What Is Conservatism? (And Why Would Anyone Want to "Conserve" Anything?)

Imagine you’re playing a game with some friends. The rules are a little weird—they’ve been passed down from older siblings, and nobody quite remembers why one particular rule exists. But everyone knows it, everyone follows it, and the game works. Now imagine someone shows up and says: “These rules are irrational. Let me design a perfect new set of rules from scratch, based on logic alone.”

Would you be excited? Or would you feel a little nervous?

That nervous feeling—that suspicion that tearing everything down and starting over might cause more problems than it solves—is the emotional heart of conservatism. And it’s much stranger and more interesting than the word “conservative” usually suggests in adult arguments about politics.

The Central Puzzle: Can Reason Rebuild Society?

In the late 1700s, something enormous happened. The French Revolution attempted to tear down the old political order—centuries of monarchy, aristocracy, and church authority—and rebuild society from scratch, based on rational principles. The revolutionaries believed that human reason could design a perfect society. They wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which said that all people have universal rights just because they are human.

A British politician and writer named Edmund Burke (1729–1797) watched this happening and was horrified. He wrote a famous book called Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, three years before the Revolution turned violent and began executing thousands of people, including the king and queen. Burke predicted the Terror. He said: “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”

How did he know? What made him so sure that building society on reason alone would lead to disaster?

Burke’s Big Idea: The Wisdom We Can’t Write Down

Burke’s central claim is this: society is too complicated for any individual mind to understand completely. The laws, customs, habits, institutions, and traditions that make up a society have been tested and refined by millions of people over hundreds of years. The knowledge embedded in them is not the kind you can write down in a book or reduce to a set of principles. It’s practical knowledge—like knowing how to ride a bicycle or sense when a joke will land—accumulated through generations of trial and error.

Burke called this “prejudice.” That sounds like an insult today, but he meant something specific. Prejudice, for him, was pre-judgment: the wisdom you inherit before you have time to reason everything out for yourself. When you’re in an emergency, you don’t want to stop and calculate the ethics of every possible action. You want good habits and instincts that have already been shaped by experience.

Burke thought the French revolutionaries made a terrible mistake. They assumed that because a tradition wasn’t rationally justified, it was worthless. But for Burke, traditions contain a kind of collective intelligence that no single person could replicate. To tear them down in the name of abstract reason was arrogant and dangerous.

Here’s a concrete example: imagine your school has a weird tradition—maybe every Friday, the oldest student in each homeroom passes out worksheets. Nobody knows exactly when this started or why. A rational reformer might say: “This is pointless. Let’s have a system where the teacher picks someone randomly each week.” But what if the tradition exists for a reason nobody remembers—like ensuring that older students learn responsibility, or that younger students have a reliable person to ask for help, or that the teacher isn’t overwhelmed with small tasks? You can’t know what you’re losing until it’s gone.

For Burke, that’s the problem with radical change. You might be smarter than the tradition in some ways, but you’re almost certainly dumber than all the generations who shaped it.

The Partnership Across Time

One of Burke’s most famous ideas is that society is not just a contract between living people. It’s a partnership:

“a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

A regular contract—like an agreement to trade pepper or coffee—can be ended whenever the parties want. But society, for Burke, is different. The people who came before us built the institutions we inherit. The people after us will live with what we leave behind. We can’t just start over every generation. We have to think of ourselves as trustees, passing something along.

This is a genuinely beautiful idea, and it’s worth sitting with for a moment. Think about your city or town. The buildings, the parks, the street layout—most of it was built by people who died before you were born. You’ll probably live in a world shaped by decisions made centuries ago. And decisions you make today—about climate, about schools, about public spaces—will affect people who aren’t even alive yet.

Burke’s point is that this isn’t an accident. It’s part of what makes a society a society, rather than just a crowd of individuals who happen to be alive at the same time. If you only care about the living, you’ll steal from the future. If you only care about yourself, you’ll break what your ancestors built.

