CONSERVATISM

Conservatism, by definition, is a relative word. Derived from the Latin conservare, it refers in the broadest sense to the effort to safeguard or "conserve" elements of a culture, society, or political regime in the face of threatening or sudden change. It follows from this description that those describing themselves, or who are described, as "conservatives" will vary tremendously in accordance with what it is they seek to protect. When elements of the Soviet establishment sought to resist the changes proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, they were characterized in the popular press as "hardliners" or "conservatives," despite the fact that they were attempting to preserve a system—communism—that is otherwise associated with more radical tendencies. By contrast, self-described "conservatives" or "neoconservatives" in the early-twenty-first-century United States frequently uphold views that are radical in certain contexts. It may well be conservative to defend democracy and free-market capitalism in America, where the two are long established. But to aim to bring them to parts of the world that have never known them—even, if necessary, by force—is anything but.

Scholars of conservatism have attempted to take into account this semantic instability since at least the 1920s, when the Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) undertook a still-valuable study of the concept. Mannheim defined conservatism as an ideology "oriented to meanings that contain different objective contents in different epochs." More recently, the political scientist Samuel Huntington has described conservatism as a "positional ideology," always relative to time and circumstance. In Huntington's view, it makes little sense to speak of conservatism as an enduring political, intellectual, or ideological phenomenon.

If one treats conservatism as a transhistorical category, then Huntington undoubtedly has a point. Yet if conservatism is considered as a European intellectual and political tradition that took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then it is possible to speak of the phenomenon as an abiding set of general beliefs that, although varying considerably according to time and circumstance, nonetheless do cohere into something more specific than a mere positional ideology. Seen in this light, conservatism is, as the scholar Jerry Muller has observed, a set of enduring "assumptions, themes, and images." As such, it takes its place alongside the other great "isms" central to nineteenth-century European history: republicanism, socialism, and liberalism.

the origins of conservatism

It is revealing that the earliest uses of the terms conservatism and conservative occur in France and England. For it was in these two countries that conservatism assumed its earliest coherence as a political disposition. In France, the word conservateur was in use from at least 1794 to refer to one who advocated "conserving" various elements of the ancien reçgime, then under attack by the forces of the French Revolution. By 1815 the liberal theorist Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) was making reference to a "conservative spirit" (esprit conservateur) everywhere apparent in France following the defeat of Napoleon. In the subsequent decade, usage of this kind was increasingly common—witnessed, most strikingly, by the establishment of a leading French weekly, Le Conservateur, in 1818. Boasting the direct participation of François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), among others, the journal vowed in its inaugural issue to uphold "religion, the King, liberty … and respectable people" in an effort to preserve traditional values and institutions from revolutionary attacks.

In England, the word conservative was first employed in a self-consciously political sense as early as 1816, when the Anti-Jacobin Review saw fit to write "of those conservative principles which all good men ought not passively to foster and cherish, but actually promote." As in France, uses of the term multiplied in the succeeding decade, culminating in the first reference to the Tory Party as the "Conservative party" in an essay by John Miller of Lincoln's Inn in the Quarterly Review in January 1830. Although it would take the Tories some time to officially adopt that title, their spokesmen readily assumed the mantle informally, presenting themselves as the defenders of "conservative principles."

Conservative and conservatives, then, are predominantly nineteenth-century terms. Yet it would be shortsighted to assume that the principles of those who adopted these labels were no older than the words themselves. In fact, much of the intellectual capital on which later conservatives drew was developed in the eighteenth century in response to three great movements of change: state centralization, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution.

The first of these movements involved the usurpation of powers and prerogatives formerly in the hands of corporate bodies, towns, landed aristocrats, and local elites. As centralizing governments in the eighteenth century developed state bureaucracies and other institutions (armies, courts, police) capable of extending their dominion over ever-larger segments of the population, they threatened to displace the traditional authorities and aristocratic families that for centuries had administered justice and mediated power in local arenas. The result was not only bitterness but also the elaboration of a rhetoric that defended the importance of preserving established authorities and privileges as a means to defend against the lurking despotism of the state. As the French aristocrat and jurist Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) observed in his 1748 classic The Spirit of the Laws, "all experience proves that every man with power is led to abuse it." Consequently, "to prevent the abuse of power, things must be so ordered that power checks power."

