Corey Robin on why the authentic conservative has always had a taste for violence:

While the contrast between the true conservative and the pseudo-conservative has been drawn in different ways—the first reads Burke, the second doesn't read; the first defends ancient liberties, the second derides them; the first seeks to limit government, the second to strengthen it—the distinction often comes down to the question of violence. Where the pseudo-conservative is captivated by war, Sullivan claims that the true conservative "wants peace and is content only with peace." The true conservative's endorsements of war, such as they are, are the weariest of concessions to reality. He knows that we live and love in the midst of great evil. That evil must be resisted, sometimes by violent means. All things being equal, he would like to see a world without violence. But all things are not equal, and he is not in the business of seeing the world as he'd like it to be.

The historical record suggests otherwise. Far from being saddened, burdened, or vexed by violence, conservatives have been enlivened by it. Not necessarily in a personal sense, though it's true that many a conservative has expressed an unanticipated enthusiasm for violence. "I enjoy wars," said Harold Macmillan, wounded three times in World War I. "Any adventure's better than sitting in an office." The conservative's commitment to violence is more than psychological, however: It's philosophical. Violence, the conservative maintains, is one of the experiences in life that makes us most feel alive, and violence, particularly warfare, is an activity that makes life, well, lively. Such arguments can be made nimbly, as in the case of Santayana, who wrote, "Only the dead have seen the end of war," or laboriously, as in the case of Heinrich von Treitschke:

To the historian who lives in the world of will it is immediately clear that the demand for a perpetual peace is thoroughly reactionary; he sees that with war all movement, all growth, must be struck out of history. It has always been the tired, unintelligent, and enervated periods that have played with the dream of perpetual peace.

Pithy or prolix, the case boils down to this: War is life, peace is death.

The success of the New Right in the 1980s partially depended on its programme being hitched to a bourgeois modernization project to overcome the suffocating stagnation in the core capitalist countries. It was characterised by an appeal to radical individualism, and the entrepreneurial spirit - no wonder its social base was disproportionately located in the petit-bourgeoisie. Third Way social theory embraced this modernization doctrine, so that those forms of social democracy that gravitated to the Third Way, principally in the Anglophone countries, began to conflate 'progress' with global capitalism and its celerity.

The "forces of conservatism", in Blair's infamous coinage, were just those who resisted this force of racing and relentless change. In this, he was probably borrowing from Giddens, who in turn was borrowing directly from John Gray on the apparent incompatibility between conservatism and neoliberalism. Giddens argues: "Conservatism always meant a cautious, pragmatic approach to social and economic change—an attitude adopted by Burke in the face of the messianic claims of the French Revolution. The continuity of tradition is central to the idea of conservatism. Tradition contains the accumulated wisdom of the past and therefore supplies a guide to the future. Free market philosophy takes quite a different attitude, pinning its hopes for the future on unending economic growth produced by the liberation of market forces".

This misrepresents Burke, who was a devotee of market forces, and an individualist of the sort that inspired Hayek's approbation. Burke was indeed 'pragmatic' about social change* but one is, after all, pragmatic to an end; one conserves some state of affairs. It happens that the tradition which Burke wished to conserve, to which end he was pragmatic, was not in the first instance a way of doing things, but property rights and the incentive structure that was produced by a particular property relation. Take his appeal to William Pitt not to supply food to the poor during famine, for example. It was not the traditional way of living of agrarian proletarians that vexed him, but the risk posed by government intervention to enterprise, and to the further development of productive forces. I've written more about Burke's market fundamentalism and the cosmic order into which it is integrated elsewhere, so won't elaborate here. The point is that what defines modern conservatism is precisely its commitment to the capitalist property system, which is itself held to be rooted in certain enduring principles of human nature.

