Encyclopedia
Popular by Category
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke is often considered to be the father of modern conservatism. Burke was a major statesman in 18th century...
China
China, officially the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is a large Asian nation ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)...
Natural Law
Natural law is a philosophical concept for there being an objective moral order that all rational persons can perceive. Natural...
Prudence
Prudence is the intellectual virtue by which moral principles are translated into right action in particular circumstances. To be prudent...
Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (1867-1947), was three-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the period between...
Brave New World
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley. Set 500 years in the future, it warns against a...
Tradition
Tradition, for the conservative, is the inheritance through which a community has its bearings. It includes language, law, religion, custom,...
Conservatism in Wales
Inset left: Andrew RT Davies, Leader of the Welsh Conservatives – Inset right: Gwern Gwynfi, CEO YesCymru. The Conservative party is often the...
Mission
The mission of The Encyclopedia of Conservatism is to be a trustworthy, educational, and authoritative source for understanding conservatism.
Purpose
Conservatism has a bad reputation in the minds of many. Our aim is to change this reputation via education about why conservatives think the way they do. It is our hope to increase the popularity of conservatism by creating a comprehensive knowledge source that is widely read and well regarded. Too many right-wing sources are hyper-partisan in nature and often fail to present conservatism in the positive, intellectual, and virtue-based fashion that it is. Our 100+ volunteer authors are professors, lawyers, journalists, and students who have come together to see this mission through.
Latest articles
WW2
The Second World War ran from Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 to Japan's surrender aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, killed between 70 and 85 million people, and settled the political shape of the following half-century. For conservatives the war is the decisive case against two propositions they reject: that aggression can be managed by negotiation with regimes that reject the premises of negotiation, and that military strength is a provocation rather than a deterrent. Churchill's argument in the 1930s was not that war was desirable but that the choice had already been narrowed by inaction....
Woman’s Rights
Woman's rights denotes the body of legal and political claims asserting equal standing for women in property, contract, suffrage, education, employment, and family law. In the Anglo-American world the sequence ran from married women's property acts in the 1830s through the suffrage victories of 1918 to 1928 in Britain and 1920 in the United States, to equal-pay and anti-discrimination statutes in the 1960s and 1970s. Conservatives supported and in several cases led these reforms, on the ground that the common-law doctrine of coverture — which merged a wife's legal personality into her husband's — was an inherited defect rather than...
White Privilege
White privilege is the claim that people classified as white receive unearned advantages in societies with a history of racial hierarchy, and that these advantages persist after formal legal discrimination has ended. The term entered wide academic use through Peggy McIntosh's 1988 working paper at Wellesley College, which listed everyday conveniences she attributed to her race, and moved into corporate and government training programmes across North America and Britain during the 2010s.1 Conservatives dispute the concept on three grounds: that it assigns moral debts by ancestry rather than conduct, that it collapses the distinction between statistical disparity and personal culpability,...
Westernization
Westernization is the adoption by non-Western societies of institutions, technologies, laws, manners and habits of mind that originated in Western Europe and its colonial offshoots. It has taken the form of deliberate state policy — Peter the Great's reordering of Russia, the Ottoman Tanzimat, Japan's Meiji reforms, Atatürk's republic — and of unplanned diffusion through trade, missionary work, schooling and mass entertainment. Conservative thought approaches the subject from two directions that pull against each other. Conservatives hold that the Western political inheritance is a real achievement rather than an arbitrary local custom: the rule of law, secure property, representative institutions...