Conservatism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Conservatism” is a word whose usefulness is matched only by its capacity to confuse, distort, and irritate. Since the patterns of thought and action it denotes are real and enduring, and since no substitute seems likely to be generally accepted, “conservatism” will doubtless have a long life as a handy, if dangerous, tool of social science. Scholars who use it lie under a severe obligation to be as exact as they can ever be in the handling of words that are encrusted with tradition and saturated with emotion. In particular, they must recognize, and thus distinguish among, the uses of this word that have become fairly standard in the years since World War II. There are, it would appear, four such uses.

Temperamental conservatism. Conservatism, by one definition, is both the “natural” and the culture-determined disposition to resist dislocating changes in a customary pattern of living and working. It describes, crudely and yet effectively, a temperament or psychological stance, a cluster of traits that are on daily display by most men in all societies. The important elements in the conservative temperament would appear to be habit (what William James called “the enormous fly-wheel of society, and its most precious conservative agent”), inertia (a force that often seems to be as powerful in the social world as in the physical), fear (especially fear of the unexpected, the irregular, and the uncomfortable), and emulation (a product of both fear of alienation from the group and a craving for its approval).

All these traits of character flourish with particular vigor among some of the most unfortunate, insecure, and expendable groups in society. One may speak with propriety, if also with pity, of the conservatism of the poor, the conservatism of the aged, and the conservatism of the ignorant, At the same time, one must assign a high value to the conservative temperament in the pattern of social survival and even of social progress. A community made up entirely of men engaged in the quest for security and order would be dreary, decayed, and perhaps even cruel, but a community that counted no such men would be a scene of anarchy. Neither the division of labor nor the maintenance of law and order, neither the gathering of knowledge nor the transmission of experience from generation to generation would be possible if the conservative temperament, especially as it is transformed into the imperatives of organization, were not an active force in the lives of men.

Situational conservatism. Conservatism, by a second definition, related to the first, is an attitude of opposition to disruptive change in the social, economic, legal, religious, political, or cultural order. It describes, somewhat less crudely and somewhat more effectively, a pattern of social behavior, a cluster of principles and prejudices that are on daily display by many men in all developed societies. The distinguishing mark of this conservatism, as indeed it is of any brand of conservatism, is the fear of change, which becomes transformed in the political arena into the fear of radicalism— in this instance, the radicalism of men who propose to “make the world over,” or at least to “improve” it at the expense of old values, institutions, and patterns of living. Situational conservatism is not confined to the well-placed and welltodo. Persons at all levels of being and possessing may lament change in the status quo. For reasons that range from the intuitive to the pragmatic by way of the traditional, many men in developed societies can be counted upon to express a highly personal sense of satisfaction and identity with the established order. One happy home of situational conservatism is the upper reaches of society; another is the land. Where these two shaping forces come together, as in the situation of an English duke, the result can often be a caricature of conservatism.

Somewhat unfortunately for the reputation of both temperamental and situational conservatism among social scientists, as well as for the reputation of social science among political conservatives, several studies of political behavior have tended, despite repeated disclaimers of ill intent, to equate conservatism with authoritarianism, obscurantism, racism, fascism, alienation, maladjustment, and “the closed mind.” Some social scientists have elected to probe the dark frontier between politics and personality by constructing a spectrum that runs from an extreme labeled “conservatism” to an extreme labeled “liberalism,” and then, by eliciting and tabulating responses to questions designed to reveal attitudes toward controversial social and personal problems, to place the persons questioned —be they workers in Detroit or criminals in San Francisco or citizens chosen at random in Liverpool—along the scale. It is revealing that “liberal” responses to the questions of even the most fair-minded students of political behavior are almost always given “plus” values in the resulting tables and scales, while “conservative” responses are tagged with the ever so slightly tainted “minus” sign.

The prototype of such studies was carried through by T. W. Adorno and his associates and was published as The Authoritarian Personality (1950). The question may well be raised whether this kind of study has not done damage to the image of conservatism and rendered the word itself suspect among many social scientists who hitherto found it useful and not at all pejorative in content. In any case, much careful research must be done before political and philosophical conservatism can be linked causally with the unpleasant aspects of temperamental and situational conservatism that are assumed to form this polar phenomenon known as “the closed mind.”

