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To provide such an account, arguably the most convincing theoretical model is that advocated by the contemporary scholar Michael Freeden, most notably in his groundbreaking work Ideologies and Political Theory (1996). Freeden argues that although Mannheim’s work is insightful, conservatism should not just be viewed as a peculiarly ‘reactive’ movement but as a full-scale political ideology. By this he does not mean to label conservatism as a delusion, a form of ‘false consciousness’ in the Marxian sense of the word, since on his definition an ‘ideology’ does not represent a limited, blinkered view of political life, incapable of adaptation. Rather, for Freeden, an ideology is a sophisticated and flexible way of understanding political life, which exhibits not only a certain degree of systematization of ideas, but also an ability to adapt, to respond to changing historical and political circumstances (Freeden 1996: 124–7). An ideology is, in other words, usually capable of mobilizing active political support as well as inspiring intellectual statements – and re-statements – of its ideas (Freeden 1996: 16, 552–3). As such, he argues, political ideologies are not crudely organized around one particular concept, but instead have a conceptually complex internal structure. While they will have some stable ‘core’ concepts, which remain fairly constant, they also have ‘adjacent’ and ‘peripheral’ concepts, whose relationship with each other and with the core changes over time, as their relative importance alters (Freeden 1996: 77–91). Indeed, in some cases, even concepts that have previously been at the core of an ideology may cease to be so, and become adjacent concepts instead (Freeden 1996: 84). Thus, Freeden argues, while liberals almost always set ‘liberty’ as a core concept at the heart of liberalism, precisely what liberty actually means will be affected by its changing relationship with adjacent and peripheral concepts within the ideology. For example, in mid-nineteenth-century liberal political theory in Britain ‘liberty’ was generally defined in contradistinction to ‘society’ and ‘social welfare’, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, in the work of such theorists as L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson, the idea that guaranteeing welfare was indispensable to the pursuit of liberty – and indeed that one of the main points of that pursuit was to ensure the flourishing of society in general – had become far more prevalent. ‘Society’ had thus become a concept adjacent to ‘liberty’ in liberal political theory; indeed, in some cases it had become more or less inseparable from it. Conversely, the right to individual private property, which for some liberal theorists had been a core component of liberalism and a key guarantor of freedom, became far less central, given the new stress on the flourishing of society at large (Freeden 1996: 202–9). Likewise, the demand for equal voting rights for women – a largely peripheral component of liberalism in nineteenth-century Britain – became by the early twentieth century increasingly linked to another of its core concepts, namely that of progress.

How, then, does Freeden think that conservatism functions as a political ideology, and what does he believe its ‘core concepts’ to be? Echoing some of the arguments we made earlier, he concedes that it is difficult to identify conservatism with a set of substantive core concepts in the same way that one can with the more ‘progressive’ ideologies of liberalism and socialism, since the ideological commitments of conservatives have been so variable. Rather, he seeks to build upon the more historically focused analyses of conservatism that we examined above, but to combine them into a more sophisticated structure. He argues that conservative ideology has four ‘core’ concepts – which of course can be combined with various (often more substantive) ‘adjacent’ and ‘peripheral’ ones. The core concepts are, first, a commitment to controlling or managing historical change, which at the very least favours caution in altering the status quo over radical change, and may (more ambitiously) claim that only change in accordance with ‘natural’ development or an ‘organic tradition’ should be considered legitimate. Freeden thus picks up Oakeshott’s and Gilmour’s arguments about conservatives following a ‘natural’ tradition, but treats these as a statement of conservative ideology, rather than as objective descriptions about tradition and historical change (Freeden 1996: 332–3).

