THE ANGLOSPHERIC ADVANTAGE:

Benjamin Disraeli offered one of the clearest articulations on the relationship between conservatism and history. In 1867, he gave a speech in Edinburgh where he ruminated on the purpose of the Conservative Party. He also offered some thoughts on the relationship between change, history and the role of the politician. Change, Disraeli suggested, is an inevitable part of human existence, and the question is not whether change should be opposed, but "whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines". Disraeli suggested that the Conservative Party was a "national party" that embraced the former perspective, whilst other political persuasions adopted iterations of the latter perspective. 

Disraeli draws out something fundamental about conservatism as a body of thought in this passage. He himself calls these two perspectives on change the "national system" and the "philosophical system" respectively. An alternative way of stating the binary might be the "historical system" and "ahistorical system". In the former, the answer to the question "what is to be done?" is determined historically, from the experiences of the past transmitted through to the present. In the latter, what is to be done is derived from abstract reasoning. Conservative political thought represents the former system; it is intensely preoccupied with history in a way that other ideologies are not, and this manifests itself in a number of ways.

For one, it makes conservatism contextualist. Conservatism suggests that we can only understand ideas when they are situated in contexts, geographical and temporal. "Circumstances," Edmund Burke argued, "give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind." In contrast, ahistorical systems of thought like liberalism or socialism believe the ideas they advance to be valid universally across time and space, in that what ought to be done ought to be done everywhere and anywhere. For the conservative, the force and weight of ideas comes through their interaction with experience. For liberals or socialists, the force and weight of ideas is innate to them. This contextualism makes it difficult to tie conservatism down to the defence of a particular set of ideas or institutions, for conservatives have defended a variety of institutions and ideas in different moments. History -- context, circumstance -- has always shaped the content of conservatism.

Yet contextualism is not exclusive to conservatism, and it is not what makes conservative thought unique. Nor do conservatives simply settle for a relativism that says ideas only have relevance in contexts and not across time. Conservatives believe that we are given direction about what should be done in the present from consulting the past. It is this that makes conservatism's relationship with history distinctive and profound: the things it values are a historical inheritance, rather than the product of rational deduction. 

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