Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Lawrence Goldman

rejected the democratic principle, which could become the tyranny of the

majority: ‘It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two

hundred thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of

arithmetic’ (Burke 2003,p.44).

While conservatism in the second half of the nineteenth century focused

on other themes beyond this Burkean inheritance, and while we must note

that this form of Anglo-Saxon conservatism cannot stand for all types, the

essence was always, as in Burke’s case, anti-revolutionary. And that anti-

revolutionary case usually comprised some at least of Burke’s arguments

(Muller 1977,p.25). Nineteenth-century conservatives stressed human

imperfection; they counselled, therefore, an epistemological caution because

we cannot know all we need to know, or would like to know, in fashioning

society. They placed their faith in institutions, whether religious or secular,

as necessary restraints on human irresponsibility. Pace Rousseau, men were

civilised by institutions rather than enchained by them: they were born bad

rather than free. Hence the utility of religion: while many conservatives

embraced Christianity in true faith, others saw its usefulness in impos-

ing moral, and by extension, political restraints on men and women, and

reminding them of their fallen nature. That social institutions had endured

was taken as evidence of their ﬁtness for purpose rather than a reason for their

reform: the past was a surer guide to political wisdom than the unknown

future that liberalism rushed to embrace. According to Chateaubriand, ‘The

past is a fact, a fact that cannot be destroyed; while the future, which is so

dear to us, does not exist.’

Conservatives were suspicious of theorising,

both because no theory can account for the vagaries of human will, and

because theories applied to the crooked timber of humanity must ignore the

historic, the local, and speciﬁc, and might then become tyrannous. Thus

the universalist deductions of nineteenth-century liberal political economy

were as much anathema to the conservative as to the socialist: in ﬁgures like

Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin moral and emotional opposition to lib-

eral economics led to an ambiguous stance, allowing them to be claimed by

both left and right. Conservatives were suspicious of liberal contractualism

as a way of understanding and organising society because this degraded the

complex relations and loyalties that held actual societies together. The use of

organic imagery in conservative discourse (‘webs’, ‘skeins’, ‘nets’, ‘f abrics’)

was an afﬁrmation of the interdependence of social groups and institutions,

and an implied critique of those who would disturb the complex work

4 ‘

Etudes Historiques’, Chateaubriand 1859,pp.21–2, quoted in Tholfsen 1967,p.188.

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Conservative thought from the revolutions of 1848

of time by shallow, because ideologically inspired, reform: this would rend

the social fabric, and, in upsetting social order, lead to unanticipated and

disturbing consequences.

Nineteenth-century conservatism was reactive rather than purposive,

therefore. It thus accords with the views of those who have argued that

conservatism is always better understood as a set of attitudes (or a ‘dis-

position’ as Michael Oakeshott put it) than an ideology (Oakeshott 1962,

pp. 168–96).

Unlike liberalism and socialism, it did not present itself as an

all-encompassing solution to human ills, it did not aspire to universalism.

It emerged in response to speciﬁc threats in speciﬁc social situations (and

has thus been termed a ‘positional ideology’ by Samuel P. Huntingdon).

And in so far as it was localist in mentality, emphasising particular and

contextual features, it varied considerably in different national contexts,

and, within nations, in different regional contexts (Pocock ‘Introduction’,

in Burke 1988, pp. vii, xlix). The so-called ‘conservatism’ of the industri-

alising northern states in America in the late nineteenth century may be

contrasted with the quite different conservatism of the agrarian American

South.

2 The development of conservatism: European politics

and society after 1848

The 1848 revolutions conﬁrmed the prejudices of many observers. At one

extreme Joseph de Gobineau’s abhorrence of democracy led him to embrace

and disseminate his degenerative theories of racial mixing. At the other,

Macaulay’s Whig triumphalism was reinforced: that Britain was untouched

while the rest of Europe was in turmoil was evidence of the superiority of

British institutions, built on the wise governance of whig-liberal elites since

the Glorious Revolution had secured order and representation in 1688

(Macaulay 1864, ii,pp.239–43). But the well-known description of the

1848 revolutions as the historical turning point where history did not turn,

gives a clue to understanding the conservative response to these events.

5 For a general deﬁnition of conservatism see Scruton 1980, 1991,pp.1–28.

6 Conservatism has been deﬁned as ‘an attitude of opposition to disruptive change in the social,

economic, legal, religious, political, or cultural order’, Rossiter 1968,pp.290–1. Though see Karl

Mannheim’s distinction between traditionalism and a true ideology of conservatism in Mannheim

1971,pp.132–222.

