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A Dialectical Definition of Conservatism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2015

James Alexander
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Abstract

Conservatism is now often said to be a disposition. Against definitions of conservatism as a disposition, critics say that it is also an ideology, and against any such abstract definitions, that it is a historical entity. But no one has yet indicated how these criticisms can be used to improve the definition of conservatism. Here I argue that the dispositional understanding of conservatism, while not wrong in itself, is only the first and simplest element in what has to be an extended or dialectical definition of conservatism. This article is a statement of such a definition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 91 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 215 - 232
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2015 

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References

1 Beckstein, Martin, ‘What Does It Take to be a True Conservative?’, Global Discourse 5 (2015), 4–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Femia, Joseph V., ‘Identifying True Conservatives: A Reply to Beckstein’, Global Discourse 5 (2015), 22–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Alexander, James, ‘The Contradictions of Conservatism’, Government and Opposition 48 (2013), 594–616 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Michael Oakeshott, ‘On Being Conservative’ (1956), in Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 407–37.

5 Michael Oakeshott, ‘Review of Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (1954)’, in Luke O'Sullivan (ed.), The Vocabulary of a Modern European State (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), 81–4, at 83.

6 For an elucidation of this rather abridged argument, see James Alexander, ‘A Systematic Theory of Tradition’, forthcoming in Journal of the Philosophy of History.

7 Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952).

8 T.E. Utley, A Tory Seer: The Selected Journalism of T.E. Utley, eds C. Moore and S. Heffer (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 87.

9 Alexander, James, ‘The Major Ideologies of Liberalism, Socialism and Conservatism’, Political Studies 63 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.