutions). Rossiter notes that the word is as useful as it is confusing.

Intellectual evolution of conservatism

Origins (1750-1850). Conservatism took form as a response to the quick succession of changes of this period, above all the French Revolution and the rise of liberalism, socialism and nationalism, and tried to guard the beleaguered traditional order. Burke's Reflections (1790) gave it its defining statement, with its opposition to reform built on abstract principles and its defence of established institutions. An authoritarian strand, which often refused change or tried to turn the clock back, was reactionary, and Rossiter separates the reactionary, who longs to return to the past, from the conservative, who defends the society as it stands. Hegel and Haller on the Continent and Coleridge in England made religion and morality the keynote of state and society.

Living with change. Conservatives came to resist change only until it became inevitable and to accept it at a gradual pace, following Burke's principle of changing in order to conserve.

Twentieth century. Oakeshott restated conservatism as a disposition and a critique of rationalism in politics, preferring the familiar to the unknown and the actual to the possible. The features now attributed to conservatism include a free market and limited government alongside authority, hierarchy, tradition, religion and the organic society, which brings it close to the neo-liberal revival that Hayek and Friedman led on the liberal side. Russell Kirk's canons gave an American form.

Types. Burke's own career is read as a passage through status quo conservatism, organisational conservatism (parties and the parliamentary system) and philosophical conservatism.

Limits. The doctrine is too broad and vague: what counts as radical in one period may cease to be radical in the next. It has not become an ideology of world importance, and its defence of inequality and its resistance to ideas like gender justice make it unpopular in democratic societies.

Burke and Oakeshott

Edmund Burke. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) has been taken as the defining statement of modern conservatism, opposing radical reform drawn from abstract principles and pleading for established, evolved institutions. He argued that the violence and the uprooting of tradition in the Revolution outweighed its liberating ideals, that efforts to remake complex modern states on metaphysical doctrines lead to despotism, and that stability and prosperity depend on established institutions. Yet Burke was not against all change: he held that one should change in order to conserve, at a gradual and not a revolutionary pace, and within his conservatism he showed a reforming side. Burke's admiration for liberty joined to order completes his view.

Michael Oakeshott. His conservatism proceeds from a critique of rationalism. Rationalist ideology is for him only an abridgement or index of a tradition of behaviour; political activity springs from existing traditions and consists in amending arrangements by exploring what is implied in them. To be conservative, in his essay On Being Conservative, is to choose the known over the strange, what has worked over what is merely untried, the actual over the possible, the near over the distant and the convenient over the perfect; stability is more valuable than improvement and if change is unavoidable it should be small and slow. Critics find his definition of tradition so wide that it means little.

Conclusion

Conservatism evolved from a defence of an old order against revolution into a flexible temper that accepts gradual change, and later into a doctrine that counts the free market and limited government among its features. This history shows that its content shifts with what it opposes; its constant is the distrust of abstract blueprints and respect for inherited ways.