Dictionary:

conservatism

  (kən-sûr'və-tĭz'əm)

1. The inclination, especially in politics, to maintain the existing or traditional order.
2. A political philosophy or attitude emphasizing respect for traditional institutions, distrust of government activism, and opposition to sudden change in the established order.
3. Conservatism The principles and policies of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom or of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada.
4. Caution or moderation, as in behavior or outlook.

Accounting guideline that understates assets and revenues and overstates liabilities and expenses. Expenses should be recognized earlier than later while revenue should be recognized later than sooner. Thus, net income will result in a lower figure. Conservatism holds that in financial reporting it is preferable to be pessimistic (understate) than optimistic (overstate) since there is less chance of financial readers being hurt by relying on prepared financial statements. One can argue that pessimism is needed to counteract the optimism of management. However, excess conservatism may result in misguided decisions.

In general terms, a political philosophy which aspires to the preservation of what is thought to be the best in established society, and opposes radical change. However, it is much easier to locate the historical context in which conservatism evolved than it is to specify what it is that conservatives believe. Modern European conservatism evolved in the period between 1750 and 1850 as a response to the rapid series of changes and prospects for change which convulsed European societies; these included the ideas of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialization (especially in England), and the demands for an extended or universal, generally male, suffrage. The name ‘Conservative’ for the English political party which had previously been called the Tory Party became established during the debate about electoral reform which led to the Reform Act of 1832.

The nature of conservative reactions to change has varied considerably. Sometimes it has been outright opposition, based on an existing model of society that is considered right for all time. It can take a ‘reactionary’ form, harking back to, and attempting to reconstruct, forms of society which existed in an earlier period. Other forms of conservatism acknowledge no perpetually preferable form of society but are principally concerned with the nature of change, insisting that it can only be gradual in pace and evolutionary in style. Perhaps the most unifying feature of conservatism has been an opposition to certain kinds of justification for change, particularly those which are idealistic, justified by ‘abstract’ ideas, and not a development of existing practices.

It is clear that, ideologically, conservatism can take many different forms. Liberal individualists, as well as clerical monarchists, nostalgic reactionaries, and unprincipled realists, have all been called ‘conservatives’, regarded themselves as conservative, and demonstrated the typically conservative responses to projects for change. Particular conservative writers have founded their conservatism on individualism as often as on collectivism, on atheism as much as on religious belief, and on the idealistic philosophy of Hegel as well as on profound scepticism or vulgar materialism. Furthermore conservatism has been primarily a political reaction, and only secondarily a body of ideas: those who are defending their interests against projects for change often have little interest in philosophical ideas or treat them on the basis of ‘any port in a storm’.

A further complication is that many people might be properly described as conservatives who would not describe themselves as such. A principal reason for this is that the image of conservatism in much of continental Europe became tainted, during the first half of the twentieth century, first by association with a defunct clerical-monarchist outlook and later by alliance with fascist and National Socialist movements. Thus, although the word ‘conservatism’ exists in French, German, and Italian, the number of prominent intellectuals and politicians who have described themselves as ‘conservative’ since 1945 is extremely small. When a ‘Conservative’ group existed in the European Parliament between 1989 and 1992, it had only English and Danish members. In some respects, other political movements, especially Christian Democracy, have become forms of conservatism ‘that durst not speak its name’, but even Christian Democracy is quite distinct from conservatism in its origins and principles.

Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France has been taken as definitive and formative of modern conservatism, with its opposition to radical reform based on abstract principles and its pleas for the virtues, often hidden, of established, evolved institutions. But Burke himself was not a conservative. Not only did his literary and political careers precede the existence of conservatism, but he was a Whig with reformist and protoliberal views on the principal issues of the day, including India, Ireland, America, and Parliament. Until the 1920s he was claimed and cited as often by Liberals as by Conservatives. There is every reason to suppose he would have opposed ‘Conservatism’ when it emerged in 1832.

