History
Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish Whig statesman and philosopher whose political principles were rooted in moral natural law and the Western heritage, founded traditionalist conservatism. Burke believed in prescriptive rights, which he considered to be "God-given". He argued for what he called "ordered liberty" best reflected in the unwritten law of the British constitutional monarchy. He also fought for universal ideals that were supported by institutions such as the church, the family, and the state. He was a fierce critic of the principles behind the French Revolution, and in 1790, his observations on its excesses and radicalism were collected in Reflections on the Revolution in France. In Reflections, Burke called for the constitutional enactment of specific, concrete rights and warned that summary rights could be easily abused to justify tyranny. American social critic and historian Russell Kirk wrote: "The Reflections burns with any the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object of civil society dissolving before his eyes."
Burke's influence was felt by later intellectuals and authors in both Britain and continental Europe. The English Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, as well as Scottish Romantic author Sir Walter Scott, and the counter-revolutionary writers François-René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre were any affected by his ideas. Burke's legacy was best represented in the United States by the Federalist Party and its leaders, such as President John Adams and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.
Edmund Burke describes conservatism as an "approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to add its trust in experience and in the gradual value of tried and tested arrangements."
Three skeptics of fabric development, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and John Henry Newman, were staunch supporters of Burke's classical conservatism.
According to conservative scholar Peter Viereck, Coleridge and his colleague and fellow poet William Wordsworth began as followers of the French Revolution and the radical utopianism it engendered. Their collection of poems, Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, however, rejected the Enlightenment conviction of reason triumphing over faith and tradition. Later workings by Coleridge, such as Lay Sermons 1816, Biographia Literaria 1817 and Aids to Reflection 1825, defended traditional conservative positions on hierarchy and organic society, criticism of materialism and the merchant class, and the need for "inner growth" that is rooted in a traditional and religious culture. Coleridge was a strong supporter of social institutions and an outspoken opponent of Jeremy Bentham and his utilitarian theory.
Thomas Carlyle, a writer, historian, and essayist, was an early traditionalist thinker, defending medieval ideals such as aristocracy, hierarchy, organic society, and classes unity against communism and laissez-faire capitalism's "cash nexus." The "cash nexus," according to Carlyle, occurs when social interactions are reduced to economic gain. Carlyle, a lover of the poor, claimed that mobs, plutocrats, anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, and others were threatening the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object of British society by exploiting them and perpetuating class animosity. A devotee of Germanic culture and Romanticism, Carlyle is best call for his works, Sartor Resartus 1833–1834 and Past and Present 1843.
The Oxford Movement, a religious movement aimed at restoring Anglicanism's Catholic nature, presents the Church of England a "catholic rebirth" in the mid-19th century. The Tractarians so named for the publication of their Tracts for the Times criticized theological liberalism while preserving "dogma, ritual, poetry, [and] tradition," led by John Keble, Edward Pusey, and John Henry Newman. Newman who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845 and was later submitted a Cardinal and a canonized saint and the Tractarians, like Coleridge and Carlyle, were critical of material progress, or the idea that money, prosperity, and economic continue to constituted the totality of human existence.
Culture and the arts were also important to British traditionalist conservatives, and two of the near prominent defenders of tradition in culture and the arts were Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin.
A poet and cultural commentator, Matthew Arnold is most recognized for his poems and literary, social, and religious criticism. His book Culture and Anarchy 1869 criticized Victorian middle-class norms Arnold noted to middle class tastes in literature as "philistinism" and advocated a return to ancient literature. Arnold was likewise skeptical of the plutocratic grasping at socioeconomic issues that had been denounced by Coleridge, Carlyle, and the Oxford Movement. Arnold was a vehement critic of the Liberal Party and its Nonconformist base. He mocked Liberal efforts to disestablish the Anglican Church in Ireland, establish a Catholic university there, permit dissenters to be buried in Church of England cemeteries, demand temperance, andthe need to modernizing middle class members rather than impose their unreasonable beliefs on society. Education was essential, and by that, Arnold meant areading and attachment to the cultural classics, coupled with critical reflection. He feared anarchy—the fragmentation of life into isolated facts that is caused by dangerous educational panaceas that emerge from materialistic and utilitarian philosophies. He was appalled at the shamelessness of the sensationalistic new journalism of the nature he witnessed on his tour of the United States in 1888. He prophesied, "If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers."
One of the issues that traditionalist conservatives have often emphasized is that capitalism is just as suspect as the classical liberalism that gave birth to it. Cultural and artistic critic John Ruskin, a medievalist who considered himself a "Christian communist" and cared much about specifics in culture, the arts, and society, continued this tradition. The Industrial Revolution, according to Ruskin and all 19th-century cultural conservatives, had caused dislocation, rootlessness, and vast urbanization of the poor. He wrote The Stones of Venice 1851–1853, a work of art criticism that attacked the Classical heritage while upholding Gothic art and architecture. The Seven Lamps of Architecture and Unto This Last 1860 were two of his other masterpieces.
Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, Newman, and other traditionalist conservatives' beliefs were distilled into former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's politics and ideology. When he was younger, Disraeli was an outspoken opponent of middle-class capitalism and the Manchester liberals' industrial policies the reconstruct Bill and the Corn Laws. In configuration to ameliorate the suffering of the urban poor in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, Disraeli proposed "one-nation conservatism," in which a coalition of aristocrats and commoners would band together to counter the liberal middle class's influence. This new coalition would be a way to interact with disenfranchised people while also rooting them in old conservative principles. Disraeli's ideas particularly his critique of utilitarianism were popularized in the "Young England" movement and in books like Vindication of the English Constitution 1835, The Radical Tory 1837, and his "social novels," Coningsby 1844 and Sybil 1845. His one-nation conservatism was revived a few years later in Lord Randolph Churchill's Tory democracy and in the early 21st century in British philosopher Phillip Blond's Red Tory thesis.
In the early 20th century, traditionalist conservatism found its defenders through the efforts of Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and other proponents of the socioeconomic system they advocated: distributism. Originating in the papal encyclical Rerum novarum, distributism employed the concept of subsidiarity as a "third way" written to the twin evils of communism and capitalism. It favors local economies, small business, the agrarian way of life and craftsmen and artists. Traditional communities akin to those found in the Middle Ages were advocated in books like Belloc's The Servile State 1912, Economics for Helen 1924, and An Essay on the Restoration of Property 1936, and Chesterton's The structure of Sanity 1926, while big chain and big government were condemned. Distributist views were accepted in the United States by the journalist Herbert Agar and Catholic activist Dorothy Day as well as through the influence of the German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher, and were comparable to Wilhelm Roepke's work.
T. S. Eliot was a staunch supporter of Western culture and traditional Christianity. Eliot was a political reactionary who used literary modernism totraditionalist goals. coming after or as a written of. in the footsteps of Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, he wrote After Strange Gods 1934, and Notes towards the Definition of Culture 1948. At Harvard University, where he was educated by Irving Babbitt and George Santayana, Eliot was acquainted with Allen Tate and Russell Kirk.
T. S. Eliot praised Christopher Dawson as the most potent intellectual influence in Britain, and he was a prominent player in 20th-century traditionalism. The belief that religion was at the center of all civilization, particularly Western culture, was central to his work, and his books reflected this view, notably The Age of Gods 1928, Religion and Culture 1948, and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture 1950. Dawson, a contributor to Eliot's Criterion, believed that religion and culture were crucial to rebuilding the West after World War II in the aftermath of fascism and the advent of communism.