Why is conservatism good

Order and justice and freedom, they believe, are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice. Thus the body social is a kind of spiritual corporation, comparable to the church; it may even be called a community of souls.

Human society is no machine, to be treated mechanically. The continuity, the life-blood, of a society must not be interrupted. But necessary change, conservatives argue, ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once. Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.

Conservatives sense that modern people are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time. Therefore conservatives very often emphasize the importance of prescription —that is, of things established by immemorial usage, so that the mind of man runneth not to the contrary. There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights to property, often.

Similarly, our morals are prescriptive in great part. Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste. It is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgment and private rationality.

The individual is foolish, but the species is wise, Burke declared. Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away.

As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious.

The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality.

The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.

Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom.

To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk.

By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. Seventh, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.

Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Upon the foundation of private property, great civilizations are built. The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth. Economic levelling, conservatives maintain, is not economic progress. Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired.

The history of the two cannot be disentangled. The conservative acknowledges that the possession of property fixes certain duties upon the possessor; he accepts those moral and legal obligations cheerfully. Eighth, conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.

He hosted a TV show. He went to fabulous parties. Change is bad and dangerous. Inequality is not only inevitable but necessary. Men should only count on their fellow man for help, and not on any kind of state-created support system. Tenth, the thinking conservative understands-that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any.

I know Trump is currently president, but look around you. There is so much longer to go, but social progress is not an illusion, especially if you compare the world now to how it was centuries ago. Kirk never addresses racism, or sexism, or environmental issues.

There is only the timelessness of conservativism to act as a bulwark against hysterical liberals who, I dunno, might want a few laws against police brutality put on the books. Buckley also rejects the idea of bipartisanship outright. This is the kind of faulty philosophy that resulted in Buckley requiring a luxurious ten years to walk back his notorious pro-segregation editorial "Why The South Must Prevail" , and why he claimed to support equal rights for women but not the actual machinery needed to achieve them.

It is how conservatives have come to view all men as created equal with NO acknowledgement or care that all men do not come from equal standing. In fact, if you go by Kirk and Buckley, any attempt—even by popular vote—to help level the playing field is actually immoral, and a quick path leading us to the evergreen bogeyman of a liberal dystopia.

This nightmare comes in many forms, but usually takes the shape of either Soviet-style Communism, a giant Manson Family commune, or gasp! If you ever wanna keep a conservative up all night, just show him a supercut of every Clay Davis scene from The Wire. I grew up during the downfall of the Soviet Union, so I understand why men from the generation before me are so wary of Communist and socialist ideas, and why they endlessly worship Reagan for helping precipitate its downfall one author created a set of Reagan-style bedrock principles , and they are as equally blind and dated as the others.

I am a greedy capitalist at heart, and I do not like the prospect of a Commie Russia endgame any more than they did.

However, one should not conclude that conservatism is essentially a British view; all cultures have political sceptics who value experience. For Neiman,. Neiman Others claim Hume as a proto-liberal.

Liberalism was defined by J. We now examine his ideas and how they arose. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France , the Irish Whig and parliamentarian Edmund Burke — warned against revolutions and their utopian schemes for human perfectibility. Writing in , he predicted the French Revolutionary Terror of three years later:.

In the groves of [the] academy [of this new conquering empire of light and reason], at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows; Burke, WS III: His prediction is based on his view that when compliance no longer flows from customary allegiances, the result is naked force WS VIII: As Steiner comments,.

When Burke reflected and published, the French Revolution was in its Arcadian phase [and] his bloodstained previsions seemed nearly hysterical…Retroactively… his sombre clairvoyance took on formidable weight. Steiner 3; see Lock Vol. Its British friends compared the French Revolution with the Glorious Revolution of ; for Burke, it reprised , when Parliament was purged and the king executed.

Burke argued that revolutionaries impose theory on political practice, when they should rather derive theory from it. In a speech of , he held it preposterous. Steiner 3. As Pocock writes,. But to reiterate, Burke advocated organic and restorative reform, not reaction:. The Reflections argue that the ancien regime could have been restored to its pre-corrupt state; summoning the Estates General for May was an opportunity for enlightened reform of the monarchy, hijacked by enthusiastic atheists and deists WS VIII: —6.

Burke had a Whig belief in limited government. Burke differs from liberal tradition not in rejecting rights as such, but in his conception of them Lock — He rejected a constitution or bill of rights that does not simply express existing practice.