Political conservatism. If we bring together in imagination a goodly number of conservatives of temperament and situation, then thrust them into the hurly-burly of active politics, we move naturally toward a third definition of conservatism that is roughly synonymous with the worn but still convenient label “the Right.” Most persons who talk of conservatism mean political conservatism, that is to say, the aspirations and activities—most of them defensive rather than creative—of parties and movements that celebrate inherited patterns of morality and tested institutions, that are skeptical about the efficacy of popular government, that can be counted upon to oppose both the reforming plans of the moderate Left and the deranging schemes of the extreme Left, and that draw their heaviest support from men who have a substantial material and psychological stake in the established order.

Political conservatism is a phenomenon which, if we stretch the definition beyond the boundaries of common sense, is a universal of organized society. One may find, if one seeks them intensively enough, political conservatives in every country and culture. One may even say that since conservatism is essentially the defense of a going society, the leaders of the Soviet Union are conservatives. This, however, is to ignore both the history and logic of this phenomenon, which comes fully to life—as does its great partner and adversary, liberalism—in the civilized political and cultural struggles of the open, ordered, constitutional society. The Tories of Great Britain, the Republicans of the United States, the Gaullists of France, and the Christian Democrats of a half-dozen European countries are conservative parties in the most meaningful sense, the Liberal Democrats of Japan and the Swatantra party of India in a rather less meaningful sense, the Communist party of the Soviet Union in no sense at all except the arbitrary or whimsical. The political situation in which they lived and wrought made it fully possible for Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Konrad Adenauer, Sir Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle to act as conservative statesmen, but we would not easily find counterparts of such men in most parts of Asia and Africa.

A distinction should be made, although it is often impossible to maintain in politics, between the two classic political positions of the Right: conservatism and reaction. Reaction is the position of men who sigh for the past more intensively than they celebrate the present and who feel that a retreat back into it is worth trying. While the conservative, a man essentially at rest, may indulge from time to time in reveries of 1945 or 1928 or 1896 or even 1788, he is generally well adjusted, psychologically as well as programmatically, to “a world he never made.”

The reactionary (or, as some might prefer, the restorationist), a man in motion, refuses to acknowledge that whatever has been settled must henceforth be considered good or at least tolerable, and he seems willing to erase some laws, scrap some institutions, even amend his nation's constitution, so that he can roll back the social process to the time at which his countrymen first went foolishly astray. The restorationist should not be confused with the violent reactionary, who, like the violent revolutionary, seems ready to shed blood and to subvert all order in pursuit of his immediate ends.

There is, it can be seen, an essential relationship—or perhaps nonrelationship—between conservatism and revolution. The historic mission of political conservatism in the West has been not to defeat but to forestall revolutions, not to crush but to anticipate them. Conservatism in a truly revolutionary situation is a politics of delusion; a society that bursts into revolution will not be able to smother it by conservative means. The conservative is above all a man of order, and a shattered society has no place for him. To speak of conservatism in France in 1792 or Russia in 1917 or Cuba in 1962 is to speak of political arts that no man could have practiced. The explosion of a genuine social revolution is rather certain evidence that political conservatism has never flourished in a community or, if it has flourished as an important movement, has failed in its mission.

Political conservatism is a posture, whether adopted by individuals, classes, or parties, that is increasingly difficult to maintain in the twentieth century. In many parts of the world—for example, in totalitarian countries like the Soviet Union and Hungary, unstable countries like Colombia and Peru, and only half-formed countries like some of the new states of Africa and Asia—genuine conservatism as a political force can hardly be said to exist, and persons who might make excellent conservatives in more ordered societies must choose between the nihilism of “standing pat,” the frustration of trying to recreate a dead past (which may never have existed in the first place), or the cryptoradicalism of riding the tiger of revolution. Even in those parts of the world in which the politics of tradition, wealth, and aristocracy has been a historic force—for example, in Great Britain, the United States, Canada, France, Japan, and the Scandinavian countries—conservatives are sorely tried by the pressure of events over which neither they nor, as it often seems, any men seem to exercise effective control.

