Disposition, Doctrine, or Ideology?

Conservatism is a tradition of political thought defined, to a large extent, by an attitude toward social change: prudence in the face of sweeping reform, esteem for inherited institutions and customs, and skepticism about the capacity of abstract reason to redesign society. There is a basic controversy over its status. For some authors it is a disposition or temperament that cannot be reduced to a program (Oakeshott’s thesis). For others it is an ideology with content of its own (authority, hierarchy, transcendent order, property), as in Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton. Samuel Huntington, in “Conservatism as an Ideology” (1957), proposed yet another reading, a situational one: conservatism is the defense of whatever established order is under threat, not a fixed set of beliefs. All three readings will prove useful below.

This article concentrates on the Anglophone and French canon running from Burke to contemporary authors. There are other conservative traditions (Iberian Catholic traditionalism, German conservatism, Latin American variants) that fall outside its scope except where needed to mark distinctions. For the contrast with the liberal tradition, see Classical Liberalism: Locke, Mill, Berlin, Hayek.

Burke and the Reflections on the Revolution in France

Edmund Burke (1729–1797), Irish-born and a British Whig member of Parliament, is regarded as the founder of modern conservatism, although the label postdates him. The point matters: Burke defended the Glorious Revolution of 1688, supported the cause of the American colonists (for example in his speech on conciliation with America, 1775), criticized British administration in India (the impeachment of Warren Hastings), and defended a free grain trade in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (written in 1795). He was therefore no opponent of change in general.

The Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) began as a response to a sermon by the Dissenting minister Richard Price, delivered in November 1789, which welcomed the French events. The book develops several arguments that became the matrix of conservative thought:

  • Critique of abstract rights. Burke does not deny rights; he speaks of the “real rights of men” (such as justice, the fruits of one’s own labor, and instruction), but denies that metaphysical rights deduced from an abstract human nature can be applied directly to politics without the mediation of circumstances. Politics is a practical science, not a geometry.
  • Prescription. The legitimacy of institutions and property can be grounded in long use and continuity, by analogy with legal prescription. The English constitution is an inheritance, and English liberties an entailed patrimony to be handed on, not a set of rights invented at a founding moment.
  • Prejudice. Burke uses the term in a non-pejorative sense: prejudice is a sedimented judgment, the fruit of generations, that spares each individual from recalculating by reason at every decision. Individual reason, he says, is a small private stock, and nations do better to draw on the common bank of the ages. The rehabilitation of prejudice returns in the hermeneutics of Gadamer, who, without being a political conservative, takes up the idea that understanding always proceeds from inherited pre-judgments.
  • Society as a partnership across generations. Against a reading of society as an occasional contract, Burke affirms that it is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The consequence is a duty of transmission, and the objection to radical reform is that the present has no right to squander the legacy. This may be compared with the contractarian reading examined in The Social Contract.
  • Reform and revolution. Burke holds, in essence, that a state without the means of change lacks also the means of its conservation: he prefers gradual, corrective reform that preserves continuity to rupture driven by an abstract plan.

In an earlier work, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), Burke defended the legitimacy of parties as associations built around principle and wrote: “When bad men combine, the good must associate.” That sentence is his. The famous saying that “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” is not traceable to Burke in any known primary source. Quotation scholars regard it as a later paraphrase of uncertain origin, and its attribution to him as spurious.

Maistre and Counter-Revolutionary Traditionalism

Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), a Savoyard magistrate and diplomat of the Kingdom of Sardinia in St Petersburg (1803–1817), is often grouped with Burke, but the grouping must be made with care. In Considerations on France (1796) he reads the Revolution as a providential judgment on a society that had strayed from the religious order; in On the Pope (1819) he defends the sovereign and infallible authority of the pontiff as the foundation of European order; in St Petersburg Dialogues (1821, posthumous) he develops a reflection on sovereignty, sacrifice, and punishment in which the executioner holds a central symbolic place.