For him, the only reliable liberty comes through descent, justified. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, [just as] we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives.

Burke mistrusted appeals beyond positive law, but his writings on India allow, in its absence, an appeal to natural law though not natural right. The Hobbesian conception of Reflections treats natural rights as pre-social, and incompatible with society.

For Burke, liberty is precarious; to say that it is assured by providential order, and has an inevitable progress, is the kind of metaphysical principle he abhorred Himmelfarb —7.

Burke misrepresents the social contract of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau as a rather temporary expedient,. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world… Burke, WS III: This is a powerful statement, but hard to interpret.

Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

For Scruton , liberals tend to make present members of society dominant over those who went before, and those who come after; some conservative commentators fear that the cross-generational contract is now being broken by. Ferguson Burke was a Christian thinker whose conservatism has been traced to his theological presuppositions Harris ; Cobban 94 ; he saw atheistic Jacobinism as a threat to Western cultural tradition. Many conservative writers share his religious interpretation of the contract across the generations; for Kirk 7 , established religion is among the traditions that conservatives value.

But religious belief is not essential to conservatism, and Oakeshott was a secular conservative Cowling, xv. But they caused a stormy reaction from radicals. The parliament or the people of …had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day…. Paine Your imagination would have taken fire. Wollstonecraft In his later career, liberals believed, Burke showed himself a prisoner of the feudal and landed conception of society. For most of his career, he was regarded as a moderate reforming Whig, campaigning against the corruption and brutality of the East India Company.

Only at the end did he become the Tory scourge of Revolution. Indeed, Reflections is liberal compared to Letters on a Regicide Peace five years later, which demanded a war abroad and repression at home to extirpate revolutionary infection.

The 19 th century regarded him as a liberal, treating his later writings as an aberration—an interpretation reversed in the 20 th century.

Marx scathingly dismissed Burke as an opportunist:. The sycophant—who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic…against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies…he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy—was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois. Burke, l. Churchill 40—like Burke, he changed party and so may have identified with him. Was he against reason, or just against abstract reason?

Did he supplant individual with collective reason? A subtler view is that for him, individual reason cannot discern fully how social and political institutions work; it cannot see the entire process of communal adaptation, or understand by itself the principles on which it is based.

As Hampsher-Monk puts it, institutions result from trial and error, embodying accumulated historical experience in institutional reason—like precedent within Common Law, which Burke had studied. Pocock ff. The British and American common law system is evolutionary, not abstract like Roman and Napoleonic coded law. Judgment according to precedent, unlike a priori codified law, is better able to anticipate new circumstances.

Burke [credited] educated prejudice as an antidote to its bigoted forms. This did not entail a renunciation of reason, but a suspicion of its inordinate pretensions. Bourke, in Dwan and Insole Scruton echoes Burke when he argues that beliefs that appear to be examples of prejudice may be useful and important; the attempt to justify them will merely lead to their loss. One might show prejudice as irrational, but there will be a loss if it is discarded Scruton We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason…the stock in each man is small, and…individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages….

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Rejecting the dominant individualist cognitive tradition in Western epistemology, Burke regards political reason as historically accumulated in developed social institutions—including an unwritten constitution, practices of representation, and dispositions notably of compromise.

According to Himmelfarb, there is for Burke good reason—reason itself—to praise prejudice, which exists on a continuum with theoretical reason Himmelfarb b. However, Hampsher-Monk argues that. For Hume and Burke this is a customary framework; for religious thinkers such as Cardinal Newman it is fideistic, appealing to the extra-rational authority of religious doctrine. Prejudice is normative; the inability to subsume particular actions under a universal law does not imply radical relativism Vannatta For the classical liberal, in contrast, reason precisely does not operate within customary frameworks.

Burkean conservatism influenced Continental European traditions, but these also had a separate development. De Tocqueville —59 was probably the most Burkean among 19 th century Continental conservatives in his condemnation of the French Revolution:. Our revolutionaries had the same fondness for broad generalisations, cut-and-dried legislative systems, and a pedantic symmetry; the same contempt for hard facts; the same taste for reshaping institutions on novel, ingenious, original lines…[for reconstructing] the entire system instead of trying to rectify its faulty parts.

Though Beiser argues that they arrived at their position independently. The historians von Savigny — and von Ranke — assumed a Burkean organic development of societies. To reiterate, reaction is not Burkean conservatism, however. De Maistre — was a reactionary critic of reason, intellectuals and universal rights.

