Let’s now talk about different definitions of conservatism that have been advanced over the years because they are all interesting and they all give us some food for contemplation. One day I hope to teach a course on conservative thought, and I would start it with these definitions that I found in all sorts of places.
In the definition of conservatism that he wrote for the The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (2009), Lincoln Allison explains that conservatism doesn’t organize itself in opposition to change as such. Instead, it opposes a very specific kind of change. Conservative thought, he says, dislikes the kind of change that is driven by idealistic, aspirational and abstract ideas instead of change that is driven by developing the already existing practice.
Allison also mentions that many people of a clearly conservative disposition do not refer to themselves as such because conservatism has been tainted by people associating it with Nazism. This is quite extraordinary, given that the Nazi worldview was very revolutionary in many ways. It is also curious that leftism has somehow avoided the taint of Stalinism rubbing off on it. Allison is not wrong, though. He observes correctly that since 1945 the number of intellectuals, artists, philosophers and thinkers in Europe and the US who have described themselves as conservative has been minuscule. In intellectual circles, it’s only a bit worse to be a self-avowed pedophile than a conservative. Nobody wants to be a pariah, so people conceal the truth from others and often even from themselves. Conservatism has become a political orientation, quips Allison, that dares not speak its name.
Let’s think about what it means that people who simply oppose the kind of change which aims to create an ideal society are scared of confessing to holding this belief. Let’s think what it means for all of us. Can it be a good thing? Shouldn’t there be some limitation on the human drive to pursue abstract ideas? Apparently, we all as a civilization have decided that no, there shouldn’t be. Because Nazis. Who – and this is the really cute part – wanted no limitations on their drive to pursue the most radical change formulated in the abstract. We hate Nazis so much that we defend the organizing principle of their existence at any cost. Makes total sense.
Allison points out that, since the times of J.S. Mill, the standard, mainstream attitude towards conservatism as a philosophy has been not only negative but downright contemptuous. It became “a truth universally acknowledged” that conservatives are morons. They are stupid, plodding individuals who are too intellectually limited to cast off the shackles of obscurantism and bigotry. Is it any wonder that almost nobody wants to be seen as a stupid, bigoted Nazi? Especially if they are very smart, very unbigoted and very much not a Nazi?
One reason why I like Allison’s definition of conservatism is that he says very correctly (and, God, finally somebody managed to articulate it) that there is no scenario under which “an extreme belief in ‘free’ markets and a minimal state of a kind that never existed or existed only in the distant past” can be called a conservative idea. In other words, neoliberalism is not conservative. It’s in the bloody name, people. Why is it so hard to get anybody to process this simple idea? I don’t mean any of the readers of this blog, of course, but I will be a happy person if I never again hear the question, “But didn’t you say you are against neoliberalism, so how can you be conservative?”
The text of the definition is very short, so I attached it here because I have not been able to find it in open access and had to request the volume through the library. I am hoping that more people will start integrating these ideas into their research and teaching and I want to make the text available to them.
By the way, just for fun I asked the in-built WordPress AI to generate an image to accompany the text of the post, and it gave me an image of some Andrew Tate type wiping his nose, probably after sniffing cocaine. I decided not to inflict the image on my readers.
Clarissa's Blog 
Nooo, don’t do it! Your blog is slop-free and I would love it if it remained so.
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I wasn’t going to post it, I promise. I only wanted to see what it would do. It was predictably horrid.
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Prof. Clarissa, I’m really enjoying this series on conservative thinkers! I can perhaps offer a hypothesis about the question concerning why people think that free-market-absolutism is conservative. I think the blame for this situation perhaps rests on the shoulders of one man: Ludwig van Mises. His critiques of Marx and Keynes were so powerful and devastating that American leftists quite correctly saw his thought (and the thought of his disciple Murray Rothbard) an enormous threat to what they believed they wanted. And since American leftists called themselves “liberals” and had already decided that their enemies were called “conservatives,” then van Mises must have been “conservative.”
That’s my highbrow hypothesis. My less highbrow hypothesis is Ronald Reagan, a liberal who was enough of a tough guy on the international stage and who gave enough lip service to fundamentalist Christianity to make establishment liberals hate him, so… he must have been conservative.
What I don’t yet understand is how authentic conservative thought vanished so entirely from American discourse except among a handful of underground intellectuals, despite being, as I believe, the default sensibility of a vast number of Americans. It’s odd to contemplate that all our current political bickering is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, nor even between libertarians and communists or Keynesians, but between two different flavors of neoliberalism (which is not to say that I think that there is no moral difference between voting Republican and Democrat). I have some intuitions about when in American history this occurred, but not why.
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That’s exactly it. We are stuck between different flavors of neoliberalism, unable to step out of its magic circle. This is precisely what’s happening. I don’t know if we can step out of it but my goal is to at least bring this to people’s attention. You can’t solve what you don’t understand and can’t even name. We must start naming the problem correctly.
I’m also not sure when and how it started and why it became so dominant. I’m trying to find out through these readings and explorations, and I hope we can do this together here on the blog.
