ABSTRACT
To the contemporary social scientist, to be labeled a conservative is more often to be damned than to be praised. Three major perspectives stem from the writings of the early nineteenth-century conservatives in Europe. The perspectives are: Masses, Alienation, and Power. Conservatism, as a distinguishable social philosophy, arose in direct response to the French Revolution, which had something of the same impact upon men's minds that the Communist and Nazi revolutions have had in the twentieth century. Conservative criticisms of capitalism and political centralization were of a piece with denunciations of individualism, secularism, and equalitarianism. For the conservatives, especially in France, the metaphysical reality of society, apart from all individual human beings, was unquestioned; and this was perhaps the major proposition directed against the social nominalism of the Enlightenment. Sociology may be regarded as the first of the social sciences to deal directly with the problems of dislocation involved in the appearance of a mass society.
