Conservatism

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Edmund Neill. Conservatism

Table of Contents

Guide

Pages

Series Title. Key Concepts in Political Theory

Conservatism

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

1 Defining Conservatism

The Challenge of Defining Conservatism

Defining Conservatism: One Key Concept?

Defining Conservatism: Historical Approaches. Samuel Huntington: ‘dispositional’ conservatism

Michael Oakeshott and Ian Gilmour: ‘traditionalist’ approaches to defining conservatism

Karl Mannheim: conservatism and traditionalism

Michael Freeden’s Approach to Political Ideologies

Plan for the Book

Notes

2 Conservatism from the French Revolution to 1848. The Challenge of the Enlightenment, Industrialization and the French Revolution

Conservatism in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

Edmund Burke

Post-1815 conservatism: ‘liberal Toryism’

Post-1815 conservatism: ‘romantic Toryism’

Conservatism in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century France: The Revolution and Its Aftermath

Moderate reform: Jacques Mallet du Pan

‘Theocratic conservatives’: Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald

Post-1815 conservatism: Vicomte de Chateaubriand

Conservatism in the Early United States: Puritanism and Slavery

Early conservatism in the United States: Puritanism

Southern conservatism: John C. Calhoun and George Fitzhugh

Conclusion

Notes

3 Conservatism from 1848 to the First World War. New Challenges (1848–1914)

Conservative Response I: An Embrace of the Market

Conservative Response II: Nationalism and Imperialism

Conservative Response III: Nostalgia, Radicalism and Pessimism

Conclusion

Notes

4 Conservatism in the Era of the Two World Wars. New Challenges: From the First World War to the 1960s

Conservative Response I: Embracing Mass Democracy – Stanley Baldwin and Michael Oakeshott

Conservative Response II: Elitist Sociology – Vilfredo Pareto

Conservative Response III: Values from the Ancient World – Leo Strauss

Conservative Response IV: Values from Christianity – T. S. Eliot and Jacques Maritain

Conservatism and Fascism

Conclusion

Notes

5 Conservatism from the 1960s to the Present. New Challenges: From Permissiveness to Populism

Conservative Response I: New Right Conservatism

New Right conservatism in Britain: Thatcherism

New Right conservatism in the USA

Conservative Response II: Traditionalism

Conservative Response III: Post-New Right Conservatism – David Willetts, John Gray, Jesse Norman

Conservative Response IV: Neo-conservatism

Conservative Response V: Conservative Populism – Saviour or Cuckoo?

Conclusion

Notes

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

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Edmund Neill

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First, it is an explicit ideological position, which comes into being in response to dramatic social changes, in order to combat the progressive political ideologies associated with those changes. Conservatism, in other words, is itself a modern phenomenon, since, prior to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, it had no raison d’être. Second, as an explicit ideological position, conservatism seeks to put forward a comprehensive alternative to the core concepts of liberal Enlightenment thought, favouring above all an emphasis on the concrete over the abstract. So, Mannheim argues, rather than stressing universality, abstract natural rights and rationalism in general, as the Enlightenment thinker does, the conservative seeks to emphasize the importance of different individual situations, the holistic nature of society, and a dynamic, historical approach to reasoning – of ‘history, life, and nation’, as he puts it. As such, the Enlightenment concept of ‘freedom’, for example, is not simply rejected by the conservative; rather, it is recast as something concrete, historically specific and only comprehensible within a wider social framework (Mannheim 1986: 107–10).

In suggesting that conservatism is best defined as an explicitly modern phenomenon that specifically emerges to combat the effects of sociological changes and progressive ideologies associated with the French Revolution, Mannheim provided a more promising definition than those who seek to identify conservatism with a backward-looking nostalgia or an adherence to a single natural, hegemonic, tradition. Moreover, his observation that conservatives have often sought to rebut progressives’ arguments by contending that their abstract concepts are better defined in concrete and historically situated terms provides a valuable insight into how conservatism operates. However, given Mannheim’s focus on conservatism’s origins, what his account lacks is a full account of how conservatism develops, and in particular of what provides it with lasting coherence as it has evolved and mutated from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century to the present.

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