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This lesson examines the central internal division within conservatism: the contest between one-nation conservatism and the New Right. Of the strands you must master for the Edexcel specification, this is the one most often examined directly, because it pits two visions of conservatism against each other so sharply that some commentators doubt whether they belong to the same ideology at all. For the 24-mark essay you need to be able to explain each strand's view of the state, the economy, society and equality, to deploy the relevant prescribed thinkers, and above all to reach a reasoned judgement on whether the New Right represents a development of the conservative tradition or a rupture with it. This lesson develops the strands in depth; the five prescribed thinkers are treated in the lesson that follows.
Conservatism has always been a tradition of caution, order and human imperfection, but it has never been a single agreed programme. From its beginnings it has contained a tension between a paternalist impulse — the sense that the privileged owe a duty of care to the less fortunate and that gross inequality is socially dangerous — and a libertarian impulse, sympathetic to the free market and suspicious of state interference. For much of the twentieth century the paternalist impulse, expressed through one-nation conservatism, was dominant in Britain. From the late 1970s the libertarian impulse, reorganised and intensified into the New Right, captured the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher. The argument between the two is therefore not merely academic: it is the argument that has shaped the modern Conservative Party, and it reaches back to the most fundamental questions about human nature, the organic society and the proper role of the state that define conservatism itself.
One-nation conservatism takes its name and its founding image from Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881), the Conservative statesman and novelist who twice served as prime minister. In his novel Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), written during the upheavals of early industrial Britain, Disraeli warned that the country was splitting into "two nations" — the rich and the poor — "between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy", who were "as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets". The phrase crystallised a fear that runs through the whole one-nation tradition: that unchecked inequality would dissolve the bonds holding society together and ultimately invite revolution.
Disraeli's response was not socialist but conservative. He did not propose to abolish hierarchy or to equalise wealth; he proposed to bind the nation together by reminding the privileged of their obligations. The aim was to make Britain one nation rather than two, preserving the existing order precisely by softening its harshest edges. As prime minister in the 1870s his government passed social reforms — on public health, housing and the legal position of trade unions — that exemplified this approach: cautious, practical measures designed to draw the working class into the national community rather than to transform society.
It is important to grasp that the "two nations" anxiety is, at root, a fear about the unity of the political community. The danger Disraeli identified was not inequality as such — conservatives have never regarded inequality as inherently wrong — but inequality so extreme that it severs the bonds of mutual sympathy and recognition between rich and poor, leaving them strangers within the same country. A nation thus divided is one in which the poor have no loyalty to an order from which they derive no benefit, and in which the rich feel no responsibility for those whose labour sustains their position. Such a society, on the one-nation view, is ripe for resentment, disorder and ultimately revolution. The whole point of paternalism is to forestall this outcome by re-knitting the community: by ensuring that the privileged visibly serve the common good and that the poor are protected enough to feel themselves genuine members of a single nation. This is conservatism defending hierarchy by making hierarchy bearable.
Paternalism is the belief that those in positions of wealth and authority have a duty to look after the interests of those beneath them, much as a parent looks after a child. It is rooted in the older aristocratic ideal of noblesse oblige — the obligation that "nobility obliges", binding the privileged to serve the common good.
Paternalism flows directly from the conservative idea of the organic society. If society is a living, interdependent whole rather than a collection of separate individuals, then its parts have duties to one another, and the strong have a responsibility for the weak. One-nation conservatives therefore accept a moderate welfare state and a mixed economy, not because they believe in equality for its own sake, but because they believe that social cohesion, stability and the preservation of order require that the worst extremes of poverty be relieved. This is paternalism rather than socialism: its goal is the security and continuity of the existing order, not its transformation.
The second defining feature is pragmatism. One-nation conservatives are the heirs of Burke and Oakeshott in their distrust of abstract theory and their preference for practical, evidence-based judgement. They will support whatever policies actually maintain social harmony — including, when necessary, significant state intervention — and they distrust rigid doctrines, whether of the left or the right. This is why one-nation conservatism is comfortable with the mixed economy: it judges economic arrangements by their results, not by their conformity to free-market principle.
The third feature is moderation and a positioning on the centre-right. One-nation conservatives seek to balance freedom against social responsibility, the market against the community, and they are temperamentally hostile to extremes. The post-war Conservative governments of 1951–64 embodied this disposition: they accepted the welfare state, the National Health Service and broadly Keynesian economic management bequeathed by the 1945 Labour government, governing the new settlement rather than dismantling it. Figures such as Harold Macmillan, prime minister from 1957 to 1963 and author of the inter-war book The Middle Way, exemplified the one-nation belief that a stable Conservative order required active management of the economy and a genuine concern for full employment and social provision.
It is worth being precise about what makes one-nation conservatism a conservative rather than a socialist or liberal position, because students sometimes mistake its acceptance of welfare for a leftward drift. The crucial point is that one-nation conservatism arrives at the welfare state by a conservative route and for conservative reasons. It does not embrace social provision out of a belief in equality, which it does not hold; it embraces it out of a concern for order, stability and the preservation of the existing hierarchy. The reasoning is essentially prudential and defensive: a society in which the poor feel they have no stake will become unstable and may turn to revolution, as the upheavals of nineteenth-century Europe seemed to Disraeli to prove. By contrast, a society in which the privileged visibly discharge their obligations and the poor are protected from destitution is a society at peace with itself, in which the existing order — including its inequalities of rank and wealth — can be securely maintained. Welfare, on this view, is the price the established order pays for its own continuity. This is the deep logic of paternalism, and it explains why one-nation conservatism can accept a great deal of state intervention without ceasing to be conservative: the purpose of the intervention is conservative even where the means resemble those of the left.
