What is conservatism? History, ideology and party
| Author | Richard Bourke |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1474885118782384 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EJPT
Article
What is conservatism?
History, ideology and party
Richard Bourke
Queen Mary University of London, UK
Abstract
Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? A history of the phenomenon written
along sceptical lines casts doubt on the existence of a transhistorical doctrine, or even
an enduring conservative outlook. The main typologies of conservatism uniformly
trace its origins to opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund
Burke is standardly singled out as the ‘father’ of this style of politics. Yet Burke was
de facto an opposition Whig who devoted his career to assorted programmes of
reform. In restoring Burke to his original milieu, the argument presented here takes
issue with 20th-century accounts of conservative ideology developed by such figures
as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein and Samuel Huntington. It argues that the idea of a
conservative tradition is best seen as a belated construction, and that the notion of
a univocal philosophy of conservatism is basically misconceived.
Keywords
Conservatism, Edmund Burke, enlightenment, French Revolution, ideology, Karl
Mannheim, party, scepticism
Scepticism and political theory
In the rousing final paragraph of his ‘Introduction’ to Jealousy of Trade, Istvan
Hont wrote that ‘History is the tool of skeptics’ (Hont, 2005: 156). The phrase has
often been quoted, but what does it mean? Hont’s purpose in the passage was to set
out an agenda for the history of political thought. He was arguing that it made no
sense to revive forgotten ideological alternatives that might ‘miraculously’ answer
current problems in political theory. The past, he seemed to be saying, has no such
purchase on the present.
One of Hont’s targets here was Quentin Skinner, specifically the recommenda-
tion that the neo-Roman ideal of liberty was worth excavating as a corrective to
reigning liberal dogma. Yet there is something troubling about Hont’s paragraph.
European Journal of Political Theory
2018, Vol. 17(4) 449–475
!The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118782384
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Corresponding author:
Richard Bourke, Department of History, School of History, Queen Mary University of London, London E1
4NS, UK.
Email: r.bourke@qmul.ac.uk
On the one hand, he seems to be claiming that returning to past ideas in the hope of
instructing the present is a redundant exercise. Yet, on the other hand, such a
return is ultimately what he wants to propose. This proposal was made even clearer
in a later study by Hont, where the combined insights of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Adam Smith were presented as holding the keys to understanding our current
predicaments (Hont, 2015: 24). In fact, Hont was prepared to go further still:
recourse to 18th-century political economy promises to provide more than
simple analytical clarification, he contended. The ‘best’ thinkers who wrote on
commercial society in the period are said to have provided reliable assessments
of where we are on the basis of their remarkable clairvoyance: ‘The commercial
future that many 18th-century observers imagined as plausible has become our
historical present’ (Hont, 2005: 156). Past analysis of a possible future turns out
to offer the most compelling guide to contemporary political judgement.
Hont’s recipe mixes virtuosity with perplexing difficulties. Some of the virtuosity
derives from Reinhart Koselleck, specifically his concern with ‘futures past’ –
namely, his interest in the changing ways in which past thinkers imagined
the future (Koselleck, 1989). For Koselleck, these projections were usually
pathological in nature, yet for Hont they often contained the seeds of accurate
prediction. This led to the suggestion that bygone political theory offered the best
chance of illuminating our current situation, even though, as Hont also saw,
past philosophy could be a prisoner of its age. This conundrum encapsulates
the problems sometimes associated with the ‘Cambridge School’ in the history of
political thought, which Hont wanted to exemplify and disavow at the same time
(Bourke, 2018: 467 ff.). He was committed both to philosophy and its historicisa-
tion, leaving his work suspended between the present and the past.
Faced with this puzzle, I propose to use Hont’s injunction in favour of scepti-
cism against his scheme for reviving long-departed thinkers. Specifically, I want to
embrace his call for scepticism by applying it to the idea of conservativism, whilst
rejecting his resort to ‘usable’ philosophy from the past. History is indeed an
instrument of scepticism, and scepticism is a valuable resource for political
theory. But we need to begin by asking what the sceptical impulse is, and how it
should be employed when reflecting upon politics. Hont does not help us here:
‘scepticism’ was a favourite term of his, yet nowhere did he define it. Sometimes he
used it in its most familiar sense, denoting a posture of epistemological doubt
(Hont, 2005: 167). More often he associated it with a strand of ‘utilitarian’
ethics, rooted in a neo-Augustinian critique of natural sociability (Hont, 2005:
47). Yet this usage denotes a philosophical commitment, not a mode of historical
inquiry, and so it can have little relevance to history as a ‘tool’ of scepticism.
To understand how scepticism in this sense might be used, we had better turn to
Hont’s original inspiration, David Hume.
In the Treatise and the first Enquiry, Hume showed how pyrrhonian doubt
destroyed every remnant of conviction, leading to a melancholy state of disorien-
tation, only then to be mitigated by immersion in the ‘affairs of life’ (Hume, 2000:
175). The extremes of scepticism might in this way be ‘corrected by common sense
and reflection’ (Hume, 1999: 207). Yet this did not exhaust the role of philosophical
450 European Journal of Political Theory 17(4)
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