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Jan 19, 2022 · The triumph of conservatism in early twenty-first-century Texas was in many ways unsurprising, given the state’s long history of valuing rugged individualism. Extending back as least as far as the Republic of Texas, the mostly White, mostly conservative, mostly male people who ruled the state believed that the best way to insure the collective good was to guarantee the widest possible ...
- Overview
- Conservatism in the 19th century
- Metternich and the Concert of Europe
- The retreat of old-style conservatism
The 19th century was in many ways antithetical to conservatism, both as a political philosophy and as a program of particular parties identified with conservative interests. The Enlightenment had engendered widespread belief in the possibility of improving the human condition—a belief, that is, in the idea of progress—and a rationalist disposition ...
The 19th century was in many ways antithetical to conservatism, both as a political philosophy and as a program of particular parties identified with conservative interests. The Enlightenment had engendered widespread belief in the possibility of improving the human condition—a belief, that is, in the idea of progress—and a rationalist disposition ...
The massive social upheavals of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods provoked a reaction of more immediate and far-reaching consequence than the writings of conservative theorists. During the period 1815–48, the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich, a major influence in Austria and in Europe generally, devoted his energies to erecting an antirevolutionary chain of international alliances throughout Europe.
Metternich was a dominating figure at the Congress of Vienna, the international peace conference convened in 1814 near the close of the Napoleonic wars. The peace settlement, reached at Vienna in 1815, was based on conservative principles shared by the Austrian delegate, Metternich; the British delegate, Viscount Castlereagh; the French delegate, Talleyrand; and the formerly liberal Russian tsar Alexander I. These principles were traditionalism, in reaction to 25 years of rapid change; legitimism (hereditary monarchy as the only lawful rule); and restoration of monarchs ousted after 1789.
The European great powers also attempted to enforce peace through periodic conferences between governments that gave rise to a period of international cooperation known as the Concert of Europe. The Concert system, which amounted to a rudimentary form of international governance, was used to arbitrate peacefully several international disputes and to suppress liberal uprisings within the borders of the member states.
According to Metternich, the liberal revolutions of the 1820s and ’30s in Spain and parts of Italy and Germany were “unhistorical” and unrealistic. Liberals were engaged in a futile attempt to impose the English institutions of parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy in places where they had no historical roots. Using arguments borrowed from Burke, he insisted on the need for continuity with the past and orderly, organic development. Hence his sarcastic comments on the liberal revolutions in Naples and elsewhere:
The settlement engineered by Metternich at the Congress of Vienna was reactionary in that it aimed at reinstating the political and social order that existed before the French Revolution. Nevertheless, the restored monarchies in France, Austria, and Spain thought it prudent to sanction the formation of parliamentary institutions as a sop to liberal sentiment. Political parties were hardly necessary in these states, given the limited powers accorded to the new parliaments and the narrowness of the franchise. As a result, the monarchies’ most reliable supporters, the aristocratic landowners and the clergy, were able to secure the allegiance of the general population. They were especially influential in rural areas, where an inherently conservative peasantry was still relatively unaffected by industrialization and other modern innovations.
This political settlement proved untenable within a few decades of the Restoration, chiefly because of the increasing discontent of urban liberals. City dwellers tended to be more active politically than rural people, and as urban populations grew in both absolute and relative size owing to the Industrial Revolution, their festering discontent began to threaten the Restoration establishment. In the face of their agitations and revolts, conservatives gradually lost ground, and after the Revolutions of 1848—which resulted in the exile of Metternich and of King Louis-Philippe of France—conservative factions either lost power to liberals and nationalists or clung to influence only in coalitions with other groups.
whether there is anything left to study in the history of the Right.1. The answer is yes. The new work on conservatism has illuminated the history of a powerful and diverse political movement that organized throughout the postwar era alongside other social movements that received much more attention.
New Deal Era. During the 1930s, the beginning of modern conservatism was born with opposition towards the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Conservative (mostly Midwestern) Republicans and Southern Democrats united for the first time, and distinct characteristics of modern conservatism began to appear.
Aug 1, 2015 · Conservatism and its modernising, anti-traditionalist rivals, liberalism and socialism, are the dominant political philosophies and ideologies of the post-Enlightenment era. Conservatives criticise their rivals for making a utopian exaggeration of the power of theoretical reason, and of human perfectibility. Conservative prescriptions are based ...
The central goal of conservative leaders in early nineteenth-century Europe, like the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, was to prevent future revolutions and maintain a favorable balance of power, an equilibrium that prevents one nation from dominating others.
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Timeline of modern American conservatism. This timeline of modern American conservatism lists important events, developments and occurrences that have affected conservatism in the United States. With the decline of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party after 1960, the movement is most closely associated with the Republican Party (GOP).