But Wait: Is Conservatism Just “Don’t Change Anything”?

That would be the easy criticism. But Burke wasn’t against all change. He said something surprising: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” In other words, if you refuse to change at all, you’ll break—because the world changes around you.

Think of a tree in a storm. If it’s rigid, it snaps. If it bends, it survives. Conservative change is like that: gradual, cautious, adjusting rather than replacing. Burke supported the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, which was a restoration—a return to older liberties after a king had gone too far. He wasn’t against change. He was against blueprint change: tearing everything down and rebuilding from abstract principles.

This is different from reaction, which wants to go backwards. And it’s different from libertarianism, which has its own abstract principles (like “the free market should decide everything”). True conservatives are skeptical of all ideologies—including free-market ones—if they try to impose a single rational plan on a complex society.

Two Kinds of Conservatism

Philosophers have noticed that conservatism can mean two different things:

Relativistic conservatism: Whatever system a society has, try to make it work better through gradual improvements. If a society is feudal, conserve feudalism. If it’s communist, conserve communism. The conservative doesn’t have a fixed idea of what a good society looks like—they just want to preserve whatever exists.
Non-relativistic conservatism: Some systems are not worth conserving. A totalitarian society that doesn’t allow gradual change, or a revolutionary system that was imposed by force rather than growing organically, can’t be conserved in the conservative sense. For this kind of conservative, not every tradition is a living tradition worth keeping.

Most serious conservatives adopt the second view. They wouldn’t say that a communist dictatorship deserves to be conserved just because it exists. They’d say that true conservatism requires a society with living traditions—ones that can grow, adapt, and be gently improved.

The Big Objections

Critics point out several problems with conservatism.

First, who gets to decide what counts as a “living tradition”? The Soviet Union lasted for decades. Was that long enough to become a tradition worth conserving? This question has never been fully answered.

Second, conservatism seems to favor whoever currently has power and privilege. The philosopher Ted Honderich called it “organized selfishness.” When a conservative says “let’s keep things as they are,” they’re often saying “let’s keep things unfair.” Burke himself defended the property rights of the rich and worried about giving power to ordinary people.

Third, how do we know that gradual change won’t also cause disaster? Maybe sometimes you need big, radical changes—like abolishing slavery, giving women the vote, or ending segregation. Those weren’t gradual reforms. They were fought for, sometimes violently, against conservatives who said “let’s go slowly.”

Fourth, and most philosophically tricky: conservatism says “there are no general rules for politics.” But isn’t that itself a general rule? If you say “don’t trust abstract principles,” you’re stating an abstract principle. This is called a self-referential problem, and it’s not clear conservatives have a good answer to it.

A Different Kind of Conservative: G.A. Cohen on Why We Keep Things

In the 21st century, a philosopher named G.A. Cohen (1941–2009) offered a surprising defense of conservatism. Cohen was a socialist—not the kind of person you’d expect to defend conservative ideas. But he noticed something important.

Conservatism, for Cohen, isn’t really about epistemology (what we can know). It’s about attachment. We love particular things—not because they’re the best possible things, but because they’re ours. A beautiful new building might be objectively better than an old one in every measurable way, and you might still feel grief when the old one is torn down. That grief isn’t irrational. It’s human.

Cohen argues that we need to conserve particular valuable things, not just maximize value in general. If you could destroy a cathedral worth 10 units of beauty and replace it with two buildings each worth 9 units of beauty, a pure “value maximizer” would say: go ahead, you’ve gained 8 units. But the conservative says: no, the cathedral itself matters, not just the abstract value.

This is a deep point. Markets and bureaucrats both tend to treat things as replaceable—as long as the numbers add up, it doesn’t matter what gets destroyed. But for most people, it does matter. We want to live in a world where the things we love stay, not just one where the total amount of goodness keeps rising.

Why This Matters Now

You might think conservatism is just about old people complaining about change. But the ideas are stranger and more challenging than that.