Much theoretical commentary on conservatism has contributed to the inherent confusion of the subject by starting with false assumptions. Often, the commentators are not merely hostile, but contemptuous, in the tradition of J. S. Mill's comment that the Conservative Party was, ‘by the law of their existence the stupidest party’. The assumption has been that conservative ideas are essentially flawed as well as being chosen for their political utility rather than their theoretical coherence. Alternatively, a spurious theoretical unity is attributed to conservatism, so that all conservatives are thought to believe in psychological pessimism, or the organic nature of society, or the importance of national traditions. Nor have many of the taxonomies of conservatism—for example, between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, ‘true’ and ‘neo’, ‘old’ and ‘new’, Tory and Conservative—afforded much insight, the distinctions having been made in too many different and contradictory ways without any one version establishing itself. A further source of unclarity is the common resort to a confused notion of a political ‘spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ which suggests that to be deeply conservative is to be on the ‘extreme right’, along with (mysteriously) divine right monarchists, libertarian anarchists, and National Socialists.

Mannheim, faced with the considerable differences between Continental and English traditions of conservatism, concluded that the drive behind conservatism was a ‘universal psychic inclination’ towards traditionalism, the doctrinal form that expressed this inclination differing between contexts. But he does detect a common negative strand to all conservatism, a critical response to ‘natural law thinking’. Conservative ideas are, thus, more genuine and profound than many critics suggest, but such unity as they have is purely negative, definable only by its opposition and rejection of abstract, universal, and ideal principles and the projects which follow from them.

This analysis of conservatism, as having only a negative doctrinal unity that allows for a vast range of positive doctrines, would seem to be the least misleading picture of what conservatism is as a general political phenomenon. It generates an intellectual method that can be described as a sceptical reductionism, which demands, of grand proposals and principles, ‘Is it really a good idea, given local conditions?’ This kind of questioning is common to Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Michael Oakeshott, and Margaret Thatcher; it may well be all that they have in common as conservatives.

Thus conservative reformism is quite central to the conservative tradition, rather than aberrant or peripheral. The idea of radical conservatism is less easy to accept. In so far as radicalism is interpreted according to its original meaning, which suggests that radicals propose a systematic replacement of institutions and practices, from the roots up, then radical conservatism is a contradiction in terms. It is more acceptable at a less literal level as meaning a belief, in a particular context, that drastic, immediate change is required to preserve the underlying virtues of the system. For example, the belief that a severe combination of reductions in public expenditure, the privatization of services, and high unemployment was necessary to preserve the underlying vitality of the capitalist system, might fall into this category. However, an extreme belief in ‘free’ markets and a minimal state of a kind which has never existed, or existed only in the distant past, could not properly be called conservatism at all.

In the nineteenth century conservatism was preoccupied with what might reasonably be called the liberal agenda of extended rights. To different degrees in different contexts it won or lost these struggles or simply took over what had been its opponents' policies in earlier periods. Nineteenth-century conservatism appears more successful when judged as a procedural doctrine preoccupied with the nature of change, than as a substantive doctrine concerned with the value of particular social forms. In the twentieth century conservatism has been so preoccupied with the struggle against forms of socialism that many people have made the mistake of identifying conservatism purely with anti-socialism. If this perception were correct then the demise of socialism would also be the demise of conservatism. But in fact there is never any shortage of the kind of belief to which conservatism is inherently opposed. We can be assured that forms of feminism, ecologism, radical democratic theory, and human rights doctrines will, inter alia, continue to provide the kind of political projects which serve as both opposition and stimulus to conservatism.

— Lincoln Allison

For more information on conservatism, visit Britannica.com.

Originally in Burke an ideology of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society, or changing its inherited traditions and institutions. In this ‘organic’ form it includes allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, benevolent paternalism, and properly subservient underclasses. By contrast, conservatism can be taken to imply a laissez-faire ideology of untrammelled individualism that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility, free markets, law and order, and a minimal role for government, with neither community, nor tradition, nor benevolence entering more than marginally. The two strands are not easy to reconcile, either in theory or in practice.

