There are three facts about the origins of conservatism that sit badly beside each other, and I want to spend this essay making them fit.
Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. The word “conservative” wasn’t attached to a British political party until 1830, forty years later. And Burke sat in the House of Commons for twenty-nine years, always on Whig (not small government) interest, under Whig patrons, as a member of the Whig party.
He was never a Tory (conservative), not once, not briefly, and not at the end. The man we call the father of conservatism spent his whole career in the party of reform, and he died three years before anyone in Britain was using the word in its modern political sense.
So either the label is wrong, or it means something other than what most people assume. I’m going to argue for the second, because almost every bad argument you’ll hear about conservatism this year begins by getting this part wrong.
This is the first of four essays on where conservatism came from. The series runs on a single question, first put out loud by Benjamin Disraeli about Robert Peel in 1844, after a conservative party accepted a constitutional change it had spent two years fighting. Disraeli asked the obvious thing. What, exactly, are you conserving? Every generation since has had to answer it over again, because the thing being conserved keeps moving.
The word arrives late
You’ll often hear that the word came from France, from Le Conservateur, the journal Chateaubriand founded in 1818 to defend the Bourbon restoration. That’s mostly how it reached English, and the story is also a bit too tidy. Richard Bourke points out that a Parisian journal called Le Conservateur was already in print by 1794, devoted to what it called true democratic principles. Same title, opposite politics, a generation earlier.
The word found a party in 1830, when it was applied for the first time to an established political organization, and that organization was the Tory party of Great Britain and Ireland. By 1841, German writers were calling for a konservative Partei. The label spread across Europe in about a decade, carried out of the vocabulary of the Continental restoration, which is important to know because it produces an irony we come back to at the end.
The harder question is whether there was conservatism before there was a word for it.
Karl Mannheim argues that the obvious yes is a category error. Traditionalism, in his account, is a psychological disposition, the inclination to cling to the accustomed, and it exists in all people in all societies at all times. Your grandmother has it about her kitchen. A software team has it about a codebase nobody wants to touch. Because it’s everywhere, it explains nothing.
Conservatism (capital C) in Mannheim’s sense is a self-conscious, articulated worldview that came into existence as a counter-movement, and it has a date. Something happened, and people who had never before been asked to explain why institutions were valuable suddenly had to explain it in public, under attack. That something was 1789, with the French Revolution.
The implication is that conservatism isn’t the natural resting state of politics. It’s a response. Nobody writes a defense of inherited institutions until somebody proposes abolishing them, the same way nobody writes a defense of gravity. The tradition is reactive by construction, and that turns out to be the source of its deepest problem. Something I need to add here: institution doesn’t just mean government agency or program; it means all our institutions, which, assembled together, make our culture.
What existed before the label
Something was obviously going on before 1789, and it’s worth knowing what, because the raw material Burke works with is English and has nothing to do with France.
Richard Hooker, writing in the 1590s, gives the tradition three things it keeps. He describes law as a graded order running from divine reason down to the statutes men actually write, so that a law is never pure reason and never somebody’s arbitrary will. He grounds authority in the consent of the whole body. And he treats political society as corporately immortal, binding the living to what the dead agreed. He also writes a sentence that belongs over every reformer’s desk: Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. He isn’t telling anyone to avoid change. He’s saying there’s a bill, and it comes due whether the change was right or not.
The doctrine that gives English conservatism its spine is the ancient constitution, worked up by Sir Edward Coke and the common lawyers in the early 1600s. It holds that England has an immemorial system of common law and parliamentary government predating the Norman Conquest, and that the system binds the king. Coke’s move on the Conquest is clever and almost certainly bad history, since he argues that William agreed to maintain existing Anglo-Saxon law in place of imposing new law. The result is a constitution with no author and no founding moment. Nobody granted it, so nobody can revoke it.
Historians now treat the doctrine as ideology in antiquarian dress, which is probably correct and also beside the point, because of what the doctrine buys you. If long usage is what makes authority legitimate, and nobody designed it, then you can be a constitutionalist and an anti-absolutist while still arguing from antiquity. The same argument that legitimates the king limits him. Continental counter-revolution never had that move available, because its argument for authority was theological, and God does not have a common-law history.
David Hume has a claim on being the first conservative as well, and some people press it hard. Jerry Muller opens the standard anthology of conservative thought with him, on the grounds that Hume is where the position becomes coherent and secular. Here he is in “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” thirty-eight years before the Reflections:
To tamper, therefore, in this affair, or try experiments merely upon the credit of supposed argument and philosophy, can never be the part of a wise magistrate, who will bear a reverence to what carries the marks of age; and though he may attempt some improvements for the public good, yet will he adjust his innovations, as much as possible, to the ancient fabric, and preserve entire the chief pillars and supports of the constitution.
