Conservatism

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. ...

Edmund Burke Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on 12 January 1729 and died in Beaconsfield, England, on 9 July 1797. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and trained in law in London, he became a writer and, from 1766, a Whig member of the House of Commons, where he sat for nearly three decades. His work is not a philosophical system but a body of essays, speeches, and pamphlets occasioned by concrete political questions: the relation of Crown and Parliament, the conflict with the American colonies, the East India Company’s rule in India, and the French Revolution. His contribution to political philosophy lies precisely in this interplay of principle and circumstance. ...