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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
2 occurrences of Ancients and Moderns in the Eighteenth Century
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2 occurrences of Ancients and Moderns in the Eighteenth Century
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1. Prerevolutionary Conservatism. In prerevolu-
tionary, pre-industrial, and corporatively (ständisch)
structured society a conservative social and political
mentality was normal. It rested on the assumption that
law is not made but discovered, and rulership is not
legitimized by the consent of the governed, but by
divine law. Changes in law, religion, and societal
structure were therefore sternly rejected; their protag-
onists were found guilty of heresy, disturbance of the
“natural” order, and lèse-majesté by the established
powers. Conservative mentality is manifested, for ex-
ample, in Cicero's standardizing of the old consti-
tutional res publica and in the idealizing of the old
Roman way of life by Roman historians, as well as
generally in the exemplary lessons taught by history
(historia magistra vitae).

It was on the basis of the same views, however, that
reformers and rebels—among them Tiberius Gracchus,
Cola di Rienzo, John Wycliffe, and the leaders of the
German Peasant War—understood and justified their
objectives as restoration (renovatio, restauratio, refor-
matio,
Renaissance). Leopold von Ranke called Luther
“one of the greatest conservatives who ever lived.” The
Glorious Revolution of 1688 was interpreted as the
restoration of the traditional constitution proper to
England. Only after “revolution” was understood as
a deliberate total change in accordance with norms
of universally valid rational and natural rights, as the
elimination of abuse, and as a means of emerging from
self-imposed infancy, could it no longer be represented
as restoration. Instead, restoration became a conscious
attempt to reverse revolutionary change, and con-
servatism became conscious opposition to revolu-
tionary tendencies.

The change from a mood of predominant “stand-
pattism” to one of reactionary opposition and of active
defense of positions under attack, from habitual to
conscious traditionalism, was not merely a consequence
of political revolutions, but arose in opposition to
criticism of and changes in the predominant mood, e.g.,
the Sophistic accusations against the Greek polis, the
changed attitudes toward the ecclesiastical reforma-
tions of the sixteenth century, and also towards the
Enlightenment.

The earliest translation of the antagonism between
the defenders of the traditional social and ecclesiastical
order and their adversaries into a party system of
political conflict took place in England during the
seventeenth century; it influenced the whole political
thinking of Europe and North America. In England,
the influence was due to political institutions (Parlia-
ment, State Church, common law) and societal factors
(an aristocracy far from immune to panic, an ascending
gentry, and an economically powerful bourgeoisie in
London). Also the wide range of political positions,
from the patriarchalism of Filmer via Hobbes, Hooker,
Locke, and Milton to the radicalism of Winstanley,
articulated during the fights between partisans of Stuart
absolutism (closely connected with the Church of


480

England) and Puritan-Independent opponents in the
English Parliament, which lasted for decades, gave the
necessary impetus. The same basic political and ideo-
logical assumptions still shaped the fundamental prin-
ciples of those Parliamentary groups which were called
by their nicknames “Tories” and “Whigs” around 1679,
though these parties gradually became guided by po-
litical conceptions during the eighteenth century.

The beginnings and core of the traditionalist defense
and the formulation of a conservative position consisted
in rejecting criticism of dogma, of the authority of
ecclesiastical teachings, and of their influence in the
realm of secular education which became increasingly
independent. With the extension of this criticism to
the whole hierarchical and aristocratic culture of the
seventeenth century and to the traditional corporative
and regional institutions of Europe, conservatism
developed into a general social and political viewpoint
opposed to the contract theory on which monarchy
depended to support its centralizing administrative
tendencies. The Enlightenment critics, the reform
policies of progressive governments, and above all the
French Revolution were the factors that led con-
servatism out of mere traditionalism and made it a
political ideology. It did not, however, result in
the dissolution of “pre-ideological” traditionalism.

Conservatism never attained the systematic unity
and orthodoxy of Jacobinism, or of democratic radical-
ism, nor even that of liberalism. Down to the 1960's
it remains an assortment of political ideas, a political
credo that is more clearly delimited by what it rejects
than by any positive program. The latter substantially
depends on the degree of challenge at any given time.
Thus conservatism is conceived of as antirevolutionary
thought (Burke), as a counterrevolutionary appeal (de
Maistre), as a “conservative revolution” (Hofmanns-
thal). Even when it supposes itself anti-ideological,
this misunderstanding itself displays ideological traits.
In an “age of ideology” conservatism has also not been
able to escape ideological alignments; conservative
ideologies, however, remain relatively unarticulated in
any systematic theories; among the important repre-
sentatives of political conservatism, then, are a large
number of practical statesmen, while only a few can
be named whose influence has been exclusively through
their writings.