Historical Conservatism Research Paper

The study of conservatism has proved difficult for modern social science. Compared with the other great ideological phenomena of the last two centuries, such as liberalism, socialism, communism or fascism, the subject of conservatism is underilluminated by scholarship. One reason is because of the difficulty of arriving at meaningful generalizations about conservatism, which displays less obvious uniformity across national borders and tends to be more nationally particular than liberalism or socialism, which aspire to be universal in their reach. Moreover, since conservatism emphasizes the need for institutional and symbolic continuity with the particular past, its symbols and institutional ideals tend to be more tied to specific, usually national, contexts. For all of these reasons, studies of conservatism which go beyond one particular national context are scarce; as a result, conceptions of conservatism have tended to be parochial.

One of the earliest social scientific approaches to the issue was formulated by the Hungarian–German sociologist, Karl Mannheim, in his essay Conservative Thought (1927). He introduced the important distinction between traditionalism and conservatism, the former a near-universal psychological propensity to do things as they have traditionally been done, the latter an articulated set of inter-related political ideas, an ideology which arose, Mannheim thought, in response to the new and dynamic historical processes associated with the Enlightenment, capitalist modernization. A pioneer of the sociology of knowledge, Mannheim claimed that conservative thought was linked to a worldview which could be correlated with class position, roughly that of the feudal nobility. The basic categories of each ideology, he maintained, were unconsciously determined by the experience of the world and the self-interest of the class which developed it. In the case of conservatism, it led to a focus on experience and the concrete, as opposed to universalistic, rationalistic theories of liberalism and the Enlightenment. Conservatives offered a critique of the rationalistic conceptions for reorganizing society proposed by advocates of radical reform, and focused on explaining the historical particularities of real, existing societies and the interconnectedness of their institutions.

Subsequent social scientific analysts of conservatism, even when they have not followed Mannheim’s focus on class, have stressed the reactive nature of conservatism, the fact that it arises in response to a challenge (intellectual, political, or cultural) to existing institutions, on behalf of which conservative arguments are then developed. In one of the most perceptive scholarly analyses of the subject, Samuel Huntington (1957) argued that conservatism is best understood not as an inherent theory in defense of particular classes and institutions, but as a positional ideology. ‘When the foundations of society are threatened, the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and desirability of the existing ones’, Huntington suggested. He claimed that because ‘the articulation of conservatism is a response to a specific social situation … The manifestation of conservatism at any one time and place has little connection with its manifestation at any other time and place.’

The reactive nature of conservatism is a premise of one of the finest historical studies of the subject, Klaus Epstein’s The Genesis of German Conservatism (1966), which pays close attention to political and intellectual context and demonstrates how conservatism arose in German-speaking Europe as a response to the Enlightenment, commercial capitalism, and bourgeois liberalism. Taking the reactive approach a step further, Martin Greiffenhagen (1971), suggested that because self-conscious conservatism only arises once the institutions it values have lost their hold, conservative thought seeks not a preservation of the status quo, but uses an imaginatively transfigured conception of the past with which to criticize the present. According to Greiffenhagen, the romanticization of the past is thus an intrinsic and recurrent element of conservatism.

Two thinkers presented nonreactive conceptions of conservatism during the immediate post-war decade. In The Conservative Mind (1953), Russell Kirk, a US conservative man of letters, offered a conception of conservatism as based upon religion and ‘belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience’—a conception which assimilated conservatism to religious orthodoxy, and was of scant use as an analytic tool. Kirk’s conception was rejected by Michael Oakeshott, the most important British conservative philosopher of the era, in On Being Conservative (written 1956 and published in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962), which presented a brilliant phenomenological description of conservatism as a disposition centered ‘upon a propensity … to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.’ Oakeshott sought to conserve a liberal and pluralist conception of society, and doubted that ‘a disposition to be conservative in politics’ depended on the religious and metaphysical assumptions set forth by Kirk.