In an alternative tradition to Burkean conservatism, Continental conservatives have subscribed to Thomist or Hegelian traditions, producing a rational or systematic conservatism—which might include reactionary forms.

John Gray argues that. Conservatives have sometimes disdained theoretical reflection on political life, implying that political knowledge is…best left inarticulate, uncorrupted by rationalist systematising.

The [19 th and 20 th ] centuries are nevertheless replete with conservative thought…as systematic and reflective as any found in the liberal tradition. Gray 78—9. Rational conservatives maintain that a community with a hierarchy of authority is most conducive to human well-being—though they also regard agent-relative virtues such as loyalty and patriotism as fundamental, holding that it is universally true that patriotism is a virtue.

This is clearly the standpoint of authority rather than the standpoint of freedom see 1. Hegel — is a key figure in the understanding of rational conservatism. Surprisingly for a standpoint that stresses the value of experience, conservatism—Hume excepted—has been associated more with Idealism than with empiricism; philosophical empiricists have commonly been radicals.

Hegel has been claimed by conservatives, but his political affiliation has been disputed since his earliest disciples. For them, Geist did not invoke a transcendent power, as some Right Hegelians maintained, but was an anthropological and historical process of emancipation, propelled by contradiction and struggle.

In the 20 th century, Hegel was regarded alternatively as a proto-totalitarian reactionary, a conservative, or a liberal. Hegel was ambivalent towards the French Revolution, the world-historical event against which his generation thought out their political philosophy and stance towards the Enlightenment Taylor Hegel However, Hegel also has a Rousseauean side, that is clear in the Philosophy of History , where the Revolution signals the dawn of freedom:. Hegel — Some writers thus claim Hegel for liberalism rather than conservatism, regarding his philosophy as.

Franco 3. The contemporary consensus sees Hegel as attempting to synthesise liberalism and conservatism. For Cristi, his rapprochement is not an eclectic blend of liberal and conservative strands of thought, but a systematic synthesis:.

Cristi —20, While Hegel does not appeal to non-human natural law or providential order, he attempts to reconcile human reason with historical laws and institutions:. For Hegel, unlike Burke, the political order must ultimately be justified to human reason, although not in the individualistic manner that typifies Enlightenment rationalism.

Franco The Idea of the state unites its divine character with the Rousseauean view that it is the product of human will and rationality Franco The essence of the modern state is that the universal should be linked with the complete freedom of particularity and the well-being of individuals…the personal knowledge and volition of the particular individuals who must retain their rights…Only when both moments are present in full measure can the state be regarded as…truly organised.

Hegel argues that in morality and politics, we judge for ourselves, but not by ourselves. We come to recognise rational norms historically, as actualised; we always reason in terms of the norms of our society, which we must nonetheless endorse only reflectively. But for Skorupski, Hegel holds that free thought or natural reason must be mediated by entrenched institutions of intellectual and spiritual authority: for Aquinas, the Church, for Hegel, a tradition of communal ethical life.

The right and the moral must have the ethical as their support and foundation, for the right lacks…subjectivity, while morality in turn possesses this [alone]. Hegel accepts that an ethical life is historically contingent, even arbitrary, in content, yet insists on its essential role in every society, and its need to develop organically.

For him, some kinds of Sittlichkeit are more advanced than others; at any one time, a more advanced society drives world history forward by realising it in its institutions, customs, culture new ideas. This position goes beyond the minimal rationality and universality of conservatism, which makes no reference to historical advance.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the thinker chiefly responsible for introducing German Idealism to English-speaking readers, though in the person of Kant rather than Hegel. He declared that. Coleridge Coleridge argued for a national Church exercising spiritual, moral and cultural leadership, maintaining schools in conjunction with the state. CW []: The work of major Victorian thinker and writer Thomas Carlyle — bears a complex relationship with conservatism; in his later career he was a reactionary.

Carlyle was a prophet of his time who rejected industrialisation, and questioned progress; in these respects he was a precursor of the equally influential Victorian thinker, John Ruskin.

His aim was to unite these two nations through the benevolent leadership of the Conservative Party; he thus offered a milder version of Bismarckian conservatism. As Chancellor of the Exchequer and conservative leader in the House of Commons, he guided the Reform Act, and as Prime Minister , enacted social reform, passing laws on public health, factory acts, and laws on trade union recognition.

