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This lesson examines the five key thinkers of conservatism prescribed by the Edexcel A-Level Politics specification: Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick. The 24-mark Section B question explicitly requires you to deploy these thinkers as evidence, so it is never enough to describe conservatism in the abstract; you must show what each thinker argued, how their ideas connect to conservatism's core principles, and — crucially — where they agree and disagree. The five do not form a single chorus. Three of them (Hobbes, Burke and Oakeshott) belong to the traditional, order-and-imperfection wing of conservatism, while two (Rand and Nozick) are libertarian, free-market voices associated with the New Right whose place in the conservative canon is itself contested. Learning to set thinker against thinker — Burke against Rand on society, Oakeshott against the New Right on rationalism — is the surest route to the analysis (AO2) and judgement (AO3) the higher bands reward.
Before examining each thinker individually, it helps to see how they relate to the core ideas of conservatism, because the most effective essays use thinkers to illuminate ideas rather than treating the two as separate lists. Conservatism's defining commitments are human imperfection, tradition, the organic society, pragmatism, hierarchy and authority, and paternalism, together with a distinct libertarian strand that entered the tradition through the New Right. Each prescribed thinker can be located by which of these ideas they emphasise.
Human imperfection is the foundation from which most of the others flow, and it is supplied most starkly by Hobbes, whose bleak account of human nature justifies the strong state, and reinforced by Burke and Oakeshott, who treat human beings as fallible, limited and dependent on settled institutions and accumulated wisdom. Tradition and the organic society are pre-eminently Burke's contribution, refined by Oakeshott's defence of the conservative disposition and his critique of rationalism. Pragmatism — the preference for experience over abstract theory — runs through Burke and Oakeshott alike. The libertarian strand, by contrast, is carried by Rand and Nozick, whose confident, rights-bearing individual and minimal state stand in tension with the imperfection, organicism and paternalism of the traditional wing. This mapping explains why the canon divides into a traditional cluster (Hobbes, Burke, Oakeshott) and a New Right cluster (Rand, Nozick), and why the disagreements between the clusters are the richest source of evaluation.
Thomas Hobbes wrote during the upheaval of the English Civil War, and his masterwork Leviathan (1651) bears the unmistakable imprint of that experience of disorder. Hobbes is the earliest of the prescribed conservative thinkers, and although he predates the word "conservatism" by well over a century, his insistence on order and his bleak view of human nature place him at the foundation of the tradition's concern with security and the strong state.
1. A Pessimistic View of Human Nature. Hobbes regarded human beings as needy, vulnerable and easily led astray — driven by appetite, fearful of death and competing restlessly for power, gain and reputation. There is nothing in Hobbes of the liberal's confidence in reason or the socialist's faith in cooperation; for him, human beings left to themselves are a source of mutual danger.
2. The State of Nature. From this anthropology Hobbes derived his famous account of the state of nature — the condition of human life in the absence of a common authority. Without a sovereign power to keep them in awe, individuals would fall into a "war of all against all", in which life would be, in his celebrated phrase, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".
Hobbes: in the state of nature, where every person is a threat to every other, the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".
3. The Social Contract and the Strong State. To escape this intolerable condition, rational individuals agree to surrender their natural freedom to a sovereign authority — the Leviathan — strong enough to enforce peace and security. For Hobbes, order is the precondition of every other good, and only a powerful, undivided sovereign can supply it.
Hobbes supplies conservatism with its starkest justification for authority and order, grounded in human imperfection — themes utterly central to the tradition. Yet his position sits awkwardly within it. He reaches the strong state by a contractarian and individualist route: the state is constructed by rational individuals to serve their interest in self-preservation, a method closer to liberalism than to the organic conservatism of Burke. Hobbes thus illustrates a recurring feature of this topic — that the prescribed thinkers do not fit the tradition's pigeonholes neatly, and that the tensions in their fit are themselves examinable.
For conservatism, the enduring Hobbesian legacy is the conviction that order is the precondition of every other political good. Liberty, prosperity, justice and the arts of civilisation are all impossible in the chaos of the state of nature; they become available only once a sovereign power has secured peace. This ranking of order above liberty is one of the deepest dividing lines between conservatism and liberalism. Where the liberal begins from the free individual and treats the state as a necessary evil to be watched and limited, the Hobbesian conservative begins from the terror of disorder and treats a strong, undivided authority as the indispensable guarantor of any settled life at all. It is worth stressing, too, that Hobbes's pessimism is not merely a claim that some people are wicked; it is a claim about the human condition as such. Because all individuals are roughly equal in their capacity to harm one another, because resources are scarce and because people are driven by fear, competition and the desire for power, even reasonable individuals will find themselves at war in the absence of a common authority. The remedy must therefore be institutional rather than moral: not the improvement of human character, which conservatives doubt is possible, but the imposition of a sovereign strong enough to keep all in awe.
If Hobbes supplies conservatism's psychology of order, Edmund Burke supplies its philosophy of tradition, and he is widely regarded as the founding father of conservatism. An Irish-born MP, Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) as a horrified response to the French Revolution, which he saw as a catastrophic attempt to demolish a whole social order in the name of abstract principle.
1. Tradition and the Partnership Across Generations. Burke revered established institutions as the repository of the accumulated wisdom of generations.
Burke: society is a partnership "not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born".
Because no single generation possesses the wisdom to redesign society from scratch, the inheritance handed down from the past deserves respect and should not be swept away by reformers confident in their own untested theories.