A national political and intellectual movement of self-described conservatives began to congeal in the middle of the twentieth century, primarily as a reaction to the creation of the New Deal welfare state, but also in response to the alleged erosion of traditional values and the American failure to win a quick victory in the Cold War. Among the factions within this movement, traditionalists typically stressed the virtues of order, local custom, and natural law; libertarians promoted limited government, laissez-faire economics, and individual autonomy; and militant cold warriors sought primarily to combat communism. Despite these internal differences, by 1960, conservatives had formulated a coherent critique of liberalism and built a network of political activists. In 1964, they mobilized to win the Republican presidential nomination for Senator Barry Goldwater and, subsequently, remained a major political force.

Although this late twentieth-century movement stands out in its size and success, from the outset, American life was influenced by men and women who, by some plausible standard, can be considered conservatives. Modern conservative thinkers sought to legitimate their own worldviews by discovering precursors in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Liberals responded that conservatives were merely stringing together an incongruous list of heroes for a nation whose history was, in a broad sense, liberal. Conservatives themselves often acknowledged the dilemma. Disagreeing among themselves about the essential features of modern conservatism, they offer differing evaluations of plausible precursors. Thus, any account of a conservative "tradition" is inherently problematical.

Early American Conservatives

Few modern conservatives honor the Loyalists, whose commitment to order led them to oppose the American Revolution. Rather, Edmund Burke, a British Whig who supported the cause of independence but despised the French Revolution, is typically cited as the intellectual founder of American (or Anglo-American) conservatism. The Constitution wins praise from modern traditionalists for protecting private property and limiting democracy, and its foremost authors are rightly credited with skepticism about human perfectibility. In the late eighteenth century, however, a charter that established a republic and barred religious tests for office hardly looked conservative. Moreover, skeptical of the strong central government latent in the Constitution, libertarians sometimes hail the Antifederalist defense of local prerogatives and insistence on a Bill of Rights.

While a handful of libertarians look back favorably on Thomas Jefferson, most modern conservatives scorn his optimistic view of human nature and enthusiasm for the French Revolution. They find the leaders of the Federalist Party, which rose and fell in competition with the Jeffersonian Republicans, much more appealing. Certainly, the Federalists valued hierarchy, order, and religious fidelity more than equality, democracy, and tolerance. Yet the party was by no means unambiguously conservative by modern standards. Alexander Hamilton's economic program sanctioned federal intervention, not laissez-faire, to foster capitalist development. John Marshall's jurisprudence grudgingly yielded to legislative expressions of the popular will. Furthermore, the second generation of Federalist politicians tried to save the party in the 1810s by muting their public critique of democracy.

Equally problematical is the relationship between modern conservatism and the Whig Party, which rose and fell in competition with the Jacksonian Democrats. Especially in New England, the Whigs were more likely to value decorum, orthodox Christianity, and deference to authority. The party insisted that it was preserving the moderate democracy of the nation's founders against the usurpation of power by "King Andrew" Jackson. Prominent Whigs, including Daniel Webster, even called themselves conservatives. Yet the Whig record falls short of the modern libertarian or traditionalist ideal. The party not only advocated federal appropriations for "internal improvements," but also pioneered flamboyant electoral politics in the "hard cider" campaign of 1840.

The Civil War and Conservative Politics

The antebellum South produced a distinctive intellectual conservatism in which a critique of unfettered democracy, federal power, and bourgeois individualism was increasingly tied to a defense of slavery. In the writings of James Thornwell, William Trescott, and George Fitzhugh, the slave South remained within the mainstream of Christian civilization, while the free North was capitulating to "ultraism" in the form of infidelity, socialism, and women's rights. At the same time, John C. Calhoun adapted the founders' republican ideas to protect southern interests. According to Calhoun's doctrine of the "concurrent majority," the two foremost factions in the United States—the slave states and the free states—had a right to protect their basic interests. Accordingly, the Constitution should be amended to provide for two presidents, one from each section and both armed with the veto.

