With reference to the French Revolution

French disciples of the Dublin-born British political thinker, Edmund Burke, were the first to coin the word “conservative” in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Hamilton, 2020). It originally referred to those ideas which Burke had espoused in his Reflections on the Revolution in France and was also associated with general anti-revolutionary sentiment throughout Europe in the 19th century. However, today, the word has taken a much broader meaning that has come to refer to a myriad of political ideologies, many of them which lack the essence of conservatism, such as Thatcherism or neoliberalism, monarchism and even radically theocratic ideas of the Iranian Revolution. While elements of conservatism can be identified within these doctrines and creeds, they are not representative of what the term conservative ought to describe, which cannot be an ideology itself but is rather a disposition which tends to oppose it yet can also lend itself to an ideology if there are common, traditional values.

As the philosopher Ted Honderich tells us, conservatism announces its purpose within its name – to conserve, and, as it follows, to oppose change (1991a, p. 6). But what change or innovation is, and how it differs from what is sound reform to conservatives, appears to be an arbitrary distinction at first. Burke claims in a letter that “change… alters the substance of the objects themselves and gets rid of their essential good as well as the accidental evil annexed to them.” (Burke, 1796. Cited in Honderich, 1991a, p. 10) while “Reform is… a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of” (ibid, p. 11). These are vague and unhelpful differentiations of the two terms, which Honderich argues fail to characterize conservatism (1991a, p. 15), though can still be used to demonstrate that Burke’s disposition lacks a clear creed or doctrine but is rather an arbitrary opposition to some forms of change. 20th century British philosopher Michael J. Oakeshott provides a definition centered around familiarity (1991b, p. 408) - what is known is to be preferred over what is unknown, and what is tried to be preferred over the untried. Indeed, Burke had made a similar argument in his reflections regarding the English people’s unwillingness to “ape the fashions they have never trialed, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.” (Burke, 1790, p. 23) The vagueness of what determines which changes are acceptable and which are not, to a conservative, affirms the idea that their ideas are indeed a disposition and not a creed or doctrine.

Oakeshott defines the conservative by his opposition to the political rationalist. The rationalist is characterized by the independence and removal of his mind and his reason from the present condition – and dismisses the uses of prejudice (Oakeshott,1991, p. 5). As a result, he believes that rationality in politics is infallible (ibid, p. 8), leading to a misguided belief in a ‘politics of perfection’ or a ‘politics of unity’ (ibid, p. 9), and a rejection of the values of familiarity and the usefulness of that which exists and has existed for many generations (ibid, p. 8). Oakeshott contends that almost all politics today have become a form of political rationalism (ibid, p. 5). A conservative, then, is someone who has rejected rationalism as the sole tool of political governance, and naturally, as Oakeshott believes, someone who has accepted that politics is an art rather than a science. (Nardin, 2020) Politics and governance is akin to aesthetics or culinary arts, as like those two it centers on wants, not objective truths of the reality of our universe. There is no objectively optimal way of organizing a society because human wants, even if common in some respects, are ultimately different. A conservative is like a post-modernist in this regard, rejecting the modernist understanding of political rationality. For this reason, it is difficult to label conservatism as an ideology in the same sense as proper and defined doctrines such as Marxism-Leninism or Liberalism.

Burke’s criticism of the revolutionaries in France is in great part due to their disregard of precedent, and reliance on the blank slate of rationality. This in turn leads to many failures in governance, as human reason is unequipped to change a history of precedent. Burke chastises the revolutionaries for their government structure, writing “Your all-sufficient legislators, in a hurry to do everything at once, have forgot one thing that seems essential… never done before… in theory or practice… they have forgot to constitute a senate” (1790, p. 168). Indeed, the French Revolutionaries did not implement a second chamber until 1795 with the introduction of the Corps Législatif (Britannica, 1998), demonstrating a failure of blank slate ideological thinking. Similarly, Burke also criticizes the military policy of the revolutionaries, which dismissed precedent when democratizing the army and removing the officer class from their positions (1790, p. 186). The policy was a failure and reversed within a short duration as precedent showed its importance in the military. Burke successfully demonstrates the link between conservativism and precedent, and discerns changes in what is fundamental, in this case, the utility of bicameral legislation in what has effectively become a republic, as well as the necessity of hierarchy in the military. Precedent, then, is an important factor in the conservative disposition, yet something so simple and broad cannot be called a creed or doctrine.

