CONSERVATISM

the creed of those who believe in the value of conserving the present political, social, and economic order as much as possible. More precisely, it is the tendency to take one's bearings from those traditions and institutions that have proved themselves through the test of time and experience, and to want to introduce changes in them only gradually and infrequently. The term conservatism is also used to name the philosophical doctrines used to justify this tendency. Hence, conservatism is not so much a political proposal as an attitude toward political proposals. A conservative believes, first of all, that a society is a very complex organism, involving myriad interrelated elements that contribute to its well-being, often in unpredictable ways. This organism has evolved slowly, usually over centuries of trial and error. Continuity is thus an important conservative value. Every proposed change in society, or more particularly in its government, should therefore be evaluated not against some abstract and independent standard of right but as to how well it can be incorporated into the complex governmental organism with a minimum of undesirable side effects. The conservative seeks to reawaken the distinction between theory and practice, for a compelling theoretical idea may be ineffective and even dangerous in practice. A ruler, the conservative feels, should therefore be suspicious of too much artifice and philosophy in the practical affairs of state and must let himself be guided by precedent and by what has worked in the past. A conservative thinker typically expresses his insights into political principles in works and speeches of the moment, designed for a particular practical purpose, rather than in abstract theoretical tracts. Conservatives tend to abhor the petitions, proclamations, and declarations of rights to which liberals are prone. A few practical programs are generally associated with this organicist view of the state. Conservatives tend to hold a strong respect for historically important institutions, such as the church, the family, and private property. Temperamentally, conservatives tend to be opposed to sudden change and innovation, and they are prone to accept the imperfections of human beings as a matter of fact, rather than to hope for or count on their future perfection. The father of modern conservatism (although he never used the term conservatism) was the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke. Burke's ideas developed as a result of his reaction to the French Revolution of 1789. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke attacked the French activists, to whom he referred as theorists, metaphysicians, and speculationists, for their preoccupation with theory and with ideas. These preoccupations, combined with their tendency to judge political programs against abstract notions such as right, led them to underestimate the complexity of government and to think that far-reaching changes could easily be attained. Burke did not deny in principle the rights asserted by the revolutionariesthey are metaphysically truebut he did deny that it was wise to use them as a framework for constructing a governmentthey are morally and politically false. The rights of people are best guaranteed by the well-being of the state, he held, and the well-being of the state depends upon the wisdom of its rulers. Burke sought the foundation of government not in the rights of human beings, although he did not deny them, but in the government's function of providing for wants and needs. It was this idea, that governments should act mainly out of practical rather than theoretical considerations, that underlay his great political stances: his opposition to the French Revolution, his support of the Irish Roman Catholics, and his support of the American colonists. If a British right existed in those disputes, he asserted, that did not necessarily mean that it was wise to exercise it. Great Britain was the birthplace of modern conservatism, just as it was the birthplace of modern liberalism. It has also maintained the strongest modern conservative political party. The British Conservative Party appeared in the 1830s as the direct descendent of the Tory party, although it had a much wider electoral base, extending beyond landowners and clergymen to all social classes. Benjamin Disraeli did much to turn it into a cohesive political force. Winston Churchill led a coalition during World War II in which the Conservatives predominated. Since then, it has either governed or held the role of chief opposition party. The other great 20th-century conservative parties include the Christian Democrats of Germany and Italy, the Liberal Democrats of Japan, and the Republicans of the United States. In France the main philosophical spokesman for conservatism during the 19th century was Joseph de Maistre, although he, like Burke, never used the word. While Burke accepted in principle the validity of certain liberal ideals but thought it often unwise to be guided by them, de Maistre denied the ideals themselves. He became the chief apologist for the ancien rgime. Burke was by far the more original thinker and the more influential, and even later French conservatives, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, drew more from Burke than from de Maistre. Prince Metternich of Austria embodied European conservatism in the post-Napoleonic period, and the great German conservative spokesmen were the historians Friedrich Karl von Savigny and Leopold von Ranke. In America, Federalists such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were guided by conservative principles akin to those of Burke. But American political movements did not finally divide into conservative and progressive factions until about the time of the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. American conservative movements tended to be more centrist than their European continental counterparts until after World War II, when they became strident opponents of international