Second, Freeden maintains that conservatives almost always contend that social and political institutions are shaped and constrained by ‘extra-human’ forces – forces independent of human control such as ‘God’, ‘history’, ‘biology’ or ‘order’, depending on the era. In other words, rather than viewing social and political institutions as being primarily created by conscious individual effort, conservatives argue – or indeed often assume – that the survival of these institutions depends on respecting such quasi-natural forces. Thus, in the nineteenth century, conservatives deemed it vital to the social order that there was a strong sense of hierarchy within society – sometimes buttressing such claims with evolutionary arguments about race – while in the twentieth century they often took economic arguments, whether Keynesian or post-Keynesian, as having an unquestionable, quasi-scientific status. And conservatives have almost always demanded that the family be accorded particular respect as a ‘natural’ institution. For Freeden, this explains the scepticism that conservatives usually exhibit about the possibility of improving social and political institutions by conscious design, since the stress on the vital nature of ‘extra-human’ factors in conservative thought demotes the importance of human agency and purpose, setting up a sharp dichotomy between the ‘natural’ evolution of institutions on the one hand, and the ‘artificial’ imposition of human design and planning on the other (Freeden 1996: 334–5).

These are conservatism’s two most fundamental core concepts, according to Freeden. But they are also combined with two others that, together with conservatives’ dislike of rapid and radical change, help to reveal why conservative beliefs have been so historically variable. First, going beyond Mannheim’s important insight that conservatives develop their concepts about freedom, rationality and the social order in reaction to those of progressives, Freeden stresses that, for conservatives, such concepts never play an identical role in conservatism as they do in liberal or socialist ideology. Although Mannheim is entirely right to stress that conservative concepts are formulated as (more concrete) polar opposites to those of the progressives, Freeden argues that this misses an important and fundamental point about conservatism. For, rather than constituting the core of conservative ideology in opposition to progressive ideology, such concepts always remain to some extent adjacent to the real core concepts of conservatism – namely the desire to manage change, and the conviction that human actions are always subject to ‘extra-human’ influences.

This helps to explain the variability of such concepts within conservatism, Freeden argues, since on the face of it conservatives appear to be fundamentally inconsistent, variously advocating the importance of aristocratic hierarchy, mass democracy, income inequality and relatively generous welfare states. But in fact, these radical inconsistencies become readily explicable if they are viewed as subsidiary to the core conservative desires to control change and treat human agency as subject to an ‘extra-human’ order, since such adjacent conservative concepts are always constituted as responses to progressivism, just in divergent ways at different times (Freeden 1996: 335–40). Indeed, Freeden emphasizes, it is important to stress that conservatives’ formulation of such concepts is far from being a passive process; rather, they are chosen precisely to combat whichever ‘threat’ to the current social and political order seems most pressing. (To give just one of Freeden’s examples, in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, Victorian conservatives sought to combat liberal demands for more equal rights, particularly voting rights, by stressing the importance of a pre-existing aristocratic order for ensuring social and political stability; by the early twentieth century, however, they were instead stressing the virtues of universal private property rights against incipient demands for socialist redistribution [Freeden 1996: 339–40].) Paradoxically, Freeden argues, this can mean that if progressive demand for change is particularly strong, conservative support for the status quo can harden into conceptual rigidity, since although in the longer term a major strength of conservatism is its adaptability, in the shorter term the form conservatism takes is always parasitic on its progressive opponents (Freeden 1996: 341–2).⁷

One key factor, then, in understanding how conservatism operates and why it puts forward such an array of different positions, is that it has fundamentally different core concepts from those of the progressive ideologies. Thus, conservatism does not simply provide alternative definitions of such core progressive concepts as ‘liberty’, ‘progress’ and ‘equality’, but accords them a merely adjacent status within its ideological position. However, Freeden argues, conservatism’s diversity and complexity can only truly be appreciated if we highlight a second factor in its response to such ideologies: not only does conservatism seek to formulate concepts in opposition to the most pressing threat to the social order, but it also often misinterprets (wilfully or otherwise) what the actual core concepts of such progressive ideologies are. Thus many post-war conservatives, confronted with the core socialist demands for greater equality and community, often chose to conceptualize such aims as being identical to the adjacent socialist demand for greater nationalization, with the result that conservatives appeared to be stressing privatization and decentralization as core concepts. Equally, a common conservative strategy to combat Marxism has been to conflate all forms of the ideology with ‘totalitarianism’, to imply that all Marxist movements are necessarily committed to state violence – a charge that is clearly fairer in some cases than others. And this phenomenon may be further complicated, Freeden argues, by the fact that conservatives sometimes decide they have previously been genuinely mistaken about the nature of their ideological opponent, with the result that they revisit their judgement about the nature of the threat, and pursue policies that appear to be aiming to put the clock back, rather than merely controlling or limiting social or political change. Thus many British and American conservatives in the 1980s clearly felt that they had been mistaken about the degree of state intervention they had allowed to occur since the end of the Second World War, with the result that they recalibrated their approach to give a greater prominence to individual liberty and private property within the conservative conceptual arsenal than had been the case in recent times. In such cases, the ideological position remains genuinely conservative, Freeden argues, since it is designed to preserve a pre-existing social order – just one that had existed rather earlier than the present. But the tactics involved then become, at least on the surface, rather more radical (Freeden 1996: 343–4).

