The term ‘conservative’ stands, by any measure, as one of the most successful political labels ever coined. It has endured for nearly two centuries, weathering intellectual revolutions, constitutional upheavals, economic tumult and global conflict to become the primary identifying descriptor used by a large swathe of society. This has been particularly true in the Anglo-American world: in 2025, according to a Gallup poll, over a third of the US population identified as ‘conservative’, while in Britain the Conservative party has formed a strong and abiding pillar of the nation’s political temple. In the marketplace of political labels, the word has attracted millions of investors.

It is easy to overlook this most basic of observations largely because we do not often think of the word as a word. In our imaginations, ‘conservatism’ – the philosophy that confessed conservatives claim adherence to – has ascended to the status of a cosmic force, one half of the political order trapped in a Manichaean struggle with its natural foe, Liberalism (or Socialism), for dominance over man’s political destiny. We take it for granted that our politics ought to be divided between conservatives and their opponents, and we assume that conservatism has, in some sense, always existed and will always exist, whether we give it a name or not. Most scholarly approaches to the history of conservatism try to understand it in this spirit as a tradition – a reverse-engineerable genealogy of thinkers and writers who have bequeathed over the centuries an ideology comprised of load-bearing doctrines that conservatives, by definition, adhere to.

Another way of telling the story of conservatism, however, is to tell it first and foremost as the story of a word. How have ‘conservatives’ in the Anglo-American political universe practically deployed the term to describe and justify their views? How have their understandings of the word shaped the political choices they have made? More importantly, how have they debated what properly defines a ‘conservative’?

Conservative, in the sense of a thing that retains or preserves, is an old word, but it was first used in a political context during the French Revolutionary era. In 1799, following the Coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon established the sénat conservateur, an institution charged with upholding the new national constitution and determining whether laws conformed to it. Outside of France, the term appeared mostly in commentaries on French politics referencing the sénat, but by the 1820s it was increasingly deployed as an adjective to debate domestic issues across the Atlantic world, retaining its association with constitutional preservation and institutional stability.

In Britain, the word became a common label amid the national crisis over Catholic Emancipation and the Great Reform Act, a drama set within a rapidly developing industrial economy and widespread social discontent following Napoleon’s defeat. Tories in Westminster, including traditionalists like the Duke of Wellington, were forced to acknowledge the need for certain constitutional reforms in order to avoid a bloody revolution. Scholars have suggested that its first clear use in this context was in an article in the Quarterly Review of 1830 penned anonymously by the Scottish lawyer John Miller, which proposed that the Tory party ‘might with more propriety be called the Conservative party; a party which we believe to compose by far the largest, wealthiest, and most intelligent and respectable portion of the population of this country, and without whose support any administration that can be formed will be found deficient both in character and stability’. After that, the word spread like wildfire; by the end of the 1830s people across the country – and, by the 1840s, in the United States and Mexico – were talking and writing not only about conservatives, but also about a thing called conservatism.

That is, very briefly, how the label came to be. But what did it mean? More specifically, what did the people who first used it think it meant? Miller had suggested that describing the Tory party as ‘conservative’ indicated its openness to constructive constitutional reform. ‘Some of this party, we know, object to all change whatever,’ he wrote. ‘But these are neither considerable in numbers in rank, or in influence. We have no hesitation in stating it to be our conviction, that an immense majority of the tories [sic] are as anxious to promote any prudent and practicable amelioration of the state, as any of their fellow-subjects.’ To characterise the Tory party as conservative endowed it with an additional trait: a willingness to accept ‘prudent and practicable’ constitutional changes, in opposition to those who spurned all tinkering, and to those radical Whigs who tinkered too much.

Perhaps no one did more to flesh out the word’s definition in these formative years than Sir Robert Peel, widely considered the first leader of the ‘Conservative Party’. The Tamworth Manifesto, issued by Peel in 1834 upon becoming prime minister for the first time, built upon Miller’s understanding. In it Peel outlined the general principles that would guide him as premier; he would reject any measures that would abandon ‘law or reason… the respect for ancient rights, and the deference to prescriptive authority’, but he would embrace ‘a careful review of institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, undertaken in a friendly temper combining, with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances’. In this spirit, he considered the Great Reform Act ‘a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question – a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb’. Peel never mentioned the word conservative in his manifesto, but several years later – speaking once more to the electors of Tamworth on the eve of his second premiership – he recalled with pride the establishment of a ‘great Conservative party’ amid the constitutional crisis of the early 1830s, a party that was ‘attached to the fundamental institutions of the country’ though ‘not opposed to any rational change in it which the lapse of years or the altered circumstances of society might require’.

