In 1790, Edmund Burke sat in his London study and wrote about a revolution that was, at that moment, still being celebrated across Europe. The Bastille had fallen the previous year. The Declaration of the Rights of Man had been proclaimed. The French monarchy had been humiliated. Liberal intellectuals in Britain — Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft — greeted these events as the dawn of freedom and rational governance. Burke wrote against all of them.
"Reflections on the Revolution in France" was published in November 1790, before the Terror, before the guillotine, before the Committee of Public Safety, before Napoleon. Burke could not have known what was coming. But he predicted it — not from superior factual knowledge but from a different theory of politics, human nature, and the relationship between reason and inherited wisdom. His argument was that the French revolutionaries, in their confidence that rational principles could be applied from scratch to the reconstruction of society, were destroying the accumulated practical knowledge embedded in existing institutions without being able to replace it. The result, he argued, would not be freedom but despotism. He was right.
Burke's prescience did not make him a prophet. He was writing from a particular vision of how human beings are constituted, how societies hold together, and what the limits of abstract reasoning are. That vision — refined, challenged, extended, and sometimes distorted over two centuries — is the foundation of modern conservatism. It is a serious and sophisticated intellectual tradition, even when it is used to justify things Burke would have found repugnant, and even when its contemporary representatives have largely abandoned its founding insights.
"A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution." — Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
| Conservative Tradition | Core Emphasis | Key Thinkers |
|---|---|---|
| Classical conservatism | Tradition; organic society; gradual change | Burke, Oakeshott, de Maistre |
| Libertarian conservatism | Free markets; limited government; individual liberty | Hayek, Goldwater, Reagan |
| Social conservatism | Traditional values; religion; family structures | Religious right; Scruton |
| National conservatism | Nationhood; cultural cohesion; skepticism of globalism | Yoram Hazony; "New Right" |
| Fiscal conservatism | Balanced budgets; lower taxes; spending restraint | Thatcher; Paul Ryan |
Key Definitions
Conservatism: A political disposition emphasizing skepticism about abstract rationalism, reverence for inherited institutions, organic social change, and the accumulated wisdom embedded in tradition — more a style of political thinking than a fixed doctrine.
Prescription: Burke's term for the legitimacy conferred by long use and custom; inherited rights and institutions have a presumptive validity precisely because they have been refined through generations of practical experience.
The organic society: The conservative metaphor for society as a living organism whose parts are interdependent; the implication is that radical surgery on one part will produce unpredictable and potentially fatal effects on the whole.
Fusionism: The postwar American conservative project, associated with Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley's National Review, of combining libertarian economics with traditional social values under the unifying umbrella of anti-communism.
National conservatism: A contemporary strand emphasizing the nation-state as the proper unit of political organization and opposing liberal cosmopolitanism, large-scale immigration, and international institutions.
Neoconservatism: A strand that emerged from disillusioned leftists and liberals in the 1970s-1980s, combining hawkish foreign policy and democracy promotion with social conservatism and acceptance of the welfare state's basic structure.
Paleoconservatism: An older strand of American conservatism, associated with Patrick Buchanan, that emphasizes national sovereignty, immigration restriction, non-interventionist foreign policy, and cultural traditionalism over market liberalism and internationalism.
Russell Kirk's six canons: The core principles Kirk identified in "The Conservative Mind" (1953): belief in transcendent moral order; appreciation of the variety of human existence; connection between property and freedom; faith in prescription over abstract theory; recognition that change and reform are not identical; and conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes.
The Burkean Foundation
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Irish-born Whig politician and political philosopher whose response to the French Revolution created the template for modern conservative thought. His central argument was about epistemology — about what we can and cannot know about complex social systems — as much as about politics.
Burke argued that inherited institutions embody practical wisdom that cannot be fully articulated. The common law of England, the customs of the established church, the conventions of Parliament, the deferences and obligations of social hierarchy — these were not, in Burke's account, arbitrary impositions but the residue of centuries of practical experiment. Each generation had received these institutions, lived within them, modified them slightly where experience showed modification to be beneficial, and passed them on. They contained, in compressed form, the knowledge gained from living with the consequences of various arrangements. Abstract reason, working from first principles in the philosopher's study, could not access this knowledge because it was practical, tacit, and distributed across millions of lives and generations.
The French revolutionaries thought they could design a better society from scratch. They began with abstract principles — liberty, equality, fraternity — and attempted to apply them to the reconstruction of law, property, religion, and governance. Burke predicted that this approach would destroy what it proposed to improve: the institutions being abolished contained more wisdom than the revolutionaries knew, and without them, social order would dissolve. The Terror, the military dictatorship of Napoleon, and the conservative restoration of 1815 seemed, to conservatives, to vindicate this prediction entirely.