Still, capital itself had appropriated the language and icons of radicalism as part of its raid on the counterculture. Conservatism has always imitated the left, and the New Right's references consistently mined the representational strategies of the radical left. Neoliberal capital represented itself, in its cultural product, as a great, levelling, liberatory force. Think, or example, of Mike Nichols' Working Girl. Nichols, a liberal, produced something stunningly Reaganite. The heroine is a smart New York woman who has a degree but is stuck in a relationship with a deadbeat, in a friendship with an unaspiring secretary, and in a job working as an assistant for a cold, snobbish woman who doesn't respect her. This female boss is her glass ceiling - she frustrates her ambitions and steals her ideas. Her liberation is accomplished by usurping her boss' identity while he's on holiday. In this way, she establishes a sexual relationship with an established executive, with whom she contrives a business plan and woos a comely old chief executive who, she gushes, made his fortune by imitating Japanese management practises and not kowtowing to the unions. She proves her mettle, and also demonstrates that her female boss was pinching her ideas. So, the female boss is given the boot, and she is given her own office. She treats her own assistant in a respectful, open, meritocratic way. She calls her old friend, the unaspiring secretary, and tells her of the promotion. Her friend squeals with delight, apparently satisfied with the vicarious pleasure in someone else's promotion. The final shots of the gleaming silver towers of New York fade out with Carly Simons' academy award winning song 'Let the River Run', which promises a "New Jerusalem". You get the gist. As a story about female liberation, the message appears to be that emancipation is found through an alliance with patriarchs and union-busting Reaganite capitalists, in enmity with envious self-serving women, and consists of rising above your inferiors. Neoliberal capitalism thus positions itself as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation, in the form of a vibrant, dynamic meritocracy.

Given this successful cultural appropriation, it was logical for a timid and conformist social democracy, embracing neoliberalism, to try to assume a radical deportment by mimicking the conservatives. The austerity project can't even pretend to offer something like this. An 'age of austerity' is by definition an age of stagnation and adversity. The cultural cues of the emerging capitalism are rather different. Instead of luxuriating in the libidinal intensities of the market place, thrilling to the adventure of risk, and fantasising about endless protean self-invention, we are instead guided toward the unpromising waters of austerity nostalgia. No bourgeois modernism for now. Think rationing. Think neglect and decay. Think ricketts, TB, and polio.

*In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke makes a distinction between reform and change. Whereas change "alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good as well as the accidental evil annexed to them", reform "is not a change in the substance or in the primary modification of the objects, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of". As imprecise as his terms are, a permanent problem in Burke's polemics, it is fair to say that he favoured any reform of the political economic system of late 18th Century England which would help to preserve it, and opposed any change that he regarded as fundamental. This distinction is important for modern conservatism. It can embrace wrenching social transformations if these serve to conserve the kernel of existing social relations.

What is the 'Big Society' for? Is there any evidence that it is a response to popular sentiments, that it actually resonates with any underlying political feeling, for example? The polling would suggest not. Most people have not heard of it, and most don't know what it means. There is little enthusiasm for the idea when it's explained to them. Certainly, the majority aren't anxious to volunteer for any 'Big Society' programmes - why should they perform for free what public servants can perform for a wage? I would hypothesise that the 'Big Society' idea isn't really supposed to resonate, and people aren't supposed to know what it's about. It is a deodorant, precisely intended to "decontaminate the Tory brand", surrounding it in a fragrant pot-pourri of sweet nothings. It does not explain the main policies advanced under its rubric, nor does it provide a coherent policy mix. At most it places a new inflection on old policies. We'll come back to this.

There is, of course, an intellectual penumbra surrounding the 'Big Society'. Nathan Coombs' dissection of Philip Blond [pdf] would suggest that at least one of its major advocates is an occult medievalist. As far as the Conservative Party apparatus goes, it would appear to derive from the 'compassionate conservatism' of Marvin Olasky, and its exemplars drawn from a whole range of corporate philanthropists, latterly including Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Childrens' Project, who bashed the teaching unions at Tory conference this year. More on this in a moment. But is the 'Big Society' a Thatcherite idea?

***

You may argue that in acknowledging that "there is such a thing as society" it constitutes a break with Thatcherism, but that is to buy into an Aunt Sally version of Thatcher. Her famous quote, including the phrase "there is no such thing as society", is wildly misread if it is taken to imply that there can be no mutualism, cooperation and charity, that is if it is taken to be simply a hardnosed declaration that everyone is out for themselves. In fact, Thatcher was being an orthodox Hayekian here in that, for this kind of liberal, all corporate entities beyond the individual are fictitious. In this sense, there is no 'company', 'class', 'school', etc. These are reducible to the individuals who make them up. But the context of the quote made it clear that for Thatcher, charity and mutualism were entirely appropriate forms of social solidarity, at times worthy replacements for state intervention.