Naturally, the existence of a named Conservative party in Britain yoked the word to a specific organisation; to call oneself a ‘conservative’ ipso facto implied membership of a parliamentary faction rather than mere subscription to a philosophy. In the United States, however, where no big-C Conservative party has ever successfully contested elections at the federal level (though several iterations have emerged within states), the language of conservatism long enjoyed a relatively broad appeal across the republic’s party politics. While initially associated with the Whig party and its characteristic scepticism of ‘mob rule’, Democrats also eventually claimed the word as it came to signify a more inoffensive devotion to the Federal Constitution and the Union during debates over slavery. Once again, conservatism – ‘properly’ understood – did not eschew all change; as one Presbyterian divine in Philadelphia put it in 1852, ‘Conservatism is not a mere negation but a positive force; it not only proposes to guard what is valuable, but to reform what is mischievous.’

‘Conservatives’, then, anticipated the need for changes in response to the ‘altered circumstances of society’, but any reforms were to be undertaken in a way that preserved and strengthened existing institutions; to resist progress wholesale would only bring about their destruction, either by dissatisfied radical reformers or by a revolutionary uprising.

As sceptics on both sides of the Atlantic routinely observed at the time, however, this was an absurdly elastic definition. Conservatives might well have agreed on the principle that it was important to preserve traditions and institutions in the face of progress, but there was no stated agreement on what traditions and institutions were worth preserving, which they were to prioritise if the conservation of one threatened the survival of another, or what means conservatives were willing to use to conserve those things. ‘Conservatism exhibits no definite rule of selection, or deliberate choice, either in the things it proposes to preserve or in the ways by which it goes about its work,’ the British Critic, edited by John Henry Newman, pointed out in April 1839. ‘Thus, what does it wish to preserve?’ British conservatives at the time might have answered with a flurry of key examples: the church, the crown, the gentry, the ancient universities, the empire; Americans would have, in turn, offered the 1787 Constitution and the Union in response. But the unlimited political choices that could be made to determine how to preserve those institutions all but guaranteed that ‘conservatives’ would never stop debating each other over the word’s precise meaning, even if they all generally agreed on the political virtue of conserving.

In the absence of a ‘definite rule of selection’, then, conservatives have always had to make two value judgements: what traditions or institutions do I prioritise for conservation? What am I willing to do (and, if necessary, change) to conserve them?

Historically, the main way in which these value judgements have been deliberated has been by distinguishing true from false conservatism – a rhetorical motif that ‘conservatives’ have indulged endlessly. Whether debated within political parties or between them, this distinction has allowed conservatives to make those value judgements and portray them as the correct way of preserving certain institutions. Peel might well have been emphatic in his desire to hold fast that which was good and reform only those abuses that might threaten peace and stability, but when it came to the practicalities of governance his own value judgements determining what and how to conserve were not always shared by his fellow Conservatives.

Most spectacularly, Peel had to confront this first ‘crisis of conservatism’ when he supported the repeal of the Corn Laws, at least in part to alleviate the suffering wrought by the potato famine in Ireland. In so doing, Peel made his own value judgements: he would pivot the nation’s economic policy towards Free Trade, but thereby preserve the Union and mollify any social agitation bred by the economic distress. Protectionist conservatives, however, made a fundamentally different political calculation; to them the truly conservative position was to keep the Corn Laws intact. In 1845, the Morning Post fumed that, besides ‘the upholding of the Constitution in Church and State’ they had ‘understood Conservative principles also to include a fixed determination to support the laws for the protection of British industry against foreign competitors, and to maintain generally with unflinching vigour those national institutions and regulations which were threatened by the violence of democratic agitators’. Peel’s actions, not merely in supporting repeal but also in granting tax funds to a Catholic seminary at Maynooth in Ireland, had exposed the prime minister as an advocate not of Conservatism but of ‘Peelism’. Whereas both Conservatism and Peelism were once ‘thought convertible terms’, it had become readily apparent that Peelism was simply ‘an organised “hypocrisy” – a systematised fraud – an embodiment of treachery and untruth’. As the Post concluded disappointedly, ‘so long as Conservatism exists, it is no weapon to be placed in Sir Robert Peel’s hand’.