The Spirit of the Laws was the most articulate eighteenth-century attempt to think through such an ordering. And although Montesquieu's arguments on behalf of what he called "intermediary powers" would also prove appealing to American revolutionaries and nineteenth-century liberals—most famously Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)—they provided a powerful rationale to contemporary conservatives who sought to protect vested interests from the creeping encroachments of the state. Repeated widely, they inspired spirited defenses from many other across Europe, most notably the Westphalian civil servant Justus Möser (1720–1794).

This eighteenth-century response to state centralization thus formed one fertile source of early conservative rhetoric. Of equal importance in terms of mobilizing conservative opinion was the Enlightenment. A multifaceted movement, replete with rival currents and national variations, the Enlightenment was by no means a universally radical phenomenon, and in fact produced conservative spokesmen of its own. Yet it was above all the radical thrust of Enlightenment culture that brought into being the most virulent response. Especially in the Catholic countries, the Enlightenment's attacks on what it deemed the "fanaticism" of the church provoked a broad-based "Counter-Enlightenment" response. Asserting the centrality of religious orthodoxy to social and political stability, this response put forth the necessity of hierarchy and authority to rein in fallen human beings predisposed to sin. It produced arguments on behalf of sentiment, emotion, and inherited norms (prejudice) as sources of knowledge as valid as reason. It greeted Enlightenment calls for greater sexual freedom with defenses of moral rectitude and the sanctity of the family. And it met the stilted claims of Enlightenment partisans to serve as torch-bearers for an age of darkness with arguments on behalf of the wisdom of tradition. According to this perspective, the general tendency of the Enlightenment's abstract theorists was destructive. The duty of its opponents was clear: to conserve.

Well before the French Revolution, then, Europeans had generated a considerable body of conservative thought, even if they never used the term itself. Neither, for that matter, did their greatest heir, the British statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797). And yet in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Burke offered the definitive statement of conservative philosophy for centuries to come.

The immediate purpose of the Reflections was itself profoundly conservative: to protect England and English institutions from the revolutionary conflagration in France. But in serving this immediate end, Burke fashioned a number of timeless principles that were applicable to a great variety of situations. Not surprisingly, many of them echoed the earlier sentiments of European conservatives avant la lettre. Burke stressed the need, for example, voiced by Montesquieu and others, for intermediary authorities—"opposed and conflicting interests"—to "interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolution." Like Counter-Enlightenment polemicists, he lambasted "men of theory" and "intriguing philosophers" for their "political metaphysics," emphasizing the "fallible and feeble contrivance" of human reason, and man's propensity to "pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, [and] sedition." He argued the necessity of hierarchy and a church to rein in human passions, and he highlighted the supreme importance of moral values to provide a "decent drapery" to cover over and contain our many human failings. Finally, and most famously, Burke presented culture and government as the product of the "collected reason of ages." Given that natural failings are many, and private allotment of reason small, human beings should treat with respect the legacy that had been granted to them by their ancestors, appreciating that there was a "latent wisdom" that prevailed in established customs, practices, and prejudices.

Which is not to say that Burke was opposed to innovation or improvement. Throughout the Reflections, he reiterated the necessity of a "slow, well-sustained progress," arguing that a government "without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." The twin tasks of state-craft, as he saw it, were "at once to preserve and to reform."

And yet there was another, somewhat darker, side to Burke's rhetoric in the Reflections. His all us ions to them obrunrampant—"as winish multitude"—ever-ready to trample its social betters under foot; his regrettable readiness to associate "jew-brokers" and "jew-[stock]jobbers" with both the "monied interest" and political intrigue; and finally his invocation of the language of conspiracy, warning of the "confederacies" and "cabal" of philosophers and Masons, who had formed a plot, a "regular plan" for the destruction of thrones and altars across Europe—all this found a receptive audience of people with whom Burke would otherwise have been ill at ease. Whereas his thought bequeathed a fund of principles that could be drawn upon by self-professed liberals and conservatives of a moderate cast, it also was embraced by men and women farther to the right who want ed no truck with parliaments, or to lerance, or well-sustained progress at all.

