CON
The
FROM CONSERVATISM’S ROOTS IN THE
European upper-class to its adoption of pro-capitalist ideas to today’s mass populist movements of the hard Right, Edmund Fawcett provides a history of a powerful movement. From the October 27, 2020, Humanities Member-Led Forum online program “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition.” EDMUND FAWCETT, Former European and Literary Editor, The Economist; Author of Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition In conversation with GEORGE HAMMOND, author of Conversations With Socrates
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EDMUND FAWCETT: My book is, I trust, a timely history of the political Rights in France, Britain, Germany and the United States. Its message in a sentence is this: Conservatism has always been as much a source of disruption and turbulence as it has been a wise avoidance of heedless change. I think once that idea is grasped, it’s much easier to understand both the appeal and the up-and-down history of conservatism since its origin in the early 19th century. On reaching the present, my history spotlights a question that hangs over liberal democracy in Europe and the United States: Which conservatism is it to be? Is it to be the— broadly speaking—liberal kind that helped sustain liberal democracy after 1945? Or is it to be an illiberal, one-nation kind claiming to speak in the name of what it calls “the people”? In some very general, ground floor sense, conservatism speaks to a kind of universal human desire for order and stability, for tomorrow to be like today. Politically, conservatives have indeed stood for order and