One-nation conservatism also rests on a characteristically conservative view of human imperfection. Because human beings are seen as fallible and dependent on community, the tradition is sceptical both of the unfettered free market, which it fears will produce socially destabilising extremes of wealth and poverty, and of utopian socialism, which it regards as a dangerous attempt to remake human nature. It steers between the two, trusting neither the market nor the planner entirely, and preferring the accumulated wisdom of established institutions to any abstract blueprint. This is why the one-nation tradition is so closely bound to the thought of Burke and Oakeshott: it shares their organic conception of society, their pragmatism and their distrust of rationalist schemes.
The New Right emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a reaction against what its adherents saw as the failures of the post-war consensus. By the 1970s that consensus appeared to be breaking down: Britain suffered high inflation, sluggish growth ("stagflation"), recurrent industrial conflict and a sense that an overextended state and powerful trade unions had made the country ungovernable. To a new generation of conservatives, the one-nation acceptance of the mixed economy and the welfare state looked not like prudence but like a slow surrender to socialism. The New Right offered a sharp break: a return to free markets, a rolling-back of the state and a reassertion of order and authority. In Britain it is inseparably associated with Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and in the United States with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
The New Right is best understood not as a single doctrine but as a fusion of two distinct elements that do not sit altogether comfortably together: a neo-liberal strand concerned with the economy and a neo-conservative strand concerned with social order. Understanding the New Right means understanding both, and understanding the tension between them.
The neo-liberal strand is, in its origins, a revival of classical liberalism rather than of conservatism. Its central claim is that the free market, not the state, is the most efficient and the most just allocator of resources, and that the expansion of government in the post-war era had been economically damaging and a threat to individual freedom.
| Neo-liberal idea | What it means |
|---|---|
| Free-market economics | Markets, not governments, should allocate resources; competition drives efficiency and prosperity |
| Privatisation | State-owned industries should be sold to the private sector to subject them to market discipline |
| Deregulation | Government rules on business should be reduced to free enterprise |
| Low taxation | Income and business taxes should be cut to reward effort and encourage enterprise |
| Monetarism | Inflation is controlled by controlling the money supply, not by managing demand (associated with the economist Milton Friedman) |
| Anti-welfarism | An extensive welfare state erodes self-reliance and creates a "dependency culture" |
The intellectual sources of neo-liberalism lie partly in the work of economists such as Friedrich Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom (1944) argued that economic planning leads towards tyranny, and Milton Friedman, who championed monetarism and the free market. Within the prescribed conservative thinkers, the neo-liberal outlook is given its most uncompromising expression by Ayn Rand, with her defence of rational self-interest and pure laissez-faire capitalism, and Robert Nozick, whose case for the minimal "nightwatchman" state and absolute property rights provides neo-liberalism with a rigorous philosophical foundation.
Margaret Thatcher captured the individualist spirit of the neo-liberal strand in a 1987 interview: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families."
That remark is the sharpest possible repudiation of the organic society at the heart of traditional conservatism, and it is precisely why critics question whether the New Right is conservative at all. Where the one-nation conservative begins from the interdependent community and the duties it imposes, the neo-liberal begins from the free, self-reliant, responsible individual.
The neo-liberal case against the post-war state has several strands worth separating. Economically, it argues that markets process information and coordinate activity far more efficiently than central planners can, so that nationalised industries and heavy regulation produce waste, low productivity and stagnation. Politically, following Hayek, it argues that the concentration of economic power in the state is a standing threat to freedom: the more the state controls the economy, the more it controls the lives of citizens, and the road of economic planning leads, in Hayek's phrase, towards "serfdom". Morally, it argues — most forcefully through Nozick — that high taxation to fund redistribution violates the individual's right to the fruits of their own labour. And socially, the neo-liberal makes the dependency culture argument: that an over-generous welfare state, however well-intentioned, saps the recipient's incentive to work, weakens the family and the work ethic, and traps people in long-term reliance on the state rather than lifting them out of poverty. The remedy, in each case, is to roll back the state and widen the sphere of individual choice and responsibility.
If the neo-liberal strand looks to classical liberalism, the neo-conservative strand draws on more recognisably conservative concerns with order, authority and tradition. Neo-conservatism reacted against what it saw as the moral permissiveness and social fragmentation of the 1960s, and it sought to reassert a strong state in the social sphere.
The neo-conservative diagnosis is that the social liberalism of the 1960s — the relaxation of restraints on personal conduct, the questioning of established authority, the decline of the traditional family — had weakened the moral foundations on which a stable society rests. Where the neo-liberal worries chiefly about an over-mighty economic state, the neo-conservative worries about an under-mighty moral and social state, one too weak or too permissive to uphold order, discipline and shared values. The neo-conservative therefore wants the state to be active in defending tradition, enforcing the law firmly and cultivating patriotic attachment to the nation. This is the strand of the New Right that fits most naturally within historic conservatism, because its concern with order, authority and the dangers of moral decline is continuous with the conservative view of human imperfection: if human beings are flawed and easily led astray, they need the discipline of strong institutions, settled morality and firm authority to keep disorder at bay.
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