What Freeden’s analysis of conservative ideology allows us to do, then, is combine the more historically focused attempts at understanding conservatism we examined earlier into a more satisfactory structure. Rather than trying to analyse conservatism as purely backward-looking, or as an attempt to remain true to a particular tradition, or even simply as a sophisticated reaction to progressive ideologies, Freeden incorporates all of these into a method of analysing conservatism as a fully fledged ideology, based around the core concepts of managing change and of an ‘extra-human’ dimension to individual agency. What this helps to explain above all is how flexible and adaptable conservatism is. For although, as Freeden argues, all sophisticated political ideologies have the ability to evolve and adapt, this ability is especially central to conservatism – even if it comes at the cost of being parasitic on more progressive ideologies – since, according to his account, conservatism arises directly in response to progressive attempts at amelioration and alteration.

One major advantage of such an approach is that it removes the need to distinguish the various different types of conservatism radically from one another, redefining them in terms of other conceptual vocabulary, whether this be as varieties of the political ‘Right’ – such as ‘moderate Right’, ‘radical Right’, ‘extreme Right’ – or in terms of other vocabulary altogether, such as ‘Christian democrat’, ‘romantic’ or ‘reactionary’. This of course does not preclude making distinctions between different types of conservatism. There are, for example, important differences of emphasis between those forms of conservatism that tend to favour a more active attempt to return politics and society to an earlier point; those that are pessimistic about the current prospects for successful adaptation without the survival of earlier norms, but see little prospect of retaining or resuscitating them; and those that are more cautiously optimistic. One may even contend that Freeden should have made more of these differences of emphasis in his analysis. But this should not detract from his major achievement in establishing that all such ideological positions are ultimately species of conservatism, rather than being radically separate forms of right-wing thinking.⁸ What Freeden’s approach provides, in other words, is a way of identifying what differentiates conservatism from other ideological positions while also respecting its extreme adaptability.

However, what Freeden in Ideologies and Political Theory does not give us is a full account of how conservatism has evolved historically as a political ideology. This is entirely understandable in a pioneering work that seeks to prove the importance of a whole new area of scholarly study, but such an account is nevertheless vital, given conservatism’s intrinsic variability. While conceptual analyses of the different forms of conservatism are essential, particularly in view of the myriad forms the ideology can take, nevertheless, given that the very essence of conservatism is to be oppositional, to seek to control change, we need to trace its evolution historically in order to understand it properly. Such an approach has two advantages in particular. First, it enables us to explore the development of conservatism in the context of its struggle with rival ideologies, examining how it has sought to combat various progressive threats from liberalism and socialism (amongst others) during its long and complex history. Second, it also enables us to chart how conservatism is to be distinguished from political ideologies and movements which, although distinct, have at various points been closer to conservatism than the more progressive ideologies. Thus, at various historical junctures, movements such as ‘libertarianism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘Christian democracy’, ‘populism’ and even ‘fascism’, to name only the most influential, have been deemed to overlap with conservatism. Analysing conservatism in a historical and developmental fashion enables us to examine the degree to which such movements have been similar to conservatism, and even in some cases provided intellectual ammunition for it.