The political conservative is almost always the prisoner of the social process as it is embodied in the traditions and institutions of his country, and thus the foil of those men who, knowingly or un-knowingly, keep the process in motion. They act; he only reacts—except on those rare occasions when he can emulate Benjamin Disraeli and “steal the Whigs' clothes.” If they act as liberals, if the social process moves steadily but not explosively, his reactions can take the form of conservatism. But if they act as radicals, if the process begins to speed up sharply, his reactions must aim beyond mere preservation and at restoration. If, as now seems to be the case all over the world, the pace of history gets out of control, the conservative can no longer fall back on the simple, instinctive acts of conservation. He, like the liberal, must reason and discriminate; he, like the radical, may have to plan and gamble. The “conservative as reformer,” the right-wing politician who tries to outpromise liberals in the area of welfare legislation, is an uncomfortable man. The “conservative as revolutionary,” the traditionalist who acts “radically” to preserve the crumbling values and institutions of his community, is no conservative at all. Small wonder that many conservatives in Western countries have turned away from politics to fight the good fight of tradition in such areas as art, criticism, and education.

In no country in the world is the dilemma of the true conservative, the man who wants to be neither a reactionary nor a pseudoliberal, more poignant than in the United States. For many reasons—the suddenness with which both democracy and industrialism came to stay as the American way of life, the absence of such comforting relics of a more ordered age as an established church or a monarchy, the crushing of self-conscious aristocracy by the forces of an upstart plutocracy, the feebleness of political and theoretical radicalism (to which men of status and substance could react creatively)—conservatism has never flourished in America as successfully as it has in Great Britain. Now that the kind of social change resulting from automation and the reach for space has become the style of the American way of life, the true agents of change—the business and managerial classes— are proving conclusively that sponsorship of social revolution and opposition to political reform can go hand in hand. The dilemma of the American conservative will never be more dramatically demonstrated than it was in the career of Henry Ford— in his personal habits and opinions the most conservative of men, in his influence upon America one of the most marvelous agents of profound and protracted social change the world has ever known.

Conservatism as philosophy. Beyond the conservatisms of mood and deed, yet almost always relating directly back to them, is the conservatism of thought. As a philosophy dedicated to the defense of an established order, and also to the leadership of certain groups or classes within the order, conservatism is an important intellectual force in most countries of the West. In the years since World War ii, a season of disillusionment over the broken promises of the once-ascendant liberal tradition, conservative and pseudoconservative thinkers have been more active than at any period in the past two centuries.

Wherever it is an intellectual force, conservatism has earned its measure of respect and influence the hard way. Unlike the radical or liberal, the genuine conservative engages reluctantly in political speculation. The most famous conservative statesman of the twentieth century, Sir Winston Churchill, steadfastly refused, for all his literary skills, to reflect upon and write down the principles that animated his career. The mere intention to spin out a theory of conservatism is somehow an unconservative impulse, and the pursuit of this intention carries a person dangerously far from that simple social piety, that hesitation about poking a finger into the “cake of custom,” that is the essence of the conservative point of view. There would seem to be a few grains of truth in the observation of many critics that a conservatism in search of clear-cut principles is a conservatism already in retreat.

Whether it is, in fact, in retreat or on the attack in the realm of politics, conservatism is flourishing in the realm of ideas, and one must recognize the existence of a core of principles that is the common property of the moderate Right wherever it flourishes as a legitimate force. These, it would seem, are the persistent themes of the philosophers of modern conservatism:

The existence of a universal moral order sanctioned and supported by organized religion.

The obstinately imperfect nature of men, in which unreason and sinfulness lurk always behind the curtain of civilized behavior.

The natural inequality of men in most qualities of mind, body, and character.

The necessity of social classes and orders, and the consequent folly of attempts at leveling by force of law.

The primary role of private property in the pursuit of personal liberty and defense of the social order.

The uncertainty of progress, and the recognition that prescription is the chief method of such progress as a society may achieve.

The need for a ruling and serving aristocracy.

The limited reach of human reason, and the consequent importance of traditions, institutions, symbols, rituals, and even prejudices.

