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Introduction
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy promoting traditional social institutions. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the traditional values or practices of the culture and civilization in which it appears. In Western culture, conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions such as organized religion, parliamentary government, and property rights. Adherents of conservatism often oppose modernism and seek a return to traditional values.
The first established use of the term in a political context originated in 1818 with François-René de Chateaubriand during the period of Bourbon Restoration that sought to roll back the policies of the French Revolution. Historically associated with right-wing politics, the term has since been used to describe a wide range of views. There is no single set of policies regarded as conservative because the meaning of conservatism depends on what is considered traditional in a given place and time. Thus conservatives from different parts of the world—each upholding their respective traditions—may disagree on a wide range of issues. Edmund Burke, an 18th-century politician who opposed the French Revolution, but supported the American Revolution, is credited as one of the main theorists of conservatism in Great Britain in the 1790s. (Full article...)
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Therefore I trace the peculiar unity of the everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century to the success with which it harmonised diversified and warring schools and united all good things to a single end. Hume and Paley, Burke and Rousseau, Godwin and Malthus, Cobbett and Huskisson, Bentham and Coleridge, Darwin and the Bishop of Oxford, were all, it was discovered, preaching practically the same thing - individualism and laissez-faire. This was the Church of England and those her apostles, whilst the company of the economists were there to prove that the least deviation into impiety involved financial ruin.
These reasons and this atmosphere are the explanations, we know it or not - and most of us in these degenerate days are largely ignorant in the matter - why we feel such a strong bias in favour of laissez-faire, and why state action to regulate the value of money, or the course of investment, or the population, provokes such passionate suspicions in many upright breasts. We have not read these authors; we should consider their arguments preposterous if they were to fall into our hands. Nevertheless we should not, I fancy, think as we do, if Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Paley, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Miss Martineau had not thought and written as they did. A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
— John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926)
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Mike Huckabee's band, Capitol Offense, has played for political events and parties, including entertaining at unofficial inaugural balls in Washington, D.C. in January 2001 and later again 2005, both organized and promoted by the conservative website Free Republic
Credit: Flickr upload bot
Did you know...
- ...that the Ronald Reagan Trail is a collection of highways in central Illinois that connect villages and cities that were of importance to former United States President Ronald Reagan?
- ...that Nikki Haley (pictured) of South Carolina is the first Republican Indian American state legislator in the USA?
- ... that Conservative Party candidate Bernard Trottier won a seat in the 41st Canadian Parliament by defeating the incumbent Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in the 2011 federal election?
Selected anniversaries in March
- 1871 – José Paranhos, Viscount of Rio Branco is elected Prime Minister of Brazil
- 1871 – Otto von Bismarck becomes chancellor of the newly formed German Empire
- 1962 – Young Americans for Freedom sponsor a rally which draws 18,000 people and has been described as the "birthday of the conservative movement."
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