Conservatism

Conservatism is a political ideology that favours established institutions, traditions and gradual, evolutionary change over sudden or revolutionary reform, holding that a society's inherited customs and institutions embody the accumulated, tested judgment of past generations in a way abstract theory alone cannot replicate. Its view of legitimate authority is institutional and inherited rather than purely majoritarian, resting on constitutional continuity, established custom and the rule of law, though conservative parties have long operated within and accepted electoral democracy. On property, conservatism has historically favoured private property and a settled social hierarchy, treating a propertied class as a stabilising check on both the state and a shifting electorate, though what counts as worth conserving has varied by country and era. Edmund Burke is widely regarded as its first explicitly conservative theorist, following the 1790 publication of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which argued that the French Revolution's wholesale rejection of inherited institutions would end in terror rather than liberty. Conservatism defines itself chiefly against revolutionary and utopian projects of rapid social transformation, whether Jacobin, socialist or otherwise, rather than against any single rival ideology.