Significance of Conservatism in the Modern Times - Essay Example

Seminar Journal Significance of Conservatism in the Twentieth and Twenty First centuries Nisbet commented that when a contemporary social scientist is labeled as a conservative, he is more often damned than praised. But does conservative political ideology still has a place in the world we live in today? The answer to this question is based on the general nature of conservatism as an ideology. This includes its defining characteristics, its substance, and the conditions under which it arises. Samuel Huntington (1957, p. 164) defined ideology as a system of ideas concerned with the distribution of political and social values and complied by a significant social group. During the interwar period, which is considered to be a not so positive time for Conservatism in Britain, the ideology has been seen as inclined towards the defense of class privileges and of the status quo, a negative opposition to Socialism, and a interest centers commercialist approach to the rising Nazi menace in the 1030s (Fair, 1987, p. 549). The difference between conservative ideology and ideational ideologies has led to non conservatives to deny any intellectual content to conservatism which led to conservatives attacking all the other ideologies. In Huntington’s view, both parties are wrong because they have minimized its intellectual significance. He explained that the conservative ideology as an intellectual rationale of the permanent prerequisites of human existence (Huntington, 1957, p. 168). It has a high and necessary function. As a case in point, when a society is under threat, the conservatism acts as a reminder to men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of the existing ones. As he had said, conservative ideology is not the absence of change; rather, it is the articulate, systematic, theoretical resistance to change (Huntington, 1957, p. 168). The term conservative ideology is different from one society to the other. For one, the aristocrats are the conservatives in Prussia in the 1820s; slave-owners are the conservatives in the South in the early 1850s while the liberals are considered the conservatives in America and other parts of the world. As seen in history, American liberals have been idealist, lobbying goals of greater freedom, social equality, and more meaningful democracy. Conservatism can also be seen as shaping mechanism of events rather than merely reactionary as can be seen in Disraeli’s foreign policy wherein it focused on the necessity for Britain to act constructively as a moderating and mediating power and to maintain its interest in the whole empire (Rayner 1995, p. 316). There are three elements that are recurring themes of British conservatism in both twentieth and twenty first century and to today where the world is very much technologically advanced; first is the development of material conditions by both support of individual initiative and timely reform of abuses, second is the stress on the value of traditional institutions, and lastly the belief in the necessity for an active foreign engagement. Afterward Conservative thinkers have detailed the value of divergence of personality and attitudes, the role played by property as an expression of individuality, and the essential role of the family in providing a steady environment in which the person may develop (Fair, 1987, p. 551). Feminism as a coherent political ideology The personal is political as second wave feminist would say. They challenge women’s exclusion from the public world of politics and economics which are traditionally male dominated. In so doing, they are introducing to the political discourse the personal experience of being female. Among their works is extending the meaning of the so called public politics in to the realm of social life which is seen before as personal or private. These feminists, in consequence, disturbed the public/private dichotomy, a long-held view in Western political thought that politics is the purview of a public male sphere (Humm 1989, 211). Women comprise half of the world’s population but they do more than two-thirds of the work done in the planet. Although this is the case, they only earn ten percent of the income and own only one percent of the world’s property. As exaggerated as it may seem, this statistics came from the United Nations and has a very a high probability to be accurate. Western female thought throughout the centuries has recognized the relationship between patriarchy and gender as vital to the womens inferior place.   For two hundred years, patriarchy prohibited women from having an official or political identity and the legislation and attitudes sustaining this provided the replica for slavery.   In the late 19th and early 20th centuries suffrage campaigners won in taking some legal and political rights for women in the UK.   By the middle of the 20th century, the stress had shifted from suffrage to social and economic fairness in the public and private sphere and the womens movement that sprung up during the 1960s began to dispute that women were demoralized by patriarchal arrangements (McKinon 1997). Equal status for women of all races, classes, sexualities and abilities - in the 21st century these feminist assertions for equality are usually accepted as sensible principles in western society; yet the disagreement between this code of equality and the provable inequalities between the sexes that still are present depicts the enduring dominance of male opportunity and values all over society (McKinon 1997) . Dominant Ideology in the UK The British parliament which consisted mostly of landowners opted to do without protection for agriculture in May 1846 by removing the Corn Laws. This essential policy change from protection to unilateral free trade