Conservatism

Conservatism is the cultural, social, in addition to political philosophy that seeks to promote & to preserve traditional social institutions and practices. a central tenets of conservatism may refine in version to the status quo of the culture and civilization in which it appears. In Western culture, conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions such(a) as organized religion, parliamentary government, and property rights. Conservatives tend to favor institutions and practices thatstability and evolved gradually. Adherents of conservatism often oppose progressivism and seek a proceeds to traditional values.

The first established ownership of the term in a political context originated in 1818 with a wide range of views. There is no single vintage of policies regarded as conservative because the meaning of conservatism depends on what is considered traditional in a given place and time. Conservative thought has varied considerably as it has adapted itself to existing traditions and national cultures. For example, some conservatives advocate for greater government intervention in the economy while others advocate for a more laissez faire free market economic system. Thus conservatives from different parts of the world—each upholding their respective traditions—may disagree on a wide range of issues. Edmund Burke, an 18th-century politician who opposed the French Revolution but supported the American Revolution, is credited as one of the main theorists of conservatism in the 1790s.

Themes

Some political scientists such(a) as Samuel P. Huntington, see conservatism as situational. Under this definition, conservatives are seen as defending the established institutions of their time. According to Quintin Hogg, the chairman of the British Conservative Party in 1959: "Conservatism is not so much a philosophy as an attitude, a fixed force, performing a timeless function in the developing of a free society, and corresponding to a deep and permanent prerequisites of human style itself". Conservatism is often used as a generic term to describe a "right-wing viewpoint occupying the political spectrum between liberalism and fascism". Despite the lack of a universal definition,themes can be recognised as common across conservative thought.

According to Michael Oakeshott, "To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the most to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, gave laughter to utopian bliss." such(a) traditionalism may be a reflection of trust in time-tested methods of social organisation, giving 'votes to the dead'. Traditions may also be steeped in a sense of identity.

In contrast to the tradition-based definition of conservatism, some political theorists such as Corey Robin define conservatism primarily in terms of a general defence of social and economic inequality. In that way right-wing politics maintained the abstraction thatsocial orders and hierarchies are inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, or tradition. From this perspective, conservatism is less an effort to uphold old institutions and more "a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back". Conversely, some conservatives may argue that they are seeking less to protect their own power than they are seeking to protect "inalienable rights" and promote norms and rules that they believe should stand timeless and eternal, applying to each citizen.

Conservatism has been called a "philosophy of human imperfection" by Noël O'Sullivan, reflecting among its adherents a negative notion of human nature and pessimism of the potential to upgrading it through 'utopian' schemes. The "intellectual godfather of the realist right", Thomas Hobbes, argued that the state of nature for humans was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short", requiring centralised authority.