Conservatism: Origins, Traditions and

Thinkers

Lecture 1

May 16, 2006

Important Concepts:

Right and LeftPolitical 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 AmericanRevolution-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:

Communityand

Individuals

Two Orientations:

CommunityTraditionalist-Reformist

“Organicists”

• Russell Kirk

- more concerned with reversing

- negative view of society

“Reformists”

• Peter Viereck

-concerned with adaptation

-positivist of society

Paleoconservatives

1) Nativists

2) Isolationists

3) Protectionists

4) State Right’s

5) Anti-Welfare State

Neoconservatives

1) Opportunity

2) Interventionism

3) Free Trade

4) National Government

5) Conservative Welfare State

The Problem of Organicists

Goes back to Burke…

What to Preserve?

Is conservatism ahistorical?

Is there a starting point?