When someone says “let’s redesign the whole education system from scratch,” the conservative asks: “What knowledge is embedded in the current system that you don’t even know you’re losing?” When someone says “let’s get rid of all traditional values and start fresh,” the conservative asks: “What do you owe the dead and the unborn?” When someone says “follow the evidence wherever it leads,” the conservative asks: “What if the evidence is always partial, and you can’t see the whole picture?”

These questions don’t always have good answers. But they’re worth taking seriously—even if you end up disagreeing.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Scepticism about reason	The core conservative claim that individual human reason is too limited to fully understand or redesign society
Tradition	The accumulated wisdom of generations, embedded in customs and institutions, which conservatives think deserves respect
Prejudice (Burke’s sense)	Pre-judgment; the good habits and instincts we inherit, which let us act without having to reason everything from scratch
Reaction	Wanting to go backwards to an earlier state — different from conservatism, which allows gradual forward change
Particularism	The idea that political principles can’t be applied universally; what works depends on specific time, place, and circumstances
Partnership across generations	Burke’s image of society as a contract linking the dead, the living, and the unborn
Self-referential problem	The difficulty conservatives face: their claim that there are no universal rules is itself a universal rule

Key People

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) — Irish-born British politician and writer who founded modern conservatism with his attack on the French Revolution. He argued that society is too complex for rational redesign and that traditions contain accumulated wisdom. Also campaigned against British abuses in India and Ireland.
Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) — British philosopher who described conservatism as a “disposition” to enjoy the present rather than an ideology. He compared politics to sailing “a boundless and bottomless sea” where the goal is just to keep afloat.
G.A. Cohen (1941–2009) — A socialist philosopher who surprisingly defended a version of conservatism based on attachment to particular things, not just epistemic limits. He argued that we should conserve what we love, even if something “better” could replace it.
Roger Scruton (1944–2020) — British philosopher who wrote extensively on conservatism, basing it on authority, allegiance, and tradition. Applied conservative ideas to architecture, arguing that cities should grow organically rather than be planned by architects.

Things to Think About

Burke says we should be cautious about change because traditions contain wisdom we can’t fully articulate. But how can we distinguish between a tradition that contains real wisdom and one that’s just old prejudice that harms people? Is there a test?
If you knew for certain that a radical change would make things better in the long run—say, abolishing all homework would actually improve learning—would it still be wrong to disrupt traditions that people value? Or does the value of tradition count for something even when it’s not the most efficient option?
G.A. Cohen says that even if you know the replacement will be better, you can still feel grief about losing the original thing. Does that grief make you irrational? Or is there something valuable about the history of a thing that can’t be replaced by a better version?
Here’s a hard one: if you were a conservative living under an unjust system—say, a system that enslaved people—what should you do? Burke’s logic suggests gradual reform. But what if gradual reform takes centuries, and millions suffer in the meantime? Is there a point where radical change becomes justified, and if so, how do you know when that point is reached?

Where This Shows Up

In school debates about changing the curriculum, grading systems, or school rules. Someone who says “we’ve always done it this way” is being conservative. Someone who says “let’s redesign everything from scratch” is being radical. The interesting arguments are about which approach is wiser in a given situation.
In arguments about city planning and architecture. When old buildings are torn down for new developments, the conservative asks what’s being lost that can’t be measured in dollars. This debate happens in nearly every growing city.
In environmentalism. Conservation (the environmental kind) and conservatism (the political kind) share the same root: the idea that we should “husband” resources—including social resources like laws and customs—rather than consume or replace them thoughtlessly.
In family arguments. When older relatives say “that’s just how it’s done” and younger ones say “but that doesn’t make sense,” the same tension between tradition and reason plays out at the kitchen table.
In technology debates. Every time a new app or platform replaces an old one, someone mourns what’s lost. The conservative impulse—to ask what’s being destroyed, not just what’s being created—is alive in every tech transition, even when nobody calls it philosophy.