Every man and every woman, it seems, knows Gilbert and Sullivan’s quipping lines from “Iolanthe” (1882): “That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive. / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative.” When the lines were first sung, the labels matched up with Britain’s political parties, but they obviously have a wider application—each calling to mind, then and now, a cultural outlook, an inclination, a temperament, even a philosophy. Over time, of course, even the firmest definition will shift, making easy summary difficult and historical circumstance—context, that is—crucial to our understanding of what “liberalism” is and how “conservatism” differs from it. These days, we may also ask: What sets the two sides of democratic politics so far apart?
Edmund Fawcett, a former editor and correspondent at the Economist, grappled with one end of this polarity in “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” published in 2014 and revised four years later. He now explores its opposing force in “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition.”
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