Conservative Thinkers

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) supplies conservatism with its starting assumption: that order is the condition of everything else. His argument runs through the state of nature, a hypothetical picture of life with no common power to keep people in awe.

Human nature. Hobbes described people as needy and vulnerable, driven by appetite and by the fear of violent death, and poor at understanding the world around them — so they are easily misled about what is happening and about each other's intentions. He identified three causes of conflict in that condition: competition for scarce goods, mistrust of others' intentions, and the desire for reputation. The result, in his famous phrase from Leviathan (1651), is a war of every man against every man, in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

Order. The escape is rational. Because people want self-preservation above all, they agree to surrender their natural liberty to a sovereign with undivided authority. Hobbes's key idea, in the form Edexcel assesses it, is that order and the human desire for a free life have to be held in balance: security is not the enemy of freedom but its precondition, because liberty without order is merely the liberty to be attacked.

Hobbes's step	The claim
Human nature	Needy, fearful, easily misled about the world
State of nature	Competition, mistrust and pride produce permanent insecurity
Rational escape	A contract transferring natural liberty to a sovereign
Political conclusion	Authority must be undivided; disorder is worse than harsh rule

Hobbes reaches a conservative conclusion by a route that looks liberal. He begins with separate, self-interested individuals and with consent — the classical liberal starting point — and ends with absolute authority. That tension is worth naming in an essay.

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) provides the conservative theory of change and the case for inherited practice.

Change. Burke accepted that societies must adapt; his argument was about how. Reform should be cautious, gradual and grounded in what already exists — organic, like growth, rather than mechanical, like reassembly. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) he put the point directly: a state without the means of some change lacks the means of its own conservation. Refusing all reform makes revolution more likely, which is the origin of the phrase change to conserve.

Tradition and empiricism. Burke treated long-surviving practices as carrying knowledge that no individual reasoner possesses. Institutions accumulate solutions to problems nobody wrote down, so the reformer who cannot explain what an institution does has not thereby shown that it does nothing. He set society out as a partnership between those living, those dead and those yet to be born, which makes the present generation trustees of an inheritance rather than its owners. Loyalty, he argued, is learned first in the small groups a person actually belongs to — his "little platoons" — and only then extends to the nation.

Worked example — America and France compared. Burke defended the American colonists in the 1770s and attacked the French revolutionaries in 1790, and the contrast is the clearest illustration of his method. The colonists complained of specific, concrete infringements of inherited English liberties; their case was empirical and rooted. The French revolutionaries invoked abstract rights of man and rebuilt the state from first principles. Burke judged the first as legitimate adaptation and the second as an experiment whose consequences nobody could foresee — a judgement conservatives point to when the Revolution collapsed into the Terror of 1793–94 and then into Napoleon's seizure of power in 1799.

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) restates conservatism for the twentieth century, and softens Hobbes's picture of human nature while keeping its political conclusion.

Human imperfection. For Oakeshott the problem is less that people are wicked than that they are fallible, and that society is unpredictable in a way no theory can capture. Circumstances shift, consequences escape their authors, and the information a government would need in order to plan is not available to it. Imperfection is therefore as much a limit on knowledge as a flaw in character — and on Oakeshott's account life within familiar arrangements can be perfectly enjoyable, which is why he saw no need for a project to redeem it.

Pragmatism. In Rationalism in Politics (1962) he attacked what he called rationalism: the belief that politics can be conducted from technical knowledge written down in advance. He distinguished two kinds of knowledge, and the distinction is the heart of the idea.

Kind of knowledge	Character	Political use
Technical	Can be written in rules and learned from a manual	Tempting to politicians, but incomplete
Practical	Acquired only through doing, and cannot be fully written down	The knowledge actual governing requires

The rationalist mistakes the manual for the skill. Oakeshott's alternative image of politics is navigation without a destination: a government's task is to keep the ship afloat and on an even keel, responding to conditions as they arise, rather than steering towards a promised harbour. He also gave conservatism its plainest psychological statement — the conservative disposition is a preference for the familiar over the unknown, for the tried over the untried.

Oakeshott is the theorist of pragmatism. Wherever an essay claims that conservatism is a disposition rather than a doctrine, he is the evidence.

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is on the specification because her ideas underpin the New Right's neo-liberal half, not because she resembles Burke. Her two key ideas are objectivism and freedom.

Objectivism. Rand held that reality exists independently of what anyone believes about it, that reason is the only reliable means of knowing it, and that each individual exists for their own sake rather than as a resource for others. From this she drew a moral conclusion that inverts conventional ethics: the rational pursuit of one's own interest is a virtue, and the doctrine that a person must live for others corrodes both the giver and the receiver. Her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) dramatise creators whose productive achievement is treated as a debt owed to society.

Freedom. Rand supported a pure, laissez-faire capitalist economy as the only system consistent with treating people as ends in themselves, because it is the only one in which every exchange is voluntary. The state's legitimate functions reduce to police, courts and armed forces — protecting individuals from force and fraud — with no role in welfare, redistribution or the regulation of trade.

Why she sits awkwardly in a conservative list. Rand rejected the conservative label, was an atheist, and opposed grounding public morality in religion or custom — the very things neo-conservatives defend. Her individual is atomistic, owes society nothing, and is emphatically not shaped by an organic hierarchy. Naming that tension is a fast route to AO2 credit: it shows that the New Right's two halves rest on incompatible philosophical foundations.

Robert Nozick (1938–2002) gives the New Right's economics a rights-based defence rather than an efficiency-based one, which is why he is the more powerful essay reference of the two libertarians.