But Thatcher was also a statist. She used the state not only to discipline labour, but to ringfence the national space and keep out immigrants, to wage war, to discriminate against gays and bolster patriarchy, to draw power away from local democratic institutions and centralise it (or disperse it among quangos), and so on. Is there a contradiction here? Is there something basically incompatible between a strong state and a free economy? Was Thatcher parting with her Hayekian premises here? In one sense, yes. Hayek was a liberal whose overriding concern was not with state sovereignty. Indeed, in some of his writing he confesses to hostility to the very principle of sovereignty. On the other hand, Hayek was far more profoundly influenced by Carl Schmitt than he found it convenient to acknowledge, and it was above all Schmitt's authoritarian liberalism that shaped his views on the liberal state. The role of the strong state in Schmitt's ideology is to protect the autonomy of civil society, as a zone where the rule of law alone restricts an individual's freedom - obviously, this freedom includes first and foremost the freedom of capitalist managers to operate outwith excessive regulation, and of capitalist owners to invest without excessive appropriations. So it was for Hayek, who saw a strong state as an at times essential bulwark against the encroachments of democracy. Thatcher's bolstering of the state in its disciplinary, coercive capacity is entirely consistent with her downsizing of the state in its welfare capacity.

Hayek insisted that he was not a conservative, and in a very antiquated sense this is true. He preferred to position himself in the 'old Whiggish' tradition of Edmund Burke. This would seem odd at first glance. Hayek's market-based modernism and rationalism would seem to be incompatible with Burkean empiricism and traditionalism. Hayek was a Kantian, while Burke was a Humean. Hayek was a methodological individualist, while Burke believed in an organic social totality. But their understanding of spontaneous social order was derived from the same classical political economy, and the political order that both defended was identical - 'free market' capitalism with a parliamentary system founded on some conception of natural law, and characterised by an amalgamation of political forms including monarchy, aristocracy and an elite democracy. There is thus enough shared territory for Hayek to claim some affinity with Burke, though the latter's conservatism was of a piece with his defence of the post-1688 Whig tradition - just as Schmitt's counter-revolutionary conservatism in Political Theology was continuous in fundamental ways with the authoritarian liberalism of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Today, conservatism has long since adapted to and incorporated liberal ideas, so that Hayek's insistence that he was not a conservative was anachronistic. The point I wish to underline with these observations is that a powerful sovereign state is not merely a central component of the conservative tradition, but is perfectly compatible with a certain kind of right-wing market-based liberalism. There is no reason why a 'Big Society' could not also have a strong state.

***

Back to the 'Big Society', then. Coming from a coalition government with a Liberal component and a 'freedom bill' in gestation, you might suppose that it will have a strong libertarian inflection. So let's look at the areas where the Conservatives have appeared to take a libertarian position relative to New Labour. The Tories in opposition sensibly positioned themselves against ID cards and the database state, having initially been supportive of the measures. They also took the side of publicans over the smoking ban, preferring 'voluntary' bans to be introduced by individual companies, though there's little sign that this ban will be reversed or even significantly modified.

Under David Cameron's leadership, the Tories expressed some scepticism about control orders on the grounds that they were both an affront to due process and wasteful. However, they did nevertheless vote for the renewal of the orders in 2007 (the legislation has to be renewed each year) before abstaining in 2008 and 2009. Since forming a government, the Tories have issued new control orders and have been engaged in a protracted conflict with the courts over the issue. The signs are that control orders will be retained in some form on the implausible grounds that the Tories were unaware of the security situation while in opposition. On asylum seekers, the Tories promised that they would move to end child detention, arguably a slight humanisation of a system that has resulted in systematic abuse - but since the detention system will remain in place, it will also involve breaking up more families.