nineteenth-century conservatism

Historians sometimes distinguish between conservatism and "reaction" to characterize the often blurry line that separated those who followed the more moderate Burkean course from those, especially on the Continent, who believed that politics could never be a matter of compromise when it came to fighting the noxious influences of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. What Counter-Enlightenment polemicists had seen as the cosmic, world-historical battle between Enlightenment philosophy, on the one hand, and Christianity and divinely ordained kingship, on the other, was carried over into the post revolutionary period and presented as an epic struggle between good and evil. As the Savoyard nobleman Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) declared, the struggle between Christianity and philosophy was a "war to the death" waged between God and his enemies. In a war of this kind, there could be no middle ground.

Insofar as figures of this ilk advocated policies aimed explicitly at restoring the status quo ante—recovering privileges or rebuilding institutions destroyed by the Revolution or Napoleon (r. 1804–1814/15)—the terms reaction or reactionary are useful. Upholding a firm alliance between throne and altar, right-wing reactionaries sought the restitution of properties seized during the Revolution and the Napoleonic regimes and pressed for the recovery of other lost privileges and institutions of the ancien régime. Above all, they avowed allegiance to the "legitimate" monarchs who had ruled prior to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals.

The heyday of such reaction was the period of the Restoration following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. But this heyday was short-lived, brought to a close not only by revolution and revolt but also by these forces' own intransigence. In France, ultraroyalist reactionaries soon found themselves at odds with the restored Bourbon ruler Louis XVIII (r. 1814–1815, 1815–1824), disillusioned by his apparent willingness to accommodate various aspects of the revolutionary heritage. Elsewhere in Europe, one can trace a similar phenomenon. It is evident in the response of Prussian Junkers to the practical reform efforts of Frederick William III (r. 1797–1840); in the response of the Amicizia Cattolica, an association of pious aristocrats, to that group's dissolution by Charles Felix (r. 1821–1831), king of Piedmont-Savoy, in 1828; in the politics of the Zelanti, the reactionary cardinals of the Papal States who fought all concession to the legacy of the Enlightenment and the Revolution; and most dramatically, in the opposition to the limited, constitutional monarchy of Spain by the "Carlists," men more royalist than the king, who were willing to defend their convictions by taking up arms against the state.

Uncompromising, militant, inflexible, the politics of throne and altar was thus reactionary in its increasingly unrealistic desire for the restoration of a vanished Old Regime. But that same lack of realism—the visionary, even revolutionary insistence on taking Europe back to an idealized past that had never really existed—should prevent the free application of the term reactionary. For in certain respects, the Manichean politics of the early "right"—a term that had come into use during the French Revolution to designate the seating preferences of delegates to the National Assembly—was more indicative of the future than of the past. In the vision of a Maistre—at total odds with the pluralism, individualism, and secularism of modernity, obsessed with social cohesion, and quick to contemplate violence in the service of its preservation—one glimpses an early foretaste of the radical right-wing movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although it is far too sweeping to suggest, as Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) once did in a famous essay, that in Maistre one finds a precursor of European fascism, it is nonetheless undeniable that his thought, like that of other early right-wing prophets resonated with later, more combustible figures of the radical right, who were all too ready to mix nationalism, racism, and the politics of mass mobilization in terrible and explosive concoctions.

Between these forces, on the one side, and liberals, republicans, and (by the second half of the nineteenth century) socialists and communists, on the other, stood conservatives. In their common aversion to revolution, conservatives were perfectly ready at times to make common cause with reactionaries and those farther to the right, as they did during the European-wide revolutions of 1848 and in other cases thereafter. Yet they were also prepared to pursue their wider goals through practical accommodation with established governments, whether these be dynastic, parliamentary, or imperial. As the German conservative Friedrich von Gentz (1764–1832) explained, a conservative is someone "who seeks, within reasonable limits, to maintain the old ways and to guide the tide of history, when he is unable or unwilling to stem it, along controllable channels." In order to guide the tide of history, that is, it was easier to labor along channels already dug.

This, in fact, is the central story of nineteenth-century conservatism from the outset, when Prince Clemens von Metternich (1883–1859) and other leading statesmen established the Concert of Europe to preserve the inviolability of regimes after the fall of Napoleon. Working from within to ensure order and prevent the recurrence of further social upheaval, conservatives found their place in practical, pragmatic accommodation with extant powers.

