Conservation or Conservatism?

Napoleon coined the word 'ideology' and he did so contemptuously. A philosophical theory becomes an ideology when it is used to justify a grab for power. Napoleon didn't need an ideology because he had the guns and he happened to be at the right place at the right time (timing is everything): "a whiff of grape-shot" was all it took (as Edmund Burke had predicted) to end the Revolution and make the ideologues shut up.

'Ideology' is another word, like 'reactionary' and the paired opposites 'left' and 'right', that we owe to the French Revolution.

The 20th century was an ideological century and we have the scars to prove it.

Whenever Burke is referred to nowadays, which is not often, it is as a 'classic conservative' which is about right, I guess, but not very helpful. Burke is a classic in the same way that great museums are classical institutions: they select and preserve the most perfect objects of each particular type or class. Unfortunately, the qualities that make Burke a classic make him a little tough to read: the 'thickness' of his knowledge of history, government and political institutions, tends to complicate his style in a way that is similar though not exactly comparable to the complications we notice in the style of Henry James.

Burke understood that government and the rule of law are human inventions that have evolved (in a Darwinian sort of way) over many centuries to meet changing human needs. Religion, for instance, is one of those needs. Though Burke himself is or at least presents himself as a religious man, his understanding of the way the Church of England functions, politically (in a broad sense of that word), is entirely secular. Thus, it is not for theological but practical reasons that he criticizes the revolutionary government in France for destroying the institutions and the clergy of the Catholic church. The following will give you a pretty good idea of the nature and flavor of Burke's conservatism:

There are moments in the fortune of states when particular men are called upon to make improvements by great mental exertion....A politician , to do great things looks for a power, what our workmen call a purchase [i.e., a place where it is possible to apply leverage]; and if he finds that power in politics as in mechanics he cannot be at a loss to apply it. In the monastic institutions [of France], in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence. There were revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other than public ties and public principles; men without the possibility of converting the estate of the community into a private fortune. Men denied to self-interests, whose avarice is for some community; men to whom personal poverty is honor, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom. The winds blow as they list. These institutions are the products of [religious] enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in the use. The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes, are things particularly suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning; and which propose duration when they are accomplished. He is not deserving to high rank, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen, who, have obtained the command and direction of such a power as existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations, as those which you [the French] have rashly destroyed, cannot find any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country.... To destroy any power, growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy...the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnetism....


Lao Giao's comment on the word 'ideology' is relevant here: I'm not sure what Napoleon was up to when he coined the word "ideology," but political philosophers who took power would have to include the Founding Fathers, whose success antedated Napoleon's conquests. Madison's Constitution was a beautiful ideological work that has served us well for more than two centuries. Any takers?