The differences from Burke are significant:

  • Political theology and authority. In Maistre, social order has a religious and providential basis; sovereignty is by nature absolute and grounded in authority, not in consent.
  • Rejection of written constitutions. Maistre holds that constitutions are not manufactured by deliberation: they arise from circumstances and time. He also criticizes the notion of a universal “man” (he says he has met Frenchmen, Italians, and Russians but never “man”), an argument he shares with Burke but which in Maistre serves a radical critique of the Enlightenment.
  • Restorationist aim. Burke accepts reform and defends the Whiggism of 1688; Maistre is a counter-revolutionary thinker who aims at the restoration of legitimate monarchy and the union of throne and altar.

The distinction recurs in the literature. Karl Mannheim, in Conservative Thought (1927), separates traditionalism, an attachment to inherited ways of life that is nearly universal, from conservatism, which arises as a reflective and self-conscious response to modernity and revolutionary rationalism. In this article, the counter-revolutionary traditionalism of Maistre and others (such as Louis de Bonald, 1754–1840, and, in Spain, Donoso Cortés, 1809–1853) is treated as a related but distinct current from the Burkean conservatism.

Coleridge and Tocqueville: Conservation, Liberty, and Mores

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), poet and thinker, set out in On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) a theory in which political order depends on the balance between two principles: permanence (represented chiefly by landed interests) and progression (represented by commercial and industrial interests). He defended a “clerisy,” a class of learned persons devoted to national culture and supported by a public endowment. Coleridge’s importance is twofold: he gave conservatism an organic and moral conception of the political community, and he also influenced Mill, who set him against Bentham in two essays (1838 and 1840) and acknowledged his contribution to understanding the moral conditions of social cohesion.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) is the borderline case. In Democracy in America (1835–1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), he accepts equality of conditions as an irreversible tendency of modern societies but fears its pathologies, among them individualism, conformism, and soft despotism. He values intermediate institutions, religion, mores (mœurs), and local self-government as counterweights. Many classify him as a liberal, and Hayek cites him among the thinkers of the liberal tradition he claims; others stress his affinity with conservatism in his distrust of revolutionary rationalism and in the thesis that the Revolution prolonged the administrative centralization of the Old Regime. His position is thus an example of how porous the boundaries between liberalism and conservatism are, as the article on classical liberalism also shows.

Oakeshott: Rationalism and the Conservative Disposition

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) provides the most philosophically refined formulation of the thesis that conservatism is a disposition. In Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962), he criticizes rationalism in politics: the belief that political activity consists in applying a technique (a set of explicit, universal principles) to problems, overlooking that much practical knowledge is tacit and acquired in practice within a tradition. The rationalist, Oakeshott says, wants to start from scratch and trusts in ideologies, which he regards as abstract summaries of existing practices rather than their source.

In the essay “On Being Conservative,” he develops the idea that to be conservative is, above all, a preference of character: “to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried,” a preference he extends to pairs such as the limited and the unbounded, the sufficient and the superabundant. It is not a dogma about history but a way of appreciating what one has and of accepting change as something to be conducted with care, not abolished. In another essay (“Political Education,” 1951), Oakeshott likens political activity to sailing on a sea with neither harbor nor anchorage: what matters is to keep the vessel afloat, drawing on the resources of one’s own tradition of behavior.

Government, in Oakeshott, has a limited function: to arbitrate, to preserve peace among conflicting interests, rather than to lead society toward a common end. His later work, On Human Conduct (1975), distinguishes “civil association” from “enterprise association,” which brings him close to liberalism at an important point and feeds the debate over his classification. A common objection is that the “disposition” is too vague to guide choices (what is to be preserved when the tradition is divided?) and may become a justification of the status quo, whatever it is.

