Conservatism

Conservatism is less a blueprint than a set of attitudes towards change. Conservatives doubt that human reason can design a good society from first principles; they see existing institutions, customs and traditions — family, religion, local community, common law, established constitutions — as the accumulated result of many generations' experience, containing knowledge that no single planner possesses. Change is necessary, but it should be gradual, should repair rather than replace, and should keep the burden of proof on reformers.

Burke and the critique of revolution

Edmund Burke is the 'master intellectual' of the tradition. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) attacked the revolutionaries' appeal to abstract 'rights of man', describing society instead as a partnership 'between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born'. Burke was not opposed to all change — 'a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation' — but to revolutionary utopianism that destroys institutions in the name of untested principles. Historians note that his canonical status as the founder of conservatism was largely constructed in the late nineteenth century.

Scepticism about reason

David Hume is often read as a precursor because of his scepticism about reason and reliance on custom, though others treat him as a proto-liberal. Conservatism in this sense is a particularist scepticism: it distrusts general theories and prefers the knowledge embedded in practices. Michael Oakeshott's essay 'On Being Conservative' (1956) presents conservatism as a disposition rather than a creed — a preference for the familiar over the unknown, the actual over the possible — and politics as the art of moving within an existing tradition rather than the engineering of a perfect society.

Strands

• Traditionalist conservatism stresses religion, hierarchy, community and duty.
• Liberal-conservative and free-market conservatism, prominent in the British and American New Right of the 1980s, combined defence of markets with social conservatism; critics see this as a departure from Burkean caution, since unrestrained markets can erode the family, nation and community that conservatives value.
• Christian democracy, influential in post-war Western Europe, joined Catholic social teaching, subsidiarity and a social-market economy.
• National conservatism in the twenty-first century emphasises national sovereignty, cultural continuity and scepticism of supranational bodies and immigration.

Friedrich Hayek, often grouped with conservatives, wrote 'Why I Am Not a Conservative' (1960), arguing that conservatism has no principle for guiding change and tends to use state power to protect established positions. His defence of spontaneous order nevertheless shares Burke's view that valuable institutions are the product of human action but not of human design.

• British constitutional evolution. The United Kingdom's uncodified constitution, which changes through statute, convention and judicial precedent rather than founding moments, is often cited as a conservative model of gradual adaptation.
• Reform to preserve. Benjamin Disraeli's Conservative government passed the Second Reform Act (1867), extending the franchise, and Otto von Bismarck introduced social insurance in the 1880s partly to blunt socialist challenges — examples of conservatives enacting change to stabilise existing order.
• Christian democracy. Konrad Adenauer's CDU in West Germany and Christian Democratic parties in Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands shaped post-war welfare states, European integration and the 'social market economy'.
• The New Right. Margaret Thatcher's governments (1979–1990) and Ronald Reagan's administration (1981–1989) combined privatisation, deregulation and tax cuts with appeals to traditional values.
• Institutional devices. Conservative design preferences appear in supermajority and entrenchment rules for constitutional amendment, bicameralism with a revising chamber, sunset clauses and pilots before national roll-out, and in deference to customary and indigenous law — and, in alternative governance, in James C. Scott's critique of 'high modernist' schemes that ignore local knowledge.

• Status-quo bias. Liberal and radical critics argue that conservatism defends whatever exists, including injustice; James Mill mocked Burke for protecting institutions 'not because it was good, but, because it existed'.
• Which tradition? Modern societies contain many conflicting traditions; conservatism offers little guidance on which inherited practices deserve preservation and which, like slavery or legal subordination of women, should be abolished.
• No principle of change. Hayek argued that conservatism cannot offer an alternative direction, only a brake, and tends towards using state power to protect privilege.
• Internal tension. Free-market and traditionalist conservatives disagree about whether market dynamism undermines the communities and institutions conservatism seeks to protect.
• Exclusion. Critics argue that appeals to national or cultural continuity can justify discrimination against minorities and immigrants.

Conservative parties have been among the most electorally successful political forces of the democratic era, and many conservative cautions have been vindicated by the failures of revolutionary and high-modernist projects, from forced collectivisation to planned cities that ignored how people live. At the same time, many reforms conservatives once opposed — universal suffrage, the welfare state, decolonisation, equal rights for women — became settled institutions that later conservatives defend.

For governance design, conservatism contributes a methodological lesson rather than a model: reforms should be piloted, reversible and sensitive to local knowledge and existing practice; institutions that have survived may embody solutions to problems not visible to their critics; and the legitimacy of new institutions often depends on continuity with familiar forms. The weakness of the approach is that it offers few tools for deciding when existing arrangements are so unjust or dysfunctional that more radical change is warranted.

• Andy Hamilton, 'Conservatism', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
• Michael Oakeshott, 'On Being Conservative' (1956), in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)
• Friedrich A. Hayek, 'Why I Am Not a Conservative', postscript to The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
• James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998)