Conservatism

A disposition, more than a programme, that treats inherited institutions as accumulated practical knowledge and regards abstract schemes of social reconstruction as likely to destroy more than they create.

Position on the compass: auth-right (3.5, 4.0) · 1790 – present

Key thinkers

• Edmund Burke
• Michael Oakeshott
• Roger Scruton

Origins

Given systematic expression by Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), written while the revolution was still in its early stages and before the Terror it predicted.

Burke's argument

Burke's objection to the French revolutionaries was not that they wanted change — he had supported the American colonists and campaigned against abuses in British India. It was that they proposed to redesign society from first principles, discarding institutions that had developed over centuries in favour of a scheme derived from reason alone.

His argument was epistemic. Established institutions embody a great deal of tacit knowledge about how people actually behave, accumulated through trial and error by generations who faced real problems. Much of that knowledge cannot be articulated, which means it appears irrational to someone examining the institution abstractly. Sweeping it away therefore destroys information that nobody knew was there until it was gone.

Society is indeed a contract... a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

Not the same as opposing change

Burke's own formulation was that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. The conservative position is about the mode of change rather than its direction: incremental rather than wholesale, tested rather than deduced, and preserving the capacity to reverse a reform that fails.

Michael Oakeshott developed this into a general critique of what he called rationalism in politics — the belief that political problems can be solved by applying technique to a blank slate. His alternative image was of navigation on a boundless sea, where the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel rather than to reach a predetermined destination.

Internal tensions

Conservatism contains a genuine and unresolved conflict. Market economies are the most powerful solvent of established social arrangements ever devised: they dissolve communities, relocate populations, and continuously destroy settled ways of working. A politics committed simultaneously to free markets and to the preservation of traditional community is pulled hard in two directions.

The tension became acute in the late twentieth century, when parties combining market liberalism with cultural traditionalism found that their economic programme was undermining the social fabric their cultural programme sought to defend. Much of the realignment of the 2010s, discussed in our essay on populism, follows from that unresolved conflict.

Position on the compass

Mainstream conservatism sits in the moderate authoritarian-right quadrant, though the spread within the family is wide: a market-liberal conservative sits close to classical liberalism, while a traditionalist conservative sits considerably higher on the social axis and is much less committed to economic liberalisation.

Core tenets

• Scepticism toward abstract schemes of social reconstruction.
• Institutions carry accumulated practical knowledge that cannot be fully articulated.
• Change should be incremental, tested and reversible.
• Intermediate institutions — family, locality, association — deserve protection.
• Human nature is imperfect and unlikely to be improved by political design.

Common criticisms

• Defending inherited arrangements in general means defending unjust ones in particular, since injustice is also inherited.
• The presumption in favour of the existing order systematically advantages those it already favours.
• Its commitment to markets and to traditional community are frequently incompatible.
• As a disposition rather than a doctrine, it supplies little guidance on what specifically to do.
• Deference to accumulated wisdom underweights cases where deliberate reform demonstrably worked.