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This aspect of conservatism, stressing the extent to which it represents a particular response to changing social and political conditions – rather than simply doing one’s best to ‘follow’ the norms that an authentic tradition bestows – is particularly highlighted by the third method of analysing conservatism historically. The most sophisticated version of such an approach was put forward by the influential early twentieth-century sociologist Karl Mannheim, in his book Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (1925). For Mannheim, as for others seeking to analyse conservatism historically, conservatism must be distinguished from mere ‘traditionalism’ – in Huntington’s sense of being purely ‘reactive’. But, according to Mannheim, neither can it be identified with a purely backward-looking ideology, nor with the attempt to maintain and nourish a ‘natural’ ongoing tradition. Rather, he argues, conservatism must be regarded as a peculiarly modern response to sociological changes (ultimately initiated by the industrial revolution) which pose a challenge to traditional social structures and modes of political thinking. In particular, Mannheim argued, what originally inspired conservatism was a fourfold set of sociological changes associated with the modernization of society.

These are, first, the unification of societies, so that discrete, self-contained social units are joined together, often within the nation-state; second, that within such unified societies there develop differing social strata, some favouring progress, while others favour reaction; third, that divergent ‘worlds of ideas’ corresponding to these different strata also appear; and fourth, that these divergences increasingly take on an explicitly political character – so that the struggle between progressive ideas and those of reaction are increasingly fought out in an explicitly political sphere (Mannheim 1986: 83–6). All of these related developments mean that those seeking to preserve older social and political structures can no longer simply assume their worth and durability, but instead must explicitly argue for them. Hence the appearance, Mannheim argued, of a self-conscious conservatism,⁶ which has two key features.

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.