That general pattern holds true even after the events of 1830 and 1848 proved the limitations of this policy, and spelled the demise of the Metternichian system. Whether as officials in the Prussian or Habsburg civil service; proponents of the French juste-milieu that ruled France under Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–1848); supporters of the Napoleonic legacy as embodied in his nephew, Napoleon III (r. 1852–1871); or representatives of the British Tory or Spanish Conservative parties, which for much of the second half of the nineteenth century shared power with their Whig and Liberal opponents—conservatives and conservatism continued to operate pragmatically to guarantee order and the rule of law. They sought to protect property rights and backed the established churches, pushing for a central role for religion in evolving national education programs. They upheld principles of hierarchy and social order, acting in support of notables and the aristocracy. And they worked to promote the love of country and the love of place, defending local interests while lending their support to evolving national patriotism.

Without question, conservatism's predilection for power often translated into cozy relationships with those in positions of wealth and authority in finance and industry, the army and the church, the aristocracy and the rural gentry. Moreover, conservative fears of disorder meant, in practice, the adoption of paternal or repressive policies designed to ensure that the "mob" did not take to the streets. To the extent that the machinery of the state could be harnessed in service of this task, conservatives displayed a proclivity for what the historian Michael Broers has called, borrowing a term from Marc Raeff, the "well-ordered police state," administered in defense of their own interests and general moral order. That proclivity coexisted, however, in uneasy tension with the older conservative distrust of central authority.

Yet the story of nineteenth-century conservatism is far more complicated than a simple opposition to disorder, change, modernity, or progress. It is undeniable, for example, that conservatives played a major role in breaking up the guilds, customs barriers, and other feudal atavisms that continued to impede freedom of trade and profession in the liberal nineteenth century. It was Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), a man who has been described as the founder of the Conservative Party in England, who finally repealed the Corn Laws at the expense of the great landed families, opening England's markets to foreign grain. And it was only with the aid of key conservatives that the Zollverein, the free-trade customs union of the German states, established in 1834, became a reality. In the French liberal François Guizot's (1787–1874) famous dictum "enrichissezvous" ("get rich"), many conservatives also found a long-term answer to the problem of poverty, and they worked to create the conditions—in finance, banking, manufacturing, and industry—so that more and more could do just that.

It was a conservative, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), who greatly expanded the English suffrage, enfranchising many working-class males in the Second Reform Act of 1867. And it was a conservative, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), who pushed through significant social legislation in the 1880s, initiating state-sponsored accident and old-age insurance as well an early form of subsidized medicine. It may be argued in both cases that the motives were cynical, and that is undoubtedly partly true. Yet the legislation was passed regardless, largely in the realization of that pragmatic conservative truth that in order to preserve, one must also reform.

conservatism and the new right

That same willingness to make compromises and concessions, however, entering into agreements with political opponents, could also prove a double-edged sword. This was especially the case on the Continent, and ironically, only after conservatives there had begun to learn that the "people" was not necessarily their enemy. Whereas at the beginning of the century conservatives had generally sought to restrict the suffrage, defending high property requirements for voting, the experience of Napoleon III and then the examples of Bismarck and Disraeli demonstrated that the "people" could be quite conservatively disposed. This was most clear in the realm of religion, where the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the mass mobilization of Catholics and other religious groups in defiance of the anticlerical policies favored by liberals, republicans, and socialists. A transnational phenomenon, Christian and especially Catholic mobilization involved the effective use of the means of mass politics, employing demonstrations and public protests, mass-circulation media, voluntary associations, and political parties to defend Catholic and conservative values. By opposing civil marriage or divorce, or fighting to defend and extend religious education to deprived social groups, conservative politicians could draw on considerable mass support.

And yet to do so in the arena of parliamentary regimes meant entering into compacts and compromises with the opposition. In Spain, for example, in a system that was known informally as the turno, conservatives and liberals of the Restoration monarchy (1875–1923) rotated regularly in power. Seen from the outside, and from the perspective of extraparliamentary extremes, Spanish liberals and conservatives could seem virtually indistinguishable. The danger for both parties was that they risked being tainted by the sins of their opponents, implicated in a larger regime that by the turn of the century was coming to be seen (and not without reason) as narrow and corrupt.

