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Where, then, should our investigation of conservatism start? This innocent-sounding question in fact conceals a keenly fought debate about the origins of political ideologies, including liberalism and socialism as well as conservatism. For even if we exclude other countries and focus solely on Britain, there is considerable disagreement about when one can start talking of ‘conservatism’ and ‘liberalism’, as opposed to older labels and dichotomies like ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ or ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’. Thus Robert Eccleshall, for example, introducing a well-known anthology of English conservatism, begins his survey of conservative thought with Charles II’s Restoration in 1660, but eschews using the term ‘conservatism’ until he reaches the eighteenth century (Eccleshall 1990). Other more recent commentators have suggested that it is a mistake to apply the label to any period before the beginning of a more ‘professional’ politics at the end of the nineteenth century, or even genuine mass democracy in the twentieth (Bourke 2018). Moreover, such disagreements only proliferate if we expand our focus to encompass other countries and regions, since industrialization, the 1848 revolutions in Europe, slavery, imperialism and mass politics, for example, have had differing effects on different countries at different times.

Nevertheless, there seems good reason to begin our survey of conservatism in the late eighteenth century, which commentators have long viewed as a plausible place to seek the birth of modern political ideologies, in view of the triple effects of the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In particular, Mannheim’s argument that there was no need for ‘conservatism’ as an ideology while previous early modern traditions went unquestioned remains a strong one (Mannheim 1986; Koselleck 2004). Given the limitations of a fairly short book, I will be confining my exploration of conservative development largely to Britain, France and the United States, with the occasional glance at Germany and Italy. Obviously to some extent such a choice is somewhat arbitrary, but, on the positive side, it still allows us to draw some important comparisons between how conservatives reacted to similar challenges in countries with very different national traditions, and to explore how Freeden’s excellent analysis of conservatism can be applied in a wide range of different contexts.⁹ Thus Chapter 2 seeks to examine how conservatives in Britain, France and the United States reacted to the French Revolution, industrialization and the Enlightenment, looking at the wide variety of responses in each country in turn.¹⁰ Chapter 3 shifts to exploring how conservatives reacted to the 1848 revolutions, the intensification of nationalism and imperialism, and the advent of mass politics, taking the story up to the First World War. Chapter 4 then examines how conservatives responded to the development of mass politics, the advent of socialism, and mid-twentieth-century scepticism about political theory, amongst other challenges, from roughly 1918 to the 1960s. Finally, Chapter 5 explores how conservatives reacted to the end of the economic ‘golden age’ that followed the Second World War, the impact of the liberalizing movements of the 1960s, and the problems that New Right conservatism itself presented to more traditionalist conservatives. Finally, a brief epilogue cautions against predicting the demise of conservatism too readily.