The fallibility and potential tyranny of majority rule, and the consequent desirability of diffusing, limiting, and balancing political power.

One could go further with this catalogue, for example, by taking note of the conservative preference for liberty over equality, the conservative insistence that education must discipline before it can liberate, the conservative delight in such phrases as “the tragedy of history” and “the inadequacy of politics,” and the conservative celebration of the prudent man and the ordered society; but the principles listed would seem to be the essence of self-conscious conservatism in the twentieth century.

Two points should be noted about the list. First, it is a series of abstractions, and since conservatives express a horror of abstract thinking each of these ideas must be referred back to a particular society and tradition. Second, in the special case of the United States, society is confidently progressive and the dominant tradition happily democratic, indeed liberal. As a result, the philosophy of conservatism in modern America is a jumble of crosscutting answers to the persistent questions of political theory, especially the question of where the line is to be drawn between the rights of the individual and the demands of the community. Deep inside the shell of his half-Jeffersonian, half-Hamiltonian ideology, however, the American conservative nurses principles and prejudices that are closely related to those of conservatives in other, less self-consciously democratic countries.

The conservatism of Burke. These considerations lead to a discussion of the most famous brand of philosophical conservatism, the school of political thought identified with Edmund Burke. This conservatism sprang to life in the turmoil of the 1780s and was especially a reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution. Although men as separated in time and purpose as Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker, and John Locke had created essentially conservative systems of political thought, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is properly considered the purest source of consciously conservative principles. Other important events in the birth of this conservatism were the industrial revolution, which made change rather than stability the style of the social process, and the Enlightenment, which put reason in place of tradition as the surest guide to human conduct. The result was the emergence of a political faith that celebrated the beauties of stability and tradition.

The conservatism of Burke has been and remains a Western phenomenon, a philosophy peculiar to the Atlantic community and some of its extensions throughout the world. Indeed, although it has loyal adherents in many countries, this conservatism has held continuous sway as a major political and intellectual force only in Great Britain. It has not flourished as it might have in France or Germany or Italy because, among other reasons, there has not been sufficient agreement among the men of the Right as to what institutions and values they want to conserve. It does not flourish as it once did in the United States because, among other reasons, democracy and industrialism have swept so much more powerfully, abruptly, and successfully over the American scene than they have over any other country of the West. While John Adams could be a conservative in the style of Burke and serve as president of the United States, his real and spiritual descendants—Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, Irving Babbitt, Ralph Adams Cram, Paul Elmer More, and, more recently, Russell Kirk— have been cast, as Kirk himself has admitted ruefully, in “the role of Don Quixote.”

At its present stage of development, this conservatism is prepared to defend most of the values and institutions of the West. The conservatism of Burke, as it is proclaimed in the writings of his political and intellectual heirs, is full of doubts about the goodness and equality of men, the possibilities of progress, and the wisdom of the majority—that is to say, about the democratic dogma —but it has long since accepted constitutional democracy as the only viable alternative to the totalitarianisms of Right and Left. The Burkean conservative has learned to suppress his persistent antidemocratic urges and to give new definitions, and thus a new influence, to such cherished concepts as tradition, order, and aristocracy. It must be remembered that he draws his inspiration from the Whiggish Burke, not from the reactionary Joseph de Maistre; his concern is ordered liberty, not order pure, simple, and at any cost. If he is a democrat by chance rather than choice and is gripped by a mood of pessimism rather than optimism about the prospects of democracy, he is nonetheless a democrat.

Whether as a pattern of personal behavior, a cluster of social attitudes and prejudices, a force in the realm of politics, or an enveloping way of life and thought, whether as a phenomenon to be found on display by individuals, classes, interests, sections, parties, or even entire nations, conservatism bids well to be a major force in the latter part of the twentieth century. Even as great winds of social change sweep across the world and make it more difficult for men to think and act as conservatives, the desire to discipline change, if no longer to arrest it, becomes, paradoxically, an ever more powerful urge. If conservatives can no longer afford to repeat after Lord Falkland that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change” (White [1950] 1957, p. 127), or after Samuel Johnson that “most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things” (Rossiter 1962, p. 51), they can at least insist, in the admonishing words of Disraeli, that those men who would pile change upon change and reform upon reform be properly deferential to “the manners, the customs, the laws, the traditions of the people” (White [1950] 1957, p. 127). It is their task to prove to an always doubting world that conservatism is an essential part of any pattern of ordered liberty.

