Conservatism

Edmund Neill

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509527069, 9781509527052
• eBook ISBN: 9781509527090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Conservatism is often labelled as a 'disposition', 'tradition', or even a set of knee-jerk reactions, rather than an ideology, and its suspicion of grand theorising has lent itself to this characterization. In this book, leading political theorist Edmund Neill challenges this view.

He argues that conservatism is better identified as an ideology, albeit one that, rather than putting forward positive values like 'liberty' or 'equality', conceptualizes human conduct as being partially dependent on forces beyond human volition, and prioritizes the cautious management of change. He charts the evolution of conservative thought from the French Revolution to the present, examining how conservatives responded to disruptions to traditional order across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples from Britain, France and the United States, Neill concludes with some reflections on the challenges (and opportunities) that contemporary populism presents for conservatism.

This accomplished overview is essential reading for any student or scholar working in political theory and political philosophy, especially those with a particular interest in ideologies and conservatism.

1
Defining Conservatism

This book seeks to define the concept of conservatism and to explore its nature in the context of Western Europe and America, primarily looking at Britain, France and the United States. At first sight, this might appear to be a relatively simple task. For unlike some of the vaguer, more contested concepts in political theory, such as nationalism, populism or fascism, conservatism appears to have a relatively fixed and stable meaning. In particular, theorists investigating conservatism have often argued that conservatives advocate four key political commitments. First, they have argued that conservatives favour the importance of ‘natural’ forms of authority, such as the monarchy, the church, the nation and the family to guarantee social stability – as opposed to artificially designed ‘rationalist’ ones, particularly those provided by government. Second, relatedly, they have maintained that conservatives advocate ‘evolution’ over ‘revolution’, preferring incremental change over producing solutions from scratch, even if existing institutions are far from ideal. Third, such theorists have claimed that conservatives often consider human nature to be imperfect and fallible, with the result that they hold human inequality to be beneficial, or at the very least inevitable. Finally, within these limits, they have argued that conservatives often stress the importance of private property and capitalism in promoting individual freedom.¹

The Challenge of Defining Conservatism

In fact, however, as soon as one considers the concept of conservatism more closely, it throws up difficult definitional and conceptual challenges. For although some thinkers usually described as ‘conservatives’ have upheld the four commitments just described, others have not necessarily advocated all of them, or even, in some cases, any of them (Eatwell and O’Sullivan 1989: 47–61). First, although conservatives have often argued that traditional forms of authority are important, even those that have done so have not necessarily denied the importance of the state. Thus, Roger Scruton in The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), to take one modern example, was quite happy to stress the importance of governmental authority and the rule of law, as well as highlighting the vital role of traditional institutions like the family in ensuring social solidarity (Scruton 2001: 39–41). Still less, in any case, have conservatives agreed on which institutions play the most vital role in providing authority. To some in the nineteenth century, such as the influential French theorist Joseph de Maistre, the religious authority of the church was vital; for others in the same century, such as the English conservative W. H. Mallock, let alone in the twentieth, it was largely irrelevant (Maistre 1820: 213; Ford 1974: 319).

Second, although it is true that conservatives have often been cautious about initiating far-reaching changes, there have certainly been instances where they have sought to change society fairly radically. Thus Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s conservative administrations in the 1980s in Britain and the United States initiated major changes that fundamentally altered the relationship of individual, state and society, including significant reductions in direct taxation, the privatization of many government-owned industries, a reduction in the power of trade unions and an increase in home ownership (Hoover and Plant 2015). Third, although many conservatives have indeed generally rejected more substantive forms of equality, on the basis that such ‘levelling’ is neither natural nor desirable, they have nevertheless differed significantly between themselves over the degree to which they reject equality and accept traditional social hierarchies. Thus, even in the nineteenth century, various American conservatives, however much they rejected any notion of ‘social justice’, nevertheless took the idea of formal political equality guaranteed by the US constitution as sacrosanct; by contrast, some more radical conservative thinkers, such as Heinrich von Treitschke in Germany, argued much more explicitly against equal political participation on the basis that this contradicted man’s natural inequality (Sumner 1963; Dorpalen 1957).

