Progressive Conservatism

Progressive conservatism is the position that a party of order should accept the responsibility for reform, using the authority of the state to relieve hardship so that the inherited social settlement survives. Its practitioners argue that the throne, the church, the constitution and the property system endure only when the people who live under them have a stake worth defending.

The tradition runs from Benjamin Disraeli’s One Nation Toryism through Otto von Bismarck’s social insurance, Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, and the Canadian party that carried the name Progressive Conservative from 1942 to 2003. Its critics on the right hold that it concedes the argument to its opponents and ratchets the state upward.

Key Takeaways

• Disraeli’s ministry passed the Public Health Act and the Artisans’ Dwellings Act in 1875, treating housing and sanitation as Tory concerns.
• Bismarck introduced health insurance in 1883 and old-age pensions in 1889, explicitly to draw workers away from the Social Democrats.
• Canada’s Conservative Party took the Progressive Conservative name in December 1942 under John Bracken and kept it until the 2003 merger.
• The governing idea is prescription: reform is justified when it repairs an existing settlement rather than replacing it.
• Fiscal conservatives argue the approach has no stopping point, since every concession establishes a new baseline.

History And Context

Benjamin Disraeli set out the analysis in his novel Sybil, or The Two Nations in 1845, describing rich and poor as two nations between whom there was no intercourse and no sympathy. He was writing after the Reform Act of 1832 and during the Chartist agitation, and his conclusion was that a governing class which ignored the industrial poor would not remain a governing class.¹

In office from 1874 to 1880 he acted on it. Richard Cross, his Home Secretary, carried the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act and the Public Health Act, both in 1875, along with the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act legalising peaceful picketing. None of this was socialism. It was a Tory ministry using state power to remove the material grievances that made radical politics attractive.

Bismarck reached the same conclusion from a different starting point. Having outlawed the Social Democrats under the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, he built the world’s first national social insurance system: sickness insurance in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, and old-age and invalidity pensions in 1889. The purpose was to attach the German worker to the imperial state.

The Canadian and British twentieth-century versions followed. Harold Macmillan, who had watched unemployment in Stockton-on-Tees during the 1930s, argued in The Middle Way (1938) for a managed economy under conservative direction.² Canada’s party adopted the Progressive Conservative label in 1942 as a condition of Manitoba Premier John Bracken accepting the leadership.

The Conservative Position

The defence rests on prescription rather than principle. Edmund Burke’s account of the constitution treats it as an inheritance to be repaired, and he wrote that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.³ Progressive conservatives take this as a licence for timely reform: the Reform Act of 1867, carried by Disraeli, extended the franchise to urban householders and secured the constitution by widening its base rather than by resisting until it broke.

The second argument is about the alternative. A conservatism that offers the poor nothing but the discipline of the market cedes the field to those who offer more. Disraeli’s judgment was that the Conservative Party had to become a national party or cease to be a party of government, and the electoral record from 1874 onward supported him.

Third, progressive conservatives distinguish the object of provision from its form. They favour contributory insurance over means-tested relief, local administration over central, and support for families and voluntary bodies over direct state delivery. Bismarck’s schemes were funded by employer and worker contributions and administered through existing sickness funds, not by a ministry. The aim is to strengthen the institutions that already carry the burden.

Differing Positions

Fiscal and libertarian conservatives make the ratchet objection. Each intervention establishes a new floor from which the next demand starts, and no progressive conservative has produced a principle that stops the sequence. Hayek argued that piecemeal collectivism accumulates into a directed economy whether or not anyone intends it.⁴ The record of British public spending as a share of national income from 1900 onward is offered as evidence.

Traditionalists object that the approach mistakes the disease. If the problem is the dissolution of family, church and locality, then transferring their functions to a public agency completes the dissolution rather than curing it. Nisbet’s argument is that state provision does not fill the void left by lost community; it deepens it by removing the reason for people to depend on one another.⁵

A third criticism is electoral. Critics on the populist right hold that decades of accommodation left conservative parties administering their opponents’ programme with slightly better book-keeping, and that voters who wanted a genuine alternative went elsewhere. Defenders answer that the parties which refused accommodation lost office and changed nothing at all.

References

1. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations (Henry Colburn, 1845).
2. Harold Macmillan, The Middle Way (Macmillan, 1938).
3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (J. Dodsley, 1790).
4. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge, 1944).
5. Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press, 1953).