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Both conservatism and liberalism have, on one dimension, been accorded similar treatment by some of the salient schools of ideological analysis, in that they have been denied the status of a fully fledged ideology by those who would restrict the phenomenon to total, closed, and cohesive views of human beings in society. However, whereas liberals challenge, most conservative ideologists, as well as most exponents of conservative ideology, go out of their way to dispel any suspicion that theirs is an ideology. Obviously, if the notion of ideology is confined to an a priori, abstract, closed, and total system of mass‐consumed political thinking, then a creed that claims (as conservatism usually does) to be experiential, concrete, and delimited is not an ideology. Consideration of conservative thought, however, may query whether conservatives escape the features of that very definition of ideology, and it could not escape categorization within the approach that this book has already advanced: that of presenting ideology as a structural configuration of political concepts. After asking why there is such a dearth of capable and sophisticated enquiry into the nature of conservatism, this chapter addresses the issues outlined here in three sections: (a) [Michael] Oakeshott: conservatism à la carte; (b) The chameleon contra the status quo: two discarded theories; and (c) The conservative core: resolving a morphological puzzle.

This chapter considers four of the most influential visions that characterized the response to totalitarianism, and in particular the various concepts of limit they provide, since those are the basis of the opposition which each vision sought to oppose to the totalitarian ideal. The first vision is the positivist one of Karl Popper, for whom the logic of scientific method offers the only genuine knowledge of man and society. The second great vision is that of Berlin, who abandons positivism and instead presents the human condition in tragic terms, on the grounds that it is intrinsically characterized by a plurality of incommensurable and conflicting values. A third vision situates positivism in a naturalistic portrait of the human condition. Finally, there is the ‘civil’ vision of Michael Oakeshott, which is ultimately grounded in a radical, anti-reductionist conception of human freedom.

The chapters in this book identify leitmotifs in Conservative thought which enable one to answer the question ‘What is Conservatism?’ This answer confirms and builds upon arguments developed by Anthony Quinton and Michael Oakeshott, particularly the former's ideas of intellectual imperfection, political scepticism, traditionalism, and organicism. At all levels of political debate and action throughout the 20th century, Conservatives articulated a range of positions, norms, and beliefs that were designed to identify the nature and meaning of Conservatism, and which fitted the patterns discerned by Quinton and Oakeshott, with the exception of Thatcherism. Thatcherism's implications were wholly at odds with the organicist emphasis on social association that had previously been such a marked feature of Conservative thought. As the Conservative century came to an end, it seemed that even if the Conservative Party had survived, Conservatism had not.

Begins by giving an outline of the idea of trusteeship as presented by P. H. Kerr, and then as viewed against a background of the opposite idea—that of liberty, as considered by J. S. Mill. It states the purpose of the book is to interrogate the character of trusteeship as an idea of international society, to investigate the assumptions, claims, and justifications that render it intelligible as a recognized and settled mode of human conduct in international life. It contends that the character of trusteeship is discernible in full relief at the intersection of two dispositions of human conduct: the good of assisting persons in need, and the good of respecting human autonomy. The first part of the chapter is a general discussion of the idea of trusteeship in contemporary international society, and it ends by commenting that, since the 11 September attacks, there is very little about the Bush administration's claims that would be out of place in the age of empire—an age in which trusteeship was the most obvious outward manifestation of a similarly righteous mission to propagate the virtue of civilization and to eradicate its enemies. The remaining three sections of the chapter discuss the idiom of Oakeshottian conversation in which the book is written, the international society/English School theoretical tradition in which the book is situated, and the character of trusteeship, which is intelligible in a particular relation of virtue, inequality, and tutelage.

Michael Oakeshott and Edward Shils are thinkers similar in many respects. They both belonged to the intellectual current of the post-war anti-totalitarianism that was characterised by the opposition to the idea of regulating society by planning, by the rejection of ideological politics, and by the perception of similarity, if not identity, between the left-wing and right-wing radicalisms. They both occupied the conservative-liberal slot within the broad anti-totalitarian spectrum, combining their adherence to freedom and minimal state with their deep appreciation of tradition. At the same time, their different intellectual temperaments led them to opposite directions. Beneath Oakeshott’s apparent conservatism one often discovers an emancipatory and optimistic disposition grounded in his Romantic appreciation of radical individuality. Shils’ respectable liberalism, by contrast, often results in cultural pessimism and social conservatism.

Tocqueville applied Rousseau’s critique of the Enlightenment to modern democracy. He saw in the age of equality the possibility of a new and unprecedented form of despotism arising out of long-standing trends toward administrative centralization. Tocqueville drew on Montesquieu’s theory of doux commerce to show how modernity would replace the old warrior ethic of glory in order to produce new habits based on individualism and an ethic of and “self-interest rightly understood.” This ethic was in turn the source of a distinctively modern pathology that leads people to flee from their own freedom in order to seek security and comfort from the state that had become a new kind of tutelary power. Tocqueville’s fears about this new kind of soft despotism were prescient. They were developed by twentieth-century thinkers, like Louis Hartz, Hannah Arendt, and Michael Oakeshott, concerned with the emergence of mass society and totalitarian political parties.

This chapter explores another conceptual distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental understandings of the United Kingdom. It takes issue with McLean and McMillan's distinction between primordial unionism – British as an end in itself – and instrumental unionism – British as a means to an end such as welfare, prosperity and security. In particular, it challenges the strict separation they make between continued allegiance and political utility. As in the previous chapter, it is argued here that for most citizens, other than committed nationalists, these remain distinctions within a Union and not contesting ideas about that Union. Devolution has modified but not fundamentally transformed that relationship. In other words, social bargains about the scope of rights and entitlements in each devolved administration presuppose the solidarity of common United Kingdom citizenship.