Conservatism

Conceptual Overview

Unlike liberalism, which is a term widely used to refer to the overarching modern social order of market democracy, conservatism is a term that is not applied to an entire social system. Conservatism in one of its most prominent meanings involves the defense of a traditional social order, but conservatism itself is a political tendency or side that opposes liberalism rather than a social totality. The major incarnations of conservatism from the 1790s on have been reactions to various versions of liberalism (and socialism): first, the revolutionary liberalism of the Jacobins and their Anglo-American allies like Godwin, Paine, and Jefferson; next, the classical liberalism of Bentham and the Mills; then, the socialism of the Marxists and the egalitarian liberalism of European social democrats and American New Dealers; and finally, the modern version of economic and cultural liberalism that since the 1960s has been a powerful movement in Western democracies. Conservatism even when ascendant in electoral politics—as it is now in the United States and certain other nations, such as Australia—retains an oppositionist, embattled sense of reacting to liberalism.

The course of conservatism as an oppositionist tendency was charted by Edmund Burke in his 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France. For Burke, society rightly understood was an ancient and elaborate customary partnership of the living, the dead, and the not yet born, and the radicals' dream of creating a new society based on reason was a nightmare. Burke's counterrevolutionary fervor has remained one of the animating emotions of conservatism, given strength in its own time by the horrors of the Terror to which the French Revolution descended a few years after Burke wrote, and in more recent times by the gulags, mass [Page 257]famines, and everyday repression in Communist Russia and China.

In the early 19th-century European opposition between traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals, it was the liberals who were more in favor of freer trade and markets. It was only in the United States, born with a more democratic and capitalistic social order—a liberal order in the broad sense of the term—where the more conservative parties (the Federalists of Hamilton and the Whigs of Clay) supported commerce and markets more vigorously than the more liberal parties (the Democratic-Republicans of Jefferson and the Democrats of Jackson). In the United States but not elsewhere, conservatism became associated from an early date with support for business and liberalism with criticism of business. That association was accentuated by the rise of egalitarian liberalism in the New Deal–World War II period of the 1930s and 1940s, which spawned a conservative opposition that drew support from the affluent and was centrally defined by its support for business and markets and its skepticism about government regulation.

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