With parliamentary governments throughout Europe marred by scandals at the end of the nineteenth century, observers outside of Spain noted similar phenomena. The French socialist Jules Guesde (1845–1922), for example, remarked ruefully that members of the moderately republican Radical Party distinguished themselves from conservatives only by their hypocrisy. Meanwhile, conservative Catholics in France might wonder how much their alleged supporters really differed from their left-wing colleagues across the aisle. Speaking in November 1874, the erstwhile Orlùanist Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) could maintain that "the Republic, if it is to exist at all, cannot but be conservative," and for some time it was, prompting many Catholics to heed Pope Leo XIII's (r. 1878–1903) call to "rally" to the republic in the early 1890s. Already by this point, however, the confederation of French conservatives known as the "Union des Droites" that had acted with some success in parliament in the 1880s was losing its influence. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was helpless to prevent a succession of blows to the church in France that culminated in the expulsion of the religious orders and the formal separation of church and state in 1905.

In the eyes of growing numbers on the right, such developments demonstrated both the incapacity of parliamentary conservatives to further their interests and the essential insolvency of the republic. As early as 1890 the extreme right-wing polemicist Charles Maurras (1868–1952) could write to a colleague that "there are two conservative parties in France, the living one and the other." "The first," he specified, "was with [É douard] Drumont," the author of a virulently anti-Semitic tract of 1886, La France Juive. The second, the "other," was bound up with the moribund republic, antiquated, compromised, and complicit in a decadent regime.

Maurras's distinction between living conservatives and dead conservatives, between conservatives old and new, was overstated, but telling. For although he himself advocated an idiosyncratic form of neoroyalism, his methods and outlook pointed forward to something disturbingly new. In the year before Maurras's letter, the tremendous interest generated by the French general Georges Boulanger (1837–1891), who flirted openly with the prospect of a royalist coup, had highlighted the demagogic possibilities of a strongman willing to threaten direct action against the republic. And in the years following, during the heat of the Dreyfus affair, the political potential of anti-Semitism and populist national chauvinism peddled by the likes of Drumont was already clear. By blending these explosive forces with the means of modern mass communication, Maurras and the early leaders of the protofascist Action Française, founded in 1898, concocted a new politics and a "new right" that was largely without precedent, even if it did at times recall—in its Manicheanism and penchant for conspiracy theories, its rhetorical violence and its rejection of individualism, pluralism, and the values of the French Revolution—the language of earlier figures like Maistre.

Notwithstanding these similarities, the Action Française unquestionably represented a new development, one that with its street gangs and pseudo-biological racism, its anticapitalism and populist mass mobilization, had parallels throughout Europe, above all in Germany. There, as in France, the period between the 1890s and World War I witnessed an explosive growth in groups brandishing the ideological weaponry of the new right, or what the historian Zeev Sternhell has identified as a "revolutionary right," the ideological forefather of fascism. Attacking the ravages of industrial capitalism, they invoked sinister conspiracies of Jews and international financiers. They praised the racial superiority of the German volk and preached militant nationalism and the supremacy of German values and German soil. Radical, even revolutionary, they aimed to transform the allegedly decadent society they knew and detested through mass mobilization, direct action, and the "purifying" clarity of violence.

Volkish, anti-Semitic, populist, these early ideologists of the new right ceased, as the scholar Hans-Jurgen Puhle has observed, "to be conservative in any reasonable sense of the term." They were, on the contrary, revolutionaries, who rejected the central impulse toward preservation that had governed European conservatism since its inception in the eighteenth century. When eventually they came to power throughout Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, they would show themselves adept only at destruction, leaving to others—conservatives and radicals alike—the task of piecing together the shards of European civilization that war and human malice had not obliterated entirely.

See alsoAction Française; Bismarck, Otto von; Burke, Edmund; Carlism; Catholicism, Political; Chateau-briand, François-René; Concert of Europe; Disraeli, Benjamin; Dreyfus Affair; Liberalism; Maistre, Joseph de; Maurras, Charles; Metternich, Clemens von; Nicholas I; Restoration.

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