Comprehending conservatism: A new framework for analysis

This essay argues against the view—frequently put forward by conservatives themselves—that conservatism cannot be analyzed as a coherent political ideology. It then proposes a multidimensional approach to understanding conservatism, defining (and defending a particular interpretation of) four dimensions which are termed sociological, methodological, dispositional and philosophical. It is argued that only if two of these four dimensions are present in a particular variety of political thought is it justified to speak of political conservatism. The study of conservatism as an ideology has been beset with difficulties. It is widely held that conservatism is hard to define precisely; it is frequently assumed that conservatism is more prone to internal contradictions than other varieties of political thought; and finally, as Michael Freeden has pointed out, it appears that it is mainly conservatives themselves who write about conservatism—giving rise to the suspicion that it might be hard to come by unbiased analyses. It is certainly the case that analytical philosophers only very rarely lower themselves to deal with what John Stuart Mill famously (or infamously) called ‘the stupidest party’; when they do, the results tend not in any obvious way to help the case of comprehending conservatism, or in giving us clear criteria for classifying certain strands of political thinking as conservative or not. The overall result has often been a somewhat desperate resort to nominalism (‘conservative is who calls themselves conservative’), or historicism (‘conservatism is changing all the time’), or what one might call ‘conceptual changism’ (‘there is a concept but it’s changing in crucial periods, like a Sattelzeit’). Correspondence Address: Jan-Werner Müller, Department of Politics, Princeton University, Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ, 08544-1012, USA. Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2006), 11(3), 359–365 ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/06/030359–7 q 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13569310600924012 In this brief essay I want tentatively to suggest a new framework for making sense of conservatism. I do not claim that this framework in its emphasis on different dimensions of political thought is confined to analyzing conservatism; it might well be applied to other strands of political thought, even though the dimensions clearly would then have to be described differently. Equally, I cannot claim with any confidence that the framework will be of help in definitively classifying all kinds of thinking that some would label conservatism, especially outside the West; I merely claim that it is an advance over existing approaches. Future work will have to show whether such a framework can make sense of the sheer variety of strands of political thought that tends to get called ‘conservative’ in different national contexts, and in different time periods. Before presenting the framework, I want briefly to review some of the reasons why students of ideologies have found it so difficult to find consensus on a definition of conservatism. First, there is simply no foundational text, except perhaps for Burke’s Reflections. However, as has been pointed out numerous times, ‘Burke the conservative’ was to a significant degree a 19th-century invention that necessarily had to do violence to parts of Burke’s oeuvre other than the Reflections (especially his, broadly speaking, anti-imperialism); in any case, though, Burke’s text is impossible to reduce to anything like a systematic set of political propositions; and while its unsystematic (and aesthetic) character has, for some conservatives, precisely been proof that Burke is the father of conservatism, no actual political conservatism ever rests content with a purely aesthetic approach. This is a point to which I shall return shortly, in connection with the suspicion that defining conservatism would inevitably be a form of ‘rationalism’. Second, there is the claim that conservatism itself is necessarily opposed to universal definitions, since—so the often unargued premise goes—conservatism is inevitably committed to ‘particularism’. If nations and communities are irreducibly different, there cannot be any universally valid and uniform political prescriptions; and there cannot be anything resembling a ‘Conservative International’. Indeed, has anyone ever proclaimed: ‘Conservatives of all Nations, Unite!’? And yet all will here in turn depend on the definition (and justification) of ‘particularism’. The prescription that particular circumstances matter, and that political practitioners should pay attention to them, is not exclusive to conservatives; in other words, what one might call ‘prudential particularism’ is in itself hardly a sufficient reason to stop thinking about more general characteristics or at least ‘family resemblances’ among alleged conservatisms. It would be something different again if particularism really meant a thoroughgoing commitment to relativism or certain kinds of value pluralism, in which case ignoring or destroying difference is problematic not so much for prudential reasons, but because diversity is in itself a value of some or perhaps even supreme importance. One might think here of Herder and his assumption that irreducible diversity is part of a providential divine plan. Third among the prime difficulties of defining conservatism, there is the claim that defining conservatism would already constitute an instance of ‘rationalism’; JAN-WERNER MÜLLER