Conservatism. Edmund Neill
to take the opportunity here to thank three particularly influential teachers, who in their different ways I have found genuinely inspirational: Professor Janet Coleman, Professor Jose Harris and Professor Michael Freeden. All three of them possess minds that are not merely immensely learned, but genuinely intellectually original. Apart from them, I would like to thank the following for their advice, friendship, and intellectual acuity: Michael Bacon, Callum Barrell, Dean Blackburn, Chris Brooke, Sarah Churchwell, John Davis, Hannah Dawson, Blake Ewing, Stephen Farrall, Dev Gangjee, John Gibbins, Lawrence Goldman, Naomi Goulder, Stuart Jones, Paul Lewis, Suzannah Lipscomb, Catherine Marshall, David Mitchell, Terry Nardin, Kieron O’Hara, Noel O’Sullivan, David Owen, Estelle Paranque, Joanne Paul, Mike Peacey, Jaya Savige, Christoph Schuringa, Nikita Sud, Tim Waters, Kevin Williams and Brian Young.
Particular thanks too must go to Iain Hampsher-Monk and Nicholas Cole who provided generous advice and guidance on the eighteenth century, though it must be stressed that any errors remaining are my responsibility alone.
My editor George Owers was very patient with my delays, but more to the point was an assiduous and acute reader. He also deserves considerable thanks for picking three anonymous readers of the manuscript who were encouraging but also constructively critical, in exactly the way that anonymous readers should be. They have undoubtedly improved the book, and I would have taken up even more of their suggestions if the number of words available had been greater. They have certainly given me plenty of interesting food for thought for future projects, and I am very grateful to them.
Last but not least my mother Heather, my late father Edward and my brother Greg have always supported my intellectual endeavours, even when times were tough (as they can be in academia). However, this book certainly could not have been written without the help of my partner Stefan Demetriou, who provided the very desk it was written on, but also much other support besides. The least I can do is to dedicate it to him.
1 Defining Conservatism
This book seeks to define the concept of conservatism and to explore its nature in the context of Western Europe and America, primarily looking at Britain, France and the United States. At first sight, this might appear to be a relatively simple task. For unlike some of the vaguer, more contested concepts in political theory, such as nationalism, populism or fascism, conservatism appears to have a relatively fixed and stable meaning. In particular, theorists investigating conservatism have often argued that conservatives advocate four key political commitments. First, they have argued that conservatives favour the importance of ‘natural’ forms of authority, such as the monarchy, the church, the nation and the family to guarantee social stability – as opposed to artificially designed ‘rationalist’ ones, particularly those provided by government. Second, relatedly, they have maintained that conservatives advocate ‘evolution’ over ‘revolution’, preferring incremental change over producing solutions from scratch, even if existing institutions are far from ideal. Third, such theorists have claimed that conservatives often consider human nature to be imperfect and fallible, with the result that they hold human inequality to be beneficial, or at the very least inevitable. Finally, within these limits, they have argued that conservatives often stress the importance of private property and capitalism in promoting individual freedom.1
The Challenge of Defining Conservatism
In fact, however, as soon as one considers the concept of conservatism more closely, it throws up difficult definitional and conceptual challenges. For although some thinkers usually described as ‘conservatives’ have upheld the four commitments just described, others have not necessarily advocated all of them, or even, in some cases, any of them (Eatwell and O’Sullivan 1989: 47–61). First, although conservatives have often argued that traditional forms of authority are important, even those that have done so have not necessarily denied the importance of the state. Thus, Roger Scruton in The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), to take one modern example, was quite happy to stress the importance of governmental authority and the rule of law, as well as highlighting the vital role of traditional institutions like the family in ensuring social solidarity (Scruton 2001: 39–41). Still less, in any case, have conservatives agreed on which institutions play the most vital role in providing authority. To some in the nineteenth century, such as the influential French theorist Joseph de Maistre, the religious authority of the church was vital; for others in the same century, such as the English conservative W. H. Mallock, let alone in the twentieth, it was largely irrelevant (Maistre 1820: 213; Ford 1974: 319).
Second, although it is true that conservatives have often been cautious about initiating far-reaching changes, there have certainly been instances where they have sought to change society fairly radically. Thus Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s conservative administrations in the 1980s in Britain and the United States initiated major changes that fundamentally altered the relationship of individual, state and society, including significant reductions in direct taxation, the privatization of many government-owned industries, a reduction in the power of trade unions and an increase in home ownership (Hoover and Plant 2015). Third, although many conservatives have indeed generally rejected more substantive forms of equality, on the basis that such ‘levelling’ is neither natural nor desirable, they have nevertheless differed significantly between themselves over the degree to which they reject equality and accept traditional social hierarchies. Thus, even in the nineteenth century, various American conservatives, however much they rejected any notion of ‘social justice’, nevertheless took the idea of formal political equality guaranteed by the US constitution as sacrosanct; by contrast, some more radical conservative thinkers, such as Heinrich von Treitschke in Germany, argued much more explicitly against equal political participation on the basis that this contradicted man’s natural inequality (Sumner 1963; Dorpalen 1957).
Finally, although conservatives have often been supportive of both private property and modern capitalism as guarantees of freedom, there have also been important exceptions and qualifications. Edmund Burke, arguably one of the earliest British conservatives, thought that the success of the free market relied on existing social norms, rather than the other way round, and this suspicion of the market persisted amongst certain kinds of British conservatives well into the twentieth century – the renowned poet and conservative cultural critic T. S. Eliot being one such example. Furthermore, some conservatives – like Scruton, for example – have stressed that private property rights should not be immune from all interference by the state if the general material welfare of the population at large is endangered (Burke 1968: 140, 146; Eliot 1939; Scruton 2001: 97–9).
Defining Conservatism: One Key Concept?
In view of such difficulties, clearly a different approach is necessary in order to define and explore conservatism successfully. One strategy pursued by some scholars is to try to isolate a particular concept that is especially fundamental to conservatism. Thus Peter Dorey, in his book British Conservatism: The Politics and Philosophy of Inequality (2011), sought to identify conservatism with a fundamental commitment to upholding inequality, while Noel O’Sullivan, in his 1976 study Conservatism, focused on the ‘imperfection’ of human nature – and hence a commitment to limited government – as a key to understanding conservative arguments (Dorey 2011; O’Sullivan 1976: 9–31). But although both these books are perceptive and insightful, they are in danger of ignoring or excluding types of conservatism (or facets of conservative arguments) that do not fit well with their approach. We have already noted that conservatives differ over the degree to which they uphold inequality, and even if it is reasonable to claim that most conservatives take a more negative view of human nature than most liberals and socialists, it seems implausible to argue that such a view is always the key to understanding their arguments, let alone that this necessarily implies a commitment to more limited government. Although they certainly agreed that human nature was imperfect, paternalist conservatives in post-war Britain, like Harold Macmillan, tended nevertheless to stress the positive good that government could do in preventing unemployment and boosting economic growth; likewise, late nineteenth-century French conservative nationalists, such as Maurice Barrès, certainly