Nisbet, Robert A. "MODERN AGE A QUARTERLY REVIEW: Conservatives and Libertarians: Uneasy Cousins." Isistatic. 1980.

Abstract:

BY COMMON ASSENT modern conservatism, as political philosophy, springs from Edmund Burke: chiefly from his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790. That book is of course more than a brilliantly prescient analysis of the Revolution and its new and fateful modes of power over individual lives; the Rejections is also, through its running asides and obiter dicta, one of the profoundest treatments of the nature of political legitimacy ever written. Modern political conservatism, as we find it in a European philosophical tradition from about 1800 on, takes its origin in Burke’s insistence upon the rights of society and its historically formed groups such as family, neighbourhood, guild and church against the “arbitrary power” of a political government. Individual liberty, Burke argued-and it remains the conservative thesis to this day-is only possible within the context of a plurality of social authorities, of moral codes, and of historical traditions, all of which, in organic articulation, serve at one and the same time as “the inns and resting places” of the human spirit and intermediary barriers to the power of the state over the individual. The influence of Burke’s Reflections was immediate, and all the major works of European philosophical conservatism-those of Bonald, de Maistre…

Read online on Isistatic: MODERN AGE A QUARTERLY REVIEW: Conservatives and Libertarians: Uneasy Cousins.