Classical conservatism
Society is an inheritance held in trust across generations, and obligation runs in both directions between those with power and those without.
What does this mean?
Classical or traditional conservatism is the older, more philosophical form of the tradition, closer to Burke than to any modern party programme. It sees society as an organic whole rather than a collection of individuals, and describes it as a partnership between the living, the dead and the unborn. Institutions are held in trust, not owned outright by the present generation.
It is notably less enthusiastic about markets than modern conservatism. Where free markets dissolve settled communities, uproot families or reduce people to interchangeable labour, classical conservatives have often opposed them. The tradition assumes hierarchy is natural, but attaches heavy duties to those at the top: paternalism is its characteristic form, and noblesse oblige its characteristic phrase. This is the strand of conservatism most likely to defend agricultural communities, established churches, craft traditions and the countryside against economic rationalisation.
Where did it come from?
The dominant conservative form in nineteenth-century Europe, expressed in Tory paternalism and continental Catholic social thought. It was displaced in the late twentieth century by market-oriented conservatism, and has seen renewed interest as that model’s social effects have been debated.
Major thinkers
- Edmund Burke
- Joseph de Maistre
- Michael Oakeshott
- T. S. Eliot
- Wendell Berry
Historical figures
- Benjamin Disraeli
- Otto von Bismarck
- Lord Salisbury
What it looks like today
- "Red Tory" and communitarian conservative currents in Britain and Canada
- Catholic social teaching on subsidiarity and the family
- Post-liberal conservative writing critical of market disruption of community life
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
The state in the economy
Personal liberty
Tradition and change
At the continuity pole. Inherited arrangements are treated as a trust rather than as the current generation’s to redesign.
Nation and the world
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
Environment and growth
More protective than modern market conservatism: conservation of land and landscape follows naturally from stewardship of an inheritance.
Crime and punishment
Its strongest arguments
- It takes seriously that people are embedded in families, places and communities rather than being interchangeable individuals.
- Its stewardship framing extends obligation to future generations, which gives it a natural environmental ethic.
- It notices costs of economic change — dissolved communities, hollowed towns — that purely economic analysis records as efficiency gains.
Its strongest criticisms
- Its acceptance of hierarchy as natural has been used to justify exclusions that those at the bottom did not consent to.
- Paternalism gives the powerful discretion over the welfare of others rather than giving those others rights.
- Defending a particular inheritance means choosing whose inheritance counts, and that choice is rarely made by those with least.
Common misconceptions
- That it is simply an older version of market conservatism. On economics the two often disagree, and classical conservatives are frequently the more sceptical of markets.
- That hierarchy means indifference to the poor. The tradition attaches strong obligations to those with power, and produced early factory and poor-law reform.
- That it is anti-intellectual. It is one of the more philosophically developed strands of conservative thought.
A caveat
Classical conservatism and modern conservatism can diverge sharply on economics. If your answers were traditional on society but sceptical of markets, this entry may fit better than the general one.
Sources
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790
- Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum · 1891
- T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture · 1948