Conservatism

The Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke is widely regarded as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism. A Whig of the Rockingham branch, he supported the American Revolution but abhorred the violence of the French Revolution. He accepted private property and the economics of Adam Smith, but held that capitalism should stay subordinate to a conservative social ethic and the business class to the aristocracy, the nation’s natural leaders. He favoured an established church with a degree of religious toleration, and he justified the social order by tradition, which he saw as the wisdom of the species.

Another form of conservatism grew in France from the Counter-Enlightenment works of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, and most continental conservatives favoured close cooperation between state and Catholic Church. Burke and Maistre both distrusted democracy: Maistre doubted that people could follow rules, which for him had a divine origin, while Burke doubted their ability to make rules, which for him arose from custom. Burke was more open to argument, Maistre sought faith and authority. In Germany Justus Möser and Friedrich von Gentz criticised the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

The first established political use of the word came in 1818 from François-René de Chateaubriand, during the Bourbon Restoration that sought to roll back the policies of the French Revolution. Chateaubriand set the emptiness of modernity against the “full heart” of traditional faith and loyalty.

Conservatism seeks to preserve traditional institutions, customs and values, and its tenets vary with the culture in which it appears. The political scientist Andrew Heywood names five central beliefs: tradition, human imperfection, organic society, authority and hierarchy, and property. Russell Kirk’s five canons add a transcendent order, an affection for the “variety and mystery” of human life, and the conviction that innovation must be tied to existing custom. Samuel P. Huntington called it a situational ideology, defending the established institutions of its time, and Quintin Hogg, chairman of the British Conservative Party in 1959, called it “not so much a philosophy as an attitude”.

Noël O’Sullivan called conservatism a “philosophy of human imperfection”: its adherents are pessimistic about improving human nature through utopian schemes, and Burke believed that people steeped in original sin need institutions such as an established church and a landed aristocracy. Michael Oakeshott wrote that to be conservative is “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried”. Conservatives tend to believe in traditional authority, which Max Weber described as resting on “the sanctity of immemorial traditions”, and in hierarchy.

Beyond these themes it is diverse: conservatism may be libertarian or authoritarian, populist or elitist, progressive or reactionary, moderate or extreme.

Early European conservatism was often reactionary and romantic, idealising the Middle Ages, its feudal order and established church. German Romanticism was deeply organicist and medievalist. Prince Klemens von Metternich built the monarchist Conservative Order of the Congress of Vienna to balance power in Europe and suppress republican and nationalist movements. In the late 19th century conservatism adopted capitalism and nationalism, which until then had been anti-traditionalist forces.

In Britain Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto of 1834 pledged moderate reform and gave the party the name Conservative. It split in 1846 over free trade, which the mainstream party accepted in 1852, and under Benjamin Disraeli it embraced democracy and became a grassroots force; his One Nation Toryism was the first paternalistic conservatism, stressing the obligations of the privileged to the poor. In the United States Theodore Roosevelt held that wise progressivism and wise conservatism go hand in hand, and the word conservative was first used in its modern sense for pro-free enterprise opponents of the New Deal; the Republican Party became the country’s major conservative party.

Outside Europe conservatism took local forms. Chinese conservatism is traced back to Confucius, with his hierarchical society modelled on the family. In Latin America conservative elites ruled through the Catholic Church and the army more than through parties, though Chile, Colombia and Venezuela built strong conservative parties; the Colombian Conservative Party was founded in 1849.

In Germany Otto von Bismarck enacted universal manhood suffrage in 1871 and in the 1880s created the modern welfare state, insuring workers against sickness, accident and old age, to bind ordinary Germans to state and Emperor. In Sweden the Conservative Party was formed in 1904 to stop universal suffrage, yet a conservative, Arvid Lindman, enacted male suffrage.

In the first half of the 20th century conservatism in much of Europe became authoritarian. Pétain in France, Horthy in Hungary, Metaxas in Greece, Salazar in Portugal, Dollfuss in Austria and Franco in Spain ruled as authoritarian conservative dictators. After the Austrian Civil War of 1934 the government declared martial law, held mass trials, banned the Social Democratic Party and made the Fatherland Front the only legal party. Pétain’s Vichy regime of 1940–1944 combined authoritarian conservatism with heightened antisemitism. Such regimes often suppressed fascist movements: Austrian Nazis assassinated Dollfuss, and King Carol II of Romania ordered the execution of the Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. In Latin America most nations were under military rule by the mid-1970s; Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990.

After 1945 centre-right Christian democratic parties dominated Western Europe, and in West Germany ordoliberalism is largely credited with the German miracle of reconstruction. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher’s government privatised large parts of the British economy, and the Reagan administration adopted neoliberalism, bringing 1980s growth and trillion-dollar deficits.

Critics have questioned whether conservatism defends tradition at all. The left-wing theorist Corey Robin defines it chiefly as a defence of social and economic inequality, “a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back”. Robin treats reactionary and conservative as synonyms, while Mark Lilla holds them distinct worldviews; Peter King observed that reactionary is “an unsought-for label, used as a torment rather than a badge of honor”.

Its relation to the far right is debated. Edmund Fawcett holds that fascism is totalitarian, populist and anti-pluralist, while authoritarian conservatism is somewhat pluralist but elitist: “the right-wing authoritarian is a conservative who takes fear of democracy to extremes”. Seymour Martin Lipset found the right extremists of 1920–1960 conservative, not revolutionary, their ideal a monarch rather than a totalitarian ruler. Salazar denounced fascism and Nazism as a “pagan Caesarism”.

Psychologists have studied the conservative temperament. Bob Altemeyer found that conservatives tend to score high on right-wing authoritarianism, though H. Michael Crowson and colleagues concluded that “conservatism is not synonymous” with it; Felicia Pratto linked conservative views to a high social dominance orientation, which the conservative theorist Kenneth Minogue criticised. Within conservatism, there has been tension since Burke between traditional aristocratic conservatism and the wealthy business class.

With liberalism and socialism, conservatism is counted one of the three major ideologies, and it is the dominant ideology in many countries, among them Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland and Russia. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has been the dominant ruling party since 1955, and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Narendra Modi, had over 170 million members in October 2022, by far the world’s largest party. In China the ancient schools of Confucianism and Legalism have returned to mainstream thought, and Xi Jinping has called traditional Chinese culture the “soul” of the nation.

In Europe conservatism took a more liberal form after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in recent decades nationalist parties have risen across the continent in opposition to globalism. National conservatism, which puts national and cultural identity first and favours limited immigration and a strong defence, has found a theorist in Yoram Hazony. In the United States the shifts in conservative thinking after the election of Donald Trump have been described as a “new fusionism” of traditional conservatism and right-wing populism, with more support for protectionism and a repudiation of neoconservatism. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has promoted explicitly conservative policies at home and abroad, in close collaboration with the Russian Orthodox Church.