Adjusting your innovations to the ancient fabric and preserving the chief pillars is Burke’s doctrine of reform, stated before Burke stated it, by a Scottish skeptic who was no kind of Tory. The essay opens with Hume’s reason for the caution. A government, he says, is not like other artificial contrivances, where an old engine may be rejected if a better one turns up and trials may safely be made. You can’t even run the trial, because you can’t put the country back if it fails.
What Hume supplies is the argument without the occasion. He’s the first conservative argument, but the label still needs the French Revolution.
One more figure is worth a paragraph, because he demolishes a lazy assumption about what Tory ever meant. Lord Bolingbroke wrote The Idea of a Patriot King in 1738, and he’s as Tory as they come. If Tory meant divine-right absolutism you would find it there. What you find instead is that a divine right to govern badly is an absurdity, and that asserting it is blasphemy. Royal blood gives no right, and length of succession no prescription, against the constitution of a government. The throne-and-altar language that gets projected backward onto English Toryism is Continental restoration vocabulary from forty years later.
The general bank and capital
The common misreading of Burke is that his argument runs on tradition. At the root it runs on knowledge, and specifically on how little of it any one person has.
The most misunderstood passage he ever wrote is the one where he defends prejudice by name, and he knows exactly how it sounds:
You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame on ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices.
Then he gives the argument underneath it:
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
That one sentence carries the whole of Burkean conservatism, and the metaphor he reaches for is economic and not sentimental. Each person works from a small private stock of reasoning, not because people are stupid, but because one lifetime is short and the problems are enormous and generational. Meanwhile, there’s an accumulated store of practical knowledge sitting in customs, institutions, habits and laws, built by people who are all dead and who were solving problems you’ve never heard of. A prejudice, in Burke’s sense, is a debit from that account.
He knows the obvious objection, which is that this licenses stupidity, and he answers it inside the same passage. Men of speculation, he says, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity (sagacious, or good discernment) to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they would sooner keep the prejudice with its reason attached than strip it down to naked reason. He isn’t telling you to stop asking why a practice exists. He’s telling you to go find out, and to expect an answer.
The practical half of the passage almost never gets quoted:
because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved.
Read that as an operational argument, because that’s what it is. Naked reason is slow, has to be worked out fresh each time, and gives you no motive to act on the conclusion once you’ve reached it. A habit does both jobs at once. It carries the reasoning already done and the will to act on it, and it’s available under pressure when there’s no time to derive anything.
Anyone trained to do something dangerous understands this in their body. You don’t reason through a weapons malfunction. You did the reasoning months ago on a range, and what you have in the moment is a habit with the reasoning folded into it. Burke is making that same argument about an entire civilization.
His clearest statement of the premise isn’t in the book at all. It comes from a speech in May 1782, where he says that man is a most unwise and a most wise being, that the individual is foolish, that the multitude for the moment are foolish when they act without deliberation, but that the species is wise, and that given time, as a species, it almost always acts right.
Two things about that line are we should flag. The version circulating on quotation sites drops “almost,” and that single word is the difference between Burke and a man selling ancestor worship. The text also comes from a speech his executors published after his death, assembled from his papers, which makes it the weakest-sourced item in this essay. I think it’s genuine, but you should know it’s a reconstruction.
Stated as a procedure, the method comes down to four questions you ask when somebody proposes removing an institution. What practice is this replacing? Why did it develop? What else is it doing that nobody has accounted for? And can the actual problem be fixed without destroying the thing?
Notice that none of those questions is “is it old.” Age isn’t the argument. Age is evidence that the thing has survived contact with reality for a long time, which creates a presumption somebody has to overcome. A presumption, but not a veto.
Even when I changed
If you know one Burke quotation, it’s probably about tradition. The second one you should know is this, because without it the first is a lie:
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
That’s from the same book, and the sentence beside it tells you what he has in mind. The two principles of conservation and correction, he writes, operated strongly at the two critical periods of the Restoration and Revolution, when England found itself without a king. Conservation and correction, named together and operating together, at the two moments the English constitution nearly came apart. This is something we’ve discussed a lot over the years, whether framed as conservative vs liberal, right vs left, or ambition to counter ambition.
The fuller version is the best paragraph he ever wrote on the subject:
I would not exclude alteration neither; but even when I changed, it should be to preserve. I should be led to my remedy by a great grievance. In what I did, I should follow the example of our ancestors. I would make the reparation as nearly as possible in the style of the building.
Even when I changed, it should be to preserve. Those words hold the whole doctrine of conservative reform. The doctrine isn’t resistance to change. It’s a test for change and a direction for it.