Kirk and Scruton: From Canon to Theory

Russell Kirk (1918–1994) gave American conservatism an intellectual genealogy in The Conservative Mind (1953), tracing a line from Burke to figures of the twentieth century. Kirk formulated “canons” of conservative thought, among them, in summary: belief in a transcendent order governing society; affection for the variety and mystery of traditional life; the conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes; the link between property and freedom; faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters and calculators”; and the recognition that change is not always salutary reform. Kirk rejected the label “ideology,” reserving it for the doctrinaire movements he wished to criticize.

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) is the leading English-language conservative philosopher of the next generation. In The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), he argues that conservatism is a defense of authority, allegiance, and the institutions that sustain a sense of belonging, and he criticizes liberal individualism. In Sexual Desire (1986), Green Philosophy (2012), and How to Be a Conservative (2014), he applies the perspective to aesthetic, ecological, and cultural themes. His emphasis on oikophilia, love of home and place, grounds a conservative environmental ethic that would prefer local and communal action to state regulation and large international organizations. The relation between conservatism and economic liberalism was a recurring theme in his work, in which a defense of the market coexists with a refusal to reduce conservatism to an economic doctrine. His positions were the object of intense public debate; philosophical analysis should keep to the arguments, not the biographical controversy.

Voegelin and Strauss: Critics of Modernity

Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) and Leo Strauss (1899–1973), émigrés from Central Europe to the United States, are often associated with American conservative thought, but their critique of modernity follows paths distinct from the Burkean and Oakeshottian tradition.

In The New Science of Politics (1952, from the Walgreen Lectures at Chicago), Voegelin interprets modern ideologies (progressivism, positivism, Marxism, Nazism) as forms of gnosticism: attempts to achieve within history a salvation that the Christian tradition located beyond it, with the resulting “immanentization of the eschaton.” His major work, Order and History (1956–1987), seeks to reconstruct experiences of order and transcendence in ancient civilizations. His criterion is not inherited tradition but openness to transcendence.

In Natural Right and History (1953), Strauss criticizes historicism and the separation of fact from value, and defends the recovery, in philosophical terms, of the question of classical natural right. His studies on the “art of writing” under persecution (Persecution and the Art of Writing, 1952) and on the moderns (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke) support the thesis of a “crisis of modernity.” Strauss discussed Burke, seeing in his appeal to prescription a step toward historicism, a reading that is disputed among interpreters. In both Strauss and Voegelin, the appeal is to an order that reason can recognize (not to a contingent inheritance), which distinguishes them from Anglo conservatism in the strict sense. Strauss’s association with neoconservatism is, moreover, a disputed question in the literature.

Conservatism, Reaction, and Liberalism

The analytical distinctions are essential:

  • Conservatism vs. reaction. The conservative, in the Burkean and Oakeshottian sense, wants to preserve what exists and to reform cautiously; the reactionary wants to restore an earlier, already lost state, rejecting the present order. Mark Lilla, in The Shipwrecked Mind (2016), insists on this contrast, describing the reactionary as moved by nostalgia for an imagined golden age. Corey Robin, from a critical standpoint, argues in The Reactionary Mind (2011) to the contrary that conservatism has been, since Burke, essentially a reaction to the emancipation of subordinate groups, so that the boundary would be less sharp than conservatives would like to claim.
  • Conservatism vs. counter-revolutionary traditionalism. See the section on Maistre and Mannheim’s distinction.
  • Conservatism vs. liberalism. There are zones of overlap (Burke was a Whig; Tocqueville oscillates; Hayek claims a liberal tradition that values evolved rules), but also differences: liberalism tends to take the individual and his rights as the starting point, whereas conservatism starts from institutions, inherited bonds, and community. In particular, twentieth-century conservatism split into traditionalist currents (Kirk) and currents committed to the free market, and the combination, sometimes called “fusionism,” has always been uneasy. See also the communitarian critique of liberalism by Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, which shares affinities with conservative themes, although its authors are not conservatives in the strict sense. MacIntyre, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), develops the idea of tradition-constituted rationality.