2. Definition And Characterization

To understand conservatism as a distinctive mode of social and political thought, it is useful to distinguish it, ideal typically at least, from reaction and from orthodox. The orthodox theoretician defends existing institutions and practices because they are metaphysically true: the truth proclaimed may be based on particular revelation or on natural laws purportedly accessible to all rational men, it may be religious or secular in origin. The conservative defends existing institutions because their very existence creates a presumption that they have served some useful function, because eliminating them may lead to harmful, unintended consequences, or because the veneration which attaches to institutions that have existed over time makes them potentially usable for new purposes.

Conservatism can similarly be distinguished from reaction. The conservative seeks to conserve existing institutions, usually recognizing that the process of conservation may include the need for evolutionary reform. The reactionary, by contrast, is at odds with existing institutions, and seeks to return to some institutional status quo ante, often in a form trans- figured by memory and ideology.

As misleading as the confusion between conservatism and/orthodoxy is the false dichotomy of conservatism and Enlightenment. Contrary to the frequent characterization of conservatism as the enemy of the Enlightenment, it is more historically accurate to say that there were many currents within the Enlightenment, and some of them were conservative. Indeed, conservatism as a distinct mode of thought is a product of the Enlightenment. What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness, based on the use of reason.

3. Characteristics Of Conservative Thought

Conservative theorists repeatedly decry the application to society and politics of a mode of thought which they characterize as overly abstract, rationalistic, and cut off from experience. Whether termed ‘the abuse of reason’ (by Burke 1790), ‘rationalism in politics’ (by Oakeshott 1962) or ‘constructivism’ (by Hayek), the recurrent conservative accusation against liberal and radical thought is that they are said to depend upon a systematic, deductivist, universalistic form of reasoning which fails to account for the complexity and peculiarity of the actual institutions they seek to transform.

For conservatives, the historical survival of an institution or practice—be it marriage, monarchy, or the market—creates a prima facie case that it has served some human need. The conservative emphasis on ‘experience’ is linked to the assumption that the historical survival of an institution or practice is evidence of its fitness in serving human needs. Since custom and habit are important features of human conduct, some of the usefulness of a practice comes from the fact that those engaged in it are already ‘used’ to it, and are apt to be discomfited by change.

Conservative thought has typically emphasized the imperfection of the individual, an imperfection at once biological, emotional and cognitive. Conservatives typically contend that human moral imperfection leads men to act badly when they act upon their uncontrolled impulses, and that they require the restraints and constraints imposed by institutions as a limit upon subjective impulse. Conservatives, thus, are skeptical of attempts at ‘liberation’. Conservatives have also stressed the cognitive element of human imperfection, insisting upon the limits of human knowledge, especially of the social and political world. They warn that society is too complex to lend itself to theoretical simplification, and that this fact must temper all plans for institutional innovation.

These assumptions explain the emphasis of conservative social and political thought upon institutions, that is, patterned social formations with their own rules, norms, rewards and sanctions. While liberals typically view with suspicion the restraints and penalties imposed upon the individual by institutions, conservatives are disposed to protect the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions because they believe human society cannot flourish without them. Unlike liberals, who favor voluntary, contractual social relations, conservatives emphasize the ongoing importance of nonvoluntary duties, obligations, and allegiances.

While there is no necessary link between conservatism and religious belief, conservatives have tended to affirm the social utility of religion. They make several arguments for the utility of religion: that it legitimates the state; that the hope of future reward offers men solace for the trials of their earthly existence and thus helps to diffuse current discontent which might disrupt the social order; and that belief in ultimate reward and punishment leads men to act morally by giving them an incentive to do so.

Conservatives typically emphasize the unanticipated negative consequences of deliberate social action. Such negative consequences, they argue, occur because reformers are unaware of the latent functions of existing practices and institutions. Reformers are insufficiently cognizant, it is said, of the contribution of the practice to the preservation or adaptation of the larger social system in which it is implicated. That contribution may be unintended by those engaged in the practice, so that its function may be unrecognized, or recognized only retrospectively, once the reform of the practice has brought about negative unintended consequences.

Together, the concepts of unanticipated negative consequences, latent functions, and functional inter-dependence serve as recurrent arguments against radical or wholesale reform, though not against reform as such.

