The political tradition that emphasizes the importance of inherited institutions, traditions, and customary practices as sources of accumulated practical wisdom, and that views radical schemes of social transformation with deep skepticism. Edmund Burke is the founding figure of modern conservatism in this sense, though the tradition has many strands and has often been claimed by people whose specific views Burke himself would not have shared. At its philosophical best, conservatism is a temperament of careful, slow reform rather than an ideology of any specific political program.
Tradition
Conservatism
The political tradition that emphasizes inherited institutions, traditions, and customs as repositories of accumulated practical wisdom.
Thinkers
Thinker
Patrick Buchanan
1938–
Patrick Buchanan is the paleoconservative firebrand whose 'America First' nationalism — protectionist, non-interventionist, culturally traditionalist — prefigured the populist realignment of the Republican right
ThinkerClyde Wilson
Clyde Wilson is a paleoconservative historian whose editing of Calhoun's papers and defense of states' rights shaped the decentralist and neo-Confederate strands of the American right
ThinkerPaul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a paleoconservative theorist whose diagnosis of the managerial state and therapeutic liberalism shaped a dissident strand of the American right
ThinkerPeter Viereck
Peter Viereck was a Burkean humanistic conservative who rehabilitated the word 'conservative' in postwar America, only to be sidelined by the movement right for his anti-populism and defense of the New Deal
ThinkerRyszard Legutko
Ryszard Legutko is a Polish conservative philosopher who argues that liberal democracy shares unsettling affinities with the communism he once resisted
ThinkerSamuel Francis
Samuel Francis was a paleoconservative theorist who fused James Burnham's managerial-elite analysis with the populist politics of alienated Middle Americans
ThinkerBenjamin Disraeli
1804–1881
Benjamin Disraeli was a Conservative prime minister and creator of 'One-Nation' conservatism, holding that aristocracy owed obligations to the poor and that social reform would unite the nation
ThinkerBarry Goldwater
1909–1998
Barry Goldwater was the limited-government, libertarian-leaning conservative whose landslide-losing 1964 campaign nonetheless transformed American conservatism and paved the way for Reagan
ThinkerRonald Reagan
1911–2004
Ronald Reagan was the conservative 40th President whose tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-communism marked a decisive turn from New Deal liberalism
ThinkerWinston Churchill
1874–1965
Winston Churchill was the British statesman who led his nation against Nazi Germany as wartime prime minister — a defender of democracy against fascism and an unapologetic imperialist whose legacy remains contested
ThinkerJefferson Davis
1808–1889
Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederate States of America, a states'-rights defender of slavery who led the South's attempt to found an independent slaveholding nation
ThinkerCharles Krauthammer
Charles Krauthammer was a neoconservative columnist who gave post–Cold War American foreign policy its most influential argument for assertive, “unipolar” power
ThinkerNorman Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz was an American neoconservative whose journey from Cold War liberalism to hawkish anti-Communism, waged as editor of Commentary, helped institutionalize neoconservatism on the right
ThinkerWilliam F. Buckley Jr.
1925–2008
William F. Buckley Jr. was the architect of modern American conservatism as a movement — the National Review founder who built its institutions, honed its rhetoric, and policed who was in and who was out
ThinkerIrving Kristol
1920–2009
Irving Kristol was the godfather of neoconservatism — a veteran of City College's anti-Stalinist left who spent his career asking what liberalism gets wrong about human nature and the limits of good intentions
ThinkerJoseph de Maistre
1753–1821
Joseph de Maistre was the godfather of European counter-revolutionary thought, arguing that the French Revolution proved liberalism false and that tradition, faith, and the executioner were the real foundations of order
ThinkerThomas Carlyle
1795–1881
Thomas Carlyle was an anti-democratic Victorian prophet who attacked industrial capitalism and parliamentary government with equal ferocity, preaching hero-worship while his 'cash nexus' critique fed the socialist tradition
ThinkerRoger Scruton
1944–2020
Roger Scruton was a conservative philosopher who defended the unfashionable — beauty, belonging, and the inherited past — as human necessities rather than prejudices
ThinkerRussell Kirk
1918–1994
Russell Kirk was the traditionalist conservative who gave the postwar American right its intellectual soul, defending tradition, order, and the permanent things against modern ideological abstraction
ThinkerEdmund Burke
1729–1797
Edmund Burke was the founding father of modern conservatism, a reforming Whig whose response to the French Revolution defended inherited institutions against rationalist schemes of social engineering
ThinkerMichael Oakeshott
1901–1990
Michael Oakeshott was an English conservative philosopher whose skepticism of rationalist politics gave 20th-century conservatism its most sophisticated philosophical voice
ThinkerHarry Jaffa
Harry Jaffa was a Straussian conservative philosopher who reinterpreted Lincoln and the American Founding as a principled defense of natural right, shaping the West Coast school that still informs the intellectual right
ThinkerJames Q. Wilson
James Q. Wilson was a pragmatic, evidence-oriented postwar American conservative whose 'broken windows' theory reshaped policing and whose work anchored a data-driven, morally serious strand of the right
ThinkerCalvin Coolidge
1872–1933
Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president and an apostle of laissez-faire limited government whose restraint presided over Roaring Twenties prosperity — the anti-FDR for small-government conservatives
ThinkerRobert Nisbet
Robert Nisbet was a conservative American sociologist who argued that the modern state's growth hollowed out the communities and mediating institutions on which liberty depends
ThinkerWilhelm Röpke
Wilhelm Röpke was a German ordoliberal economist whose vision of a decentralized, morally grounded market shaped West Germany's postwar social market economy
ThinkerCharles de Gaulle
1890–1970
Charles de Gaulle was a French nationalist who founded the Fifth Republic, blending dirigiste economics and conservative social values in a politics that was neither left nor right
ThinkerDwight D. Eisenhower
1890–1969
Dwight D. Eisenhower was a moderate conservative Republican president who accepted the New Deal while pursuing fiscal restraint — and whose farewell warning against the military-industrial complex proved prescient
ThinkerMargaret Thatcher
1925–2013
Margaret Thatcher was Britain's free-market conservative Prime Minister, the 'Iron Lady' whose program of privatization, deregulation, and broken union power remains the template for market conservatism worldwide
ThinkerOtto von Bismarck
1815–1898
Otto von Bismarck was the arch-practitioner of Realpolitik who unified Germany through blood and iron, then pioneered the welfare state to undercut socialism — authoritarian substance beneath parliamentary forms
Defining tradition for
Archetype
Moderate Conservative
You would rather change gradually inside inherited frameworks than remake them wholesale — conservatism's core disposition, the bet that what experience has tested deserves more trust than what theory has merely designed.
ArchetypeReform Conservative
Burke's own warning — a tradition incapable of reform is a tradition incapable of survival — is where you plant your conservatism: principles that must evolve to stay relevant, not a museum kept under glass.
Related through shared thinkers