Understanding conservatism
The same term “conservatism” is applied to both a temperament and a political tradition, with a distinction that the former is usually spelled with a small “c,” whereas the latter usually merits a capital “C.” The temperament was described by Lord Hugh Cecil as “a disposition averse from change.” Those who share this preference like to keep things as they are because they feel comfortable with the familiar, and think that change might put at risk the value they derive from them.
The status quo that “conservatives” seek to preserve can vary widely from culture to culture. One can be a “conservative” ayatollah in Iran, or a prince in Saudi Arabia, or a trade unionist in the United Kingdom. It simply denotes a preference for keeping things as they are.
The Conservative political tradition has always been more complex than a simple aversion to change. It has opposed those who seek to make society what they think it ought to be like, preferring instead to have society evolve spontaneously into what its members between them make it become. It prefers planning to be done individually at the periphery, rather than collectively from the centre. It prefers people to have the opportunity to make choices, rather than be channelled into choices made by others.
In other words, it wants changes to be spontaneous and evolutionary, rather than preconceived and revolutionary. The Conservative political tradition seeks to preserve the spontaneity of society, or to restore it if it has been lost. It does not oppose all change or seek to preserve any particular status quo, but rather to preserve the process by which changes occur. Edward Heath, in sticking with the centre-left postwar consensus, was certainly more “conservative” than Margaret Thatcher, but she, in moving society away from dirigisme and central planning, was a great deal more “Conservative.”
Conservatives are happier with Popper’s “piecemeal social engineering” than they are with attempts at the wholesale transformation of society to turn it into what the planners think it “ought” to be like. They point out, as Adam Smith did, that people are not wooden chess pieces to be moved around the board by the outside hand of a player, but that “in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.”
This leads to a political divide in which those on the Left seek an outcome they think can be rationally planned and brought to fruition. They are suspicious and even resentful of a global economy of free exchange and markets, and want to control and restrict business. Conservatives, by contrast, are happy with a genuine capitalism that promotes investment, production and trade. They, like the Left, oppose the phoney, crony version in which large corporations lobby governments for political favours that allow them to make money that genuine markets would not give them. But Conservatives, unlike their Left-wing counterparts, do not wish to control or limit genuine businesses that compete with each other to satisfy customers and attract their trade.
The difference hinges on the Conservative acceptance and even embrace of spontaneity, and the Left’s desire to impose a planned and preordained order conceived in human minds. Conservatives think that people interacting freely will produce an overall order superior to a planned one, and will bring more satisfaction to more people. They are strengthened in this stance, by the fact that free markets and free trade deliver the goods, creating more wealth and uplifting more lives with opportunities than any of the planned systems have managed.
Conservatism, as a political force, favours societies that emerge, rather than ones that are imposed. It is anchored firmly in the real world of people who develop and change, and who change society as they do so. The political tradition conserves the process, not the outcome. Hayek wrote his essay, “Why I am not a Conservative,” because he thought Conservatives wanted to conserve postwar socialism. In reality it was “conservatives” of all parties who wanted to do that, and “Conservatives” who later changed it.