7 ‘The articulation of conservatism is a response to a speciﬁc social situation. The manifestation of

conservatism at any one time and place has little connection with its manifestation at any other time

and place.’ Huntingdon 1957,pp.454–73 (quotation at 468).

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For if initial conservative reactions took the form of Burke’s response to

the Revolution of 1789, later and calmer reﬂection gave reason to believe

that the revolutionary movement was weak and that that weakness might

be exploited. The history of several European states over the next two

generations and more may be understood as the exploitation by conservative

elites of the paradoxes and contradictions of liberalism.

These were not lost on conservatives. The peasants and ar tisans who

took up arms were often ﬁghting against the destruction of a traditional

economic and social order by liberal capitalism. The liberals failed to rep-

resent the whole of the middle classes but only the professional groups –

lawyers, professors, students, ofﬁcials – among them: the property-holding

and commercial bourgeoisie was much less in evidence. Only the national-

istic uprisings in Italy and Hungary were large in scale and truly threatening

to established authorities. Outside of Paris, and perhaps not even there, the

new industrial proletariat played almost no role. In general, revolutionary

incidents were triggered by traditional problems, most notably crop failures

and the price of bread. Monarchy and order were reimposed with relative

ease across the continent. The divisions within liberalism on social and also

national lines (as exposed in the Frankfurt Parliament) and the lack of deci-

sive liberal leader ship in almost all the revolutionary situations were plain

to see. Further crucial divisions that emerged between the bourgeoisie and

the working classes in several of the German states and in the violence

of the ‘June Days’ in Paris demonstrated the fragility of inter-class unity.

Catholic, peasant France voted in 1848 under the universal suffrage of the

Second Republic for a conservative Chamber and for a Bonaparte, Louis

Napoleon, as President. All these features suggested strategies and possibili-

ties that could be exploited by conservatism in the future, be it in imperial,

monarchical, aristocratic, papal or populist form. The real lesson of 1848

was that popular revolution could be averted by the astute management of

different and opposed social groups and the manipulation of popular, and

above all, national sentiments (Agulhon 1983; Evans and von Strandmann

2000;Price1988;Sperber2005).

In addition, changing intellectual, economic and social structures offered

conservatives opportunities among new social groups and explain the fun-

damental historical transition in conservatism during the second half of the

nineteenth century from an elitist preserve to a popular force. At a political

level, as liberalism evolved to embrace a new, redistributionist social agenda

by the 1880sand1890s, so conservatism adopted the classical laissez-faire lib-

eralism of an earlier era and appealed to disaffected property-holders fearing

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the taxes that social liberalism would impose. Where once conservatism was

synonymous with landed interests it could now depend upon the support

of an urban business class. Indeed, in many societies a consolidated class

of the propertied began to emerge, no longer divided by considerations of

status and landed background, whose members reﬂexively turned to the

right. This trend was accelerated by the agricultural depression from the

1870s which affected all rural populations, and which spurred landed fami-

lies to diversify their assets where they could by investing in urban property

and industrial stocks. The traditional liberal policy of free trade was often

unpopular among farmers and peasants, and also among urban workers who

feared for their jobs under a regime of unrestricted imports. Indeed, declin-

ing rural incomes from Texas to Russia gave rise to deep resentment on the

land towards traditional urban liberal elites, especially bankers, who were

blamed for the downturn, and by extension, towards Jews. In a situation in

which world markets were awash with cheap commodities, it suited land-

holders just as much as their tenants and peasantry to impose tariffs – as it also

suited industrial interests in regions developing after the mid-century and

facing price competition from the imports of more and earlier-established

industrial nations. Thus was born the so-called ‘Rye–Iron’ alliance in

Germany, an intrinsically conservative association between large landhold-

ers and capitalists in favour of import tariffs. The emergence and growth of

a petit bourgeoisie between the urban liberal middle classes and the workers

was another oppor tunity to be exploited. Owning a little property, they had

much to gain from the politics of order and respectability, and much to fear,

or so they believed, from the rise of organised socialism. The combined

impact of the rise of working-class movements; the consolidation of the

class of large property-holders; the emergence of a lower middle class in the

new service-based economies of the more advanced cities; and the immiser-

ation of small farmers and peasants on the land created tensions, resentments

and fear that worked in favour of conservatism. For their part, conservative

leaders lear nt to embrace mass democracy, which they found, despite the

dire predictions of the early nineteenth century, could be manipulated and

led in the interests of elites – though these elites were now very different

from the traditional aristocracies of the ancien r

egime (Weiss 1977,pp.71–3).

