Conservatism

• 1. Introduction

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  Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. In 1818, during the Bourbon Restoration in France, François-René de Chateaubriand gave the term its first established use in a political context. Yet the impulse it names is older, and stranger, than a single coinage. Consider that one of its founding figures, the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, opposed the French Revolution while supporting the American Revolution. How can a single idea defend a monarch in one country and a republic in another? Why is conservatism the dominant ideology in nations as different as Japan, India, Iran, and Hungary, yet means something entirely unique in the United States? And how did a philosophy of tradition come to be called, by one of its own students, a "philosophy of human imperfection"? The answers lie not in a fixed creed but in a way of seeing the world, one that varies considerably from nation to nation while circling the same handful of stubborn convictions.

• 2. A Philosophy Of Imperfection

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  Thomas Hobbes, called the "intellectual godfather of the realist right," argued that the natural state of humanity was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." From that bleak premise he reasoned that centralized authority and royal sovereignty were needed to guarantee law and order. This pessimism runs deep through conservative thought. Political scientist Noël O'Sullivan named the whole tradition a "philosophy of human imperfection," reflecting a negative view of human nature and doubt that utopian schemes can improve it. Edmund Burke, often called the father of modern conservatism, believed human beings are steeped in original sin. For that reason, he argued, society needs traditional institutions such as an established church and a landed aristocracy in order to function at all. Scholars have tried to pin down the creed more precisely. Political scientist Andrew Heywood lists five central beliefs: tradition, human imperfection, organic society, authority and hierarchy, and property. Historian Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind of 1953, set out five canons of his own. They include a belief in a transcendent order, an affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence, and a conviction that society requires orders and classes built on natural distinctions. Kirk also tied property to freedom and prized custom, convention, and the political value of prudence. Samuel P. Huntington added a twist that complicates every definition. Conservatism, he argued, is also a situational ideology, defending the established institutions of whatever time it finds itself in.

• 3. Tradition, Hierarchy, Authority

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  Michael Oakeshott captured the conservative temperament in a single cascading sentence. To be conservative, he wrote, "is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss." Such traditionalism amounts to trusting time-tested methods, giving what one observer called "votes to the dead." Hierarchy draws a sharper line, and not everyone defines it the same way. The left-wing theorist Corey Robin treats conservatism primarily as a defense of social and economic inequality, even "a meditation on the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back." Conservatives themselves often celebrate rank. The philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila wrote, "Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal." The word hierarchy itself has religious roots, translating to "rule of a high priest." Authority completes the trio, and conservatives tend to favor its traditional form. The sociologist Max Weber described this as authority "resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions." The philosopher Alexandre Kojève split it in two: the Authority of the Father, embodied by priests and monarchs, and the Authority of the Master, embodied by aristocrats and military commanders. Robert Nisbet warned that as guilds, parishes, and families decline, the buffers between the state and the lone individual vanish with them.

• 4. Two Founding Streams

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  Edmund Burke served as private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham and as official pamphleteer to the Rockingham branch of the Whig party. His views mixed conservatism with republicanism. He accepted private property and the economics of Adam Smith, yet insisted that capitalism stay subordinate to a conservative social ethic and that the business class stay subordinate to the aristocracy, whom he saw as the nation's natural leaders. He justified the whole social order on tradition, which he regarded as the wisdom of the species. A second stream rose in France, shaped by Counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. Many continental conservatives rejected the separation of church and state, preferring cooperation with the Catholic Church as it had existed before the Revolution. They were also early to embrace nationalism, which had until then belonged to liberalism. Both Burke and Maistre distrusted democracy, but for opposite reasons. Maistre doubted that humans could follow rules, believing rules had a divine origin. Burke doubted that humans could make rules well, believing they arose from custom. Burke stayed open to argument and disagreement; Maistre sought faith and authority, leading to a more illiberal strain. Their ideas flowed into a single current of anti-rationalist, romantic conservatism while remaining, to the end, two separate streams.

• 5. The Many Faces

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  Authoritarian conservatism portrays authority as absolute and unquestionable, and its 20th-century roster reads like a map of interwar Europe. Marshal Philippe Pétain in France, Regent Miklós Horthy in Hungary, General Ioannis Metaxas in Greece, Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain, and António de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal's dictator for 40 years. These regimes are easily confused with fascism, but Edmund Fawcett drew the line cleanly. "The fascist is a nonconservative who takes anti-liberalism to extremes," he wrote. "The right-wing authoritarian is a conservative who takes fear of democracy to extremes." The two often clashed. Austrian Nazis assassinated the ultra-Catholic dictator Engelbert Dollfuss, and Salazar, a Catholic seminarian, denounced fascism and Nazism as a "pagan Caesarism" recognizing no legal, religious, or moral limits. Liberal conservatism takes the opposite turn, borrowing the classical liberal case for minimal economic intervention while still demanding a strong state for law and order. In the United States this strand is known as fiscal conservatism. Paternalistic conservatism runs differently again, stressing the obligation of the privileged to the poor. It first arose in Benjamin Disraeli's "One Nation" Toryism, and in Germany it appeared when Otto von Bismarck built insurance for workers against sickness, accident, and old age. Progressive conservatism found a champion in Theodore Roosevelt, who said he had "always believed that wise progressivism and wise conservatism go hand in hand."

• 6. Tradition's Many Homelands

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  Chinese conservatism traces back to Confucius, whose philosophy rests on loyalty, duty, and respect, and who envisioned a hierarchically organized society modeled on the patriarchal family. During the Cultural Revolution the Chinese Communist Party suppressed this inheritance violently. Red Guards set out to destroy the Four Olds, old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits, wrecking much of China's cultural heritage. In recent decades Confucianism and Legalism have returned to mainstream thought, and General Secretary Xi Jinping has called traditional Chinese culture the "soul" of the nation. Japan offers a different model of continuity. Conservatism has been its dominant ideology throughout modern history, with the Liberal Democratic Party ruling since 1955, an arrangement called the 1955 System. Japan is the oldest continuing monarchy in human history, with Naruhito currently serving as Emperor. In Singapore, the People's Action Party has governed since independence in 1965, making it the longest uninterrupted governing party among modern multiparty parliamentary democracies. Its founder Lee Kuan Yew embraced the label of a nanny state, saying, "If Singapore is a nanny state, then I am proud to have fostered one." In Iran, the Pahlavi dynasty's reforming Shah launched the White Revolution in 1963, only for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to replace the monarchy's progressive conservatism with the reactionary conservatism of an Islamic theocracy.

• 7. Europe's Long Shadow

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  Klemens von Metternich designed the monarchist Conservative Order enacted at the Congress of Vienna, after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, aiming to build a European balance of power that could suppress republican and nationalist movements. European conservatism began largely reactionary and romantic, idealizing the Middle Ages and its feudal order. By the late 19th century it had turned progressive, adopting capitalism and nationalism. Then, in the first half of the 20th century, it transformed into the far-right across Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Romania. The deposed German Emperor Wilhelm II watched that transformation with horror. In 1938 he wrote of Adolf Hitler, "There's a man alone, without family, without children, without God." Of his homeland he added that out of "a nation of poets and musicians, of artists and soldiers, he has made a nation of hysterics and hermits." After the war, conservatism assumed a more moderate form. Center-right Christian-democratic parties dominated Western Europe, drawing especially strong support from women who valued their pro-family policies. In Italy, Christian Democracy governed for 47 out of 52 years until its dissolution in 1994. More recently, the work of Christian Democratic Union leader Helmut Kohl helped bring about German reunification, before nationalist parties began rising across the continent in opposition to globalism.