ABSTRACT
The birth of a deliberate international conservatism is dated by Edmund Burke's essay of 1790, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in the same way that the birth of international Marxism is dated by the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Wide usage of the noun first began among European traditionalists of the early nineteenth century, groping for a new philosophical terminology to use against the French Revolutionary era of 1789-1815, especially against its most radical and terrorist party, the Jacobins. Liberals supported its early phase of rapid but peaceful change and were later frightened off; radicals sometimes defended even its later phases of violent change, terror, secret police, class war. Whether intentionally or unconsciously, whether literally or as a metaphor for behavior, conservatives apply to politics the Christian doctrine of man's innate Original Sin. Journalistic looseness identifies conservatism with softness toward fascism; liberalism, with softness toward communism.