Burke Was Not a Libertarian
A crucial and often missed point about Burkean conservatism: it is not a defense of minimal government, free markets, or individual autonomy against collective authority. Burke's political vision was communitarian rather than individualist. He believed human beings were embedded in families, communities, religious traditions, and inherited institutions that formed their identities, constrained their choices, and gave their lives meaning. The abstract individual of Enlightenment political theory — the rational chooser behind John Rawls's later "veil of ignorance" — was, for Burke, a philosophical fiction and a political danger.
Burke celebrated the established church not merely as a political institution but as the vehicle through which society connected to transcendent moral order. He defended social hierarchy — the deferences and distinctions of class — as the structure through which social complexity became manageable. He valued the "little platoons" of civil society — families, parishes, guilds, local communities — as the primary units of human loyalty and the building blocks of any genuine social order.
This is quite different from the libertarian celebration of market freedom and minimal government that often travels under the "conservative" label in contemporary politics. A thoroughgoing libertarianism that dissolves all traditional institutions in the market, replaces communal bonds with contractual relations, and treats every inherited norm as a constraint on individual preference is, from a Burkean standpoint, itself a form of rationalist radicalism — just a right-wing variety rather than a left-wing one. William F. Buckley recognized this tension in founding National Review in 1955 and coined "fusionism" — the project of holding libertarian economic instincts and traditional social values together under the umbrella of anti-communism. The Cold War made this coalition possible. Its ending exposed the tensions beneath.
The Conservative Intellectual Tradition
Russell Kirk and the American Revival
The American conservative intellectual tradition was largely created by Russell Kirk (1918-1994), whose "The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana" (1953) traced a coherent Anglo-American conservative tradition and identified its core canons. Kirk wrote against the dominant liberal consensus of postwar America with the argument that Burke, Adams, Coleridge, Newman, and others represented a living tradition of political wisdom that America had forgotten but needed to recover.
Kirk's canons of conservative thought remain the clearest statement of the tradition: belief in a transcendent moral order that society should reflect; appreciation for the complexity and variety of human existence against rationalist uniformity; conviction that civilized society requires orders, classes, and distinctions; connection between private property and human freedom; faith in prescription — inherited custom and convention — over abstract theories; and recognition that change and reform are not identical, that not all change is improvement.
Kirk was explicitly hostile to libertarianism, which he regarded as sharing the individualism and rationalism he opposed. His conservatism was rooted in religion, community, and tradition, not in markets and individual choice. He corresponded with Eliot, admired Newman, and took the religious dimension of the conservative tradition more seriously than almost any other American political writer. His break with the emerging libertarian-influenced Republican mainstream in the 1960s and beyond foreshadowed the internal conservative tensions that would eventually erupt in the Trump era.
Michael Oakeshott's Conservative Disposition
Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990), the English philosopher, provided perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated conservative position in his essay "On Being Conservative" (1962) and his collection "Rationalism in Politics" (1962). Oakeshott's target was what he called the "rationalist" — the person who believes that political problems have technical solutions derivable from abstract principles, that the proper business of government is to apply rational schemes for human improvement to resistant reality.
Against this, Oakeshott described conservatism not as an ideology but as a disposition — a preference for the familiar over the unknown, the tried over the untried, the limited and the present over the unlimited and the utopian. The conservative is not opposed to change but approaches it with caution, preferring modest and reversible innovations to comprehensive schemes, preferring to repair and adapt rather than demolish and rebuild. This conservatism is epistemically humble: it distrusts confidence in one's own ability to design better institutions than those that evolved through long experience. It is also, notably, politically neutral in a certain sense: Oakeshott himself was skeptical of the ideological anti-communism and market libertarianism of postwar American conservatism, which he saw as its own form of rationalist politics.
Roger Scruton and the Aesthetic Dimension
Roger Scruton (1944-2020) extended the conservative tradition in a direction neither Kirk nor Oakeshott had fully developed: the role of beauty, culture, and aesthetic experience in political thought. In "The Meaning of Conservatism" (1980) and numerous subsequent books, Scruton argued that conservatism is ultimately rooted in love — love for a particular place, a particular culture, a particular way of life — rather than in abstract principle or economic calculation. Attachment to what exists, precisely because it exists and one has grown within it, is the emotional foundation from which the political disposition follows.
