Tensions within Conservatism

Traditional conservatism is the original strand, formed in reaction to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment claim that society could be rebuilt on rational principles. Its commitment is to hierarchical and paternalistic values.

Its defining positions:

• Fixed hierarchy. Society is naturally arranged in ranks. A person's station is settled by birth and circumstance rather than earned, and attempts to level ranks damage the organic whole.
• Authoritarian paternalism. Those at the top govern in the interests of everyone, and the governed are expected to comply. This is paternalism as command, not as negotiation.
• Deference. Social stability depends on people accepting the authority of their superiors, in the family, the church, the local community and the state.
• Property as duty. Property is a source of security and continuity, and it carries obligations to those who have none.
• Suspicion of democracy. Extending power to the uneducated mass was seen as handing decisions to people the ideology regards as intellectually and morally imperfect.

Worked example — Burke on the French Revolution. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) attacked the revolutionaries for scrapping monarchy, aristocracy and church in the name of abstract rights. His objection was not that the old regime was faultless but that reformers had no way of knowing what the institutions they destroyed were quietly doing. Traditional conservatism takes that argument as its foundation.

Traditional conservatism is not simply "old" conservatism. It is a distinct position on hierarchy and obedience which the other two strands each modify.

One-nation conservatism is traditional conservatism updated in response to the emergence of capitalism. Industrialisation created concentrated urban poverty and an organised working class, and conservatives faced a choice between resisting all concession and conceding enough to keep society whole.

Benjamin Disraeli set out the diagnosis in Sybil (1845): Britain had become two nations, the rich and the poor, ignorant of one another. His prescription followed from noblesse oblige rather than from equality. The privileged must act, because a society split in two invites the upheaval that destroys the privileged first.

One-nation position	Reasoning
Accept social reform	Deprivation left untreated becomes revolutionary pressure
Preserve hierarchy	Reform binds the ranks together; it does not dissolve them
Favour the mixed economy	Markets are useful, but unchecked capitalism fractures society
Govern pragmatically	Judge each measure by whether it holds the nation together

Worked example — the post-war consensus. Conservative governments from 1951 to 1964 kept the National Health Service, the welfare state, nationalised industries and Keynesian demand management inherited from Labour. The similarity between Conservative and Labour economic policy in that period was mocked as "Butskellism", after Chancellor R. A. Butler and Labour's Hugh Gaitskell. Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, had argued for exactly this middle course between free markets and planning in The Middle Way (1938).

The one-nation defence is pragmatic, not moral: welfare is bought as insurance against social breakdown. That distinction separates one-nation conservatism from socialism, which pursues greater equality as a goal in itself.

The New Right emerged in the 1970s, when the post-war settlement appeared to be failing. Britain faced high inflation alongside rising unemployment, an oil shock in 1973, a loan from the International Monetary Fund in 1976 and the strike wave of the 1978–79 "Winter of Discontent". One-nation pragmatism looked to its critics like managed decline.

The New Right's answer combined two distinct bodies of thought that had developed separately.

	Neo-liberalism	Neo-conservatism
Principal concern	Free-market economics and atomistic individualism	Fear of social fragmentation
Diagnosis	The state has grown too large and crowds out enterprise	Permissiveness has eroded authority, family and shared morality
Prescription	Privatise, deregulate, cut taxes, control inflation	Tough policing and sentencing, firm public morality, strong national identity
View of the state	Roll it back	Strengthen it
View of the individual	Self-reliant chooser	Member of a moral community who needs guidance

The coalition was held together by a shared enemy — the expansive post-war state and the culture that grew with it — and by a shared willingness to be radical, which is unusual in an ideology built on caution. Because the New Right seeks to overturn a settled order rather than conserve it, some commentators question whether it belongs inside conservatism at all. That question is the standard 24-mark essay on this content area.

Neo-liberalism is the economic half of the New Right, and its content is closer to classical liberalism than to Burke. It borrows the classical liberal case for negative freedom, the minimal state and laissez-faire capitalism, and imports it into a conservative party.

Its central arguments:

• Markets outperform planners. Knowledge of what people want is scattered across millions of transactions and cannot be assembled by an official, so market prices coordinate better than any ministry.
• The state crowds out enterprise. High taxation and public borrowing absorb resources that would otherwise be invested, and regulation deters risk-taking.
• Welfare creates dependency. Provision from above weakens self-reliance and removes the incentive to work, which is why neo-liberals reject paternalism outright.
• Atomistic individualism. Society is a collection of individuals and families pursuing their own purposes. Margaret Thatcher's remark in a 1987 magazine interview that there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women and families, is the sharpest statement of that view by a serving Prime Minister.

Worked example — privatisation. British Telecom was sold in 1984 and British Gas in 1986; the Housing Act 1980 let council tenants buy their homes at a discount. Each was justified twice over: markets would run the assets more efficiently, and ownership would turn dependants into independent citizens. The second justification is moral, not economic, and it is the one traditional conservatives find hardest to accept, because it treats inherited social position as something to be escaped.

Neo-conservatism is the social half of the New Right, and it is far closer to traditional conservatism. Its animating fear is social fragmentation: the belief that permissiveness, family breakdown and the loss of shared values are dissolving the bonds that hold a society together.