has intrigued political scientists, historians and economists for about a century and a half. The party became a part of the government in 1981 wherein they looked as a unified party committed to protecting agriculture but there leader, Prime Minister Robert Peel changed this stand within five years. What made it more interesting and relevant to this topic is that it split the Conservative party for a generation. It is clear that there have been different interests at stake and definitely of ideology (Rayner, 1995). Historians and political scientist have long argued on the reason why this group of conservatives has changed their stand with regards on the defining issue of this parliament and why the party was divided and continued to be so for a very long time. Many research and theory construction in the field of sociology of knowledge depends on the dominant ideology thesis, wherein it suggests that there exist in most societies a set of beliefs which dominates all others and which through its assimilation in the consciousness of subordinate classes have a tendency to hold back the development of radical political opposition (Rayner 1995). This was also argued by Marxists wherein they stated that the role of ideology in a society is to lay down the belief system. According to their philosophy, a dominant ideology molds the formation of political institutions, the relationships between institutions and individuals, and the relationships between individuals (Huntington, 1957, p. 674). The laws of the state are shaped to preserve this ideology. In Britain, the dominant ideology is liberal and therefore the laws are designed to preserve the system. Law enforcers, whether the police or the judges are responsible and trained to uphold this laws which will in turn uphold the ideology. In such societies, the instrument used in transferring the dominant ideology is not that efficient. Such is the case when normally; the direction of the transfer is towards the dominant ideology alone, and thus not including the subordinate class (Knight 2006, p. 618). In Britain, the most important and dominant set of political ideas has been, and up to this time, remains, liberalism. In many ways, liberal ideology are the building blocks of modern British politics, they even say that it is second nature because it became so ingrained. It is also a fact that rival ideologies share many core beliefs with liberalism. When liberalism came to the United Kingdom, it was a seen as a highly revolutionary set of ideas, primarily challenging many traditions and social hierarchies which were very important to traditional Britain. Liberalism also acted as justification when UK effectively undergoes a transition from feudalism into the industrial revolution which led them in the first developed capitalist country. In the UK, liberalism was said to have had a double history, for one, it is a tradition in its own right at the onset and end of the twentieth century and second, it was an element in all the other ideological traditions in twentieth and twenty first centuries. At the onset of the twentieth century, liberal ideology meant individual freedom, free markets, political democracy, and a minimal state. Even though the Liberal Party did not flourish in the United Kingdom, liberal ideas continue to a very significant part of political life and in influencing the policies and rhetoric of Parliamentary politics. Overall Answer As the twentieth century commenced, the concept ideology was hardly ever employed past limited references relating to political philosophy. This insignificance was obvious in the pages of the Review. Where references to ideology averaged only 2.6 per year in its first half-century, and by no means surpass 10 per year. After World War II, however, references to ideology swelled, averaging 20.3 per year and in no way dropping below 10 per year. Much of the debate about ideology in the late twentieth century focused on the predictions of its demise, or at least of its fading relevance (Heywood, 2002, p. 31). This came to be known as the ‘end of ideology’ debate. It was initiated in the 1950s, stimulated by the collapse of fascism at the end of the Second World War and the decline of communism in the developed West. As the US sociologist in the name of Daniel Bell once said, this debate about the end of ideology is due to the assumption that the stock of political ideas has been exhausted. He further argued that ethical and ideological questions had become irrelevant because in most western societies parties competed for power simply by promising higher levels of economic growth and material affluence. To put it differently, economics triumphed over politics (Bell, 1990, p. 3). Francis Fukuyama also contributed on this debate in his work ‘The End of History’. He did not say that ideology is coming to an end nor it is irrelevant but he did believe that a single ideology had triumphed over all its rivals and that it is a final victory for liberal democracy. Fukuyama’s work when taken to context was made when communism collapsed in Eastern Europe which he understood as the downfall of Marxism as an ideology of world-historical importance (Heywood, 2002). Another important contributor to this debate is Anthony Giddens who argued that left and right conventional ideologies have become more and more redundant in a society characterized by globalization, declining tradition and the expansion of social reflexivity. According to critics, Bell who was a forerunner in the end of ideology debate in the 1ate 1950s, was seen to be proclaiming disillusionment with a philosophic attitude towards government which was previously connected with the values of communism, socialism, and social welfare liberalism. This debate was discussed during that time on opinion pages of journals