Defeat of the South in the Civil War facilitated the rise of what the political scientist Clinton Rossiter called "laissez-faire conservatism." The leading ideologist of this persuasion, William Graham Sumner, adapted social Darwinism to the American scene. Not only did the fittest survive to acquire great wealth, Sumner contended, but the concentration of wealth in the hands of a competent few also maximized its productive (hence, moral) use. In a democracy, the less fit majority tried to capture the state in order to redistribute or redirect wealth. But no government could administer wealth as wisely as the industrialists and entrepreneurs who created it.

Not only did the dour, secular Sumner decline to think of himself as a conservative, but he also recognized that laissez-faire conservatives fell short of his limited government ideal. The Federalist and Whig belief in social stewardship did steadily erode with the disappearance of those parties. Yet late nineteenth-century Republicans in particular advocated both protective tariffs and federal expenditures for internal improvements. In order to strike down popular legislation that impinged on property rights, laissez-faire conservatives increased the power of at least one branch of the federal government: the judiciary. Similarly, it is ironic that the hundreds of vetoes cast by conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland in order to limit regulations and expenditures actually enhanced the power of the presidency.

What is usually called the Progressive movement has been particularly perplexing to modern conservatives—and with good reason. As libertarians lament, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and others who rode the bipartisan tide of reform created the regulatory state. Traditionalists regret that they also rallied "the people" against so-called special interests. Yet progressive Republicans and Democrats were sufficiently nationalistic in their social views and restrained in economics to preclude the creation of an explicitly conservative party. Furthermore, seeking to limit the influence of "unfit" ethnic and racial minorities, many Progressive reformers supported less democratic forms of municipal government and the disfranchisement of African Americans.

The New Deal and the New Conservatives

World War I, the subsequent red scare, and the cultural conflicts of the 1920s combined to move the political center of gravity in a more conservative direction. The major party presidential nominees were more skeptical of the regulatory state than Roosevelt or Wilson had been. Social critics and social scientists assailed the excesses of mass democracy. Organizing to protect their ways of life, diverse cultural conservatives promoted "100 percent Americanism," defended Prohibition, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in public schools, and expanded the Ku Klux Klan into the largest nativist organization in American history.

Culturally, conservative literature and criticism flourished, too. During the nineteenth century, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and many lesser writers affirmed tradition, order, and authority rather than economic development and democracy. Their post–World War I counterparts included the irreverent pundit H. L. Mencken, the "new humanists" Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and the Nashville Agrarians.

The Great Depression and the New Deal finally produced a clear and durable left-center-right political spectrum. Proponents of the welfare state, in calling themselves liberals, typically supported the Democratic Party and followed Franklin D. Roosevelt. Opponents complained that Roosevelt had stolen that honorable label to camouflage his socialism, but they nonetheless came to call themselves conservatives. Conservative attacks mixed laissez-faire conservatism with venerable fears of federal control and corruption. Few defended laissez-faire more zealously than the former Democrats who led the anti-New Deal Liberty League. Although the question of federal intervention in the economy was central to sorting out the political spectrum, conservatives also thought that Roosevelt's Jewish, Catholic, and cosmopolitan followers fell short of being 100 percent Americans, as did his activist wife, Eleanor. Starting in 1937, southern Democrats—incensed by the New Deal's mild concessions to African Americans and Roosevelt's attempt to expand the Supreme Court—joined northern Republicans in an informal conservative congressional coalition to fight further expansion of the welfare state.

A distinct far right crystallized during the 1930s. Senator Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and lesser activists agreed with conservatives like former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft that the New Deal was bureaucratic, corrupt, and un-American. But far right activists not only placed a higher priority on revitalizing (as opposed to conserving) what they considered to be the American way of life, but sometimes also favored economic redistribution. Most of them rooted their politics in theologically conservative versions of Christianity, and many embraced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. To liberals and radicals, this far right looked like an American fascism.

