Conservatism:
Origins, Traditions and
Thinkers
Lecture 1
May 16, 2006
Important Concepts:
Right and Left
Political Spectrum
Radical and Reactionary
Classical Liberalism
Montesquieu (1748)
John Locke (1670s)
Adams Smith (1776)
Thomas Jefferson (1776)
John Stuart Mill (1859)
Modern Liberalism
John Rawls (1971)
John M. Keynes (1919)
Isaiah Berlin (1969)
The French Revolution
Joseph de Maistre
Edmund Burke
A new concern?
NO
T. Hobbes in Leviathan (1651)
Life without government is “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short”
The American
Revolution-1776
"a disposition to preserve, and
an ability to improve".
Loyalists
vs.
Revolutionaries
Declaration of Independence
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments
long established should not be changed for light
and transient causes; and accordingly all
experience hath shewn that mankind are more
disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than
to right themselves by abolishing the forms to
which they are accustomed.”
Back to Burke’s definition:
The American Dilemma…
What to preserve?
Louis Hartz
The Liberal Tradition in America
Two Orientations:
Community
and
Individuals
Two Orientations:
Community
Traditionalist-Reformist
“Organicists”
• Russell Kirk
- more concerned with reversing
- negative view of society
“Reformists”
• Peter Viereck
-concerned with adaptation
-positivist of society
Paleoconservatives
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Nativists
Isolationists
Protectionists
State Right’s
Anti-Welfare State
Neoconservatives
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Opportunity
Interventionism
Free Trade
National Government
Conservative Welfare State
The Problem of Organicists
Goes back to Burke…
What to Preserve?
Is conservatism ahistorical?
Is there a starting point?