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What is Conservatism?
History, Ideology and Party
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Richard Bourke (Queen Mary University of London)
r.bourke@qmul.ac.uk
Abstract
Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? A history of the phenomenon written along
sceptical lines casts doubt on the existence of a transhistorical doctrine, or even an enduring
conservative outlook. The main typologies of conservatism uniformly trace its origins to
opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund Burke is standardly singled out
as the ‘father’ of this style of politics. Yet Burke was de facto an opposition Whig who
devoted his career to assorted programmes of reform. In restoring Burke to his original
milieu, the argument presented here takes issue with twentieth-century accounts of
conservative ideology developed by such figures as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein and
Samuel Huntington. It argues that the idea of a conservative tradition is best seen as a
belated construction, and that the notion of a univocal philosophy of conservatism is
basically misconceived.
Keywords: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Karl Mannheim, French Revolution,
enlightenment, party, ideology, scepticism.
I: Scepticism and Political Theory
In the rousing final paragraph of his ‘Introduction’ to Jealousy of Trade, Istvan Hont
wrote that ‘History is the tool of skeptics’ (Hont, 2005: p. 156). The phrase has often
been quoted, but what does it mean? Hont’s purpose in the passage was to set out an
agenda for the history of political thought. He was arguing that it made no sense to
revive forgotten ideological alternatives that might ‘miraculously’ answer current
problems in political theory. The past, he seemed to be saying, has no such purchase on
the present.
One of Hont’s targets here was Quentin Skinner, specifically the
recommendation that the neo-Roman ideal of liberty was worth excavating as a
corrective to reigning liberal dogma. Yet there is something troubling about Hont’s
paragraph. On the one hand, he seems to be claiming that returning to past ideas in the
hope of instructing the present is a redundant exercise. Yet, on the other hand, such a
return is ultimately what he wants to propose. This proposal was made even clearer in
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This article grew out of a lecture that I first delivered to the Siemens Foundation in Munich in 2014. I
am grateful to Heinrich Meier for inviting me on that occasion. Research for the talk was undertaken at
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in the same year. A version of the argument appeared in German in
Leviathan: Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft in 2016. I am grateful to Jérémie Barthas, Reinhard
Blomert, Philip Manow, Paul Sagar and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier renditions
of my text. The usual disclaimer applies.
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a later study by Hont, where the combined insights of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam
Smith were presented as holding the keys to understanding our current predicaments
(Hont, 2015: p. 24). In fact, Hont was prepared to go further still: recourse to
eighteenth-century political economy promises to provide more than simple analytical
clarification, he contended. The ‘best’ thinkers who wrote on commercial society in the
period are said to have provided reliable assessments of where we are on the basis of
their remarkable clairvoyance: ‘The commercial future that many eighteenth-century
observers imagined as plausible has become our historical present’ (Hont, 2005: p.
156). Past analysis of a possible future turns out to offer the most compelling guide to
contemporary political judgement.
Hont’s recipe mixes virtuosity with perplexing difficulties. Some of the
virtuosity derives from Reinhart Koselleck, specifically his concern with ‘futures past’
– namely, his interest in the changing ways in which past thinkers imagined the future
(Koselleck, 1989). For Koselleck, these projections were usually pathological in nature,
yet for Hont they often contained the seeds of accurate prediction. This led to the
suggestion that bygone political theory offered the best chance of illuminating our
current situation, even though, as Hont also saw, past philosophy could be a prisoner
of its age. This conundrum encapsulates the problems sometimes associated with the
‘Cambridge School’ in the history of political thought, which Hont wanted to exemplify
and disavow at the same time (Bourke, 2018: pp. 467 ff.). He was committed both to
philosophy and its historicisation, leaving his work suspended between the present and
the past.
Faced with this puzzle, I propose to use Hont’s injunction in favour of
scepticism against his scheme for reviving long-departed thinkers. Specifically, I want
to embrace his call for scepticism by applying it to the idea of conservativism, whilst
rejecting his resort to ‘usable’ philosophy from the past. History is indeed an instrument
of scepticism, and scepticism is a valuable resource for political theory. But we need to
begin by asking what the sceptical impulse is, and how it should be employed when
reflecting upon politics. Hont does not help us here: ‘scepticism’ was a favourite term
of his, yet nowhere did he define it. Sometimes he used it in its most familiar sense,
denoting a posture of epistemological doubt (Hont, 2005: p. 167). More often he
associated it with a strand of ‘utilitarian’ ethics, rooted in a neo-Augustinian critique of
natural sociability (Ibid.: p. 47). Yet this usage denotes a philosophical commitment,
not a mode of historical inquiry, and so it can have little relevance to history as a ‘tool’
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of scepticism. To understand how scepticism in this sense might be used, we had better
turn to Hont’s original inspiration, David Hume.
In the Treatise and the first Enquiry, Hume showed how pyrrhonian doubt
destroyed every remnant of conviction, leading to a melancholy state of disorientation,
only then to be mitigated by immersion in the ‘affairs of life’ (Hume, 2000: p. 175).
The extremes of scepticism might in this way be ‘corrected by common sense and
reflection’ (Hume, 1999: p. 207). Yet this did not exhaust the role of philosophical
criticism. While our natural habits of mind restrained the tendency of scepticism to
derange, the critical attitude of the sceptic would nonetheless find additional beneficial
outlets. An openness to doubt would humble intellectual pride, confine the imagination
within its proper sphere, and challenge the obstinacy of ruling dogmas. The most
affecting dogmatic beliefs stemmed from religion, morals and politics. In connection
with the last two categories, the philosophical spirit inculcated impartiality as an
antidote to self-righteous inclinations of the mind. The objective here was to foster
sceptical detachment from apparently self-evident intuitions and values, and encourage
reflection on the wider situation in which these norms were embedded.
