Conservatism
보수주의
Conservatism is a collective name for intellectual and political movements that aim to preserve an existing social order or restore an earlier one, grounded in continuity through peaceful evolution and in historically grown tradition. With liberalism and socialism it is one of the three major ideologies defined in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, and it took shape in response to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, with Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre in the 1790s among its forerunners. Scholars distinguish a continental form centred on the state from an Anglo-American form centred on the individual and private enterprise, and its policies have ranged from aristocratic and landed conservatism and Bismarck's state social insurance to Disraeli's One Nation Toryism and the market-oriented conservatism of Thatcher and Reagan.
In depth
Definition and basic ideas
German reference works define conservatism as a collective term for intellectual and political movements aiming to preserve existing social orders or restore earlier ones, resting on continuity through peaceful evolution and historically grown tradition. With liberalism and socialism it is one of the three great ideologies defined in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, though often described as an attitude in a given historical situation rather than a closed philosophy; R. J. White called it 'less a political doctrine than a habit of mind'. Commonly listed positions are the insufficiency of human reason, experience drawn from history rather than abstract systems, the diversity of what has grown historically, tradition as the unconscious wisdom of ancestors, authority based on natural inequality, and the unity of civil liberty and private property.
Answer to the French Revolution
Its first programmatic writings arose from criticism of the French Revolution. Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre in the 1790s are counted among the forefathers of Western conservative thought. Burke saw society as an organic whole spanning generations, preferred tradition to abstract 'Reason', yet wrote that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Louis de Bonald set out monarchy, hereditary aristocracy and patriarchal authority as French conservative principles in 1796. The Congress of Vienna opened a conservative reaction against the liberal and nationalist forces released by the Revolution; Chateaubriand co-founded Le Conservateur in 1818; in Russia Sergei Uvarov proclaimed 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality' in 1833. Historian Klaus Epstein distinguished status-quo and reform conservatism from reaction, which seeks to revive a golden age.
Parties and the state in the 19th century
The political term arose around 1800 in Britain and France and spread to Germany after the Tories renamed themselves the Conservative Party in 1832. Prussian conservatives first formed a party during the revolution of 1848–1849; until 1918 the Reichstag had the agrarian German Conservative Party, the Free Conservatives and, from 1871, the Centre Party. Bismarck banned the Social Democrats under the Anti-Socialist Laws while introducing sickness, accident and old-age insurance. British conservatism split over the Corn Laws in 1846, and paternalistic conservatism first arose as a distinct ideology in Disraeli's One Nation Toryism.
The 20th century
Conservatism and fascism shared nationalism and an enemy in communism, but authoritarian conservative regimes often suppressed fascist and Nazi movements. In Germany Alfred Hugenberg's DNVP furthered Hitler's rise from 1929, while other conservatives went into exile or joined the 20 July 1944 plot. After 1945 German conservatism largely accepted the democratic constitutional state, and the CDU integrated Catholic and Protestant conservatives. In Japan the Liberal Democratic Party has dominated since 1955. American conservatives of the 1950s rallied against 'godless communism', and Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s privatised state assets under neoliberal economics, opposed within the party by One Nation conservatism.
Continental and Anglo-American forms; socialism
The continental form treated the state as the natural seat of power and social responsibility; the Anglo-American form gave the individual that ordering role and viewed the state as anonymous power. After the Revolution conservatism opposed liberalism, constitutionalism, radical democracy and later socialism; conservative and classical-liberal parties favour private ownership against communist, socialist and green parties. Yet Bismarck's social insurance was known as state socialism, and One Nation conservatives accepted the welfare state.