Burke is also critical of the championing of abstract ideas, which he argues can result in arbitrary tyranny. He refers to a specific case during the revolution, when the revolutionary government deprived former soldiers in the French army their promised pensions – as Burke puts it, they were “robbed without mercy” (1790, pp. 91-92). The argument provided by the French government was that the state they had served no longer existed, so they were not owed anything. Another case where property rights are violated is discussed by Burke, in which the revolutionary government disregards property as a fiction of the state

and liable to confiscation by a government (ibid, p. 90). A final verdict is given towards the end of his Reflections where he describes a cycle of violence before exclaiming, “Massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men! These are the fruits of metaphysic declarations wantonly made…” (ibid, p. 188). The criticism is launched towards metaphysical, or abstract, declarations – and indeed, perhaps the most abstract of ideologies took power when the Sans-culottes and Jacobins overthrew the moderate Gironde on 2 June 1793 (Hobsbawm, 1962, p. 67), and promptly ushered in the most tyrannical and brutal period of the revolution. Within the first fourteen months of the period termed as the “Reign of Terror”, the Jacobin republic executed 17,000 people and issued the repressive “levée en masse” to amass a large force to continue a war of supposed liberation against other European powers (ibid, p. 68). The revolutionary is an actor of arbitrary tyranny, according to Burke, and thus a conservative is defined by his opposition to him. However, it does not suffice to define a conservative’s creed or doctrine solely on the basis of their opposition to the rationalist, as that would be too broad of a stance. The notable American sociologist Robert Nisbet gives a short and effective definition of an ideology: “any reasonable coherent body of moral, economic, social and cultural ideas that has a solid and well-known reference to politics and political power…” (Nisbet, 1986. Cited in Honderich, 1991, p. 55). Burke and Oakeshott’s conservatism by itself cannot fit into this definition, instead better defined as a disposition or tendency which can lend itself to one.

An example of this is the overlap between liberalism and conservatism. At least within the Anglosphere, liberalism has been the ideology of those who hold the conservative disposition, something we can see with the adoption of conservatism by neoliberal politics in the United Kingdom (Thatcherism) and in the United States (Reagan-era Republican Party to today). While it is incorrect to call these ideologies “conservative” in the sense that Burke and Oakeshott have used it, they still possess some of the conservative disposition regarding the values they hold. Sir William Blackstone, the conservative jurist, identifies three traditional rights of Englishmen – personal security, personal liberty and private property. (Harrison, 1965, p.107). Similar sentiment is echoed within the founding documents of the United States – including their declaration

of independence. If we accept these as traditional values, it makes sense for liberalism to be the ideological expression of conservatism in a practical sense. However, in a strict sense it is incorrect to label neoliberalism as conservatism – best explained by one of neoliberalism’s most important contributors, the British Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who concluded his The Constitution of Liberty, oft-cited by Thatcher, with a digression titled “Why I am not a Conservative”. Hayek writes, “To the liberal, they [institutions and liberty] are valuable not mainly because they are long established or because they are American but because they correspond to the ideals which he cherishes” (1960, p.399). Despite many conservatives holding a liberal ideology (including Burke and Oakeshott), it is more of an alliance of convenience given that the key values of liberalism are deeply rooted within the Anglosphere.

An alliance of convenience is also visible in the opposition to the French Revolution, with conservatives and counterrevolutionaries among the émigrés, Vendée rebels and the radical theocratic thinkers like Joseph de Maistre. The Vendée rebelled against the revolution many times throughout the 1790s, but at its climax the counterrevolutionaries amassed approximately 10,000 men in March 1793 (Davies, 2002, p. 42), primarily composed of peasantry but led and organized by clergy and nobility (ibid, p. 41). The rebels wore the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and were officially called the Catholic and Royal army, they opposed the revolution on grounds which included religious and political, and their aims were ultimately to return France to its pre-revolutionary state (ibid, p. 44-46). The émigrés were of a similar disposition, and emigrated from France at various times in opposition to different events – some royal and military emigration occurred after the Bastille fell, clergy and those religiously disposed after the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in Sprin 1791, and following the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 (ibid, p. 38). While conservatism is aptly termed to these two categories, there is a third group of radical theocrats who are not best described with the word conservatism. This is the ideology of Joseph de Maistre, a lawyer from Savoy, who wrote the “god-fearing" and “mystical” criticism of the French Revolution, the Considerations on France, in 1796. (ibid, p. 29). While a critic of what he sees as rationality and abstraction in politics and a proponent of traditionalism (ibid, p. 31-32), his criticism of rationality is only of atheistic rationality, as he instead relies on a religious doctrine and reason – relying also on providence (ibid, p.29, 31). Like the theocrats of Iran, also viewed as a conservative regime (Heywood, 2007, p. 67), de Maistre essentially wishes to return to a period of history which did not strictly exist.¹ We can discern that the relationship between theocracy (or monarchy) to the conservative disposition is an alliance of convenience or a result of theocratic/royal values being deeply embedded in the tradition of the country.

In the two centuries where the term conservative has risen to prominence, it has characterized many ideologies and lines of thought which do not align with how the word ought to be used. Despite the conservative disposition being an element within some ideologies, due to the same values or institutions being embedded within society, it is not appropriate to define conservatism as a creed or doctrine by itself. Naturally, the conservative disposition will adapt to different cultures and contexts, resulting in being in different political camps such as liberalism in the Anglosphere or monarchism in Revolutionary France.

¹ Note: The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was driven by rationalism, like the rationalism of de Maistre, in that it was grounded in interpretation of scripture, rather than preserving or returning to any existing state.

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