The liberalisation that the Tories have reluctantly embraced has often involved endorsing New Labour reforms - on section 28 and gay adoption, for example. On the other hand, the Tories have firmly backed the government's anti-immigration legislation, just as they have backed the government on most 'anti-terror' legislation. The Tories have often wanted to go farther than the last government, demanding a tougher policy on crime (there are now noises that prisoners will have to work a 40 hour week in jail), and imposing a cap on non-EU immigration. Much of the legislation they have opposed, meanwhile, has been that which abridged sovereign power. For example, the Human Rights Act has been a Conservative bete noir since it was introduced. It has allowed the judiciary to inflict defeats on the government over issues such as immigration, deportation and rendition. Cameron argued for the repeal of this act precisely to prevent that from happening. Indeed, the Law Lords ruled last year that the use of control orders was in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights. All signals are that such libertarianism as does manifest itself with this government will be low key and relative - ie, relative to the last government, which set a high benchmark for authoritarianism. And it is not only in the area of civil liberties, crime and immigration that one expects the 'strong state' to persist.

***

The 'Big Society' has been pitched as a remedy for the 'broken society'. It involves a radical re-structuring of the welfare state and the public sector. Its intellectual basis has been in preparation since the Tories' devastating election defeat in 2001. In addition to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), which had informed Tory social thought since Keith Joseph founded it in 1974, there has been the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), set up by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith in 2004 to provide conservative answers to the problems of poverty and 'social exclusion'. Iain Duncan Smith comes from the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative Party, a 'strong state and free economy' conservative whose campaign for the leadership was briefly set back when it transpired that one of his advisers was the father of BNP leader, Nick Griffin. The base and the parliamentary party had endorsed him precisely because of this vintage. But he couldn't restore the Tories to a decent standing in the polls, and lasted less than two years as leader.

Theresa May understood the problem: "Our base is too narrow," she told the party as its chairperson in May 2002, "and so, occasionally, are our sympathies". The Tories were seen, she warned, as "the nasty party". The politics of the free market and the strong nation were not enough to win elections any more. The Tories had lost votes among the professional middle class, the lower middle class and the 'skilled working class', which could not be mobilised on such a basis. Duncan Smith had tried to take this lesson on board and implement it, and David Willetts started to try to float a distinctly Tory response to poverty and social exclusion. But it wasn't enough to detoxify the Tory brand. However, the CSJ took this strategy forward and, after another failed interregnum, David Cameron took the Tory leadership. Acknowledging the advice of Lord Ashcroft and advisor Steve Smith, Cameron "smelled the coffee", staking out an ostensibly 'moderate' policy stance in order to "decontaminate the Tory brand".

Cameron's leadership succeeded to some extent, where Duncan Smith failed. Cameron, like his predecessors, comes from the Thatcherite right-wing, but he has persuaded many commentators that he belongs to the 'One Nation' tradition of Benjamin Disraeli - though he has never been a member of the 'One Nation' parliamentary group. He speaks the language of progress and social reform, and articulates concerns about inequality and poverty. It sounds a great deal more like the 'left-wing' Toryism of Macmillan and Butler than the hard-nosed Poujadism of Thatcher and Tebbitt. Yet, specific policies on welfare and the public sector are notable for being continuous with the legacy of Thatcherism. Indeed, many of the policies associated with the 'Big Society' are recycled from past Conservative manifestos, as well as camping on territory recently staked out by New Labour. 'Free schools' and 'GP-led' trusts advance the logic of partial privatization, academies and foundation hospitals. They are profoundly anti-democratic in thrust, just as the earlier transfer of public assets to quangos was an attack on democracy. The attempts to reduce 'wasteful bureaucracy' continues previous manifesto commitments, and follows from New Labour's battles with the civil service and public sector employment. 'Freeing' public sector workers from central oversight, and 'liberating' them to focus on targets is an old Thatcherite idea that was enthusiastically taken up by New Labour.

And for all that the Tories would pose as friends of liberty, when it comes to welfare reform the moral panic of the "broken society" authorises not less but more surveillance and bullying. It has been argued that the "broken society" will reduce the statist "chivvying" that has left "shards" of "vanished civilities" littering the political terrain. This is highly unlikely. A centrepiece of Cameron's election campaign in 2010 was that the government should cut off benefits for those who refuse jobs. The Tories under Cameron continued its policy of seeking to force claimants to work for their benefits, ending the "something for nothing culture" and "helping" people back into work. The morality behind this policy, implying that unemployment is the result of an individual moral failure and that those who claim benefits are parasites, is the same as that which drove the first tentative moves toward workfare under Thatcher, finally bearing fruit with 'Project Work' in 1996 and continuing under New Labour.