Finally, although conservatives have often been supportive of both private property and modern capitalism as guarantees of freedom, there have also been important exceptions and qualifications. Edmund Burke, arguably one of the earliest British conservatives, thought that the success of the free market relied on existing social norms, rather than the other way round, and this suspicion of the market persisted amongst certain kinds of British conservatives well into the twentieth century – the renowned poet and conservative cultural critic T. S. Eliot being one such example. Furthermore, some conservatives – like Scruton, for example – have stressed that private property rights should not be immune from all interference by the state if the general material welfare of the population at large is endangered (Burke 1968: 140, 146; Eliot 1939; Scruton 2001: 97–9).

Defining Conservatism: One Key Concept?

In view of such difficulties, clearly a different approach is necessary in order to define and explore conservatism successfully. One strategy pursued by some scholars is to try to isolate a particular concept that is especially fundamental to conservatism. Thus Peter Dorey, in his book British Conservatism: The Politics and Philosophy of Inequality (2011), sought to identify conservatism with a fundamental commitment to upholding inequality, while Noel O’Sullivan, in his 1976 study Conservatism, focused on the ‘imperfection’ of human nature – and hence a commitment to limited government – as a key to understanding conservative arguments (Dorey 2011; O’Sullivan 1976: 9–31). But although both these books are perceptive and insightful, they are in danger of ignoring or excluding types of conservatism (or facets of conservative arguments) that do not fit well with their approach. We have already noted that conservatives differ over the degree to which they uphold inequality, and even if it is reasonable to claim that most conservatives take a more negative view of human nature than most liberals and socialists, it seems implausible to argue that such a view is always the key to understanding their arguments, let alone that this necessarily implies a commitment to more limited government. Although they certainly agreed that human nature was imperfect, paternalist conservatives in post-war Britain, like Harold Macmillan, tended nevertheless to stress the positive good that government could do in preventing unemployment and boosting economic growth; likewise, late nineteenth-century French conservative nationalists, such as Maurice Barrès, certainly stressed the positive role the state could play, even if they did not have an entirely positive view of human nature (Green 2002: 171–4; Jennings 2011: 456). At best, therefore, such an ‘exclusionary’ approach can be useful if we are seeking to produce normative arguments in favour of a certain type of conservatism. But as a more analytic, descriptive approach, which aims to delineate the richness and complexity of the tradition of conservative thought, it leaves much to be desired.

Defining Conservatism: Historical Approaches

Samuel Huntington: ‘dispositional’ conservatism

What, in particular, these definitional failures reveal is that we need a method of understanding conservatism that is more sensitive to the way in which it has changed and developed, that pays attention to the fact that conservatism is a dynamic, historically variable phenomenon, rather than a static one that can be defined purely abstractly. One way of trying to do this is simply to identify conservatism with the impulse to uphold the status quo – in other words, with the desire to resist any attempt at (significant) change at all costs. So, rather than attempting to define conservatism by referring to a fixed list of objectives, this method instead identifies conservatism as a mode of thought simply with being reactive. This approach was famously advocated by Samuel Huntington in his article ‘Conservatism as an Ideology’, where he defined conservatism as ‘that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter’ (Huntington 1957: 455). As such, Huntington argued, conservatism is not a doctrine that has essential attributes which are transmitted through time, and hence also does not have set of classic studies associated with it, which are then constantly subject to reinterpretation and reassessment (but also retention). The advantage of such a definition is that it avoids trying to identify conservatism with a fixed, unchanging set of attributes, hence going some way to respecting its mutable nature. But it also has two significant problems. In the first place, it seems deeply counterintuitive to label monolithic totalitarian states such as Soviet Russia as ‘conservative’, purely on the basis that their institutions failed to adapt and alter. Secondly, such a definition makes no allowance for those cases where thinkers and politicians that most scholars and contemporaries would label ‘conservative’ – such as those associated with the Thatcherite revival of conservatism in the 1980s – undertake fairly radical innovations (even if they do do it in pursuit of a past set of norms).² Despite its formal admission of the historically variable nature of conservatism, therefore, such a definition ultimately remains too formal to do justice to the way in which conservatism substantively develops, historically speaking.

In view of the difficulties involved with Huntington’s definition of conservatism, other scholars – both from within the conservative tradition and from outside it – have sought to analyse conservatism in a more genuinely historical fashion, giving it a more substantive definition. Broadly speaking, there have been three ways of attempting this. First, some scholars have tried to define conservatism as being a nostalgic, backward-looking movement that seeks to uphold the institutions and practices of the pre-Enlightenment era. Conservatism then consists of trying to retain at least some of the pre-Enlightenment norms of religious belief, of monarchy and of hierarchy in society in general, against the corrosive modernizing forces associated with the Enlightenment in theory, and with the French and industrial revolutions in practice. On such a definition, a particular concern for conservatives is the attempt to uphold pre-modern forms of authority that were in danger of being undermined by Enlightenment rationalism – by its scepticism about religious belief, demands for equal representation, and rejection of aristocratic hierarchy, all of which had come to fruition during the French Revolution. Such pressures on traditional forms of authority, it is also maintained, have been heightened by some of the effects of modern capitalism, with its corrosive effect on traditional social and political hierarchies, so that a key concern of conservatism is to uphold the importance of a respected and beneficent aristocracy in order to maintain both order and social harmony (Kirk 2008; Vincent 2010: 57).

This definition of conservatism, however, has some significant weaknesses. It is useful in identifying certain tendencies within conservatism, particularly in the nineteenth century (as we shall see in Chapter 2), when a host of writers from Edmund Burke to Joseph de Maistre lamented the passing of the ancien régime and of pre-industrial social arrangements, at least to some extent. And its focus on the conservative criticism of Enlightenment rationalism highlights a tendency that remains important even in modern conservative thinkers who are less obviously nostalgic, notably John Gray.³ But the trouble with the definition is that it significantly underplays conservatism’s capacity for innovation. Even in the nineteenth century, some conservatives increasingly subscribed to certain ‘Enlightenment’ norms by embracing capitalism and representative government. And in a contemporary context, whatever reservations thinkers such as Gray have had about the philosophical justifications for modernity provided by the Enlightenment, they have nevertheless accepted most of its political programme, including the equal right to political representation, the stress on private property, and the fundamental importance of the concept of the ‘rule of law’. Such a definition, then, clearly fails to capture the full meaning of conservatism.

Michael Oakeshott and Ian Gilmour: ‘traditionalist’ approaches to defining conservatism

Rather than trying to define conservatism as being largely backward-looking, therefore, other theorists, particularly within the conservative tradition itself, have sought to conceptualize conservatism as being an attempt to manage change cautiously. Such theorists include the British Conservative cabinet minister from the 1980s Ian Gilmour, and the influential mid-twentieth-century political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Key to their analysis of conservatism is their claim that it does not simply consist of trying to uphold the status quo or of returning to a previous ‘golden age’. Rather, they argue that conservatism is to be identified by its commitment to careful, organic, evolutionary change, contrasting this with more radical or progressive approaches, which are characterized as ‘ideological’ in the sense of being more self-conscious, more perfectionist, more radical and less respectful of tradition. Thus, Oakeshott famously suggested that a conservative’s attitude to change is to be ‘warm and positive in respect of enjoyment, and correspondingly cool and critical in respect of change and innovation’, while Gilmour compared a conservative approach to change with that of an architectural conservationist who may regret the destruction of historic buildings, but nevertheless admits that a certain amount of updating and alteration is necessary (Oakeshott 1991: 412; Gilmour 1977: 122). To be a conservative, on such a definition, is to ‘pursue the intimations’ of the Western tradition, in Oakeshott’s phrase, rather than trying to impose a new artificial pattern on it. This meant that conservatives could indeed extract from their political tradition certain kinds of ends that they ought to be pursuing – as opposed to lurching off in uncharted n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Defining Conservatism
• 2 Conservatism from the French Revolution to 1848
• 3 Conservatism from 1848 to the First World War
• 4 Conservatism in the Era of the Two World Wars
• 5 Conservatism from the 1960s to the Present
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement