well as secular authority will also be evident. Nationalism and
support for ‘family values’ will usually also be found.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke
[1729–1797] sought to articulate a suspicion of rationalist egali-
tarianism and to praise instead the strength of the genius of the
national constitution:
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock
of reason; because we suspect this stock in each man is so small, and
that the individual would do better to avail themselves of the general
bank and capital of nations and ages.
(Burke, 1907, Vol. IV: 95)Rather than a contract between individuals – like a trading agreement
- the state is instituted as a partnership between the generations,
‘between those who are living and those who are dead’, to be
approached with reverence.
Many of the themes presented somewhat rhetorically and
unsystematically by Burke were expounded in a more philosophical,
systematic and perhaps less intelligible way by nineteenth-century
German idealists such as Hegel to whom we have already referred.
In Britain the Conservative Party has supported both the throne
and the Established Church. In the United States the symbols of
continuity are now the national and state constitutions (interpreted
to stress the limitations on government), the flag, prayers in schools
and the like. Historically conservatives in both countries have tended
to be suspicious of grand theories of government and pragmatic
in their pursuit of political support. The left has been attacked as
peddlers of disunity and conflict with trade unionism regarded with
distaste – in the United States its links to socialism and ‘hence’ the
Soviet Union making it doubly unacceptable during the Cold War.
British Conservatives, however were much influenced by
Disraeli’s [1804–1881] doctrine of ‘One Nation’, popularised in his
novel Sybiland his political practice as prime minister (1868 and
1874–1880). His idea was that national unity should be preserved
through a direct appeal to the interests of the working classes on the
part of benevolent Tory governments. In the nineteenth century the
Conservatives were still led by a mainly aristocratic leadership who
combined ideas of ‘noblesse oblige’ with an inclination to ‘dish the
IDEOLOGIES 93