Indeed, the whole thrust of Cameron and Osborne's attack on the undeserving poor - because, as Cameron and 'fairness' means giving people what they deserve - is that the state should have more of a say in the lives of those claim benefits. It reflects the dominant values of a ruling class that is, pace Digby Jones, demanding ever more disciplinarian and intrusive policies for the poor, while claiming greater liberty for itself, principally from taxation and regulation. That the recipients of benefits are citizens claiming an entitlement, and not beggars, is conveniently bypassed in a discursive regime that criminalises the unemployed and disabled, just as the Tories and New Labour have successfully criminalised asylum seekers.

***

Now, I raise this because there is a debate between Anthony Barnett and David Marquand, old colleagues in Charter 88. It is a debate whose assumptions about the nature of Thatcherism, the Cameroons and the 'Big Society' I find deeply questionable. There is an assumption that the 'Big Society', however vague and inconsistent its concrete recommendations, is a genuine attempt to move beyond New Labour authoritarianism. There is an assumption that the attempt at finding mutualist, cooperative answers to social problems is real and meaningful, despite the incoherent mishmash of medievalist distributism, philanthropy, meritocratic dogmas and 'progressive' social thought that underpins it. There is even an assumption that the 'Big Society' answers to some popular demand for freedom from overbearing statist interventionism. But the evidence behind these assumptions is scarcely to be seen. The Tory instinct will always be to strengthen the state's repressive capabilities, because it is in this capacity that the sovereign state most effectively wards off popular democracy and upholds the interests of those class fractions that are most closely integrated into the Conservative Party leadership. To imagine otherwise is to leave oneself vulnerable to a sickening let down.

When I was writing The Meaning of David Cameron, I found it very useful to mine Corey Robin's knowledge on the history and ideas of conservatism. His essay on 'Conservatism and counter-revolution' has recently been published by Raritan and can be read here. It is a more thorough demolition of the myth of conservatism-as-tradition than any so far, including Ted Honderich's philosophical debunking:

While conservatism is an ideology of reaction—originally against the French Revolution, more recently against the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies—the nature and dynamics of that reaction have not been well understood. Far from yielding a knee-jerk and unreflexive de fense of an unchanging old regime or a staid but thoughtful tradition alism, the reactionary imperative presses conservatism in two rather different directions: first, to a critique and reconfiguration of the old regime; second, to an absorption of the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it opposes...

If you want to understand the relationship between conservatism and capitalist modernity, you could do worse than consult the Canadian marxist C B Macpherson and his brief guide to Edmund Burke. The apparent paradox of Burke is that he is a defender of aristocracy, of tradition and hierarchy, a scourge of liberal revolutionaries, a natural law conservative, at the same time as being a bourgeois liberal, a pro-market Whig and a vehement opponent of British imperialism. It is true that conservatism gradually integrated aspects of liberalism throughout the 19th Century so that, in its dominant Angl0-American variant, it eventually became a more ardent defender of classical liberalism than the liberals of the 20th Century. But Burke was there at the beginning, as it were - along with Joseph de Maistre, a founder of modern conservative thought, such that his paradoxical embrace of aspects of liberalism can not be treated as merely part of that adaptive process. His liberalism, and his modernism, were always-already constitutive of his conservatism.

Macpherson intriguingly suggests in his introduction that the key to resolving this conundrum is Burke's support for capitalism:

"There is no doubt that in everything he wrote and did, he venerated the traditional order. But his traditional order was already a capitalist order. He saw that it was so, and wished it to be more freely so. He had no romantic yearning for a bygone feudal order and no respect for such remnants of it as still survived, notably in the royal household ... He lived in the present, and made it his business to study the economic consequences of actual and projected state policies. As MP for Bristol (1775-80) he could scarcely have done otherwise, for Bristol was then one of the greatest commercial ports in England. But his interest in economic affairs had, as we shall see in some detail, begun earlier and lasted longer than his connection with Bristol..." (C B Macpherson, Burke, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 5).

