THE ESSENCE OF CONSERVATISM 13

the Soviets, however, and our national abhorence of col-

lectivism in all its varieties, a good many Americans now

doubt very much whether they care to be called liberals

or radicals. The liberals, for a good while, have been

drifting leftward toward their radical cousins; and lib-

eralism, in recent years, has come to imply an attachment

to the centralized state and the dreary impersonality of

Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's 1984. Men and

women who sense that they are not liberals or radicals

are beginning to ask themselves just what they believe,

and what they ought to call themselves.\The system of

ideas opposed to liberalism and radicalism is the con-

servative political philosophyA^Already "conservative"

and "conservatism" are being employed as terms of praise

in the popular press and by a good many serious thinkers,

and books by conservative writers are receiving an at-

tention denied to such works for decades. Before long,

party leaders probably will be describing their own pro-

grams as conservative. In politics, as in physics or in law,

it is scarcely possible to make any true progress until you

have defined your terms. What is conservatism?

Modern conservatism took form about the beginning

of the French Revolution, when far-seeing men in Eng-

land and America perceived that if humanity is to con-

serve the elements in civilization that make life worth

living, some coherent body of ideas must resist the level-

ing and destructive impulse of fanatic revolutionaries. In

England, the founder of true conservatism was Edmund

Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France

turned the tide of British opinion and influenced in-

calculably the leaders of society in the Continent and in

America. In the newly established United States, the

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