Recurrent substantive themes of conservative social and political thought include:

(a) a skepticism regarding the efficacy of written constitutions, as opposed to the informal, subpolitical, and inherited norms and mores of society. For conservatives, the real ‘constitution’ of society lies in its historical institutions and practices, which are inculcated primarily through custom and habit;

(b) the central role of cultural manners and mores in shaping character and restraining the passions, and hence the political importance of the social institutions in which such manners and mores are conveyed;

(c) an emphasis on the family as the most important institution of socialization, and despite considerable divergence among conservatives over the proper roles of men and women within the family, the assertion that some degree of sexual division of labor is both inevitable and desirable;

(d) the legitimacy of inequality, and the need for elites, cultural, political, and economic; security of possession of property as a prime function of the political order;

(e) and the importance of the state as the ultimate guarantor of property and the rule of law, and hence the need to maintain political authority.

4. Historical Overview

Terms related to ‘conservative’ first found their way into political discourse in the title of a French weekly journal, Le Conser ateur founded in 1818 by Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand with the aid of Louis de Bonald. ‘The Conserateur upholds religion, the King, liberty, the Charter and respectable people (les honnetes gens)’, it proclaimed in its first issue. In England, the label ‘Conservative Party’ was first applied to the Tories by the publicist John Wilson Crocker in 1830. In Germany, the term ‘conservative’ came into use later in the same decade: it was first employed as an epithet against those designated as conservative, who were accused of seeking to preserve existing institutions at any price, but the term was eventually accepted by those it had been used to stigmatize. But as with many other historical developments, the phenomenon of conservatism long pre-ceded the use of the term in political life.

The precursors of conservatism may be found in the Anglican critique of the Puritan contention that the elect or the inspired congregation, guided by their individual interpretations of the Bible, were entitled to exercise political authority. The thought of David Hume marks a watershed in the development of conservative social and political thought into a coherent, secular doctrine. Hume began by borrowing and expanding upon this critique of the politics of religious ‘enthusiasm’. And he went on to criticize what he saw as its secular counterparts in the philosophically implausible and politically subversive doc-trines of natural rights and of voluntary contract as the sole legitimate basis of political obligation. In 1757, Edmund Burke used similar terms to attack what he called the ‘abuse of reason’ among some enlightened thinkers. On the Continent, conservative social and political thought arose as a critique of the policies of enlightened absolutism. Among the fore-most practitioners of this criticism was Justus Moser, himself a part of the German Enlightenment, and a reformer of a conservative and corporatist tinge. In Holland, another Enlightenment figure, Jean de Luzac, articulated politically conservative arguments opposing the claims of ‘patriots’ for a more democratic constitution. The contention that conservatism arose in opposition to the Enlightenment and to the French Revolution reflects Edmund Burke’s polemical characterization of the Enlightenment in his critique of the French Revolution. Though frequently reiterated, the contention is historically untenable. Conservatism arose not against the Enlightenment but within it. Much of post-1789 intellectual conservatism is continuous with the analytic strategies, if not with the tone, of pre-revolutionary conservative analysis.

It was the democratic radicalism of the French Revolution that evoked Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which became the most influential work in the history of conservative thought. Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and Louis Gabriel de Bonald (1754–1840) were the two leading figures in the tradition of French counter-revolutionary thought. The task with which they saw themselves confronted was rather different than the one that had motivated Burke’s Reflections, and the nature of their conservatism varied accordingly. Burke’s primary task was to conserve a British order which was substantially intact, though subject to intellectual attack. He could thus stress the historical utilitarian arguments that the existence of an institution creates a prima facie case that it has served some human need, and that historical continuity is intrinsically valuable because it increases the emotional hold of an institution upon its members. Similarly, Burke could underscore the importance of habit and custom. By the time de Bonald and de Maistre came to write their major works, the forces of the French Revolution had already overturned or transformed many of the key institutions of the Old Regime. The Counter-Revolutionary conservatives, therefore, were forced by circumstances to offer a rationale other than that of historical continuity, for the institutions of the old regime had been disrupted by the Revolution. De Maistre responded to the revolution by carrying to new lengths previous conservative arguments of epistemological modesty, historical particularism, and the unanticipated consequences of deliberate action.