In chapter five, he draws this out further, but it is necessary to further elaborate on his market liberalism, as well as his hierarchical conservatism. The former manifested itself earlier in his career, the latter after the French revolution. From his earliest undergraduate polemics on political economy in Dublin, Burke's position on the rights of property was impeccably bourgeois, as befitted a member of the Ascendancy. He was no leveller, but he believed that the owners had a duty to "improve" their property, to augment their own wealth and thereby increase the wealth of all classes. For this reason, he was to find himself far more at home in England, where most landowners were commercial proprietors, than in Ireland, where absentee landlordism was still rife. He was taken up by literary London, joining the 'Club', among whose luminaries was Adam Smith, and taking up residence in Grub Street (though, in a rather more august capacity as a writer than the street is notorious for). His entry into politics was equally facilitated by a superior taking him under his wing, when William Gerald Hamilton MP asked him to be his private secretary. As a bourgeois, he owed much of his career to patronage, and later to the accomodating abundance of 'rotten boroughs' that enabled him to be 'elected' as MP for Wendover by grace of Lord Wendover.

It was Burke's career as an MP that marked him out as a moderate Whig, a reformer, and an opponent of colonial abuses. His liberalism was as opposed to a priori reasoning as was his later conservatism. Rejecting abstract accounts of liberty, as he had earlier rejected Rousseau, he denied that freedom bore "any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysicks, which admit no medium". Liberty in real social life was "variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in different degrees ... according to the temper and circumstances of every community". This anti-theoretical approach informed his response to the American revolution, in which he urged the British government not to see the abstract virtues of liberty, but the concrete virtues of a peace obtained by tolerating liberty in some degree. Consistently, against inductions from general principles, he posed complex empirical reality, the frailty and imperfection of human beings, and the hard reality of "human nature" about which he held bourgeois assumptions. His assumptions about human nature provided the foundation for his principled attack on Irish penal laws, for he maintained that the law was of necessity grounded on two aspects of the human condition: equality of original condition, and rationality. The law must therefore apply equally to everyone within a given polity, and must be of use to the whole of society.

If the law was to apply equally, and be of use to the whole of society, this had some ramifications for Burke's views on property. For the law must protect property, the better to further industry for the benefit of he commonwealth. Any law that abridged the rights of property, in just that proportion also curtailed the propensity toward industry. But if private acquisitiveness benefited society by stimulating industry, and if Burke was happy to defend the rights of property no matter how it was originally acquired, he was not content with property-holders who lacked industry. His attack on the Duke of Bedford, provoked by the latter's attempt to deprive him of a pension in his retirement, displayed bourgeois resentment of lazy aristos in gloriously contemptuous prose. His pension, he noted, was a reward for "merit", while the Duke's holdings were his despite his "few and idle years", and his inability to "know anything of public industry in its exertions".

So, from the ground of "human nature" to the lofty principles of law, economics and justice, he was a thorough bourgeois. But the bourgeois revolution in France produced, apparently, quite a different Burke, the Burke that is most familiar today from his Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. The latter part of the title is of course crucial - it was that the French revolution was being held up as a model for Britain to emulate which inspired Burke to produce his conservative manifesto. The revolution, the "plague", must be quarantined - and if this quarantine eventually called for an all out war by 1796, on an ideological level it entailed detailed elaborations on the nature of society, and government. The sacrosanct position of property, and of inheritance, was above all what he sought to conserve. He did so by citing, or rather inventing, a tradition grounded in transcendent principles. He noted that in English law, liberty was itself "an entailed inheritance, derived to us from our forefathers", in contrast to the French revolutionary assertion of liberty from natural right. Liberty, along with privilege, peerage, the crown, property, franchises, etc., were all heritable goods, and all goods worth conserving. Such principles did not exclude gradual improvement, but they did exclude radical innovation which was likely to be motivated by a selfish spirit. Institutions of longevity having demonstrated their worth, their utility for the whole of society, ought not to be overthrown in a fit of revolutionary pique, by the fiat of revolutionary pick-axes. If the sentiment is clear, Macpherson claims, the logic is not: a prolonged sequence of momentary choices is not logically superior to a single momentary choice. The distinction between small changes, of which Burke approves, and large, qualitative changes against which he sets himself is not clear. Burke's argument amounts to a case for prejudice in favour of tradition.

