Conservatism by Ted Honderich

“… no one could seriously believe Ronald Reagan had the same politics as such decent Tories as Rab Butler, the enlightened minister of education in the time of Churchill.” (p4)

(p6) “Conservativism by its name announces that it conserves… against change.” “Conservativism as we know it, sometimes aggressive, sometimes in retreat, sometimes seeming to be changing or maybe taking on a disguise, came into existence as a reaction to the French Revolution. It began in disapproval, shock, fear and resistance. Some say, as a result, that conservativism is better identified by what it opposes than what it supports.

(p7) “Our subject for analysis, however, as you will have gathered, is not conservativism in a wide sense, where it has to do with more or less anything in addition to society and politics and is more a matter of a personal disposition or indeed personality than principles. Nor is our subject a related conservativism where that is something that can turn up in any political party, and has turned up in liberal, socialist and communist parties. We are not concerned with conservative wings of such parties, so long as those wings remain more or less true to the spirits or principles of the parties.” “Our subject is the particular political tradition of belief, feeling, policy, legislation and action exemplified by the Conservative Party in Britain until its election disasters in 1997 and 2001 ended its run of successes, and also by the main part of the Republican Party in the United States, certainly that of Mr Bush, and some of the Democratic Party.” “It has among its leading principle, as they are briefly and coolly traced throughout its history by Anthony Quinton, the principle of traditionalism, which has to do with attachment to and reverence for established institutions and customs. “Purpose of sound men must be to keep a country recognizably the same” (according to Peregrine Worsthorne)

(p9) “In Britain, from 1979, as already noted, Thatcher governments set out to reduce much of what others regarded as the decent institutions and practices of the society, things that others took to have made a little contribution to advancing civilization, say the railways. In fact, Conservative Party politics, more than labour party politics, was the politics of alteration.”

(p10) “Conservativism has never been in favour of the alteration, involving unfamiliarity, that is change. It has been and is for the kind of alteration, no doubt also involving some unfamiliarity, that is reform… deep difference between change and reform.

(p11) Burke: “To innovate is not to reform. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no nothing at all, unchanged. The consequences are before us – not in remote history, not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us… by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation.”

(p12) “His drift is clear enough, and is as well put in this way as any other: change alters what is somehow fundamental, and reform alters what is not fundamental.” “Burke is not against all change, which is to say all alteration to what is fundamental to a thing. A large part of the reflections on the revolution in france is given over to damnation of the very nature of a thing, a thing regarded in its most fundamental nature.” “Another example was his championing of the American Revolution, inconsistent or not with his vilification of the French.”

(p13) “He purports to shed light for us by conveying the different thing that change alters what was good, and reform alters what was bad. As he says, change gets rid of essential good, while reform remedies evil.”

(p14) “Of course several notes are sounded by Burke’s words – change is what shakes security and troubles ‘private enjoyment’ and business. But they convey no other general propositions save one that is subordinate to or part of the one at which we have just been glancing. It is that change which is what has bad effects. Thatt gives us no more understanding of conservativism that the like proposition about liberals, socialists or any other sane persons, that they are against alterations that they take to have bad effects.”

(p15) “Taking one thing at a time, what we now have is no clear and general distinction between change and reform. As a result, we remain with the further conclusion that conservativism cannot be characterized even in part as opposition to change. We possess no effective characterization of it, and have no grip on what is different, its fundamental principle. We thus have no possibility either of celebrating or condemning conservativism, no way of coming to a judgement about it.”

Change and Reform continued, Oakeshott (p16) “The conservative, he continues, does not say, with Goethe, ‘stay with me, you are so beautiful’, but rather says, ‘stay with me, because I am attached to you’.”

“The conservative disposition provokes neither of these conditions: the inclination to enjoy what is present and available is the opposite of ignorance and apathy it breeds attachment and affection. Consequently it is averse from change, which appears always, in the first place, as deprivation. A storm which sweeps away a copse and transforms a favourite view, the death of friends, the sleep of friendship, the desuetude of customsof behaviour, the retirment of a favourite clown, involuntary exile, reversals of fortune, the loss of abilities enjoyed and their replacement by others – these are changes, none perhaps without its compensations, which the man of conservative temperament unavoidably regrets. But he has difficulty in reconcling himself to them, not because what he has lost in them was intrinsically better than any alternative might have been or was incapable of improvement, nor because what takes its place is inherently incapable of being enjoyed, but because what he has lost was something he actually enjoyed and had learned how to enjoy and what takes its place is something to which he has acquired no attachment.”

(p17) To Oakeshott “Change is something quite different: an ending of deep attachments, of love and affection, of enjoyment… is welcomed only by the ignorant, the apathetic and the strangers to love and affection.”

(p18) “The conception of conservativism as resistance to that change that consists in a loss or destruction of the enjoyable. This cannot distinguish conservatives from socialists, or the National Union of Mine Workers, or for that matter the Pennsylvania Amish, all of whom can say that they are opposed to the loss of the truly enjoyable.”

“It is the change that threatens or destroys our personal identities and hence our senses of ourselves – our identities and our senses of ourselves somehow depend on our being in and seeing ourselves in a continuing setting. It is the change that consists in defaulting in a great contract between generations… Consider the idea that conservativism is marked off by its opposition to alterations that endanger our personal identities.”

(p19) “Burke requires that we be mindful of what we have received from our ancestors and of what is due to posterity” reference to Burke reflections p194-5, idea of a contract between the dead, the living and those to be born.

(p55) Robert Nisbet’s definition of ideology: “Leaving aside the historical meaning it has had, such as its pejorative reference to a certain class of ideas in Napoleonic times and its use by Marx for the collective consciousness of social class, the sense of ideology in our age is quite clear, and altogether useful. Stated briefly, an ideology is any reasonably coherent body of moral, economic, social and cultural ideas that has a solid and well-known reference to politics and political power…” (Nisbet, Conservativism)

(p56) Anthony Quinton… protesting that it is not an abstract theory. He later adds a traditional comment: “Conservatives generally insist that different social arrangements are appropriate to different times and places. They do not, like classical liberals, or later doctrinaires like the Fabian socialists, endorse a timeless ideal of (unrelated to quote but maybe use the word universal somewhere) civilized order which should be imposed, if necessary by force, on those communities whose historical experience has not led them to it.”

(p117) “One of Burke’s most extended damnations of the French Revolution had to do with its confiscation of a kind of private property, such corporate property as that of the church.”

The idea of property and inheritance is quite closely linked with conservativism?

(p119) “In the past history of conservativism, it has certainly been more given than other political traditions to restricting the category of persons who can put themselves forward as possible owners. Women and certain races and social classes come to mind. With respect to the twentieth century and after, however, and to pass by the primitive racial restrictions imposed by whites in South Africa during apartheid, which had the tacit support of very many British and other conservatives.” “Conservativism, for part of its history, stood in opposition to liberalism. This opposition, in good part, had to do with forms of government that have since declined. In its more recent history it has more clearly stood with liberalism in opposition to socialism and to socialist strains in other ideologies. To a great extent this has been an opposition to extensions of public ownership and in particular an opposition to extensions or existing extents of the range of things that are public property.

Utilities; water, gas, electricity Public services; housing, education, health, pension, transport, communication, industries; coal, steel