Forms of conservative populism were evident in Britain from the 1870s,

in France, during the Second Empire, and in Germany after 1871 in the

Second Reich. In Britain, in a genuinely plural political culture (if not yet

a fully democratic system) where the differences between liberal and con-

servative were narrower and more muted than almost anywhere else, the

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Conservative Party of Disraeli and Salisbury attracted disaffected middle-

class voters on the rebound from the more radical liberalism of Gladstone’s

party after 1868 (Cornford 1963,pp.35–66). Liberal political dominance

during the mid-century was followed after 1874 by a string of Conserva-

tive electoral successes based on a soothing rhetoric of constitutionalism,

social stability and imperialism. Though the debate over the character of

the French Second Empire between 1851 and 1870 continues, there are

good reasons for taking Louis Napoleon as a new type of conservative

able to sustain his regime by the manipulation of a mass electorate. This

was achieved by exploiting threats of revolutionary subversion; conciliating

the many different conservative interests in French society including the

Catholic Church and local notables, as well as the various right-wing polit-

ical factions, Legitimist, Orl

eanist and of course, Bonapartist; encouraging

prosperity through state intervention as an antidote to popular discontent;

and using an ambitious foreign policy (albeit one that failed miserably) in

Italy, Mexico and the Far East, to encourage patriotic support (Bury 1965;

Plessis 1985; Zeldin 1958). Meanwhile, in the new Germany, building on a

wave of popular exultation for the new Reich, these and other tactics were

employed to control, in the conservative interest, a complex and ﬁssiparous

nation riven by regional, religious and class division (Craig 1978; Sheehan

1978; Wehler 1985). Sham constitutionalism gave the illusion of democratic

accountability in Germany. It was reinforced by the alliance of the most

powerful urban and rural conser vative interests; the suppression of ideolog-

ical and social ‘enemies of the Reich’, notably the socialists between 1878

and 1890; the marginalisation of liberal interests and opinion in both the

state itself and wider civil society; the blandishments of a social welfare pro-

gramme from the 1880s; and the promotion of a militaristic and nationalistic

internal culture as the corollary of an aggressive foreign policy. In these ways

it has been argued that an unreformed and essentially pre-industrial elite

was consolidated at the apex of German society reliant upon the support of

property-holder s who, a generation before, looked as if they were lost to

the conservative cause (Goldman 2003,pp.97–113).

Sustaining this elite, and conservative interests across Europe in general,

was made all the easier by the transformation of nationalism from a liberal

to a conservative force (Hobsbawm 1990; Kohn 1968,pp.19–20; Mosse

1975). The change is vital to an understanding of nineteenth-century polit-

ical thought in general. Nationalism, the corollary of the ﬁrst French Revo-

lution, and adopted by liberal intellectuals in many different parts of Europe

after 1815, had emerged as a genuinely radical and popular movement in its

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support for national self-government as opposed to localist particularism,

and in its opposition to dynastic rule based on hereditary, or supposedly

divine, rights. But the 1848 revolutions had revealed its darker, atavistic

heart, and demonstrated that a powerful and emotive ideology designed to

differentiate and separate one group from another had no inevitable con-

nection to liberal principles. As John Stuart Mill opined (with prescience)

in 1849, ‘in the backward parts of Europe, and even (where better things

might have been expected) in Germany, the sentiment of nationality so far

outweighs the love of liberty, that the people are willing to abet their rulers

in crushing the liberty and independence of any people not of their race

and language’ (Mill 1849,p.347).

As Mill could now see, nationalism was not only a force for international

discord, but might be used by unscrupulous (and otherwise unpopular)

rulers as a tool for the internal control of the people, co-opting them in

a process in which popular liberties were stalled or undermined. Because

there were real enemies abroad in an age of increasing national economic

and political competition, it was also comparatively easy to associate the

left, characterised by internationalism and anti-militarism, with an absence

of national feeling, and even treason, as in the famous Dreyfus case of the

1890s in France (Bredin 1987; Johnson 1966). And because this competition

compelled European nations to raise and sustain large armed forces, they

were able to socialise generations of young men and their families in the anti-

democratic culture of military service and ‘preparedness’. The conservative

historian Jules Michelet apparently told Matthew Arnold, who quoted him

approvingly, that ‘France was a nation of barbarians civilised by conscription’

(Arnold 1960,pp.75–6; Weber 1976,pp.292–302). The history thus tells

of a rightward drift, or lurch in some cases, across Europe after 1848.By

the manipulation of the new mass politics; by judicious political alliances;

by magnifying the threat of internal subversion; by the invocation of ‘the

national interest’; and by virtue of increasing international tension the means

were devised to maintain or reinstall conservative interests, groups and classes

in power.

