Portal:Conservatism
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Introduction
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in which it appears. In Western culture, depending on the particular nation and the particular time period, conservatives seek to promote and preserve a range of institutions, such as the nuclear family, organized religion, the military, the nation-state, property rights, rule of law, aristocracy, and monarchy.
The 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, who opposed the French Revolution but supported the American Revolution, is credited as one of the forefathers of conservative thought in the 1790s along with Savoyard statesman Joseph de Maistre. 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 and establish social order.
Conservatism has varied considerably as it has adapted itself to existing traditions and national cultures. Thus, conservatives from different parts of the world, each upholding their respective traditions, may disagree on a wide range of issues. One of the three major ideologies along with liberalism and socialism, conservatism is the dominant ideology in many nations across the world, including Hungary, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, and South Korea. Historically associated with right-wing politics, the term has been used to describe a wide range of views. Conservatism may be either libertarian or authoritarian, populist or elitist, progressive or reactionary, moderate or extreme. (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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On August 11, 1984, United States President Ronald Reagan, while running for re-election, was preparing to make his weekly Saturday address on National Public Radio. As a sound check prior to the address, Reagan made the following joke to the radio technicians:
Though this was not the first time Reagan had joked prior to giving a speech or address, the Soviet official news agency, TASS, condemned the joke, declaring that "USSR condemns this unprecedentedly hostile attack of US President" and that "this kind of behaviour is incompatible with high responsibility the heads of nuclear states are bearing for the destinies of their own people and the mankind".
Did you know...
- ... that California began celebrating Ronald Reagan Day on February 6, 2011, which would have been Reagan's 100th birthday?
- ... that author Jonathan Krohn gave a two-minute speech at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference at age thirteen?
- ... that for Theodore Dalrymple's book Life at the Bottom, he interviewed over 10,000 people who had attempted suicide?
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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