Its programme follows directly:

• Law and order. Crime is treated as a product of human moral imperfection rather than of social conditions, so the response is deterrence and punishment rather than rehabilitation alone.
• Anti-permissiveness. The 1960s claim that moral choices are private is rejected. Society is held to need shared standards, publicly upheld. Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which restricted the "promotion" of homosexuality by local authorities and was repealed in 2003 in England and Wales, is the standard legislative example.
• National identity. Patriotism and a common culture are treated as social glue, which produces scepticism about multiculturalism and support for firm immigration controls.
• A strong state abroad. Robust defence and a willingness to assert national interest, particularly in the American neo-conservative tradition.

Neo-conservatism is conservative in a way neo-liberalism is not: it accepts human imperfection, organic society and the need for authority. What makes it neo is the perception of crisis and the readiness to legislate on morality rather than trust custom to do the work.

The academic phrase for the New Right combination — a free economy alongside a strong state, as Andrew Gamble put it in 1988 — captures the arrangement precisely. Economic life is deregulated while social life is disciplined.

The specification frames every idea against human nature, the state, society and the economy. Building the comparison on those four themes gives AO2 marks for genuine connections instead of a list of separate descriptions.

	Traditional	One-nation	New Right
Human nature	Imperfect; needs authority and guidance	Imperfect; the strong owe duties to the weak	Neo-liberal: self-reliant and rational in markets. Neo-conservative: morally frail
The state	Authoritative, paternalistic, above consent	Interventionist where social cohesion requires it	Economically minimal, socially strong
Society	Organic and hierarchical, held by deference	Organic; one nation, not two	Neo-liberal: atomistic. Neo-conservative: fragile and in need of moral repair
The economy	Property carries duty; stability before growth	Mixed economy with state management	Free market, privatisation, low taxation
Paternalism	Accepted, in authoritarian form	Accepted, as noblesse oblige	Rejected as a cause of dependency
Approach to change	Resist unless pressure demands concession	Change to conserve	Radical: reverse the post-war settlement

Points of agreement matter as much as points of difference. Every strand accepts human imperfection, rejects utopian schemes for remaking humanity, defends private property, and treats order as a precondition of liberty. The gap between them concerns how far the state should reach, not whether authority is needed.

Section B asks a single "To what extent" question worth 24 marks, split AO1 8 / AO2 8 / AO3 8, and requires the key ideas of named thinkers as evidence. Take the question: To what extent do conservatives disagree about the role of the state?

A structure that earns all three objectives:

Stage	What to write
Shared ground (AO1)	Every strand accepts that imperfect humans need an authoritative state; Hobbes supplies the foundation, since order has to precede liberty
First disagreement (AO2)	Traditional and one-nation conservatives accept paternalism, in authoritarian and obligation-based forms; neo-liberals reject it, with Nozick arguing that redistributive taxation violates self-ownership
Second disagreement (AO2)	The New Right splits internally: the state should shrink economically yet grow in policing and public morality
Counterweight (AO2)	Burke's readiness to concede reform and Oakeshott's pragmatism suggest the differences are situational responses rather than fixed doctrines
Judgement (AO3)	State a verdict — for example, that disagreement over the state's economic scope is genuine and deep, while agreement on its authority over crime and order is deeper still — and justify it

How a thinker is used as evidence. Weak: "Nozick was a libertarian." Strong: "Neo-liberal hostility to paternalism has a philosophical basis rather than a merely economic one: Nozick's principle of self-ownership treats taxation for redistribution as a claim on another person's labour, which is why the New Right rejects the one-nation duty to provide rather than simply arguing that provision is unaffordable."

That second version carries AO1 (the idea), AO2 (the connection between thinker and strand) and sets up AO3 (a judgement about how deep the split runs).

1. Treating the New Right as one position

Neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism are separately named in the specification and pull in opposite directions on the size of the state. An answer that merges them cannot explain the tension examiners are asking about.

2. Confusing one-nation conservatism with socialism

Both support welfare provision, but for opposite reasons. One-nation conservatives buy social stability and preserve hierarchy; socialists pursue equality as a value in its own right.

3. Presenting the strands as three separate essays

AO2 rewards connections. Compare the strands theme by theme — human nature, the state, society, the economy — rather than describing each in turn and hoping the comparison is implied.

4. Forgetting what the strands share

Human imperfection, private property, order before liberty and hostility to utopian schemes run through all three. A "to what extent do they disagree" question is unanswerable without the common ground.

5. Attributing every New Right policy to neo-liberalism

Privatisation and tax cuts are neo-liberal; sentencing policy, public morality legislation and national identity are neo-conservative. Sorting them correctly is a quick source of AO1 precision.

6. Using undated or vague contemporary evidence

Politics rewards current, attributed examples. As of September 2026 the Conservative Party is led by Kemi Badenoch, leader since 2 November 2024, and a YouGov poll of 6–7 September 2026 put the party on 20%, behind both Labour and Reform UK on 23%. Attach the date and the pollster whenever you use figures like these.

7. Describing the tensions without resolving them

The command word is "To what extent", carrying 8 AO3 marks. Decide whether the conservative tradition is fundamentally united or fundamentally divided, and defend the verdict in the conclusion.