CRITICAL THINKING BOOKS
Back to basics
After decades of domination by free-market thinking, conservative parties are finding electoral success by emphasising stability and order, writes David Willetts
“For conservatives, it is useful that conservatism is hard to pin down”
Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition by Edmund Fawcett (Princeton UP, £30)
Too many books on conservatism fall into one of two categories. First, those where true believers set out their faith. Tradition, national identity and the deep wisdom of unreflective instincts are celebrated. These works have an incantatory quality and rarely engage with critics. They are based on reverence for a particular country’s history and institutions, especially in the form they took before liberals (and worse) got at them. There is a strain of utopianism in this conservatism-with the past as the utopia. The lack of critical thought in such works makes them fair game for those who see conservatism as hocus pocus, bereft of principle beyond the ruthless pursuit of power to further the interests of the rich, all disguised behind a rhetoric of nostalgia and patriotism. Then, of course, there are the books by those who regard conservatives as their enemy, which make exactly this case more directly.
Hunger for office is indeed one of the animating beliefs of British Conservatives, who believe that when it comes to the game of politics it is far better to be batting than bowling. To achieve office, it is rather useful that conservatism can be hard to pin down. Shortly after the landslide Tory defeat of 1997, I found myself sitting next to Denis Thatcher at a dinner. I asked him what he thought the Tories needed to do to win back power. He replied: “We must get back to basic conservative principles-but don’t ask me what they are.” British conservatism is rather like a capacious Mary Poppins bag from which it is always possible to extract an argument that applies to the circumstances of the day.
There are surprisingly few analyses of conservatism that avoid the twin perils of reverence or debunking. Even serious accounts, certainly in Britain, tend to be histories of activity in parliament and government rather than of thinkers and ideology. This could be said to be authentically conservative- instead of an explanation of prior beliefs, which are then applied in practice, we have a host of examples of actual practice from which underlying principles may be distilled. But it does leave one asking if there is more to conservatism than an account of how conservatives have practised politics.