The engineering in the rest of the passage repays attention. Being led to the remedy by a great grievance sets a threshold and puts the burden on the reformer to show real damage instead of theoretical imperfection. Following the example of our ancestors means the method comes out of the tradition and not out of a textbook. And the reparation in the style of the building is the image that makes the whole thing click. There’s a cathedral, a wall is failing, and you repair the wall in the style of the building because what you want is the cathedral. You don’t take the occasion to redesign it according to a better theory of cathedrals.
We are the longest-running Constitutional Republic in human history, and the first true experiment in human liberty. Sure, there have been mistakes, but unless someone can make an argument that would clearly meet the threshold of maximizing human liberty to a greater degree than present (reparations and present racism to counter past racism is nonsense and could never meet this standard), then we shouldn’t even consider uprooting and replacing our system. That is conservatism at its root.
One more piece of the record cuts against the caricature, and it may be the most interesting thing he ever did. In 1770 he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents and defended political parties:
Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.
That reads as unremarkable now and was close to scandalous then, because respectable eighteenth-century opinion held that parties were a disease. The man who had made that case most forcefully, thirty-two years earlier, was Bolingbroke: faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive: party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties.
So the two most quoted British political writers of the century are flatly opposed on the central institutional question of the century. Bolingbroke says party is an evil to be transcended by a patriot king who governs as the common father of his people. Burke says organized party is the only honest instrument by which principle gets into government and power gets held accountable. Anybody drawing a straight line from one to the other has a problem on their hands.
Burke’s version of the case comes with a line I’d keep: When bad men combine, the good must associate. That’s an argument for organizing, and it has nothing to do with defending tradition. It has everything to do with coordination between those determined to defend their culture, or as Tocqueville called them, joiners.
If Burke were the man people take him for, a defender of whatever exists against whoever wants to change it, his career would show it. The career shows the opposite. He spent a decade arguing for conciliation with America. He pushed free trade with Ireland and Catholic relief, which cost him his seat at Bristol, a real contested constituency he lost for telling his constituents he owed them his judgment and not his obedience. He ran the campaign for economical reform, cutting Crown patronage. And he spent fourteen years pursuing the impeachment of Warren Hastings over British rule in India, which consumed the back half of his life, exhausted his friends, damaged his reputation, and failed. Hastings was acquitted.
A man absolutely devoted to immemorial custom does not spend fourteen years trying to destroy a British official over how he treated Indians.
The best single statement of his method sits in the speech on conciliation with America, delivered March 22, 1775:
The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable; but whether it is not your interest to make them happy?
Parliament had the legal authority and Burke conceded it. His argument was that having a right to do a thing and being wise to do it are separate questions, and that governments which confuse the two lose their empires.
The partnership
What Burke took a society to be comes out in a passage that’s usually quoted in fragments, and the fragments make it sound mystical. Taken whole, it’s an argument.
He’s responding to people who described the state as a contract among its current members, terminable at their pleasure, and he opens by conceding the premise. Society is indeed a contract. Then he asks what kind of contract:
Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure, but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.
Pepper and coffee, calico and tobacco are the goods of the East India and Atlantic trades, and he’s accusing the revolutionaries of mistaking the constitution of a nation for the articles of a trading company. Then comes the famous part:
It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
The reason he gives is practical, and it’s the part that gets skipped. The ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations. Some projects take longer than a lifetime. A cathedral does. A common law does. A language takes longer than anyone can measure. If the only parties to the contract are the people currently breathing, then no project longer than a human life can be undertaken, because nobody has standing to commit to it. There’s nothing mystical in that. It’s a problem in contract design, and his answer is that the contract has more parties than are in the room or even on the planet at a given time.
That brings me to the most abused sentence in the book, which needs two corrections:
To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle, the germ as it were, of public affections.
The first correction is that he wrote “little platoon,” singular, once, in his entire body of work. The plural “little platoons” that every politician uses is not in Burke. The second correction changes the meaning, because in context the subdivision is a social rank and not a neighborhood association. He’s writing about French nobles and clergy who abandoned their own order, which is why the passage goes on to say that none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.
I’d argue the modern usage is a legitimate extension. The logic really does run from the small and near out to the large and far, and the family and the parish and the volunteer company are the obvious American application. But you should know you’re extending him and not quoting him.
The other tradition
While Burke was writing in London, a different counter-revolutionary tradition was forming on the Continent (Europe). It reaches conclusions that sound similar and rests on completely different foundations, and conflating the two wrecks the analysis in both directions.
Joseph de Maistre published Considerations on France in 1796, and it gets routinely called the French counterpart to the Reflections. That’s fair in one sense, since both books attack the Revolution, and wrong in every other. His most famous argument concerns the French constitution of 1795. It was made for man, he says, and then he adds that there is no such thing as man in the world. He has seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians. Thanks to Montesquieu, he knows that one can even be Persian. But man he has never met.