Scruton's conservatism was culturally rich and often at odds with the market liberalism dominant in the Thatcher era. He defended traditional architectural harmony with its surroundings, traditional literary and musical education, and religious observance not as quaint survivals but as forms of cultural transmission through which human beings connect to something larger than themselves. His philosophical aesthetics, particularly "The Aesthetics of Architecture" (1979) and "Beauty" (2009), developed the argument that aesthetic judgment is a form of practical wisdom, not merely subjective preference. The individual who belongs to nothing — who has no community, no tradition, no aesthetic home — is not free in Scruton's analysis, but diminished.
The Varieties of Conservatism
Conservatism in practice encompasses several distinct traditions that share a label while diverging substantially. The tensions between these traditions have been present throughout the modern conservative movement and were only partly suppressed by Cold War coalition politics.
Economic Conservatism and Its Hayek Problem
What is called "conservatism" in the United States often more closely resembles classical liberalism: defense of free markets, limited government, individual liberty against state interference, and private property rights. Friedrich Hayek ("The Constitution of Liberty," 1960; "The Road to Serfdom," 1944) and Milton Friedman ("Capitalism and Freedom," 1962) are its canonical thinkers. Hayek explicitly identified himself as a liberal rather than a conservative in a famous appendix titled "Why I Am Not a Conservative," arguing that the conservative's attachment to the status quo was not his concern — he wanted to restore the liberal institutions that the modern state had eroded, which was a different project from defending existing arrangements.
Hayek's "knowledge problem," articulated in his 1945 American Economic Review paper "The Use of Knowledge in Society," remains the most important economic argument in the conservative tradition: market prices aggregate and communicate distributed information that no central planner can possess, and the attempt to substitute central planning for market coordination will necessarily produce inferior outcomes. This is an epistemological argument as much as an economic one, and it connects to the Burkean tradition more deeply than Hayek himself acknowledged.
Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism emerged in the 1970s from a group of intellectuals who had moved from the socialist or liberal left, associated with Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and their journals "Commentary" and "The Public Interest." Irving Kristol's quip — "a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality" — captured the movement's self-image as pragmatic disillusionment rather than principled reaction. Neoconservatives accepted the welfare state's basic structure while opposing its further expansion, advocated muscular American foreign policy and the promotion of democracy abroad, and provided the intellectual architecture for Reaganism and later for the George W. Bush administration's democracy-promotion agenda in Iraq. The failures of that agenda provoked significant rethinking within the neoconservative tradition itself.
National Conservatism
National conservatism, associated with Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony ("The Virtue of Nationalism," 2018) and figures like J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Tucker Carlson, argues for the nation-state as the proper unit of political organization against liberal cosmopolitanism, international institutions, and large-scale immigration. It explicitly rejects libertarian economics in favor of industrial policy, trade protection, and a more active state in support of working-class communities and national solidarity. Patrick Deneen's "Why Liberalism Failed" (2018) provides a related but distinct theoretical foundation: that liberalism's internal logic destroys the pre-political communities — families, religious institutions, local associations — that human flourishing requires, and that no amount of procedural freedom can substitute for the substantive bonds of communal life.
J.D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy" (2016), while not a theoretical work, gave national conservatism its most widely read cultural document: an account of the economic and social devastation of working-class Appalachian communities whose plight was ignored by both the free-market right and the multicultural left.
The Trump Era Rupture
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the subsequent reorganization of American conservatism forced the most visible confrontation between the tradition's competing strands. The conservative movement that had organized itself around limited government, free trade, American leadership of international institutions, and rule of law from the 1950s through the 2000s found itself displaced by a populist nationalism that rejected each of these commitments in practice.
Traditional conservatives and the handful of remaining "neverTrump" Republicans argued that Trumpism represented not conservatism's fulfillment but its corruption — the abandonment of constitutional norms, institutional restraint, and the epistemic humility that Burke placed at the tradition's core in favor of a cult of personality and majoritarian populism. George Will's "The Conservative Sensibility" (2019) made the case for recovering the Madisonian constitutionalism that Trump had abandoned. Jonah Goldberg's "Suicide of the West" (2018) argued that conservatism's capitulation to nationalism was a betrayal of the Enlightenment liberal institutions that made American prosperity possible.
National conservatives responded that the old conservative establishment had failed the working-class voters it claimed to represent, that its commitment to free trade had been a catastrophe for American manufacturing communities, and that its cosmopolitan internationalism had prioritized elite interests over ordinary citizens. From this perspective, Trump's nationalism represented a long-overdue political realignment, even if his personal conduct was often difficult to defend. Patrick Buchanan had made a version of this argument in the 1990s, without success; by 2016, sufficient political conditions had changed to make it newly persuasive.