Clinton Rossiter

[See alsoLiberalism; Personality, political; Radicalism; and the biography ofBurke.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For an introduction to conservatism as a behavioral phenomenon, see the many references in Bassett 1952. Also consult Adorno et al. 1950, in conjunction with Christie & Jahoda 1954; McClosky 1958, with attention to the comments of Kendall 1958 and Frisch 1958; and Rokeach 1960.

For histories of conservatism as a political and cultural phenomenon, see Kirk 1953; Auerbach 1959; Graubard 1961; and Viereck 1956.

For modern classics of philosophical conservatism, see Eliot 1939; Oakeshott 1962; Strauss 1953; Lippmann 1955; and Ortega y Gasset 1930.

For sympathetic modern expressions of the conservatism of Burke, see Kirk 1956; Viereck 1949; White 1950; Cecil 1912; and Hogg 1947.

For general studies of conservatism and social science, see Nisbet 1952; Huntington 1957; Mannheim 1953; and Rossiter 1962. The last has an extensive bibliography on pages 310–327.

Adorno, T. W. et al. 1950 The Authoritarian Personality. American Jewish Committee, Social Studies Series, No. 3. New York: Harper.

Auerbach, Morton 1959 The Conservative Illusion. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

Bassett, T. D. Seymour (bibliographer) 1952 Radicalism and Conservatism. Pages 368–375 in Donald D. Egbert and Stow Persons (editors), Socialism and American Life. Volume 2: Bibliography; Descriptive and Critical. Princeton Studies in American Civilization, No. 4. Princeton Univ. Press.

Burke, Edmund (1790) 1955 Reflections on the Revolution in France. New York: Liberal Arts.

Cecil, Hugh R. H. 1912 Conservatism. London: Williams & Norgate.

Christie, Richard; and Jahoda, Marie (editors) 1954 Studies in the Scope and Method of The Authoritarian Personality. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Eliot, T. S. (1939) 1940 The Idea of a Christian Society. New York: Harcourt.

Frisch, Morton J. 1958 On McClosky's “Conservatism and Personality.” American Political Science Review 52:1108–1111.

Graubard, Stephen R. 1961 Burke, Disraeli and Churchill: The Politics of Perseverance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Hogg, Quintin M. (Lord Hailsham) 1947 The Case for Conservatism. London: Penguin.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1957 Conservatism as Ideology. American Political Science Review 51:454–473.

Kendall, Willmoore 1958 Comment on McClosky's “Conservatism and Personality.” American Political Science Review 52:506–510.

Kirk, Russell (1953) 1960 The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. 3d ed. Chicago: Regnery. ? First published under the title The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana.

Kirk, Russell 1956 Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: Essays of a Social Critic. Chicago: Regnery.

Lippmann, Walter 1955 Essays in the Public Philosophy. Boston: Little.

McClosky, Herbert 1958 Conservatism and Personality. American Political Science Review 52:27–45.

Mannheim, Karl (1922–1940) 1953 Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology. Edited by Paul Kecskemeti. London: Routledge.

Nisbet, Robert A. 1952 Conservatism and Sociology. American Journal of Sociology 58:167–175.

Oakeshott, MICHAEL 1962 Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose (1930) 1961 The Revolt of the Masses. London: Allen & Unwin. ? First published as La rebeliñn de las masas.

Rokeach, Milton 1960 The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations Into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems. New York: Basic Books.

Rossiter, Clinton 1962 Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion. 2d ed., rev. New York: Knopf. ? The first edition was published in 1955.

Strauss, Leo 1953 Natural Right and History. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Viereck, Peter 1949 Conservatism Revisited: Revolt Against Revolt. New York: Scribner.

Viereck, Peter 1956 Conservatism From John Adams to Churchill. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand.

White, Reginald J. (editor) (1950) 1957 The Conservative Tradition. New York Univ. Press.