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Ted Honderich Pluto Press, London, 2005(revised edition), ix+334pp.ISBN: 0 7453 2129 1
This is an impressively crotchety book. Reading it is rather like being beaten over the head with Labour's 1983 election manifesto for a terribly long time by Victor Meldrew. Ted Honderich's (1989) original attack on conservatism has been extended and supplemented by discussion of Tony Blair and George Bush.
Honderich's nominal aim is to find a usable definition of conservative thought, and evaluate it. The result is, however, a diatribe. The admirable clarity of style encourages an unfortunate populism. He makes Michael Moore seem like H.L.A. Hart.
There are four major problems with Conservatism . First, the edition isn't revised so much as expanded with scattergun attacks on New Labour. Even Blair's chancellor Gordon Brown, the hope of many on the left, is dismissed as a phoney, pro-business hack who lets the rich avoid tax (p. 156) and lazily subscribes to conservative theories of economic incentive (p. 62).
Apart from the anti-Blair/Bush sections, however, there is very little post-1989 stuff included. Much of it, such as the sentimentality over the miners or collective bargaining, seems like an echo from a long-lost world, a world where apartheid still flourishes in South Africa (p. 224) and in which a paper from 1985 can be called recent (Chapter 6, n. 18). And maybe David Miller (1999) or Geoffrey Cupit (1996) might want to deny that George Sher's is the only known book on desert (p. 294).
Second, Honderich is too far away from his target to see relevant distinctions. He discusses a range of figures on the right, heedless of whether they might properly be described as conservatives, neo-liberals, moral fundamentalists, fascists, pro-business, racists or moderate democrats, and assumes that there is an ideological unity underlying them.
There are arguments for such a unity put by, among others, W.H. Greenleaf (1983, 189-195), Enoch Powell (1990), Michael Freeden (1996, 348-383) and Robert Eccleshall (2003). But nowhere does Honderich allude to these, or rebut the charge of circularity. He shows that conservatives are not against change, for example (p. 8) by exhibiting the radical restructuring of society undertaken by Margaret Thatcher, but if the prior question -- whether Mrs. Thatcher, and the new right more widely, were conservatives...