He had more veneration for established institutions than did Mill and his followers, and regarded moral life as relatively static. His objections to Mill were paternalist, and like conservatives, he was a pessimist concerning human nature. Conservatism does not rest on a defence of a landed nobility, monarchy and established church, so even though the United States lacks these, an American conservatism is possible. Thus Gray argues that right-wing thought in the U. But it is probably true that Burkean conservatism has not produced thinkers in North America of the depth of its leading British representatives, Burke himself, Coleridge and Oakeshott.

Henry Sidgwick — arguably belongs in the ranks of modern conservatives. When all relevant facts are taken into consideration [he holds] it will scarcely ever be right on Utilitarian grounds for a Utilitarian openly to break or to recommend others to break the rules of morality commonly accepted in his society.

Broad ; see also Collini Hayward notes, with exasperation, that rather than insisting. Hayward in Schultz ed. An important issue that connects the conservatism of Hume, Burke, Sidgwick is what people have reason to expect over time. Suppose one holds that justice requires X , but that people have long been doing Y , which is incompatible with X , and have entered into life-plans that assume that Y is how things are.

If one tries to make society more just by preventing people doing Y , that in itself is an unjust action. But in our actual imperfect world. Every reform of an imperfect practice or institution is likely to be unfair to someone …To change the rules in the middle of the game, even when those rules were not altogether fair, will disappoint the honest expectations of those whose prior commitments and life plans were made in genuine reliance on the…old rules.

The propriety of changing the rules in a given case depends upon inter alia the degree of unfairness of the old rules and the extent and degree of the reliance placed upon them…we must weigh quite legitimate incompatible claims against each other in circumstances such that whichever judgment is reached it will be unfair to someone or other Feinberg Michael Oakeshott —90 was the last major exponent of the Idealist tradition, which enjoyed a period of eminence in Anglophone philosophy in the later 19 th and early 20 th century.

He has been regarded as a liberal Franco , while others claim him for the afore-mentioned maverick right Anderson 7. But Oakeshott is generally regarded as the most important modern conservative. Oakeshott He contrasted a state that has an economy, with a state effectively reduced to an economy, and bemoaned the domination of politics by the pursuit of economic growth as opposed to the good life. For Oakeshott, human knowledge is not the mother of practice, but only its stepchild…an exfoliation from [practices] that we have inherited…When we theorise our practices, we are discerning coherences within them, not imposing from without any set of abstract principles.

Gray , Other Internet Resources. In his book of essays Rationalism in Politics , Oakeshott is concerned with how the rationalist conception of knowledge has operated to the detriment of practice.

This conception of knowledge holds that all genuine knowledge can be expressed entirely in propositional terms, in a theoretical system, or a set of rules or maxims. Oakeshott holds that in the modern world, the resulting instrumental rationality has penetrated inappropriate areas such as law, education and the arts—his thought thus interestingly parallels that of Critical Theorists such as Adorno, and also Heidegger.

Means-end thinking concerning the state is particularly inappropriate, as we have no choice but to belong to it, Oakeshott maintains. Politics is not the science of setting up a permanently impregnable society, it is the art of knowing where to go next in the exploration of an already existing traditional kind of society.

Ideologists make everything political, but politics is only a part of human life, he holds. For Oakeshott, civil associations are fundamental to modern, free democracies, and opposed to the modern interventionist state. Enterprise associations, in contrast, are defined by a common purpose; society is not one of them. Politics, for Oakeshott, belongs to the mode of practice, along with religion and morality; the two other modes are science and history.

We again see that conservatism, although a practical standpoint that appeals to experience, does not rest on philosophical empiricism. Oakeshott is a Burkean particularist sceptic, for whom politics concerns people developing ways of living together in light of their history and traditions, not driven by universal extrinsic goals such as equality or elimination of poverty:.

In political activity…men sail a boundless and bottomless sea: there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel… When the mechanic has to mend a watch, he lets the wheels run out, but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions. Aesthetic Education , Letter 3. However, Gamble adds, that disposition gains substance from its connection with national ways of life and traditions:.

For Oakeshott, the past conceived in this way is intensely liberating because it is a repository of a wealth of practical knowledge, which is needed to live the good life. Gamble For him, conversation is the model of education. In a position reminiscent of J.

