Photo from: National Portrait Gallery, London
By: J Tyler Syck
Aside from Burke and Tocqueville, we Americans tend to forget about great conservative statesmen and thinkers who lived, thought, and worked outside of the United States. Among these neglected thinkers, perhaps none is as important as Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli (later Lord Beaconsfield or “Dizzy” to his friends) was Queen Victoria’s favorite Prime Minister, not to mention a romance novelist. Throughout his long career, he pioneered a conservative philosophy designed to help the British people face a rapidly changing world. We would do well to learn from this philosophy today.
Disraeli rose to power in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, as British society was being radically altered by changing economic and social circumstances. Urbanization and rising poverty rates upset the carefully ordered world of Regency Era England. These changes proved a particularly difficult problem for conservatives. For decades, conservative political thought in England had rested on simple support for the aristocracy and monarchy, which typically involved minimizing social upheaval as much as possible. However, in the face of rapid industrialization, conservative politicians found themselves facing a difficulty never before encountered.
Conservatives at the time hit upon two different approaches. The first, pioneered by British Prime Minister Robert Peel, was to embrace the brave new post-industrial world wholesale, merely working to implement social change in a slow, moderate fashion. The second, largely a continuation of old-fashioned conservative strategy, was to stand opposed to all change and work to undo industrialization. Disraeli thought both approaches were deeply wrong-headed. Disraeli thought Peel’s approach was hardly different from liberalism. In Coningsby, the most political of his novels, he describes Peel’s brand of conservatism as “an attempt to construct a party without principles.” However, Disraeli thought the old guard of his party was little better. By attempting to stand against the forces of industrialization and stop all change, they were trying the impossible.
Disraeli offered a middle ground between these two approaches. He summarized his view in a speech delivered before a crowded banquet hall in Scotland: “In a progressive country change is a constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people,” which are the real source of human freedom and happiness. In short, Disraeli believed that the job of conservatives was neither to embrace nor to stop change but to work to preserve and adapt those institutions that sustain human flourishing. In practice, this meant a conservatism that provided generous welfare to the poor while at the same time bolstering custom, tradition, law, and religion.
Modern American conservatives could learn much from Disraeli’s vision for the British Conservative Party of the nineteenth century. In our contemporary moment, the social institutions that make a free society possible are quickly evaporating. Unless halted, the decline of families, churches, and local government will spell certain death for the American Republic. On one side of the political spectrum lay progressives who see no problem with the sometimes dangerous evolution of modern American culture. On the other side are arch-traditionalists who refuse to admit that American society may have to change in order to stay the same. Disraeli helps us understand this hard truth – displaying that adaption does not lead to extinction. On the contrary, it is the only way for a civilization to survive.
Jeffery Tyler Syck is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Pikeville in his native Kentucky.