World War II and the Cold War heightened fears of disorder and subversion, energized a religious revival, and strengthened the congressional conservative coalition. Leaders of the modern conservative movement that began to coalesce in this hospitable environment ranged from irresponsible demagogues like Senator Joseph McCarthy to impressive thinkers like the traditionalist Richard Weaver and the libertarian economist Milton Friedman. No intellectual was more important than William F. Buckley Jr., who provided a forum in National Review magazine for attacking what he called President Dwight Eisenhower's "dime store New Deal." In 1960, Buckley took the lead in founding the Young Americans for Freedom, which became a base for the Goldwater campaign. While warding off liberal charges of "extremism," the modern conservative movement set its own boundaries to the right by repudiating anti-Semites, the John Birch Society's conspiracy theories, and segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace. Staunch conservatives typically opposed civil rights legislation as a violation of states rights and local custom. Equally important, the residual fear of military intervention abroad that had marked Robert Taft and Herbert Hoover subsided as conservatives demanded victory in the Cold War.

The political polarization of the 1960s and early 1970s strengthened conservatism. Racial conflict, secularization, liberalizing sexual mores, and the stalemated war in Vietnam War alienated many moderate Democrats, especially white southerners and working-class Catholics. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford drew these groups into the Republican Party, even as many conservatives denounced both presidents for compromising with congressional liberals and the Soviet Union. During the late 1970s, Democrats also lost support within two other constituencies. Jewish "neoconservative" intellectuals thought Jimmy Carter too hard on Israel and too soft on the Soviet Union. Theologically conservative Protestants discovered that this "born again" Baptist president was more liberal than they had thought. Such fundamentalists and evangelicals formed the bulwark of the New Christian Right. The leading organization of this kind, the Moral Majority, was led by the Baptist minister Jerry Falwell.

The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 brought significant change to modern conservatism. The Republicans were now clearly the more conservative major party. Yet Reagan's conservatism was more complicated than Goldwater's two decades earlier. While Reagan denounced big government, promoted tax cuts, and undermined labor unions, his administration ran record deficits and only slightly diminished the welfare state. He celebrated religious faith in general but gave scant support to New Christian Right efforts to ban abortion or restore prayer to public schools. A large military buildup and strident anticommunist rhetoric were intended to weaken the Soviet Union. Ultimately, however, Reagan accepted a version of détente as a means to end the Cold War.

Post–cold War Conservative Identity

Post–Cold War conservatism was marked by a loss of focus, internecine disputes, and false starts. The New Christian Right leader Pat Robertson ran an ineffective race for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988. Conservative Pat Buchanan challenged President George H. W. Bush's renomination in 1992, primarily because Bush had agreed to a tax increase. Bush's defeat by Bill Clinton, a supporter of affirmative action, gay rights, and abortion, brought temporary unity to conservative ranks. In 1994, assailing Clinton's advocacy of national health insurance as well his cultural liberalism, Republicans under the leadership of Representative Newt Gingrich won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. During 1998–1999, conservatives spearheaded the unsuccessful effort to remove Clinton from office for lying under oath about his sex life. Adapting old arguments, traditionalists and New Christian Right clergy presented Clinton as a symbol of corrupt cultural relativism in general and the moral decline of the 1960s in particular.

This campaign not only dissipated energy on the right, but also revealed many conservatives as self-righteous and hypocritical. George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 by advocating a practical and ecumenical conservatism that welcomed women, blacks, and Hispanics to the cause. Aside from a few traditionalist intellectuals and the staunchest fundamentalist Christians, there was no coherent conservative movement to Bush's right.

Bibliography

Allitt, Patrick. Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Brennan, Mary C. Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Buckley, William F., Jr., ed. American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

Dillard, Angela D. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now? Multi-cultural Conservatism in America. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Doenecke, Justus D. Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979.

Genovese, Eugene D. The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Hodgson, Godfrey. The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. 7th rev. ed. Chicago: Regnery, 1986.

Lora, Ronald. Conservative Minds in America. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971.

Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. New York: Basic Books, 1976.

Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967.

Rossiter, Clinton L. Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion. 2d rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1962.

—Leo R. Ribuffo

A general preference for the existing order of society, and an opposition to efforts to bring about sharp change. (Compare liberalism.)