Peel, however, insisted that his reforms had never betrayed the spirit of conservatism. ‘[I]f I look to the prerogative of the Crown – if I look to the position of the Church – if I look to the influence of the aristocracy – I cannot charge myself with having taken any course inconsistent with Conservative principles, calculated to endanger the privileges of any branch of the Legislature, or of any institutions of the country,’ he argued defiantly before the Commons in May 1846. In other words, what some conservatives believed were disruptive changes that would damage the constitutional order, Peel saw them as transformations that ultimately preserved its critical institutions by reducing popular hostility towards them. For Peel, the ‘present peace of this country… the absence of all disturbance… the calm that prevails in the public mind’, all served as visible proofs that the calculations he had made were authentically conservative.

Peel’s value judgements, however much he sincerely believed them to be true conservatism, were neatly packaged, anathemised and ejected by his conservative opponents as a heresy. In so doing the word ‘conservative’ outlasted the political downfall of the man who had played such an enormous role in defining it; now it was borne by others who still saw value in identifying with the label, but whose own calculations as to what and how to conserve were different.

For so long as conservatism demanded that its adherents make these contestable value judgements, new crises were inevitable. One of Peel’s fiercest critics, Benjamin Disraeli – now Chancellor of the Exchequer – would have to make his own controversial calculations in 1866-67 when defending a Conservative-supported extension of the franchise that many members of his party charged with being even more radical than the Great Reform Act. The government’s front bench duly made the conservative case for this constitutional transformation; Spencer Walpole, Home Secretary, contended in the Commons in February 1867 that these changes were ‘rooted in well-known principles, principles which are a part of the Constitution, and are therefore likely to last. It embodies in its provisions the free extension of the franchise; but while it does that, it embraces those Conservative elements that will ensure permanence and prosperity to the Constitution and the country’.

Ambitiously, it was argued that the extension of British democracy would aid the Conservative Party because the ‘people’ were an inherently conservative constituency. A broader franchise, then, would actually protect institutions like the church, crown, and empire by empowering loyal, Conservative-voting subjects devoted to them. In his Crystal Palace speech a few years later, Disraeli argued that the Second Reform Act had been ‘founded on a confidence that the great body of the people of this country were “Conservative.” When I say “Conservative,” I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense’, he clarified. ‘I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness… that they believe, on the whole, that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of the land.’

This time, Disraeli’s calculations were opposed by Viscount Cranborne, later Marquess of Salisbury, who bemoaned what he saw as the triumph of Conservative party considerations over conservative principles. ‘The very conditions under which our institutions exist have been changed,’ he argued. ‘[T]he equilibrium of forces by which they have been sustained is shaken.’ What Cranborne really bristled at was the sheer uncertainty that Disraeli’s value judgements introduced to the constitutional order. ‘[I]t is a poor prospect for the Conservative classes, the classes whose interests and whose affections are bound up with our existing institutions, if their future course is to depend upon the estimate which an electioneering expert may make of the prospects of the political share-market of the day.’ If there were votes to be won in it, what would these counterfeit conservatives do next: geld the House of Peers? Redistribute land? Disestablish the Church?

On the other side of the Atlantic, Americans also debated the proper meaning of conservatism, most notably in relation to the issue of slavery. Before the Civil War, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates wielded the language of true conservatism against each other, having made irreconcilable value judgements as to the best way of preserving the Union. When in 1854 a congressional bill organising western territory for settlement left open the possibility of slavery being transplanted there – in contravention of a compromise that had banned its extension into these lands – anti-slavery Northerners raged at the profoundly unconservative betrayal of a gentleman’s agreement that had kept the peace. ‘Now, who is the true conservative?’ one Boston paper exclaimed. ‘He who seeks to rebuild the shattered barrier against the black and bloody sea of slavery, or he who hangs his head, and folds his hands, and waits with oriental submission for his own destruction!’ Alternatively, pro-slavery interests portrayed the existence of slavery as the Union’s key preservative. Slavery ‘exercises a conservative influence over the action of the Federal Government, and thus will preserve the Union, and benefit equally North and South’, the Richmond Enquirer in Virginia contended. ‘The capitalists of the North see in this institution the best preventive of that growing spirit of agrarianism, socialism, and communism, which threatens their property.’ Both ‘conservatives’ may have wanted to conserve the Union, but they had fundamentally incompatible understandings of slavery’s role in doing so.

When war came at last, Lincoln was forced to make that calculation himself. Responding in 1862 to criticism that he was insufficiently anti-slavery, Lincoln laid out the set of value judgements he had to make. ‘My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,’ he explained. ‘If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.’ At this stage, Lincoln had already drafted the preliminary version of his Emancipation Proclamation, but his point encapsulates the choice that Civil War ‘conservatives’, North and South, eventually had to make, and the essential dilemma all conservatives, in their own time and place, must confront.