It sounds Burkean on the surface. Abstraction fails, particular peoples are real, a constitution made for humanity in general fits nobody, and Burke would nod along at every step. Where Maistre takes it is somewhere else entirely. Written constitutions are scraps of paper. Sovereignty comes directly from God. This is more similar to Hooker than Burke. The Revolution was divine punishment. And in the St Petersburg Dialogues he builds an argument that the executioner is the foundation of social order, the horror and the bond of human association, and that removing him collapses society into chaos.
Burke never says anything remotely like that, and the reason is structural. Burke’s test for an institution is whether it works. Maistre’s test is whether it’s divinely ordained.
Metternich is the same tradition in its administrative form. In an 1820 memorandum to the Russian Emperor that he called his Political Confession of Faith, he diagnoses the age in one word, presumption, the natural effect of the rapid progression of the human mind. A Burkean could sign that sentence. The prescription is where it turns away from Burke. He calls for union between the monarchs as the basis of policy, and asks that they suppress Secret Societies, that gangrene of society. What that produced was coordinated international intervention, enforced by censorship and surveillance and institutionalized in the Carlsbad Decrees. Burke fought a war against revolutionary France. Metternich built a standing regime of preemption, and there’s no analogue for it anywhere in Burke.
Peter Viereck put the difference in one sentence: Burke attacked the revolutionaries for the sake of traditional liberties, Maistre for the sake of traditional authority. Liberties set against authority, both of them old, and both men defending the old thing they preferred.
Jerry Muller offers a three-way distinction that’s more useful still, because it separates things that get lumped together constantly.
The orthodox thinker defends an institution because it corresponds to ultimate truth, and its track record is beside the point.
The conservative defends it by demonstrated usefulness, and the record creates a presumption somebody has to overcome.
The reactionary wants to return to an arrangement that no longer exists, which is a different project from conserving what’s here.
It might be useful to ask yourself sometime, which are you? And it’s always useful to ask which the person you’re listening to is. A conservative is someone who lives in reality, and recognizes the need for change, but even in change they expect two things: overwhelming evidence and that the change be used to preserve.
Running three men through that scheme is clarifying. Maistre comes out orthodox and reactionary at once. Burke comes out conservative and almost never reactionary, since he’s defending a constitution he thinks is operating and needs repair. And in any given year you can find all three positions being argued in one room, under one label, by people who believe they agree with each other. They don’t, and the fights get ugly precisely because nobody has named which argument they’re making.
That leaves an odd historical fact to sit with. The English-speaking world got the word from the vocabulary of the Continental restoration, which is to say from Maistre’s side, and the etymology points at throne and altar. It got the ideas from a Whig in London who had spent his career trying to reform the British Empire and would have found Metternich’s police state repellent. The word and the thing came from different places, and we’ve been paying for that ever since.
The assignment
Conservatism arrived late, under a borrowed name, from the wrong continent, attached to a man who would have been puzzled by the honor. The label has never had stable content, because what there is to conserve keeps changing. The sharpest scholars working on it will tell you the category melts under pressure. All of that is true, and none of it touches the thing underneath, which is an argument about knowledge. Each of us works from a small private stock of reason. A much larger store sits inside institutions nobody designed, and nobody fully understands. And the prudent move, when you want to change something, is to find out what it’s doing first, on purpose and incidentally.
Three things to do with that this week.
Read the Burke, and not a quotation about Burke. Thirty pages of the Reflections, free online in about a minute, and see whether the man you find is the man you’ve been told about. I’ve given you my reading of him. I’d rather you check it for yourself.
Run the method on something of your own. Take one rule, one custom, one practice in your house or your work or your church that strikes you as pointless. Before you kill it, find out why it’s there. You’ll find one of two things. Either there’s a reason nobody told you, in which case you’ve made a withdrawal from the general bank, or there’s no reason at all and the thing is dead weight, in which case you kill it with a clear conscience, because you did the work. Both outcomes are wins.
The third one is harder, because the method cuts in both directions. If the test is whether an institution does demonstrated work, then an institution that has stopped doing the work fails the test. The presumption can be overcome. Burke said so explicitly, and spent his career trying to overcome it in specific cases, though mostly losing.
So name the institution you would reform. Not in the abstract. Name a specific one you’re attached to, one you’re benefiting from or paying for, where you’ve looked at the record and concluded it isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. Without one, what you’re holding is the position Burke was accused of holding and wasn’t guilty of.
Next, describe how you’d change it, then make a list of the intended and potential unintended effects, good and bad. Not just for you, for anyone it touches. Can you reform the thing without destroying it, and more importantly without breaking the country? Then you have committed an act of conservatism.
Next: Robert Peel takes one piece of this philosophy, turns it into a party program, and creates a problem nobody has solved since. Disraeli saw it immediately and asked the question that names this series.