or newspapers, and eventually entered mainstream political science in a few ways. For one, it attracted attention because of its vagueness in definition. This can be seen when Huntington defined it in his paper in 1957 (Bendix, 1954). Another route of penetration was the debate’s rejection of “isms” which in a way was part of a campaign towards a rational and empirical discipline. According to David Apter (1964, p. 112), this is a choice between what he termed vulgar ideologies and the ideology of science, and at that time the science ideology was winning. The idea that ideology was at an end also had a third, more subtle, influence on the generation recovering from World War II and faced with a seemingly interminable Cold War. It provided a way to contrast "them" and "us" (Mullins, 1972, p. 499). More than half of the research articles in the Review in the last 50 years have utilized the term "ideology" or its modifications. Positively, the certainty that the term is in extensive use does not warranty that it is collectively understood. On the other hand, the foregoing investigation proposes that political scientists who have employed the concept have not built a tower of babble. Almost all treatments, even the universal ones, pass the central definition test of referring to a set of ideas. Furthermore, the use of ideology that approved the slightest inference of consistency has faded" (Mullins, 1972, p. 499) . A definition of ideology that points to parties, groups, and "isms" entail not only consistency, but also differentiates one abstract group, or its beliefs, with another. In conclusion, formal theory and experimental measurement of ideology have joined on a spatial conceptualization of ideology as a subject of location on a left-right or liberal-conservative continuum. Although the central meaning of ideology as a consistent and comparatively steady set of beliefs or values has remained invariable in political science in due course, the con notations related with the concept have undergone alteration (Bell, 1990, p. 67). In the nineteenth century, ideology meant attachment to principles of liberal democracy, and to be an "ideologue" was to back up the rights of man in opposition to an absolutist state. The repercussion of being romantically dedicated to those ideas was added by Napoleon and later by Marx. In the first half of the twentieth century, ideology came to imply any belief system, as the fights against fascism and communism seized center stage (Knight, 2006, 616). . Democratic ideology was compared with totalitarianism, as good against evil. The image of Hitler and his followers as ideologues extraordinaire was embossed in the public mind, maybe to be revived at the appropriate moment. But, at least as clear in the pages of the Review, the suggestions of illogical pledge to a set of ideas dulled with the inner anticommunist crusade and the uproar over the end of ideology. The behavioral revolution strengthened the concept of ideology as a "belief system" and reassured the concept of remaining negative nuances. As political scientists have become at ease with the use of the term, a batch of research took place that depicts the public as becoming more "ideological" (MacKuen et al. 2003). New interpretations have emerged and they offered to propose that the public is capable of responding to ideological signals as heuristics and new standpoints have been opened about the essential values constructing ideology (Knight, 2006, 617). There has been immense development in the capacity of political scientists to converse on the basis of a shared understanding of an essential concept. However it seems valuable to reassess two major questions that have been raised about ideology in the past: is it a benevolent influence on democratic politics? And how far does it really go through into the public at large? On a final note, Andrew Heywood (2002) declared that due to the fact that there is a debate regarding the end of ideology, an end of history, or an end of modernity can be seen as an ideology in itself. Heywood suggested that rather than indicating the final demise of ideology, such premises may simply portray that ideological debate is alive and kicking and furthermore is demonstrates that the evolution of ideology is a continuing and perhaps unending process. References Arneil, B. (1999). Politics and Feminism. Oxford: Blackwell. Bell, D. (1960). The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Polit ical Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press. Bell, D. (1990). The misreading of ideology: The social determination of ideas in Marxs work. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 35, 1-54. Bendix, R. (1964) . The Age of Ideology: Ideology and Discontent. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Davis, E. C. (2007). Feminist Identities and Ideologies among Contemporary College Students: Is Feminism Just In The Water?.  American Sociological Association Fair, J. (1987). British Conservatism in the Twentieth Century: An Emerging Ideological Tradition. British Studies, 19, 549-578. Heywood, A. (2002). Politics. New York: Pagrave Macmillan Humm, M. (1989). Dictionary of Feminist Theory. Hertfordshire: PrenticeH all/HarvesterWh eatsheaf Huntington, S. P. (1957) . Conservatism as an Ideology. American Political Science Review, 51, 454-73 Knight, K. (2006). Transformations of the Concept of Ideology in the Twentieth Century. The American Political Science Review, 4, 619-626 MacKinnon, C. (1987). Feminism unmodified. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mullins, W. A. (1972). On the Concept of Ideology in Political Science. American Political Science Review, 66, 498-510. Rayner, M. (1995). The Legend of Oakeshotts Conservatism. Canadian Journal of Political Science,2, 313-338 Read More