3 Conser vative cultural and political thinkers in Britain

There was no single corpus of conservative political thought in this period,

but a series of reactions varying according to national location and the

character and situation of speciﬁc writer s. The spectrum of opinion was

wide, running from the outright rejection of modernity by the orthodox,

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through those conservative thinkers who focused on speciﬁc themes, such

as the moral and material degradation caused by liberal capitalism, and the

cultural declension caused by mass culture, to those later ﬁgures, largely

outside the Anglo-Saxon frame of reference, who embraced various forms

of pseudo-scientiﬁc justiﬁcation for radically asocial and ‘irrational’ ideolo-

gies often based on racial rather than conventional social categories. For

ease of understanding, these reactions can be divided nationally and the

remaining discussion will focus on British, American and European forms

of conservative thought in that order.

Paradoxically perhaps, we might begin this discussion of conservative

philosophy by explaining the questions at issue through the work of two

impeccable liberal theorists whose work nevertheless betrays anxiety over

the nature of nineteenth-century social development, Alexis de Tocqueville

(1805–59) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). In both cases we are dealing

with thinkers who expected this development to end in full democracy and

who supported such an outcome. Yet both registered the type of reservation

that conservatives around them were also expressing. The reservations are

caught at the very end of the second and ﬁnal volume of Tocqueville’s

Democracy in America (1840):

The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal,

but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them

to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.

(Tocqueville 1945,p.352)

Freedom and individualism could be threatened by the force of majority

public opinion, by the political will of the majority deployed against a

minority, or by the tendency towards cultural mediocrity intrinsic to the

egalitarian mentality of democracies. Tocqueville feared the development

of a powerful government providing material comfort and assistance to

the many, and able thereby to dictate to the mass of equal individuals,

unchallenged by any intermediate institutions or interest groups. This was

what he called ‘democratic despotism’. Unsurprisingly, his political legacy

was ambiguous and Tocqueville was later claimed by both liberals and

conservatives. He had foreseen this, writing in 1835 that ‘Some will ﬁnd

that at bottom I do not like democracy and that I am severe toward it; others

will think that I favour its development imprudently.’

8 Alexis de Tocqueville to Louis de Kergolay (January 1835), in de Tocqueville 1985,p.95. See also

Jardin 1988;Welch2001.

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On Liberty (1859), Mill’s text written a generation later, develops many

of these ideas, especially Mill’s concerns regarding social and cultural uni-

formity and their negative effects on individualism:

there needs protection [also] against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling;

against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own

ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter

the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in

harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model

of its own. (Mill 1977a, p. 220)

By the 1850s it was clear to Mill, as to many others, that the expansion of

the British suffrage and reform of Parliament in 1832 would be followed by

further measures of democratisation. As he wrote in 1861, ‘it is evident, that

the only government which can fully satisfy all the exigencies of the social

state, is one in which the whole people participate’ (Mill 1977b, p. 412).

Mill’s anxiety concerning the effect of this on the quality of government

and the coherence of measures expressed itself ﬁrst in his support for plural

voting based on education and attainment, and then in his support for

an electoral refor m that might improve the calibre of legislators. If they

were to have more authority, and if they were to be elected by the less

educated classes, let them at least vote for men of ability. Mill in his Thoughts

on Parliamentary Reform (1859) endorsed a so-called ‘fancy franchise’ that

allocated votes according to the citizen’s level of education and occupation;

some might have ﬁve or six votes, others but one, so as to equalise the contest

in mid-Victorian society between ‘brains and numbers’. He then became

an enthusiastic convert to a suggested scheme of voting, essentially a type of

single transferable vote, devised in the 1850s by the lawyer Thomas Hare,

which promised the election of men of intellectual ability.

His concern to

give power to the best men led him also, in Considerations on Representative

Government (1861), to devise administrative structures within government

such as drafting committees and legislative councils, staffed by policy experts,

that would remove the taint of ignorance and amateurism from democratic

government. If Britain was to have a democracy, let it be a skilled one

(Goldman 2002,pp.278–89). Mill was contemptuous of the pretensions

of aristocratic government to direct affairs intelligently and efﬁciently: if

he had doubts about popular administration he was even more hostile to

rule by privilege. Yet these strains of conservatism within Mill’s liberalism

9 J. S. Mill to Thomas Hare (3 March 1859), Mill 1972b, pp. 598–9. See also Hare 1858.

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illustrate very effectively the challenge of democracy: if the proponent of

liberty could fear its consequences, how much more so the defenders of

property?

