ABSTRACT
Conservatism is usually taken to refer to values from traditions that are bound to certain histories of localities. It is embedded in different settings and therefore differs from locality to locality, but still conservatives share assumptions that are not mutually exclusive despite their basis in different cultural roots. Social harmony is a core tenet of conservative thought all around the world and always implies the acceptance of human inequality in this world. In conservative thinking, difference is the condition for harmony, because from a conservative point of view harmony of equals is neither easily imaginable nor affective in a systemic sense, just like the differentiated functions in an organism. In the conservative idyll differences of humans as economic units and as individual contemporaries make mutual gains possible and interesting. Equality is only accepted in a metaphysical sense, as it is with universal love, for instance, but it is nothing to be expected in this world. In this respect, contemporary conservatism is a peculiar
ideological expression of the coexistence of egoism and anti-egoism as the core dilemma of bourgeois ideology described by Max Horkheimer (1988). In this article, I will argue that this feature is central to conservatism in general and explains the prevalence of conservatism today within parties that for many observers have lost their ‘conservative’ qualities. The history of conservatism shows that it is highly flexible and adaptable to changing situations and from a psychological perspective not at all opposed to plurality and diversity.