Libertarianism. Nozick built on Kant's principle that a person may not be treated as an object or used against their will as a resource for someone else's purposes. Applied to politics, that rules out any arrangement in which some people's lives are treated as material for improving others' — including, on his argument, redistributive taxation.

Self-ownership. Each person owns their body, talents, skills and labour, and therefore owns what those produce. From this Nozick derived an entitlement account of justice: a distribution of holdings is just if each holding was acquired justly and transferred by free consent, with rectification where past acquisition was unjust. Justice is a matter of how a distribution came about, not of what pattern it forms.

Worked example — why Nozick rejects the difference principle. John Rawls argued that inequalities are acceptable only where they benefit the least advantaged. Nozick's reply, set out in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), is that any such patterned principle has to be maintained by continuously interfering with what people freely choose to do with what is theirs. If thousands of people each freely pay to watch one exceptional performer, the resulting inequality arose from voluntary transfers, and restoring the original pattern means overriding those choices. He pressed the point further: taxing earnings from labour to fund others' purposes is, in his phrase, on a par with forced labour, since it claims a portion of a person's working hours for ends they did not choose.

The political conclusion is the minimal state, sometimes called the night-watchman state: protection against force, theft and fraud, and the enforcement of contracts. Anything more extensive violates rights. Nozick did not oppose communal living or charity — people are free to pool what is theirs — but it must be chosen rather than compelled.

Section B focuses on content areas 1 and 2 and requires thinkers' ideas as evidence inside that discussion. This grid is the working tool: it converts five thinkers into a set of usable references.

Thinker	Key ideas (as specified)	Core ideas supported	Strand
Hobbes	Order; human nature	Human imperfection; authority; the necessity of the state	Foundational; closest to traditional
Burke	Change; tradition and empiricism	Tradition; pragmatism; organic society; change to conserve	Traditional, opening into one-nation
Oakeshott	Human imperfection; pragmatism	Pragmatism; human imperfection; scepticism of theory	Traditional and one-nation
Rand	Objectivism; freedom	Libertarianism; atomism; rejection of paternalism	New Right (neo-liberal)
Nozick	Libertarianism; self-ownership	Libertarianism; the minimal state; rejection of paternalism	New Right (neo-liberal)

Two patterns are worth memorising because they generate arguments quickly:

• On human nature, Hobbes and Oakeshott diverge in degree. Hobbes's people are dangerous; Oakeshott's are fallible and capable of contentment. Both conclude that grand political projects should be resisted, so the strands agree politically while differing philosophically.
• On the individual, Burke and Nozick are opposed. Burke's person is constituted by inherited obligations to the dead and the unborn; Nozick's owns themselves outright and owes nothing they have not agreed to. Any essay on whether the New Right is genuinely conservative turns on that contrast.

The 24-mark question is marked AO1 8 / AO2 8 / AO3 8. Thinkers earn credit across all three, but only when their ideas do argumentative work.

Compare three treatments of the same reference:

Version	Text	What it earns
Biographical	"Nozick was an American philosopher at Harvard who wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia."	Little or nothing; the specification excludes biography
Descriptive	"Nozick believed in self-ownership and a minimal state."	Some AO1; no analysis
Deployed	"The New Right's rejection of paternalism is philosophical rather than merely fiscal: Nozick's self-ownership principle makes redistributive taxation a claim on another person's labour, so one-nation provision is not simply expensive on this view but illegitimate."	AO1, AO2, and a foundation for AO3

Worked plan — To what extent do conservatives agree about human nature?

• Agreement (AO1). Every strand denies human perfectibility. Hobbes supplies the strongest version, Oakeshott the mildest, and both reject the idea that people can be improved by political design.
• Disagreement one (AO2). Traditional conservatism, following Hobbes, treats people as morally frail and needing authority. Neo-liberalism, following Rand, treats them as rational and competent in their own affairs — a far more optimistic anthropology.
• Disagreement two (AO2). Burke's individual is embedded in inherited obligation; Nozick's is a self-owner whose duties arise only from consent. The two cannot both be right about what a person is.
• Nuance (AO2). Neo-conservatism sides with Hobbes on moral frailty while its neo-liberal partner sides with Rand, so the New Right contains the disagreement internally.
• Judgement (AO3). Argue a line — for example, that the shared rejection of perfectibility is thinner than it looks, because Rand's confident individual leads to conclusions Burke would treat as reckless — and defend it.

1. Writing biography instead of ideas

The specification states that this content area focuses on the key ideas given rather than on biographical study. Dates of birth, university posts and publication histories earn nothing beyond the odd contextual mark.

2. Quarantining thinkers in one paragraph

A "thinkers paragraph" bolted onto an essay wastes them. Place each reference where it supports a claim about a core idea or a strand.

3. Giving one key idea per thinker

Edexcel names two for each. Hobbes on order and human nature; Burke on change and tradition and empiricism; Oakeshott on imperfection and pragmatism; Rand on objectivism and freedom; Nozick on libertarianism and self-ownership.

4. Treating Hobbes as a straightforward conservative

Hobbes reasons from atomised individuals and consent to absolute sovereignty. The starting point is closer to classical liberalism than to Burke, and noticing that is worth more than repeating that he was pessimistic.

5. Merging Rand and Nozick

Rand's case is moral: self-interest is a virtue and altruism is corrosive. Nozick's is a rights argument: whatever you think of selfishness, people own themselves. They arrive at similar policies from different premises.

6. Confusing organic change with no change

Burke argued that a state unable to reform cannot preserve itself. Presenting him as an opponent of all change misreads the single most quoted line in conservative thought.

7. Reaching no judgement about the thinkers' agreement

"To what extent" awards 8 marks for AO3. Decide whether the five thinkers represent one tradition or two incompatible ones, and say which reading you find stronger.