Burke’s defense of monarchy, aristocracy, and the established church stamped European conservative thought at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early decades of the nineteenth. Yet a similar critique of democratic radicalism appears, with a more re-publican but nevertheless recognizably conservative thrust, in the USA, first in the writings of the US Federalists, and later in the work of conservative Whig critics of Jacksonianism, such as Rufus Choate. Hume’s combination of political conservatism with the championing of commerce was to remain characteristic of subsequent British and US conservatism. By contrast, the French, Catholic strains of conservatism of de Bonald and de Maistre, as well as the romantic German strains of conservatism remained less accepting of capitalist economic development than the British and US strains.

The development of conservative social and political thought after the mid-nineteenth century shows a movement from substance to function: from the defense of particular institutions to the defense of institutions in general; from the defense of the landed aristocracy to a defense of elites in general; from an emphasis on the role of the established Church to the function of culture in linking the individual to communal purposes; from monarchical authority to the authority of the state in general. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, conservatism underwent an important shift, reflecting a change in opponents and in institutional substance. The increasing dominance of industrial capitalism, the expansion of the suffrage, the rise of socialist movements and of a new brand of liberalism which was more economically redistributionist and more culturally permissive, all led to a substantial transformation of conservatism. Many of the economic institutions and policies once associated with European liberalism now became that which conservatives sought to conserve. This new brand of conservatism was pioneered in late nineteenth century Britain, and is reflected in the works of James Fitzjames Stephen and W. H. Mallock and by the US theorist, William Graham Sumner.

The rhetoric by means of which institutions were defended also changed. It placed less emphasis on the veneration of tradition as such, while seeking to increase the emotional hold of existing institutions by showing that they were in accord with the needs of historical development. In England and the USA, the language of common law and of inherited tradition was increasingly abandoned in favor of the language of science. The justification of the social utility of landed elites was replaced by a more general defense of the need for elites in the realms of economics and politics, while the defense of the established Church was transformed into a defense of cultural elites. In Germany, too, the substance of conservatism was transformed, from a defense of aristocracy, a social order based on fixed estates, and paternalist monarchism, toward an emphasis on the functions of the state as such, a transformation exemplified in the work of the twentieth century German theorist, Carl Schmitt.

One recurrent strand of thought which is related to conservatism, yet politically and analytically distinct from it, is radical conservatism, a strand particularly powerful in inter-war Europe, where its adherents often came to favor fascist regimes. Radical conservatives share some of the concerns of more conventional conservatism, such as the need for institutional authority and continuity with the past. But they maintain that the processes characteristic of modernity have destroyed the valuable legacy of the past for the present, so that a restoration of the purported virtues of the past demands radical or revolutionary action. Hence the credo of one radical conservative, Moeller van den Bruck, that ‘Conservative means creating things that are worth conserving.’ Radical conservatism shares with conservatism an emphasis on the role of institutions in providing restraint and direction to the individual, but seeks to create new institutions which will exert a far stronger hold on the individual than do existing ones, which because of their relative tolerance are perceived by radical conservatives as ‘decayed.’

After the defeat and discrediting of fascism, conservatism in the latter half of the twentieth century was defined not only by its opposition to communism, but by antipathy to the spread of the welfare state and attempts to bring about economic redistribution, and by skepticism regarding the solution of social problems through massive governmental action.

The study of conservative movements and conservative ideology provide an ongoing challenge to social scientists. For they must provide analyses of a phenomenon which is dynamic and changes over time, which varies between nations and often between regions within nations, and which often appears in combination with a variety of other trends (religious, nationalist) and under a variety of nomenclatures. These difficulties—together with the political predilections of the majority of social scientists, who tend to be antipathetic to conservatism—have led to a gap between the historical significance of conservatism and the extent of its exploration by scholars. This is lamentable, for not only have more-or-less conservative parties dominated western European and US politics for substantial portions of the last two centuries, but conservative thinkers have played a leading role in the development of modern thought.

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