ABSTRACT
This chapter examines conservatism as a model ideological movement rather than as an inherited Platonic philosophy. Conservatism was perhaps the first political movement that was directly involved with politics as such; Bernard In Defense of Politics makes this quite clear. The breakup of the old aristocratic order upon which the conservative view is based, coupled with the collapse of visions of empire and the end of monarchy as a viable system, all helped to destroy conservatism as a political force; but it has lingered on as a political ideology. Comparison of Peter Viereck's Conservatism Revisited with Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind shows them to be very different. One of the leaders of the conservative revival in America has admitted that "conservatism is among the most unpopular words in the American vocabulary". The new conservatism has merely transformed the nineteenth-century critique of socialism by Lecky and Spencer to the effect that "socialism is slavery" into a tendentious principle.