Despite this ambivalence, ‘Mill’s pontiﬁcal authority’, as the liberal politi-

cian and higher journalist, John Morley, referred to it, was an obvious tar-

get for conservative criticism. In the famous critique by the jurist James

Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), a series of essays collected and published as

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in 1873, many of the themes that characterised

nineteenth-century conservative thought were deployed in an attempt to

undermine not only liberal conclusions, but ﬁrst principles and assump-

tions also. Stephen, drawn from a famous evangelical dynasty, was a severe

rationalist and religious sceptic (a position he shared with his brother, the

Victorian man-of-letters, Leslie Stephen) and a well-known voice in the

reviews and journals of the mid-Victorian era (Colaiaco 1983). His essential

argument was encapsulated in a letter of 1872 in which he remarked that

Mill’s Liberty was dependent on a ‘concept of human nature [which] appears

to me to be a sort of unattractive romance’.

Mill would grant as much indi-

vidual freedom as possible, consistent with doing no harm to another. In

Stephen’s view, echoing Burke, this was a fatally optimistic view of human

nature: ‘The condition of human life is such that we must of necessity be

restrained and compelled by circumstances in nearly every action of our lives’

(Stephen 1991,p.59). Since ‘there are and always will be in the world an

enormous mass of bad and indifferent people’, so ‘compulsion and restraint’

will always be required. And given the degree of their moral failings, no con-

ceivable grant of liberty would ‘in the least degree tend to improve them’.

Mill’s fundamental principle would also negate ‘every existing system of

morals’, for these, by their very nature, guide and compel right conduct

and disapprobate actions that the community may condemn, whether or not

the consequences of such actions are harmful to individuals. The principle

of liberty, in other words, is not a sufﬁcient foundation for social ethics.

To Stephen, Mill’s defence of liberty encouraged moral disorder and also

social insubordination by undermining ‘a proper sense of the importance

of the virtue of obedience, discipline in its widest sense’.

Stephen’s argu-

ments depended quite as much as Mill’s on a particular view of human

nature, though Stephen could claim that he, at least, had openly articulated

10 StephentoLadyEdgerton(24 April 1872), in Smith 1988,p.161.

11 Ibid., p. 72. 12 Ibid., p. 58. 13 Ibid., p. 169.

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his psychological assumptions. In doing so, his critique was, in essence, a

restatement of long-standing conservative themes.

Those who rejected liberalism sometimes found the certainties that

Catholicism offered, and its orthodox rejection of the present and future,

a consolation and an attraction. The case of John Henry (Cardinal)

Newman (1801–90) is perhaps the best-known example in the English-

speaking world, reminding us that while conservatism did not mandate

religious belief of any sort, or membership of any particular denomination,

it was frequently associated with Christianity and its defence (Ker 1989;

Newman 1956, 1961–2008). In Newman’s complex case, he was driven

Rome-wards by a multiplicity of factors, many of them historical, scholarly

and doctrinal, emanating from prolonged and extensive study of the Church

Fathers. But the ease with which the British state could alter the religious

arrangements of the nation (as in Catholic emancipation in 1829 and the

subsequent suppression of Irish bishoprics) and its erastian imposition on

the Anglican Church in the early 1830s, forcing it towards institutional

rationalisation, demonstrated to Newman and his bother ‘Tractarians’ in

the so-called Oxford Movement that clerical independence was a pretence;

that spirituality and holiness were menaced by the new gospels of statism,

efﬁciency and utility; and that the Established Church in England was com-

placent and apathetic. Their campaign to respiritualise Anglicanism and the

nation failed, undermined by a liberalism that, in their view, diluted and

routinised the faith. When the leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Robert

Peel, delivered a speech in 1841 that seemed to favour the replacement of

religion by education as the ethical guide to social development, Newman’s

ironic riposte in a series of letters to The Times (‘The Tamworth Reading

Room’) reafﬁrmed faith as the enduring basis of moral action. The rejection

of liberalism thus took the form, in Newman’s case, of a reversion to the

one true church which he joined in 1845, and later to a famous discussion

of the ills of modernity, alongside a vindication of his beliefs and actions, in

his autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua of 1864.

But there were other forms of outright rejection and other destinations

for anti-liberals drawn, sometimes despite themselves, towards conservatism.

In the case of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) his utter detestation of the doc-

trines of, and the consequent social arrangements created by, liberal political

economy led to a corrosive social criticism – corrosive of his own reason as

well as early Victorian society (Froude 1882–4; Kaplan 1983). And when

that criticism was reinforced by a growing contempt for the inadequacies of

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