2. The Organic Society and "Change to Conserve". For Burke, society is not a machine that can be dismantled and rebuilt but a living, organic whole that has grown slowly over time. Radical change risks destroying the delicate social fabric. This does not make Burke an opponent of all change; on the contrary, he held that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation. The conservative principle is therefore "change in order to conserve" — cautious, gradual, evolutionary reform that preserves what is valuable precisely by adapting it.
3. The "Little Platoons". Burke famously located the roots of social affection in small, local communities.
Burke: "To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections."
These "little platoons" — family, locality, club, parish — are the nurseries of loyalty and virtue, binding the individual into the wider community. The phrase has become a touchstone for the conservative emphasis on local attachment and intermediate institutions over both the atomised individual and the centralised state.
4. Empiricism and Pragmatism. Burke was deeply sceptical of governing by abstract principle. Political judgement should rest on experience, circumstance and prudence, not on the rationalist's blueprint. This empiricism is one of conservatism's defining methodological commitments.
5. The Natural Aristocracy and the Dangers of Revolution. Burke accepted hierarchy but held that the governing class — a "natural aristocracy" of talent, education and virtue — bore real responsibilities to those beneath them. And he regarded revolution as supremely dangerous: by destroying inherited order without a workable replacement, it opens the door to chaos and tyranny, a prophecy he believed the Terror confirmed.
Burke's quarrel with the French revolutionaries was, at bottom, a quarrel about how political knowledge is acquired. The revolutionaries believed that reason could derive the ideal constitution from first principles — the abstract "rights of man" — and then impose it on a society swept clean of its inherited institutions. Burke regarded this as a catastrophic conceit. The accumulated arrangements of a society, however untidy and illogical they may appear, embody the tested experience of countless generations who faced the same human problems; they "work" in ways that no individual reformer, however clever, can fully understand. To tear them up in the name of a theory is to gamble the entire social order on the untested speculations of the living. Burke therefore preferred the slow, organic adjustment of institutions to their wholesale redesign, and he trusted the wisdom embedded in prejudice and prescription — long-established habits and rights whose justification lies precisely in their endurance — over the brittle certainties of abstract reason. This is the root of conservative empiricism: the conviction that political wisdom is practical and inherited rather than theoretical and invented, and that the burden of proof always lies on the would-be reformer, not on the established order.
Burke established the intellectual architecture of conservatism — tradition, the organic society, empiricism, cautious reform and scepticism of radicalism — and he is the natural anchor of the traditional and one-nation strands. His insistence that society is too complex to be redesigned, and that change must be gradual and respectful of the inherited order, gives conservatism its characteristic temper and supplies the standard against which the radicalism of the New Right is so often measured.
Michael Oakeshott, who taught at the London School of Economics, is the most important conservative thinker of the twentieth century. His essay collection Rationalism in Politics (1962) refined the Burkean inheritance into a subtle philosophy of human imperfection and pragmatism.
1. The Critique of Rationalism. Oakeshott's central target is rationalism — the mistaken belief that politics can be conducted from abstract principles and technical blueprints, as though governing a society were like solving an equation. He distinguished two kinds of knowledge: technical knowledge, which can be written down as rules and learned from a book, and practical knowledge, the tacit wisdom of experience that cannot be reduced to rules and can only be acquired by doing. The rationalist's fatal error is to imagine that technical knowledge alone is sufficient for the immensely complex business of government, when in truth good politics depends on practical wisdom embedded in tradition and experience.
2. Politics as "a Boundless and Bottomless Sea". Oakeshott captured the conservative sense of politics as an activity without fixed destination in a famous image.
Oakeshott: "In political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination."
The task of the statesman is not to steer towards some pre-ordained utopia but "to keep afloat on an even keel" — to maintain stability and respond pragmatically to circumstance.
3. The Conservative Disposition. Oakeshott understood conservatism less as a doctrine than as a temperament or disposition.
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 near to the distant."
For Oakeshott this is not a calculation about which arrangements will produce the best results but a disposition — a settled temperament that enjoys the present, values what is to hand and is wary of sacrificing real, present goods to speculative future ones. It is, in his view, perfectly rational to be attached to the familiar simply because it is familiar, since the familiar is known and its dangers are understood, whereas the untried carries risks that cannot be foreseen.
3. Government as the Pursuit of Intimations. Oakeshott held that political activity should proceed not by imposing an external blueprint but by attending to the "intimations" already present within a society's own traditions — drawing out and developing the latent tendencies of an inherited way of life. Good reform is therefore continuous with what already exists; it amends the tradition from within rather than overthrowing it from without. This is a more subtle version of Burke's "change to conserve", and it sharpens conservatism's distinctive claim that legitimate change must grow organically out of the existing order.
Oakeshott deepened conservatism's pragmatism and its critique of utopian schemes. Significantly, he is frequently invoked against the New Right: because his attack on rationalism was directed at any attempt to govern by abstract theory, it applies as forcefully to the free-market doctrines of the New Right as to socialist planning. He would regard Thatcherite neo-liberalism as itself a form of rationalism — an attempt to remake society according to an abstract economic blueprint, complete with the ambition to transform attitudes and institutions to fit the theory — and so as a betrayal of the conservative disposition he prized. The deployment of Oakeshott to argue that the New Right is not authentically conservative is one of the most powerful moves available in an essay on the divisions within the ideology.
With Ayn Rand, the tradition's centre of gravity shifts decisively. A Russian-born American novelist and philosopher, Rand expounded her views in the novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and in her philosophy of objectivism. She is a New Right, neo-liberal voice whose radical individualism stands in stark contrast to the traditional thinkers.
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