Institutional continuity and intellectual and moral discontinuity in British conservatism

Institutional continuity and intellectual and moral discontinuity in British conservatism

In the immediate post-war period in Britain the traditional ‘constitution in church and state’, and the social structure identified with it, continued to be the primary focus of conservative political thinking. As in France and Germany, important statements of conservativism came from figures identified with Romantic tendencies in literature. William Wordsworth espoused an idea of ‘second nature’ that owed much to Burke and extolled the moral, political and personal virtues of practice that relied on unreflective tradition. This stance favoured the local, particular and immediate over the abstract and self-conscious, seeing these as the basis of personal life and of an organic community where legitimate authority was focused in the established Church and in social and political institutions that were historically attached to it. Wordsworth’s mature political position was formulated in the face of a range of destabilizing political, economic and religious developments that followed in the wake of the successful conclusion of the Napoleonic War. Concern at these developments—closely associated with, but not exhausted by, responses to economic stagnation after the war, the attempts to extend the franchise and to repeal political penalties imposed on both Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters—was shared by ROBERT SOUTHEY and SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey extolled the virtues of social and political forms that might be seen as part of the fabric of the community, but in Coleridge’s case stress was also laid on the need to productively incorporate dynamic impulses. Both the forces of ‘permanence’ (associated with landed property and the gentry) and those of ‘progression’ (stimulated by the growth of commerce and the opportunities opened up by economic development) were represented in the House of Commons. He argued, however, that the moral and practical viability of this structure rested on its capacity to resist the corrosive moral influences of an unchecked ‘spirit of commerce’. Coleridge looked to the Church of England to provide elites with both an education and an ongoing moral and intellectual culture that would ensure their commitment to an ethic of Christian humanism. In the recent past such commitment had been lacking, largely because of the impact of an ethos of philosophical materialism that Coleridge traced to the writings of John Locke. He sought to counteract this by urging the clerisy to reattach itself to a tradition of indigenous Christian Platonism that had flourished up until the late seventeenth century.

While Coleridge thus seemed to endorse many conventional conservative views on the role of tradition, his stress on its intellectual dimensions meant that his position was distinctive. One important result of this feature of Coleridge’s political and social thinking was that later appeals to intellectual traditions were often made in support of liberal and progressive positions (as in the cases of F.D.MAURICE, MATTHEW ARNOLD and T.H.GREEN), and tended to diverge from those adopted by political conservatives. Between about 1835 and 1850, for example, BENJAMIN DISRAELI and his associates in the Young England movement attempted to transform conservative thinking in England in ways that (unconsciously) echoed the ideas of Romantics in Germany. They were dismissive of the supposed triumphs of eighteenth-century development and distinctly cool towards the Glorious Revolution. In place of what they saw as the corrupt self-serving ethos of the Whig ascendancy, they sought to recover a

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medieval ideal of monarchy and aristocracy (courageously but unsuccessfully defended by the Stuarts) that would secure the loyal obedience of members of the lower class through its protection of their interests and its engagement of their (appropriately respectful) affections. These thinkers were also attracted by what they saw as the warmth and cultural colour of the medieval Church and by its capacity to provide a unifying focus for the community. In the modern world these roles might be taken up by the Church of England, but first it would need to be purged of strains of Calvinism that had tainted it since the seventeenth century, and freed from the shackles of law and convention that had turned it into a complacent adjunct of the Whig state. Although Young England had a sentimental preference for peasantry (one that made it particularly sympathetic to the plight of the Irish lower classes) they sought to apply their ideas to social and moral problems arising from industrialization, urging the upper classes to use their political power to protect the urban working classes and to curb the worst excesses of the commercial spirit. In addition, however, they saw literature as a way of stimulating sentiments that supported their political, social and ecclesiastical ideals, and of reasserting a tradition that had been in a condition of partial eclipse for much of the early modern period.