Traditional conservatism (ii): the emergence of 'one nation' Flashcards
Benjamin Disraeli and Otto von Bismarck…
Sensing that socialism, with its stress upon class conflict, was a new and grave threat to stability and tradition, conservatives like Disraeli and Bismarck understood that the case for orderly change would have to be refined. Likewise, they were aware that to ensure social cohesion and orderly change, new themes were needed to offset the class-conscious politics encouraged by early socialists like Marx.
Emerging importance of the nation in conservative thinking…
Up until the 19th century, nationalist had been associated with anti-imperialism and anti-monarchism. The French revolutionaries, whom Burke opposed so vehemently, were self-styled ‘patriots’, while subsequent revolutions across Europe had frequently been hailed as ‘patriotic movements’. In short, until the mid-late 19th century, ‘the nation’ was seen as anything but a conservative concept.
Disraeli and Bismarck, however, understood nationalism’s conservative potential. Conservatives like Disraeli embraced class differences - but in a way that fostered unity rather than rupture. Against the rhetorical background of one-nation conservatism, Disraeli and Bismarck argued that a society’s classes were, in fact, all members of the same national ‘family’ and that revolutionary politics (including Marxism) represented an attack on the nation itself.
For Disraeli, ‘the nation’ was not an alternative to the status quo but the essence of the status quo, with the existing nation-state being something that all classes had a vested interest in defending.
Scorn on the supposed links between the workers of one nation and those of another…
Conservatives like Disraeli therefore poured scorn on the supposed links between the workers of one nation and those of another. Instead, these one-nation conservatives updated Burke’s notion of an organic affinity between a nation’s richer and poorer classes, arguing that the nation’s aristocracy had a paternalistic duty to ‘elevate the condition of the people’.
Once this obligation was recognised by all classes, Disraeli and Bismarck asserted, social and political progress could be achieved harmoniously and without the horrors of class war and revolution.
Philanthropy on the part of society’s ‘haves’…
However, in pursuit of this ‘one-nation’ strategy, neither Disraeli nor Bismarck advocated mere philanthropy on the part of society’s ‘haves’. In a way that would never have occurred to previous generations of conservatives, they endorsed state-sponsored social reform, thereby distinguishing conservatism from the minimal-state principles of classical liberalism.
As a result, the one-nation conservatism of the mid-late 19th century became associated with legislation that tempered the effects of laissez-faire capitalism, supposedly on behalf of the nation’s working classes.
One-nation legislation…
In England, one-nation conservatism resulted in legislation such as the Factory Act 1874 and the Artisan Dwellings Act 1875, restricting the freedom of factory owners and landlords respectively, while Bismarck’s chancellorship of Germany led to what some historians regard as the first welfare state, providing German workers with state-backed insurance against sickness, accident and destitution in old age. Bismarck’s conservatism also led to the imposition of tariffs and import controls, thus confirming traditional conservatism’s ambivalent attitude to free-market capitalism.
