ABSTRACT
The sux “ism” has two distinct implications, though they may be combined. The rst is doctrinal: “Marxists” are dened by beliefs, propositions derived from the thought of Karl Marx, even though the meaning and relative importance of those propositions is likely to be interpreted diversely and contested. The second implication suggests tendencies of attitude and behaviour rather than belief as such: “racism” means a tendency to react in a discriminatory way towards people perceived as being racially dierent rather than any conscious beliefs about race. Thus many “racists” could truthfully deny that they believed overtly racist propositions about racial dierence or inferiority, but it is not beliefs that make them racist. “Conservatism” in most of its ordinary usages is logically much more like “racism” than it is like “Marxism”. It is much easier to describe typically conservative responses and to outline the context in which conservatism has developed than it is to list any dening beliefs of conservatism. (For a fuller account of the nature of conservatism see Allison 2009.)
The origins of conservatism lie in eighteenth-century Europe during a period in which religious disputes ceased to be the prime determinant of the political agenda and the secular doctrines of the “Enlightenment” shaped the intellectual agenda. These doctrines were typically about “natural” rights (later “human” rights) – generally those rights which a person is said to possess simply on account of their existence – and about political equality and universal suffrage. Conservatism can be identified as a variety of combinations of scepticism about and opposition to the claims of the Enlightenment, including a view that they may be ultimately correct, but could only be implemented slowly and carefully. In particular, conservatism in Britain was defined by opposition to the French Revolution of 1789 and to a large-scale extension of the franchise. In retrospect, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is considered to be one of the defining texts of conservatism, though Burke’s objections were not so much to the revolution as a change of regime (he had not objected to the American “revolution” and the subsequent establishment of a republic), but to the abstract and supposedly universal principles claimed by the French revolutionaries as the basis of their new republic (Burke 1907). The “Tory” Party, which had evolved from a parliamentary faction supporting the previous, Stuart, regime to one whose uniting principle was opposition to the ruling, “Whig”, oligarchy, further evolved into the Conservative Party by the early 1830s. The name “Conservative” was first heard in the debate about reform of the suffrage in 1831 and when the “Great Reform Act” of 1832 was passed the name became generally applied to opponents
of the Act by both themselves and their opponents. Sir Robert Peel’s speech at Tamworth in 1834 – the “Tamworth Manifesto” – is generally seen as the event which finally and inexorably transformed the Tory Party into the Conservative Party (Hume 1985).