The rupture has not healed. Whether the future of conservatism lies in some version of national populism, in a recovered Burkean traditionalism that takes seriously both social cohesion and institutional restraint, or in some fusion of the two is the central debate within American conservatism today.
The Reactionary Mind Debate
The political theorist Corey Robin published "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin" in 2011, arguing from the left that what unifies conservatism across its varieties is not any positive vision of the good but the defense of existing hierarchies against movements for emancipation. Burke was defending aristocracy against democracy; nineteenth-century conservatives defended slavery against abolition; twentieth-century conservatives defended Jim Crow against civil rights; contemporary conservatives defend economic hierarchy against labor movements and social hierarchy against feminist and LGBTQ movements. On this account, conservatism is always and essentially counterrevolutionary — defined by what it opposes rather than what it affirms.
Conservative responses to Robin have been varied. Some simply dispute the historical claim, pointing to conservative movements that genuinely supported emancipation in some contexts. Others argue that the defense of existing institutions is not the same as the defense of hierarchy, and that Robin conflates the conservative's attachment to inherited arrangements with an endorsement of whatever those arrangements happen to be. Still others point to the tradition's own internal critics — those who have used Burkean arguments to oppose capitalist disruption of traditional communities — as evidence that the tradition cannot be reduced to an apology for power.
What is clear is that conservatism has meant different things in different contexts, and that the relationship between its theoretical commitments and its political deployments is complicated. A tradition that can be invoked to justify both rural communitarianism and Wall Street deregulation, both religious traditionalism and gay marriage opposition, both institutional restraint and authoritarian populism, is either a tradition rich enough to encompass genuine contradiction or one whose theoretical commitments are thin enough to serve as ideological cover for whatever political forces happen to claim the label.
The Strongest Conservative Arguments
Whatever one thinks of conservatism's political positions, the tradition's best arguments deserve engagement on their merits.
The Burkean insight about the limits of rationalist politics — that complex social systems embody distributed knowledge that cannot be accessed by abstract reasoning, and that radical interventions regularly produce catastrophic unintended consequences — is a serious contribution to political thought with strong empirical support. The twentieth century's major experiments in radical social reconstruction, from Soviet collectivization to Maoist cultural revolution, provide sobering evidence for this claim. The conservative is not obligated to defend every existing arrangement; the argument is rather that the burden of proof lies on those who propose comprehensive reform, and that the confidence of the reformer is almost always in excess of the justification.
The conservative concern for order, social cohesion, and the non-contractual foundations of functioning societies points to genuine needs that purely individualist liberalism can undervalue. Robert Putnam's research in "Bowling Alone" (2000) documented the material consequences of social capital decline: communities with high social trust and robust civic institutions produce better health, economic, and educational outcomes. Jonathan Haidt's work on moral psychology found that conservative moral intuitions about loyalty, authority, and sanctity track genuine human needs for social cohesion that a purely individualist moral framework may underweight.
The conservative case for rootedness and belonging has found unexpected support from social psychology and sociology. Belonging to a community with stable institutions, shared norms, and intergenerational connections appears to be a genuine human need, not a preference that rational individuals can freely trade off against other goods. The conservative tradition's insistence that these goods cannot be fully replaced by market exchanges or contractual relationships reflects an insight about human psychology that empirical research has largely confirmed.
These arguments are most compelling when they function as correctives to overconfident rationalism rather than as blanket defenses of any existing arrangement. A conservatism that takes Burke seriously would be as critical of disruptive corporate capitalism as of disruptive revolutionary politics — both dissolve inherited communities and local institutions in the name of abstract principles.
Cross-References
References
Burke, Edmund. (1790). Reflections on the Revolution in France. J. Dodsley.
Kirk, Russell. (1953). The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Regnery Publishing.
Oakeshott, Michael. (1962). Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Methuen.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom. University of Chicago Press.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review, 35(4), 519-530.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1960). The Constitution of Liberty. University of Chicago Press.
Friedman, Milton. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press.
Hazony, Yoram. (2018). The Virtue of Nationalism. Basic Books.
Deneen, Patrick J. (2018). Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press.
Robin, Corey. (2011). The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Oxford University Press.
Scruton, Roger. (1980). The Meaning of Conservatism. Penguin.
Scruton, Roger. (2017). Where We Are: The State of Britain Now. Bloomsbury Continuum.
Nash, George H. (1976). The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. Basic Books.
Kristol, Irving. (1983). Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead. Basic Books.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. (1835-1840). Democracy in America. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Library of America, 2004.
Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon and Schuster.
Will, George F. (2019). The Conservative Sensibility. Hachette Books.