Patriotism

Patriotism is love of and loyalty to one’s own country and its particular way of life. Conservatives treat it as a settled disposition of gratitude and stewardship: gratitude for an inheritance one did not create, and responsibility for handing it on intact. It is the ordinary affection a citizen feels for the home that formed him, expressed through service, civic duty, and a willingness to sacrifice for the common good.

Conservatives insist on separating patriotism from aggressive nationalism. The patriot loves his country because it is his and because it is worth loving, not because he believes it superior to all others. This distinction, between devotion to a home and the pursuit of national power, runs through the entire tradition.

Key Takeaways

• Patriotism is loyalty to a particular country and its institutions, grounded in gratitude rather than supremacy.
• Conservatives distinguish it sharply from nationalism, which seeks prestige and power without restraint.
• Edmund Burke argued that a country must be made lovely in order to be loved.
• George Orwell defined patriotism as defensive devotion, in contrast to nationalism’s hunger for dominance.
• Critics charge that patriotism breeds exclusion and “my country, right or wrong”; conservatives reply that loyalty and reform are compatible.

History And Context

The idea is older than the modern nation. Roman writers praised love of the patria, the fatherland, and treated devotion to it as a duty bound up with piety toward gods and family. Cicero held that the bonds of country embrace all other loyalties and command the citizen’s highest service short of the divine.

The modern conservative account begins with Edmund Burke. Writing in 1790, he held that affection for one’s country cannot be produced by force or theory. “To make us love our country,” he argued, “our country ought to be lovely”: loyalty is earned by institutions that protect, dignify, and include their members.¹ Patriotism, for Burke, is reciprocal, the citizen’s answer to a country that has done its part.

The sharpest modern distinction came from George Orwell. In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” he separated patriotism, which he called devotion to a particular place and way of life that one has no wish to force on others, from nationalism, the appetite for power and prestige pursued on behalf of a group.² Orwell, a man of the left, gave conservatives one of their most useful tools: a way to claim love of country while disowning chauvinism. Throughout the period, patriots from Abraham Lincoln to wartime Britain framed national loyalty as fidelity to founding principles rather than ethnic pride.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives argue that patriotism is the affection that makes self-government workable. A republic asks its citizens to obey laws they dislike, fund services they will never use, and defend a territory at cost to themselves. None of this holds without a prior loyalty to the whole. Roger Scruton argued that the nation is the largest unit within which strangers will accept such obligations toward one another, and that patriotism is the sentiment binding them.³

The tradition treats patriotism as fully compatible with criticism. To love a country is to want it to be better, and the reformer who works within its institutions shows more loyalty than the cynic who abandons them. Burke’s principle cuts both ways: a country earns love by being lovely, so the patriot has reason to demand that it live up to its own standards.

Conservatives also distinguish patriotism from idolatry. Loyalty to country sits beneath loyalty to God and conscience, not above them. The patriot who claims his nation can do no wrong has, on this account, abandoned patriotism for the nationalism Orwell warned against.

Differing Positions

The universalist tradition rejects the premise that a country deserves special love. Leo Tolstoy, in “Christianity and Patriotism” (1894), condemned patriotism outright as a relic that trains men to kill for the ambitions of their rulers. Martha Nussbaum has argued more moderately that moral allegiance belongs first to humanity, and that elevating the nation teaches an arbitrary preference for those inside one’s borders over those outside.⁴

A further criticism holds that patriotism in practice cannot be kept clean. Appeals to love of country, critics argue, have justified conquest, exclusion of minorities, and the suppression of dissent under the slogan “my country, right or wrong.” On this view the line conservatives draw between patriotism and nationalism is too fine to survive contact with politics.

Conservatives concede the historical abuses but deny that they discredit the thing itself. Every strong loyalty can be corrupted; the response is to cultivate its disciplined form, not to abolish attachment. They observe that the movements for abolition, suffrage, and civil rights were typically argued in patriotic terms, as demands that a country honour its own founding promises rather than as rejections of country as such.

References

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790).
2. George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic (1945).
3. Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
4. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Boston Review 19, no. 5 (1994).