Unlike many non-Millian liberals, however, Oakeshott does not base his requirement of limited government in an abstract theory of human nature, and abstract rights. Other notable 20 th century conservative thinkers include historian Maurice Cowling and philosopher Anthony Quinton.

Probably the leading living conservative thinker is Roger Scruton, who bases conservatism on three concepts: authority, allegiance and tradition Scruton He rejects post-Hobbesian contractualism, which presupposes. It is only somewhat Hegelian, because for Burkean conservatives, history lacks the moral or spiritual direction that Hegel discerned; there is no moral or spiritual progress, and people think collectively toward a common goal only during a crisis such as war.

As we saw, conservatives have conflicting responses towards established power that arises from revolution. Non-relativistic conservatives 1.

Relativistic conservatives, in contrast, might accept these systems, if they endure for long enough. On his view, it seems, tradition is inescapable, and societies rather rigid.

True conservatism is a decidedly English doctrine with little appeal…in other countries [because] only English and hence British institutions have ever been decent enough to allow a decent [person] to be conservative. Graham —9. As conservatives such as Burke supported the Revolution, so they should support the non-violent uprisings of MacIntyre, We saw that Burke regarded tradition and individual reason as contradictory principles, but may have endorsed a notion of collective reason Beveridge and Turnbull To reiterate, this is a misinterpretation of conservatism.

Moreover, the communitarian opposition to liberal values is limited, and does not extend to advocacy of religious intolerance and homogeneity or patriarchal authority see Taylor ; Waldron —though neither does the anti-liberalism of Burkean conservatives.

A further consideration is that traditional methods may not always yield the most practical responses Scott Millian liberalism is less subject to the conservative charge of rationalism. As Gamble puts it,.

Oakeshott rejects the universal claims of liberalism, because he is interested only in claims grounded in English political experience. Bentham and—on some views—Burke seem to conceive only of legal rights; but if one can make sense of moral obligation, one can make sense of abstract rights.

When Minogue argues that. Socialists point out that the status quo is itself a construction. But as they are ought to read as we have made them by unjust coercion, by treacherous designs which the government is in a good position to carry out. Kant Neiman —9. Men make their own history, but [not] under circumstances chosen by themselves…The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Marx But writers on the left have found value in some conservative ideas.

While Lenin aimed to impose a socialist blueprint through a vanguard party of specialists, his Marxist critics Luxemburg and Kollontai held that revolutionary tasks are unknowable in advance:. Given the uncertainty of the endeavour, a plurality of experiments and initiatives will best reveal which lines of attack are fruitful…[and produce] a creative, conscious…and empowered working class. Scott —9. On this view, radical change need not involve a fixed blueprint. Cohen is another Marxist writer who finds value in conservative ideas, as we see in section 4.

Lord Hugh Cecil postulates within modern conservatism what he calls innate conservatism: a psychological characteristic found in all people to some degree Cecil For C. D Broad, it has two sides:. The more worthy side [rational scepticism] [says] that social problems are so very complex that there is always a strong probability that some factor has been overlooked in any scheme of change…The less respectable side [mental inertia] is the dislike of novelty as such.

Rational scepticism, as a motive for rejecting a scheme that offers to remove admitted evils, involves two applications of probability. The first is…that social affairs are so complex that it is very improbable that all the effects of a given social change have been foreseen.

But…we must have some ground for judging further that the unforeseen effects are more likely to be bad than good…this judgment cannot rest on the known nature of the effects of this particular measure [but only] on some general proposition, such as: It is more probable that the unforeseen effects of any social change will be bad than that they will be good.

Broad Broad is alluding to the fact that every philosophical standpoint must confront the problem of how to treat its own defining claims, by its own lights.

Conservatism seems unduly pessimistic about the possibility of individual, explicit knowledge of society, therefore. There are some things about society that we can come to know—and government economic policy, for instance, seems justifiably dedicated to finding them out. Conservatives must concede that radical change is sometimes acceptable; some major changes, for instance votes for women, are good.

These must be prepared for—as they were in Britain in , compared with, say, —and preparing for change makes it less radical. What conservatives will insist is that revolutionary change is unacceptable. Especially since the advent of green politics, there have been conservatives who have advocated ecological conservation.

A less noticed parallel is that between two oppositions: cultural conservation v. In Britain after World War II, for instance, restorable bomb-damaged buildings were demolished to make way for modernist schemes later revealed as shoddy and cheap. Conservatives would criticise both developments. Leading modernist poet T.