'In a progressive country,' Disraeli told his Edinburgh audience after the passage of the 1867 Reform Bill, 'change is 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 the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines.' At least until recently nearly all Conservatives were similarly opposed to doctrine and ideology. To choose just two examples, John Buchan, like Disraeli a novelist and Conservative MP, maintained in the 1920s that Conservatism was 'above all things a spirit not an abstract doctrine'. And ten years later, Stanley Baldwin warned a Canadian audience not to change the basis of their constitution from party to ideology, because party was founded on mutual tolerance, while rival ideologies aimed at the extirpation of one another.

LRB 6 June 2002 | PDF Download