Proceeding on this basis, philosophy should abjure the kind of moral
exhortation that was as much a feature of eighteenth-century ethics as it is of modern
political theory. For Hume, at least, the activity of preaching general ethical maxims
was likely to be as ineffective as it was usually hypocritical. Yet this did not leave the
philosopher with no practical purchase on affairs. While reasoning people out of their
preferences would not succeed, it was possible to encourage a broader assessment of
the circumstances that supported existing attachments: ‘Here… a philosopher may step
in, and suggest particular views, and considerations, and circumstances, which
otherwise would have escaped us…’ (Hume, 1985a: p. 172). In relation to politics, the
‘considerations’ and ‘circumstances’ that Hume had in mind were attendant historical
conditions. Grasping the character and tendency of a situation meant viewing it in
relation to its historical development. Thus, when it came to establishing a science of
government, the roles of the philosopher and historian began to merge: the analysis and
evaluation of practical options involved connecting decisions with their probable
results based on an appreciation of wider historical context. From this perspective, the
idea that Hume’s career lurched from philosophy to history on account of some
supposed ‘failure’ to undergird his ‘system’ could not be wider of the mark (pace S. R.
Letwin, 1965: p. 3). The kind of philosophical history that Hume came to practice
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between the 1740s and the 1760s was a natural outgrowth of his original approach.
Consequently history, for the reasons just outlined, was indeed a tool of scepticism. Yet
the question remained how history could be written on sceptical principles.
It was the goal of philosophical history as conceived by Hume to deliver that
result. Its purpose was to analyse the consequences of actions, not endorse the
pretentions of a partisan set of actors – like the Puritans against the Catholics, or the
Whigs against the Tories. In striving to approach the subject-matter of politics with this
attitude of sceptical impartiality, it became obvious that a chosen political system rarely
secured its objectives, not least because it had to pursue its purposes in the midst of
obstruction from competing designs. Outcomes were therefore usually unintended. For
the same reason, current arrangements were rarely traceable to pristine origins.
According to Hume, these insights could be gleaned from the facts of history. For
instance, they could be learned from the observation that modern liberty was not the
product of a deliberate campaign for freedom, or from the discovery that the rights of
the eighteenth-century British parliament were not to be found in embryo in the gothic
past (Hume, 1983: VI, p. 64; I, p. 163). History was discontinuous, unavailing and
ironic. This conclusion is surely an instructive one for political theory. Political
principles are embodied in traditions and slogans that need to be disambiguated,
evaluated, and contextualised. This article pursues that objective with reference to
conservatism.
The study of conservatism is bound to be analytical and historical at once. To
understand the character of any social phenomenon, it is necessary to identify what it
actually is as well as to explain the course of its descent. Both these activities are of
course linked, since the nature of any political artefact is bound up with the process of
its formation. As indicated, my aim is to examine conservatism sceptically, exactly as
one might interrogate any set of commitments by probing their claims to doctrinal
integrity and historical continuity. Historians have recently questioned the identity of
liberalism (Bell, 2016) and highlighted divergences within the Marxist tradition
(Stedman Jones, 2016). Conservatism can hardly be exempted from such scrutiny.
Critical reconstruction in fact promises practical dividends by challenging counter-
productive assumptions. The sceptical analysis of programmatic attachments helps to
secure one prize in particular: the chance to evaluate policy on its own terms, freed
from the pressure of ideological allegiance and party-political affiliation.
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In the pages that follow, I take issue with three particular claims. First I question
the usefulness of thinking of conservatism as a habit, an instinct or a disposition. Next
I query the viability of viewing it as a theory equipped with a stable ‘core’ of abstract
values. And, finally, I challenge the claim that there has existed a unified tradition that
has transmitted conservative principles down the generations intact.
II: Paradoxes of Conservatism
Writing in Perugia in 1930, Robert Michels commented on how ‘the Bolsheviks of
today are as conservative as the czarists of yesterday’ (Michels, 1945: III, p. 230). His
aim here was in part to unsettle expectations: if even the extremes of radicalism could
be dubbed ‘conservative’, did conservatism possess any meaning as an ideology?
Given Michels’ odyssey from social democracy to syndicalism to fascism, perhaps it is
not so strange that political identity could appear, to such a protean character, to
encompass the full spectrum of available positions: having passed through such a range
of affiliations, any conviction might seem to imply another. Equally, it may be that in
the context in which he was writing, Michels had a specific point to make about the
legacy of Lenin: having shaken the Russian polity to its foundations, the party of Lenin
was now committed to sustaining a regime by force.
Yet however we interpret the motives behind the statement, it is difficult to
escape a key implication of Michels’ remark: namely, that conservatism is a positional
rather than a doctrinal ideology, capable of endless ‘modification’ (Michels, 1968: p.
44). This argument has been variously presented in the past in terms of a distinction
between procedural and substantive conservatism, or between an attitude as opposed to
a philosophical system. It might be claimed that the procedural approach in the end
amounts to a doctrine: namely, the proposition that conservatism is a procedure for
preserving values against radical change (Hampsher-Monk, 1987: p, 28). This seems
close to what Michels was prepared to argue: that conservatism should not be
understood as an attempt to shore up an ideal but instead as a commitment to securing
entrenched arrangements. Its defining characteristic lay less in what was being
conserved than in the very act of conservation itself. This means that conservative
politics cannot be defined in terms of policy, or even with reference to specific
ideological principles. One conserves relative to opposing positions that seek to bring
about unwelcome change. It is of course right that in seeking to maintain a position,
conservatives must explicitly advocate a policy. Yet, on this reading, their conservatism