Conservatism
Established institutions carry knowledge that no individual reformer possesses, so change should be gradual and the burden of proof falls on the reformer.
What does this mean?
Conservatism is less a set of policies than a claim about knowledge. Societies are enormously complex; the institutions that survive in them — families, religions, legal customs, forms of property — have been tested against reality by generations of people, and often work for reasons nobody alive can fully articulate. A reformer who cannot explain what an institution does may still be wrong to remove it. This is why conservatives place the burden of proof on change rather than on continuity.
In contemporary politics conservatism generally means support for private property and markets, strong defence, firm criminal law, national sovereignty, and respect for religious and family traditions. But conservatives have historically also defended public institutions, restricted markets where they eroded communities, and opposed radical economic disruption — Disraeli’s factory legislation is as conservative as Thatcher’s privatisations. The common thread is caution about deliberate large-scale change, not any fixed economic position.
Where did it come from?
Given its first systematic statement by Edmund Burke in 1790 as a response to the French Revolution — not against reform as such, but against remaking a society from first principles. It has since taken many national forms, from continental Christian democracy to Anglo-American market conservatism.
Major thinkers
- Edmund Burke
- Michael Oakeshott
- Roger Scruton
- Russell Kirk
Historical figures
- Benjamin Disraeli
- Winston Churchill
- Konrad Adenauer
- Margaret Thatcher
- Ronald Reagan
What it looks like today
- The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom
- Christian democratic parties in Germany and across continental Europe
- The Republican Party in the United States
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
Market-oriented in most modern parties, though the tradition also contains paternalist currents that restrain markets to protect communities.
The state in the economy
Personal liberty
Tradition and change
The defining axis: continuity is preferred, and inherited arrangements are given the benefit of the doubt.
Nation and the world
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Punishment is treated as owed to the wrongdoer and to the victim, not only as a means of reducing future offending.
Its strongest arguments
- Reforms regularly produce consequences their designers did not anticipate, and caution is a reasonable response to that record.
- Institutions that have survived a long time have been tested against conditions no single generation can foresee.
- Continuity has real value to people: predictable rules and stable communities are part of what makes a life plannable.
Its strongest criticisms
- The same reasoning was used to defend slavery, denial of the vote and untouchability, each of which required deliberate reform to end.
- Treating survival as evidence of usefulness can confuse arrangements that work for everyone with arrangements that work for whoever holds power.
- Caution has a cost that is paid by the people the current arrangement is failing, and that cost is often invisible to those it is not failing.
Common misconceptions
- That conservatism opposes all change. Burke himself argued that a state without the means of change is without the means of its own conservation.
- That it is necessarily pro-market. Conservative traditions in Europe and Asia have often restrained markets to protect families and communities.
- That it means defending whatever exists. Conservatives have frequently sought to restore arrangements that were lost, which is not the same as defending the status quo.
A caveat
What counts as conservative depends entirely on what a country has to conserve. An Indian conservative, a Swedish conservative and an American conservative are defending very different inheritances.
Sources
- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790
- Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays · 1962
- Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative · 2014