Conservatism
Holds that institutions and customs that have survived and evolved over long periods usually encode accumulated practical wisdom, so change should be gradual, tested, and reversible rather than sweeping and utopian.
The Burkean core of conservatism is an argument about the method and pace of change, not opposition to change as such. Edmund Burke, writing against the French Revolution, was skeptical of remaking society from abstract first principles; he himself supported many reforms. Conservatives also emphasise mediating institutions between the individual and the state — family, religious community, local association, voluntary civic life — as checks on both state overreach and social atomisation.
“Conservative” covers a genuinely wide range that disagrees internally: fiscal / limited-government conservatives (focused on taxes, spending, regulation), social or traditionalist conservatives (family structure, religious institutions, cultural continuity), neoconservatives (historically, assertive foreign policy — see the separate entry), and contemporary national conservatives (sovereignty, immigration, skepticism of globalisation). What counts as “the tradition worth conserving” also varies a great deal by country and era.
The honest difficulty conservatives wrestle with is that the tradition has, at moments, supplied the intellectual defence for preserving unjust arrangements simply because they were established — the challenge of distinguishing “worth preserving” from “merely entrenched.”
Thinkers often cited
- Edmund Burke
- Russell Kirk (“The Conservative Mind”, 1953)
- Michael Oakeshott
Internal disagreements
- Fiscal / limited-government conservatives
- Social / traditionalist conservatives
- Neoconservatives (see separate entry)
- National conservatives
Common misconceptions
- That conservatives oppose all change — Burkean conservatism is about organic, tested, reversible change, and Burke supported reform while opposing revolution.
- That conservatism is one fixed platform — American, British, and continental European conservatism have different intellectual histories.
Read further
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Conservatism” — Neutral scholarly overview.
- Encyclopædia Britannica — “Conservatism” — Reference-encyclopedia summary.
- Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) — full text — Founding primary text of the tradition (public domain).
- The Russell Kirk Center — Primary source: a traditionalist-conservative educational organisation (right perspective).
- National Review — Primary source: a long-running American conservative magazine.
Links were checked when this was written. The web changes — if one is broken, search the same title. Primary sources are labelled with the perspective they represent; neutral references come first.