Even after the Civil War, while British Conservatives argued over the conservatism of the Second Reform Act, Americans debated the conservatism of their own constitutional revolution: amendments that proscribed slavery, affirmed black citizenship, and extended the vote to black males. Democratic ‘conservatives’ balked at the havoc such changes would wreak and condemned them as a betrayal of the North’s conservative war aims. ‘The gage of battle was accepted in defence and for the preservation of the Union under the Constitution, and for no other purpose,’ one Democrat seethed in 1868. But many Republicans argued that the extension of Civil Rights to the Freedmen was definitionally conservative because it would destroy the vestigial power of neo-Confederates and extinguish all hope of a violent rematch by eliminating the possibility of slavery’s return. The antislavery Republican Party had ‘its origin in Conservatism’, one Iowa newspaper claimed in 1869. ‘[I]ts plans and purposes are to save and preserve everything that is valuable and praiseworthy in our institutions.’ To that end, its programme of ‘radical’ Reconstruction would ‘save the name of personal liberty as prated constantly from every Democratic husting’, and ‘guarantee its enjoyment to every person born under or seeking the protection of the American flag’.

Such ‘crises’ of conservatism recurred thereafter into the 20th century, each defined by the political questions that were then being considered. In America, the term continued to enjoy a degree of party crossover until at least the New Deal, when it became associated more consistently with the Republicans who opposed FDR’s statist programmes. Southern Democrats, and so-called ‘Blue Dog Democrats’, continued to use the label well into the 20th century, and high-profile senators such as Joe Manchin have used it more recently. But since Reagan’s presidency fewer Democrats have found much value in deploying the language of conservatism, just as few Republicans now use the language of liberalism. But in the same way that British Conservatives have repeatedly debated those value judgements within their party, so, too, have Republicans struggled internally over the term’s real meaning; indignant ‘true conservatives’, for example, attacked Reagan’s arms reduction treaties with the Soviet Union as a betrayal of conservative principles as they understood them in the context of the Cold War.

Margaret Thatcher, whose premiership marked the last truly epochal struggle in Britain over the word’s definition, made political choices that caused enormous social dislocation not a few of her fellow party-members condemned as substantively unconservative. But she, too, saw her reforms as the product of truly conservative value judgements, ones that had weighed the danger of sudden economic liberalisation to established institutions against the greater threat of stagnation and collectivism. ‘It is time for a change,’ she explained in a speech to a Conservative rally at Bolton in May 1979. ‘But the changes we propose are securely rooted in the old and trusted values that have held a great nation together in the past and served her well.’ To buttress her point, she invoked Lord Tennyson’s Hands All Round: ‘That man’s the true Conservative / Who lops the mouldered branch away.’

Therein, once more, lies the pith of the problem. Conservatives might well agree that a bit of lopping is sometimes needed to save the tree, but who decides when a branch is mouldered beyond saving, what kind of axe is best suited to lop it, and how much lopping ought to be done?

It is precisely this ambiguity that now allows Anglo-American politicians to relitigate once more a well-trodden definitional contest not merely incidental to the language of conservatism, but one that has played an essential part in the career (and success) of the political concept it purports to describe.

President Trump has routinely been lambasted as a false conservative by fellow Republicans, but the ‘crisis of conservatism’ in America has largely been decided in his favour. In Britain, the jury is still out, as both Reform UK and the Conservative Party lay claim to the label: Nigel Farage has described Reform as a ‘new Conservative movement’, while Kemi Badenoch pointedly praised Nick Timothy as a ‘true Conservative’ when she appointed him as Shadow Justice Secretary to replace Robert Jenrick after his defection to Reform. Tellingly, both Farage and Badenoch explicitly renounce or tacitly distance themselves from the kind of ‘conservatism’ that governed the country between 2010 and 2024; both suggest bold and sweeping reforms, and, in so doing, they make a fresh set of value judgements on what institutions to conserve and how to conserve them.

The most consequential and memorable ‘conservatives’ have always been those that have framed their political choices to meet the exigencies of the moment they find themselves in, even if the very nature of conservatism means they inevitably end up being despised by many of their fellow conservatives for doing so. The challenges politicians face today, from immigration, rearmament, economic disruption, and technological advances all force confessed conservatives, in the Anglosphere and beyond, to reckon with what they wish to conserve and what they are willing to do to conserve them. They must fight, as all conservatives must eventually, to craft a definition of conservatism fit for our age.