St. Augustine famously noted his perplexity at the problem of time: “What therefore is time? If no one asks me I know; but if I wish to explain it to who asks, I do not know” (Confessions 11.14). Something similar may be said about conservatism—we seem to know what it is until we are asked to define it. In this respect, conservatism differs from typical political ideologies. The term “Marxism,” for example, conveys a definite doctrinal content (inter alia, the class struggle, historical materialism, the socialist critique of capitalism). But what is the doctrinal content of conservatism? When we survey the intellectual history of conservatism, we find self-described “conservatives” defending regimes as divergent as ancien régime monarchy and liberal-democratic capitalism. Nor is the contested nature of conservatism of merely historical import. Many contemporary conservatives virtually identify their conservatism with classical liberal ideas of limited government, economic deregulation, and individual freedom. Yet a new generation of postliberal conservatives (e.g., Deneen, Legutko, Ahmari, Vermeule) revives an older conservative critique of classical liberalism as a dissolvent of traditional religious and family values and the social virtues of solidarity.

We live therefore at a particularly opportune time to reexamine the question of conservative identity. Edmund Neill begins by surveying some of the most influential answers. For Samuel Huntington, conservatism is more disposition than doctrine, one in favor of the status quo and resistant to change. Other conservatives (Oakeshott, Gilmour) emphasize conservatism less as resisting, and more as managing a process of “careful, organic, evolutionary change” (7). Against dispositional definitions of conservatism, Karl Mannheim sees conservatism as a substantive political philosophy arising from the specifically modern context. Certainly, the veneration of ancestral traditions mediated through religion, family, customs, and education is the hallmark of conservatism. But this is also the default attitude of premodern cultures. For Mannheim, this traditionalism only arrives at a complete political self-consciousness when it is under challenge and forced to render an account. Conservatism thus emerges from the peculiarly modern context arising out of the trauma of the French Revolution which purposed to effect a violent rupture from the historic European tradition.

Surveying all these approaches, Neill ultimately settles on the synoptic conception of Michael Freeden who argues that “conservatism should not just be viewed as a peculiarly ‘reactive’ movement but as a full-scale ideology” (11). This ideological core has two core components: a belief in managed and organic change and a belief in “extra-human” foundations of political order (theological, historical, or biological). Other conservative doctrines for Freeden follow from these. Neill accepts Freeden's understanding of conservatism, but argues that it must be bolstered with intellectual history (17). Neill's account unfolds around a Toynbean paradigm of “challenge and response” in which conservatism is confronted by ever new challenges arising from the dynamism of the modern historical process. Conservative “splits” occur over whether given historical challenges should be resolutely resisted or prudently “managed.”

Neill organizes his “challenge and response” history of conservatism into four phases. Conservatism first arose (ca. 1789–1848) to confront the French Revolution in its war against the ancien régime of Europe (monarchy, nobility, church) and the Industrial Revolution, which transformed the socioeconomic base of Europe by empowering a commercial class of industrial capitalists to challenge the landed aristocracy. European conservatives were united in defense of the ancien régime against the revolutionaries and the Enlightenment narrative of progress and critique of tradition they drew upon. However, the rejection of the modern project had different degrees. While Edmund Burke set the “boasted wisdom of our ancestors” (Letters on a Regicide Peace [1795]) against the progressivist presumptions of the philosophes and revolutionaries, “theocratic conservatives” (De Maistre, Bonald) demanded a yet more total rejection of the Enlightenment in upholding the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The Industrial Revolution meanwhile split conservatives between liberal Tories (Peel) and romantic Tories (Coleridge).

This divide metastasizes during the second period Neill discusses (1848–1914), in which modern industrial capitalism, European imperialism, and nationalism reached an apogee. Some conservatives (Mallock, Spencer) embraced the modern capitalist market economy; others (Carlyle, Ruskin, Henry Adams) resisted it. And while in the early phase of conservatism nationalism was generally rejected, by the nineteenth century some conservatives (Bismarck, Barres, Brunetier) came to embrace it.

The period of the two world wars (1914–1945) saw the violent clash of ideologies (Communism, Fascism, Nazism), the decline of Europe, and the rise of the United States, leading to the ultimate triumph of modern mass democracy. Some (Oakeshott) saw modernity as an issue to be temperately managed and accommodated; others, however, saw it as a grave crisis to be confronted either by the reaffirmation of premodern discourses such as Christian humanism (T. S. Eliot, Maritain) and classical philosophy (Leo Strauss).

Finally, Neill discusses the period since the 1960s when conservatism had to deal with Communism, cultural liberalization, increased secularization, and the regulatory welfare state. Late cold war conservatives of the “New Right” (Reagan, Thatcher) returned to the older classical liberalism of limited government, individual freedom, and free-market capitalism. Nonetheless, the period also saw important traditionalist thinkers (Roger Scruton) and conservative intellectual critics of the Enlightenment narrative of progress (John Gray). Neill concludes with a brief coda on the populist conservatism currently on the rise (Trump, Orban).

Neill offers us a clear, well-articulated narrative that places Western conservatism in a historical context. Such an ambitious undertaking invariably leaves certain lacunae. Perhaps the most important player in continential conservatism during the modern epoch—the Austrian Hapsburg empire—receives no attention. The discussions of Latin conservatism are virtually limited to France; ignored are Spain's conservative thinkers and movements (e.g., Juan Donoso Cortes), the Carlist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Francoism.

A more substantive question concerns Neill's (and Freeden's) fundamental contention that conservatism is a modern ideology. Kenneth Minogue tried to construct a “pure theory of ideology” involving several key tenets. Ideologies are for Minogue closed systems whose axioms are insulated from rational critique or empirical verification. Modern ideologies tend to divide the world into the binary of “oppressors and oppressed.” A pervasive system of oppression is understood to characterize this oppressor-oppressed relation (familiar examples include capitalist exploitation, white supremacy, and male patriarchy). This systemic oppression is often seen partially masked by a false consciousness so subtle that neither oppressors nor oppressed operate with full awareness. Ideologies thus claim to hold the interpretative key to unmasking social oppression and liberating humanity.

While conservatives may accept moderate reforms to rectify particular injustices, projects to radically overhaul and replace inherited values and institutions cut directly against conservative skepticism about modern utopian-progressive narratives of liberation. Christopher Dawson saw ideology as characterized by “an invasion of the world of religion and metaphysics so that they claim man's allegiance even in the things that are not Caesar's” (The Movement of World Revolution [Sheed & Ward, 1959], 95). When ideology becomes a closed system that demands unqualified and unquestionable loyalty, it furnishes the foundation for modern totalitarianism. This type of ideology can operate as a totalizing political vision usurping the traditional position of Christianity as the highest locus of ultimate meaning within Western culture. The conservative opening to an extra-human horizon that both transcends and grounds the political order is an element that Freeden and Neill deem essential to the constitution of conservatism as an ideology; but it is precisely this which may constitute conservatism as an anti-ideology.