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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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CONCLUSIONS

The general expansion of the political spectrum to
the “left” has had the result that many ideas and con-
ceptions of social order and governmental organization
that were initially promoted by liberal forces have not
only found their way into conservatism, but themselves
appear comparatively conservative. While liberal
party politics in contemporary Europe is only very
sluggishly active, conservatism has manifested itself as
a stable counterweight to socialism; this has, however,
been attained by a substantial surrender of its ideologi-
cal substance. It has even been able to absorb some
features of egalitarian democracy. It has come to an
accommodation with representative democracy most
readily in the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries.
In Catholic countries it has not really appeared inde-
pendently in political parties, but has animated the
conservative clerical wing of Catholic People's parties.
In the countries of the European continent, those with
moderate conservative outlooks vote mostly for Chris-
tian Democratic parties (Italy, Germany, Austria,
Belgium, Netherlands).

A special role has been played by de Gaullism, which
has displayed features of the Bonapartism of the nine-
teenth and the nationalist presidential system of the
twentieth century. Its success may be ascribed to the
crisis of the parliamentary system and to national self-
consciousness in France.

In the 1960's when radical critics denigrate even
bourgeois liberals and social democrats as conserv-
atives, the conservatives themselves are hardly able
to articulate their position unequivocally and ration-
ally. It is doubtful whether they are capable of offering
a convincing alternative to the democratic welfare
state with its liberal social character. They cannot halt
the profound and comprehensive social changes which
the modern world is experiencing. In this process con-
servatism seems to have the task of assuring continuity,
to be a corrective against progress-at-any-price, and
simply in this way to blunt reactionary tendencies.