communism. political philosophy that emphasizes conserving as much as possible of the present economic, social, and political order. The term conservatism, although it has had different implications in varying historical and geographical contexts, is best reserved to denote a preference for institutions and practices that have evolved historically and that are thus manifestations of continuity and stability. Political thought, from its beginnings, contains many strains that can be retrospectively labelled conservative, but it was not until the late 18th century that conservatism began to develop as a political attitude and movement reacting against the French Revolution of 1789. The noun seems to have been first used after 1815 by French Bourbon restorationists such as Franois-Ren, vicomte de Chateaubriand. It was used to describe the British Tory Party in 1830 by John Wilson Croker, the editor of The Quarterly Review; and John Calhoun, a formulator of conservative minority rights against majority dictatorship in the United States, also used the term in the 1830s. The generally acknowledged originator of modern, articulated conservatism (although he never employed the term) was the British parliamentarian and political writer Edmund Burke in his essay Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Pro-parliamentarian opponents of the French Revolution, such as Burke, believed that the violent, untraditional, and uprooting methods of the Revolution outweighed and corrupted its liberating ideals. More authoritarian opponents, such as the polemicist and diplomat Joseph de Maistre, also rejected the ideals themselves. The general revulsion against the course of events in France provided conservatives with an opportunity for restoring the pre-Revolutionary traditions, and a sudden flowering of more than one brand of conservative philosophy followed. Additional reading Useful anthologies include Peter Viereck, Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill (1956, reprinted 1978); and Peter Witonski (ed.), The Wisdom of Conservatism (1971).Among Burkean-conservative works sharing an anti-extremist centre with moderate liberals are Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (1953, reissued 1966); and Thomas I. Cook and Malcolm Moos, Power Through Purpose (1954). Other studies include Ross J.S. Hoffman and Paul Levack (eds.), Burke's Politics (1949, reissued 1967); Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored (1957, reissued 1973); Walter Lippmann, The Cold War (1947, reissued 1972); Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952, reissued 1984); Robert A. Nisbet, Community and Power (1962); Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953, reissued 1971), and What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (1959, reprinted 1988); Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited, rev. and enlarged ed. (1965, reprinted 1978); Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 5 vol. (195687); Francis Graham Wilson, The Case for Conservatism (1951, reissued 1990); and Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (1980).Conservatism in Britain is discussed in L.S. Amery, The Forward View (1935, reissued 1971); Arthur Bryant, The Spirit of Conservatism (1929); Hugh Cecil, Conservatism (1912, reissued 1937); Henry Fairlie, The Life of Politics (1968); Quintin Hogg, The Conservative Case, rev. ed. (1959); F.J.C. Hearnshaw, Conservatism in England (1933, reprinted 1968); Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays, new and expanded ed. (1991); James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 17601832 (1993); and Peregrine Worsthorne, The Socialist Myth (1971); and in other countries in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds.), Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (1993); Arthur Aughey, Greta Jones, and W.T.M. Riches, The Conservative Political Tradition in Britain and the United States (1992); T.J. Pempel, Policy and Politics in Japan: Creative Conservatism (1982); Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds.), Fundamentalisms Observed (1991), a worldwide study; Katharine West, The Revolution in Australian Politics (1984); and Paul Gifford, The New Crusaders: Christianity and the New Right in Southern Africa (1991).Burton Yale Pines, Back to Basics (1982), recounts the conservative resurgence of the 1970s in the United States. Perspectives and overviews linked to the resurgence of conservatism in the 1980s and to post-Keynesianism can be found in Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg (eds.), Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right (1993); Bruce Frohnen, Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism (1993); and Paul Hainsworth (ed.), The Extreme Right in Europe and the USA (1992).A variety of more radical conservative views can be found in William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951, reissued 1986), and Up from Liberalism, rev. ed. (1968); James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (1959), and Suicide of the West (1964, reissued 1985); Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962, reissued 1982); Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative (1960, reissued 1990); Jeffrey Hart, The American Dissent (1966); Nellie D. Kendall (ed.), Willmoore Kendall contra mundum (1971); Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th rev. ed. (1986), Prospects for Conservatives (1956, reissued 1989), and Enemies of the Permanent Things, rev. ed. (1984); Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality (1952, reissued 1993); Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom (1962), and The Conservative Mainstream (1969); Thomas Molnar, The Counter-Revolution (1969); J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality (1969); and Ronald Reagan, The Creative Society (1968). Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (1993), discusses conservatism and religion. Peter Viereck The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica