or covertly, to try to render more progressive alternatives illegitimate.
However, there are also two problems with this definition. First, as we have seen, it is not always true that conservatives content themselves with the strategy of trying to ensure that historical change occurs in a cautious and evolutionary fashion. Rather, in some instances, conservatives themselves seek to initiate change, sometimes of a radical kind, with the aim of restoring a previous status quo. (For example, as noted earlier, an important component of the conservatism of the Thatcher and Reagan governments was their attempt to reverse developments they regarded as illegitimate, not least those associated with rises in direct taxation and the expansion of the welfare state.) Second, although the attempt by conservatives to present their approach to tradition as uniquely ‘natural’ or perceptive may well be revealing of their ideological strategy, it cannot be accepted as an objective analysis of conservatism. For whether or not conservatives are convincing in their particular interpretations of tradition and their responses to it, what they advocate cannot simply be assumed to be ‘natural’; rather, as with all such responses to tradition, this is a claim that must be argued for.
Karl Mannheim: conservatism and traditionalism
This aspect of conservatism, stressing the extent to which it represents a particular response to changing social and political conditions – rather than simply doing one’s best to ‘follow’ the norms that an authentic tradition bestows – is particularly highlighted by the third method of analysing conservatism historically. The most sophisticated version of such an approach was put forward by the influential early twentieth-century sociologist Karl Mannheim, in his book Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge (1925). For Mannheim, as for others seeking to analyse conservatism historically, conservatism must be distinguished from mere ‘traditionalism’ – in Huntington’s sense of being purely ‘reactive’. But, according to Mannheim, neither can it be identified with a purely backward-looking ideology, nor with the attempt to maintain and nourish a ‘natural’ ongoing tradition. Rather, he argues, conservatism must be regarded as a peculiarly modern response to sociological changes (ultimately initiated by the industrial revolution) which pose a challenge to traditional social structures and modes of political thinking. In particular, Mannheim argued, what originally inspired conservatism was a fourfold set of sociological changes associated with the modernization of society.
These are, first, the unification of societies, so that discrete, self-contained social units are joined together, often within the nation-state; second, that within such unified societies there develop differing social strata, some favouring progress, while others favour reaction; third, that divergent ‘worlds of ideas’ corresponding to these different strata also appear; and fourth, that these divergences increasingly take on an explicitly political character – so that the struggle between progressive ideas and those of reaction are increasingly fought out in an explicitly political sphere (Mannheim 1986: 83–6). All of these related developments mean that those seeking to preserve older social and political structures can no longer simply assume their worth and durability, but instead must explicitly argue for them. Hence the appearance, Mannheim argued, of a self-conscious conservatism,6 which has two key features.
First, it is an explicit ideological position, which comes into being in response to dramatic social changes, in order to combat the progressive political ideologies associated with those changes. Conservatism, in other words, is itself a modern phenomenon, since, prior to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, it had no raison d’être. Second, as an explicit ideological position, conservatism seeks to put forward a comprehensive alternative to the core concepts of liberal Enlightenment thought, favouring above all an emphasis on the concrete over the abstract. So, Mannheim argues, rather than stressing universality, abstract natural rights and rationalism in general, as the Enlightenment thinker does, the conservative seeks to emphasize the importance of different individual situations, the holistic nature of society, and a dynamic, historical approach to reasoning – of ‘history, life, and nation’, as he puts it. As such, the Enlightenment concept of ‘freedom’, for example, is not simply rejected by the conservative; rather, it is recast as something concrete, historically specific and only comprehensible within a wider social framework (Mannheim 1986: 107–10).
In suggesting that conservatism is best defined as an explicitly modern phenomenon that specifically emerges to combat the effects of sociological changes and progressive ideologies associated with the French Revolution, Mannheim provided a more promising definition than those who seek to identify conservatism with a backward-looking nostalgia or an adherence to a single natural, hegemonic, tradition. Moreover, his observation that conservatives have often sought to rebut progressives’ arguments by contending that their abstract concepts are better defined in concrete and historically situated terms provides a valuable insight into how conservatism operates. However, given Mannheim’s focus on conservatism’s origins, what his account lacks is a full account of how conservatism develops, and in particular of what provides it with lasting coherence as it has evolved and mutated from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century to the present.
Michael Freeden’s Approach to Political Ideologies
To provide such an account, arguably the most convincing theoretical model is that advocated by the contemporary scholar Michael Freeden, most notably in his groundbreaking work Ideologies and Political Theory (1996). Freeden argues that although Mannheim’s work is insightful, conservatism should not just be viewed as a peculiarly ‘reactive’ movement but as a full-scale political ideology. By this he does not mean to label conservatism as a delusion, a form of ‘false consciousness’ in the Marxian sense of the word, since on his definition an ‘ideology’ does not represent a limited, blinkered view of political life, incapable of adaptation. Rather, for Freeden, an ideology is a sophisticated and flexible way of understanding political life, which exhibits not only a certain degree of systematization of ideas, but also an ability to adapt, to respond to changing historical and political circumstances (Freeden 1996: 124–7). An ideology is, in other words, usually capable of mobilizing active political support as well as inspiring intellectual statements – and re-statements – of its ideas (Freeden 1996: 16, 552–3). As such, he argues, political ideologies are not crudely organized around one particular concept, but instead have a conceptually complex internal structure. While they will have some stable ‘core’ concepts, which remain fairly constant, they also have ‘adjacent’ and ‘peripheral’ concepts, whose relationship with each other and with the core changes over time, as their relative importance alters (Freeden 1996: 77–91). Indeed, in some cases, even concepts that have previously been at the core of an ideology may cease to be so, and become adjacent concepts instead (Freeden 1996: 84). Thus, Freeden argues, while liberals almost always set ‘liberty’ as a core concept at the heart of liberalism, precisely what liberty actually means will be affected by its changing relationship with adjacent and peripheral concepts within the ideology. For example, in mid-nineteenth-century liberal political theory in Britain ‘liberty’ was generally defined in contradistinction to ‘society’ and ‘social welfare’, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, in the work of such theorists as L. T. Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson, the idea that guaranteeing welfare was indispensable to the pursuit of liberty – and indeed that one of the main points of that pursuit was to ensure the flourishing of society in general – had become far more prevalent. ‘Society’ had thus become a concept adjacent to ‘liberty’ in liberal political theory; indeed, in some cases it had become more or less inseparable from it. Conversely, the right to individual private property, which for some liberal theorists had been a core component of liberalism and a key guarantor of freedom, became far less central, given the new stress on the flourishing of society at large (Freeden 1996: 202–9). Likewise, the demand for equal voting rights for women – a largely peripheral component of liberalism in nineteenth-century Britain – became by the early twentieth century increasingly linked to another of its core concepts, namely that of progress.
How, then, does Freeden think that conservatism functions as a political ideology, and what does he believe its ‘core concepts’ to be? Echoing some of