The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (56 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

In ethics, consequentialist doctrines are those which judge actions by their effects (or, sometimes, their intended effects) rather than by their conformance to rules, rights, or obligations. Consequentialist ethics are normally contrasted with deontological moral arguments (from the Greek
deontos
, meaning duty), which have been the overwhelmingly predominant form of moral judgements for most of human history.
The most important tradition of consequentialist ethics is
utilitarianism
, but not all consequentialists are utilitarians. One of the first thinkers to apply a thorough consequentialism to politics was David
Hume
. Whereas Whig thinkers (including
Locke
) tried to justify the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9 according to a right of rebellion arising out of the breach of a contract between monarch and people, and the more dogmatic Tories wished to appeal to an absolute duty of obedience to legitimate monarchs, Hume justified the revolution purely because it solved the constitutional question and ushered in an era of stability, prosperity, and liberty. Thus, he approved of those who defected to William of Orange without any attempt to justify their actions in terms of duties or obligations because their actions helped bring into existence a stable, prosperous, and tolerant society.
Most modern political arguments are consequentialist in form. One of the principal difficulties of consequentialism is created by the paradox that a belief in consequentialism may not have as good consequences as the alternatives: for example, religious societies may be more ordered and contented than secular societies, or societies which revere nature may get more out of their surroundings than those which treat the environment consequentially.
LA 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

Conservation is political action or belief which seeks to keep something in being. Etymologically, there is no significant difference between conserving something and preserving it in any of the languages which contain these two verbs. In Victorian England those who favoured what would now be called conservation tended to refer to the ‘preservation’ of the things they regarded as important (footpaths, ancient buildings, or species, for example) and what is now the Council for the Protection of Rural England was founded in 1926 with the word ‘preservation’ in its title instead of ‘protection’.
However, an important nuance has come to distinguish conservation from preservation: conservation accepts that you cannot literally keep things as they are, but only manage change to preserve what is valuable. Thus conserving a forest does not just mean preventing anyone from chopping down the trees, it means planting new trees and even new types of tree if that is what is needed in order to maintain a healthy forest.
Conservation and conservationism can apply to many different kinds of thing. The conservation of resources, especially soil and fossil fuels, has attracted widespread support, as has the conservation of species, including both particular species and the existing range of species on the planet. Conservation refers also to landscapes, habitats, and ecosystems. Policies to preserve particular buildings were the first stage of urban conservation, but they frequently excited the response that there was little or no value to an isolated building in an unsuitable context. André Malraux , as French Minister of Culture, instituted a development of this idea in 1962 with legislation to delineate entire urban areas (
secteurs sauvegardés
) for conservation, an idea imitated and modified in the ‘conservation areas’ established by the Civic Amenities Act of 1967 in Britain.
A great deal of the impetus behind the development of urban conservation came from a popular reaction to the projects of modernist architects who sought to replace traditional cities and vernacular architecture by new, ‘purist’, ‘internationalist’ structures of glass and concrete. Conservationists made many gains at the expense of modernists in the 1970s. The idea of urban conservation was further expanded by the concept of ‘integrated conservation’, which seeks to preserve the framework of human activity in an urban area as well as, and in tandem with, the preservation of the physical character. Although adopted as general policy by UNESCO and the European Community, integrated conservation has often turned out to be an unattainable ideal. Successful physical conservation tends to cause a rise in property values leading to ‘gentrification’ and suggesting the reverse form of Alphonse Karr's dictum: ‘the more you try to conserve it, the more you cause its real character to change’.
LA 

