By: Elliot Keck, head of campaigns
As Labour relax on their four hundred and eleven seats in the House of Commons, the challenge for the Conservatives is to figure out how to redeem themselves. They lost a shocking 244 seats at the election. And with Rishi Sunak stepping down as leader, a furious debate is now raging about where the Conservative Party, and more broadly the right as a whole, should go.
It’s by no means just the Conservative leadership race where this battle of ideas, as well as personalities, is taking place. There have recently been two significant events on the matter. There was a Popular Conservatism conference on “beginning the rebuild”’, while the Institute of Economic Affairs also held an event to discuss the “Future of the Right.” You can read more about the latter in a fascinating blog by the IEA’s Reem Ibrahim.
One of the really key questions, and one that so many have struggled with is: what actually is conservatism? A new book, The Philosophy of Conservatism, has made an impressive attempt to provide an answer.
The author is Dr Madsen Pirie, a man who many readers may be familiar with and who appeared on an episode of TPA Talks back in 2022. In his illustrious career he has been many things, but perhaps most prominently he is the co-founder and President of the Adam Smith Institute. Described by The Guardian in the early 1990s, as having “made as large a contribution as anyone has to the underlying thinking of the Conservative governments which have ruled us”, his part in what for many is the last truly conservative period of government, i.e. the 1980s, means this book is an important contribution.
Key to his approach is to use what conservatives have done in the past as a tool for us to deduce what “conservatism” actually is. Firstly there is the distinction between “small c” and “big C” conservatism - described by Pirie as “both a psychological trait exhibiting a desire to hold onto familiar things” and also “a political tradition that seeks to avoid the imposed changes of grand designs.” This is captured by the breadth of thinkers Dr Pirie examines, including Sir Robert Peel, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and F A Hayek. Across all of these, Pirie identifies shared qualities, philosophies and approaches that they all share, and analyses how they reacted to and resolved the problems they faced.
To the extent that conservatism can be defined, Dr Pirie does an impressive job of it. Broadly put, conservatives tend to support private property, are strong on law and order, prefer lower taxation, promote personal autonomy and liberty and are sympathetic to religion including organised religion. They have, on the whole, been “more in favour of varied communities than of centralised and uniform state power.” However these are policy positions that conservatives hold more than a philosophy, as Dr Pirie acknowledges. And they are policy positions that are by no means held equally or as forcefully across time and space.
As is the case with many definitions, the best way to define conservatism, and the way that Dr Pirie pursues is to define it against its antithesis, namely socialism. So whereas socialists have a “desire to impose a planned and preordained order that is conceived in human minds”, conservatives accept and even embrace spontaneity. They think that “people interacting freely will produce an overall order that will be superior to a planned one.” It favours “societies that emerge, rather than ones that are imposed.” Critically “they conserve the process, not the outcome.”
If that’s what constitutes conservatism, then clearly the last government has some questions to answer. Imposing a record high tax burden on the country and pursuing a smoking ban do not fit remotely into anything described by Dr Pirie’s fascinating book. Whoever the next leader of the Conservative party is, Dr Pirie’s book should be required reading.