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Part of that picture is certainly the tension between the VonMises/Rothbard/Hazlitt/Hayek “absolute economic freedom” school of thought, which also tends toward libertinism (taking for granted centuries of Christian social capital, not understanding how fragile and how necessary it is to their schemes), and the more pastoral, culturally-conservative thread represented by… Chesterton, Belloc, Burke, perhaps your fellows Oakeshott and Kirk (I’m not well versed in their work). The former tend to view the world as reducible to mathematics: everything is a resource, with a price. An economic unit. Why conserve anything for future generations, when everything is just a resource to be exploited? He who dies with the most trinkets wins, right? This is the mindset that grows as much corn per acre *this year* as possible, without regard for the irreplaceable fossil resources burned that way: fossil topsoil, fossil water from fossil aquifers, fossil fertilizers, longterm chemical contamination. It’s the Extraction Economy: take all the profit you can, now. The future doesn’t exist and the people who live in it will have to find their own solutions to the problems we leave them. Nothing that could be killed or burned for a dollar now, is worth saving for your grandkids, who will probably be ungrateful dopes anyway because we don’t care about non-monetizable things like culture, religion, family, stability, tradition, local adaptation, loyalty, and a respect for psychological and physiological limits… (what else?).
The second strain is less absolute regarding economic and personal freedom, and values… all those things just listed, more than the ability to make economic transactions maximally efficient and profitable.
It reminds me of my old library job, weirdly. I was a lowly page (har har): we reshelved books, read shelves (checked that books hadn’t been put back in the wrong places), tracked down holds, and several other small tasks like tidying the magazines. But mostly reshelved books. The most efficient way to do that job was to spend long stretches in uninterrupted reshelving. But we didn’t do it that way: the job was broken up into moderate stretches of reshelving, and all the other little jobs (some of which were only marginally necessary) were used to interrupt the reshelving. We got less done, overall, that way. The key was: doing the most efficient thing, shelving for two hours at a stretch and then doing all the other tasks grouped together… led to repetitive stress injury. I couldn’t understand *why* the librarians wanted me to be so inefficient at work, until I developed agonizing wrist pain.
The an-cap mises/rothbard/etc camp is like maximizing efficiency at the library without counting the cost of injury. In that model, if this were a for-profit industry, the solution would be to go for max efficiency, and as soon as employees became inefficient due to pain… swap them out for new employees. Not enough people in the local area? Open the borders to bring in fresh meat! Injuries on the job inhibit your ability to find work elsewhere? Too bad! You took that job voluntarily, you could have quit any time, and it was your responsibility to calculate the risks. This model is completely compatible with offshoring industries: it’s simply the natural result of imposing rules at home limiting externalizing of costs: you then ship the industry off to another country, where it’s OK to externalize those costs.
The second strain of conservatism is about… conservation. Knowing what’s worthwhile, and making sure that it is preserved for your kids, grandkids, etc. It’s the kind of agriculture where you improve the farm and pass it on to your son, and your son actually wants to be a farmer, because it’s a good life, not an industrial extractive production line where you spend all day wearing PPE to avoid fecal particulates and carcinogenic chemicals, your house is mobbed by flies, you’re in permanent debt to the tractor company, and Tyson could dump your contract without warning tomorrow and leave you destitute.
-ethyl
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I find it a weird Americanism that liberal is associated with the left. In Australia, the main parties are liberal and labor, which would seem to lead to more rational options depending on the state of the economy.
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Incidentally, since you are reading conservative thinkers intensively, you might be interested in the literary critic Marion Montgomery if you do not already know his work. I haven’t read him since I was in school ages ago, and I’m not sure what I would think now, but he made quite an impression on me at the time. Not many literary critics can reference in the same paragraph Flannery O’Connor, Herman Melville, Thomas Aquinas, Nietzsche, and Eric Voegelin, and make a deep, coherent point worth contemplating.
Montgomery despite his formidable intelligence and vast learning deliberately cultivated a hick-Southern “aw shucks” persona that reminds me of nothing so much as Socratic irony. “I’m just an ignorant moron as opposed to all of you Athenian wise guys (sophists).” It’s almost a necessary strategy. You make the observation about the prejudice against conservatives, “They are stupid, plodding individuals who are too intellectually limited to cast off the shackles of obscurantism and bigotry.” I used to explicate the sacred texts of Judith Butler to my left/woke friends and then translate her pseudo-arguments into symbolic logic and then point out exactly what were the formal logical fallacies, and the inevitable reply would be that I was just too stupid to understand. What can you do but smile and agree and amplify: yeah, I’m a right-wing idiot; I’m too dumb to perceive your sublime lefty wisdom. Cf Plato’s Cratylus.
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I’ve added Marion Montgomery to the reading list. Thank you! As conservatives, we don’t have a repository of our cultural memory or our intellectual trajectory. We have isolated people toiling in secret, trying to keep the flame alive. It’s legit sad that it’s come to this.
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“In intellectual circles, it’s only a bit worse to be a self-avowed pedophile than a conservative.” Depending on which era, intellectual circle, etc., there have been times when being a self-avowed pedophile was more acceptable in intellectual circles.
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True. I can’t think of anything I could say that would be more shocking to my colleagues than that I’m a conservative.
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I think WW2 and the nazis are overrated. The civil war and the KKK are probably more relevant.
In SA, conservatives are accused of wanting to bring back apartheid, but at this point even libertarians are willing to concede some of their ideas may have merit on areas such as law enforcement may have merit.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2025/11/28/groenewald-stands-firm-on-reviving-corporal-punishment/
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This would make sense if this was a US phenomenon. But it’s much stronger in Canada and Europe, so it’s got to be something outside of US history.
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