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

In general terms, a political philosophy which aspires to the preservation of what is thought to be the best in established society, and opposes radical change. However, it is much easier to locate the historical context in which conservatism evolved than it is to specify what it is that conservatives believe. Modern European conservatism evolved in the period between 1750 and 1850 as a response to the rapid series of changes and prospects for change which convulsed European societies; these included the ideas of the
Enlightenment
, the
French Revolution
, industrialization (especially in England) and the demands for an extended or universal, generally male, suffrage. The name ‘Conservative’ for the English political party which had previously been called the Tory Party became established during the debate about electoral reform which led to the Reform Act of 1832.
The nature of conservative reactions to change has varied considerably. Sometimes it has been outright opposition, based on an existing model of society that is considered right for all time. It can take a ‘reactionary’ form, harking back to, and attempting to reconstruct, forms of society which existed in an earlier period. Other forms of conservatism acknowledge no perpetually preferable form of society but are principally concerned with the nature of change, insisting that it can only be gradual in pace and evolutionary in style. Perhaps the most unifying feature of conservatism has been an opposition to certain kinds of justification for change, particularly those which are idealistic, justified by ‘abstract’ ideas, and not a development of existing practices.
It is clear that, ideologically, conservatism can take many different forms. Liberal individualists, as well as clerical monarchists, nostalgic reactionaries, and unprincipled realists, have all been called ‘conservatives’, regarded themselves as conservative, and demonstrated the typically conservative responses to projects for change. Particular conservative writers have founded their conservatism on individualism as often as on collectivism, on atheism as much as on religious belief, and on the idealistic philosophy of
Hegel
as well as on profound scepticism or vulgar materialism. Furthermore conservatism has been primarily a political reaction, and only secondarily a body of ideas: those who are defending their interests against projects for change often have little interest in philosophical ideas or treat them on the basis of ‘any port in a storm’.
Consequently, the terms ‘conservative’ and ‘conservatism’ are apt to generate at least as much confusion as, and probably more than, any term in the history of ideas. In the 1980s, it became common practice to identify ‘hard-line’ communists who opposed change in the Soviet Union as ‘conservatives’, a reference which caused much offence among Western conservatives. As a low-level, intuitive use of the term, it was an unambiguous reference to the opponents of change. But the group it identified were the remaining adherents of the doctrine to which twentieth-century conservatives have been almost unanimously, even definitively, opposed: Marxism-Leninism, with its insistence on the need for revolution and the historical necessity of progression to a wholly different form of society, communism.
A further complication is that many people might be properly described as conservatives who would not describe themselves as such. A principal reason for this is that the image of conservatism in much of continental Europe became tainted, during the first half of the twentieth-century, first by association with a defunct clerical-monarchist outlook and later by alliance with fascist and National Socialist movements. Thus, although the word ‘conservatism’ exists in French, German, and Italian, the number of prominent intellectuals and politicians who have described themselves as ‘conservative’ since 1945 is extremely small. When a ‘Conservative’ group existed in the European Parliament between 1989 and 1992, it had only English and Danish members. In some respects, other political movements, especially
Christian Democracy
, have become forms of conservatism ‘that durst not speak its name’, but even Christian Democracy is quite distinct from conservatism in its origins and principles.
Burke's
Reflections on the Revolution in France
has been taken as definitive and formative of modern conservatism, with its opposition to radical reform based on abstract principles and its pleas for the virtues, often hidden, of established, evolved institutions. But Burke himself was not a conservative. Not only did his literary and political careers precede the existence of conservatism, but he was a Whig with reformist and protoliberal views on the principal issues of the day, including India, Ireland, America, and Parliament. Until the 1920s he was claimed and cited as often by Liberals as by Conservatives. There is every reason to suppose he would have opposed ‘Conservatism’ when it emerged in 1832.
George
Orwell
presents a parallel case in the twentieth century. His writing offers some of the most powerful, conservative arguments and sentiments of its time; they permeate his work and reach a peak of intensity in the vivid anti-Utopia of 1984. But this does not make Orwell a conservative; he was a democratic socialist who disliked and mistrusted political conservatism. If we extend conservatism to include him, it must have lost all distinct political meaning. The implication is clear, if untidy: not only do non-conservatives often express conservative sentiments and ideas, but often the best expressions of those ideas and sentiments come from non-conservatives.
Much theoretical commentary on conservatism has contributed to the inherent confusion of the subject by starting with false assumptions. Often, the commentators are not merely hostile, but contemptuous, in the tradition of J. S.
Mill's
comment that the Conservative Party was, ‘by the law of their existence the stupidest party’. The assumption has been that conservative ideas are essentially flawed as well as being chosen for their political utility rather than their theoretical coherence. Alternatively, a spurious theoretical unity is attributed to conservatism, so that all conservatives are thought to believe in psychological pessimism, or the organic nature of society, or the importance of national traditions. Nor have many of the taxonomies of conservatism—for example, between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, ‘true’ and ‘neo’, ‘old’ and ‘new’, Tory and Conservative—afforded much insight, the distinctions having been made in too many different and contradictory ways without any one version establishing itself. A further source of unclarity is the common resort to a confused notion of a political ‘spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ which suggests that to be deeply conservative is to be on the ‘extreme right’, along with (mysteriously) divine right monarchists, libertarian anarchists, and National Socialists.
Mannheim
, faced with the considerable differences between Continental and English traditions of conservatism, concluded that the drive behind conservatism was a ‘universal psychic inclination’ towards traditionalism, the doctrinal form that expressed this inclination differing between contexts. But he does detect a common negative strand to all conservatism, a critical response to ‘natural law thinking’. Conservative ideas are, thus, more genuine and profound than many critics suggest, but such unity as they have is purely negative, definable only by its opposition and rejection of abstract, universal, and ideal principles and the projects which follow from them.
This analysis of conservatism, as having only a negative doctrinal unity that allows for a vast range of positive doctrines, would seem to be the least misleading picture of what conservatism is as a general political phenomenon. It generates an intellectual method that can be described as a sceptical reductionism, which demands, of grand proposals and principles, ‘Is it really a good idea, given local conditions?’ This kind of questioning is common to Edmund Burke , Benjamin Disraeli , Lord Salisbury , Michael
Oakeshott
, and Margaret Thatcher ; it may well be all that they have in common as conservatives.
Thus conservative reformism is quite central to the conservative tradition, rather than aberrant or peripheral. The idea of radical conservatism is less easy to accept. In so far as radicalism is interpreted according to its original meaning, which suggests that radicals propose a systematic replacement of institutions and practices, from the roots up, then radical conservatism is a contradiction in terms. It is more acceptable at a less literal level as meaning a belief, in a particular context, that drastic, immediate change is required to preserve the underlying virtues of the system. For example, the belief that a severe combination of reductions in public expenditure, the privatization of services, and high unemployment was necessary to preserve the underlying vitality of the capitalist system, might fall into this category. However, an extreme belief in ‘free’ markets and a minimal state of a kind which has never existed, or existed only in the distant past, could not properly be called conservatism at all.
In the nineteenth century conservatism was preoccupied with what might reasonably be called the liberal agenda of extended rights. To different degrees in different contexts it won or lost these struggles or simply took over what had been its opponents' policies in earlier periods. Nineteenth-century conservatism appears more successful when judged as a procedural doctrine preoccupied with the nature of change, than as a substantive doctrine concerned with the value of particular social forms. In the twentieth century conservatism has been so preoccupied with the struggle against forms of socialism that many people have made the mistake of identifying conservatism purely with antisocialism. If this perception were correct then the demise of socialism would also be the demise of conservatism. But in fact there is never any shortage of the kind of belief to which conservatism is inherently opposed. We can be assured that forms of feminism, ecologism, radical democratic theory, and human rights doctrines will,
inter alia
, continue to provide the kind of political projects which serve as both opposition and stimulus to conservatism.
LA