The Critiques

Hayek: “Why I Am Not a Conservative”

In the postscript to The Constitution of Liberty (1960), “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Friedrich Hayek distinguishes liberalism from conservatism. He acknowledges the latter as a legitimate and probably necessary attitude of opposition to drastic change, but objects that conservatism, by its very nature, “cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving”: it can only slow the march, without indicating a course. He adds that the conservative lacks principles that would allow him to coexist with those of different values and tends to favor the use of power to impose his morality. Hayek identifies, in short, with the Whig tradition of liberty, in which he places Burke. The critique has a precise target: continental European conservatism and the posture of defending whatever is established, not Burke’s Whiggism.

Paine: The Dead Governing the Living

Thomas Paine (1737–1809), in Rights of Man (1791–1792), answered Burke directly. He rejected the idea that one generation can bind the next: “The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.” For Paine, rights belong to the living; the authority of tradition does not replace reason or present consent. The Burkean reply would be that continuity is precisely the condition of liberty and that each generation is to receive and hand on a patrimony, not refound it.

Hirschman: The Rhetoric of Reaction

Albert O. Hirschman, in The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), analyzes the typical arguments historically used against reforms and identifies three theses: perversity (the proposed action will produce the opposite of what was intended), futility (the action will have no effect, since deep structures do not change), and jeopardy (the reform endangers earlier achievements). Hirschman applies the scheme to the three waves of rights described by T.H. Marshall (civil, political, social). The book does not treat conservatism as an error, but shows that its arguments have a recurrent rhetorical form that lends itself to mechanical use; it also observes that the progressive camp has symmetrical rhetorics (such as the claim that reform is inevitable or that history is on its side). Burke figures among the authors Hirschman discusses in connection with the perversity thesis.

Further Objections

There remains the objection, from Mannheim and Robin, that the appeal to tradition can legitimate unjust hierarchies, and the reply that tradition also contains resources of criticism and internal reform (a theme in Gadamer and MacIntyre). Finally, there is the problem of the criterion: when traditions conflict, or a tradition contains injustices, how is one to decide what to conserve without resorting to principles of which conservatism itself is suspicious?

Assessment

Philosophical conservatism contributes four lasting ideas to political philosophy: practical and tacit knowledge cannot be reduced to explicit rules; institutions are the result of long adjustment, and their destruction has costs that are hard to foresee; continuity between generations is a good that generates duties; and politics is not the application of a theory. Its weaknesses are indeterminacy about what to preserve, the difficulty of distinguishing accumulated wisdom from mere interest, and a persistent tension with economic liberalism and with individual rights. Each author treated here offers a different answer to these problems, which counsels against treating “conservatism” as a single bloc.

References

  • Burke, E. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790.
  • Burke, E. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. 1770.
  • Coleridge, S.T. On the Constitution of the Church and State. 1829.
  • Hayek, F.A. “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” postscript to The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago, 1960.
  • Hirschman, A.O. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
  • Huntington, S. “Conservatism as an Ideology.” American Political Science Review 51(2), 1957.
  • Kirk, R. The Conservative Mind. Chicago, 1953.
  • Lilla, M. The Shipwrecked Mind. New York, 2016.
  • MacIntyre, A. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 1988.
  • Maistre, J. de. Considérations sur la France (1796); Du Pape (1819); Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821).
  • Mannheim, K. “Das konservative Denken” (1927).
  • Oakeshott, M. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1962.
  • Oakeshott, M. On Human Conduct. Oxford, 1975.
  • Paine, T. Rights of Man. 1791–1792.
  • Robin, C. The Reactionary Mind. Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • Scruton, R. The Meaning of Conservatism. 1980.
  • Scruton, R. Green Philosophy. 2012; How to Be a Conservative. 2014.
  • Strauss, L. Natural Right and History. Chicago, 1953.
  • Tocqueville, A. de. De la démocratie en Amérique (1835–1840); L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856).
  • Voegelin, E. The New Science of Politics. Chicago, 1952.

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