But that tradition is that of the Leviathan state, the subjection of all to the rule of the sovereign, the constitutional impediment to natural passions that human beings enter into by tactic acquiescence. The "real" rights of man are those which he derives from having submitted to that rule, most particularly the right to property, to the fruits of the labour mixed with his property, and to the inherited accumulations of that property. All men, he agrees, have "equal rights", but "not to equal things" - a man with five shillings on his person has as much right to that as a man with five hundred pounds. And "as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of men in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention." Convention, then, has proved the unequal rights of man to property and to say in government. It has produced a "natural aristocracy", a leisured and cultured class whose entitlement to privilege, and whose usefulness for society as a whole has been proven over generations. Moreover, it has established a set of rights, differing for each man according to his concrete specificity, which it would be irresponsible to deny to future generations through some radical overthrow of the old order.

What is continuous, then, what unites the market liberal with the hierarchical conservative, is capitalism. Burke was a bourgeois political economist about whom Adam Smith is said to have claimed that he was the one man to have thought exactly the same way as Smith himself without having conversed with him. It was as a bourgeois economists that he sought to defend his property, his estate of some six hundred acres, against the possibility of non-market-based payments to labourers. In neighbouring Berkshire, the Justice of the Peace in Speenhamland had introduced a system of supplementary payments for workers depending on the size of their families to alleviate the distress caused by the market - it was payment according to need rather than industry. Scandalised, and afraid that the government might nationalise such a policy, Burke argued that such policies by arbitrarily curtailing the rights of property would undermine enterprise, thus ultimately leaving workers worse off. It would, in a word, create a culture of dependency. By contrast, free markets were ultimately the most efficient and equitable means of distributing the social product. Burke did not defend a feudal system of small producers selling surplus product on the market, but specifically a capitalist economy with the drive for accumulation as its motor. He held that it reflected the natural propensities of humans, and that it was thus an inevitable expression of human aspiration. He was happy for capitalists to accumulate surplus since this would compel them to be interested in the welfare of their workers, and to reinvest the surplus in further production for the good of all. He was equally insistent that the able-bodied must all not merely work, but work as wage labourers, since this alone would provide the surplus that would drive on further accumulation and improvement. That labour should be a "commodity like any other" whose price fell and rose according to demand was "in the nature of things".

Burke, it should be said, was fully aware of how much bourgeois society had to answer for. He was aware of the great social misery that it produced, since he documented it in some detail. But to all this, he insisted that it would be "pernicious" to follow his own instinct to "rescue [the labouring poor] from their miserable industry", since it would disturb the "natural course of things" and inhibit "the great wheel of circulation". That wheel of circulation was divinely ordained, every bit as much as the right of monarchs to rule - in a formula mirroring Smith's "invisible hand", he insisted that: "the benign and wise Disposer of all things ... obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success". The free contract between employer and labour was also a customary status, a convention deriving from natural law, an expression of divine will, and thus of necessity providential and tending toward social harmony. For, in such a contract, he maintained, there was no possibility of conflicting interests - it was in the interest of the farmer "that his work should be done with effect and celerity", which would only be assured of his labourer was well-fed, clothed, healthy, etc. This did not merely imply, but vociferated, an attititude of subjection toward the worker. The relationship between the labourer and his employer was analogous to that between the beast and the labourer, or the tool and the labourer. In each case, the latter stands as the executive, reasoning authority, that directs his subordinate man, beast or tool to his higher ends. To "break this chain of subordination in any part" was "absurd".

Thus Burke the conservative, the propagandist of hierarchy and natural law, is nothing if not a modernist, a bourgeois, and a liberal. His 'tradition' is an invented one, I need hardly add. Capitalism was no more in the natural order of things than monarchs or pontiffs. But it was an invention convoked in his intellect by the challenge of the French revolution, and the egalitarian menace that it promised. Had he been, Macpherson suggests, a 19th Century historian with the benefit of hindsight, he might have moderated his position on the French revolution, seeing that it might expand the dominion of capital. But as it was, he saw only the immediate, urgent battle between the classes. Therefore, his foundation of modern conservatism, of reaction against liberal egalitarianism, is motivated by the desire to conserve the kernel of liberalism, capitalist social relations, against the rationalist dilations of liberty and equality that were infecting the salons of London, rousing the labouring poor, and threatening precisely the "absurd" disturbance of subordination in England, in the very countryside where he resided, that he so dreaded.