In fine, the diversity of ways in which conservative views may find expression is itself proof that conservatism is no fixed ideology.

Now I present to you a summary of conservative assumptions differing somewhat from my canons in those two books of mine. In various editions of my book The Conservative Mind I have listed certain canons of conservative thought-the list differing somewhat from edition to edition in my anthology The Portable Conservative Reader I offer variations upon this theme. It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives’ convictions nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles it seems safe to say that most conservatives would subscribe to most of these maxims. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata.

For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries.

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata.

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk