POLS 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: French Revolution, Human Nature, The Good Life
Document Summary
Pols 1000 introduction to politics lecture week 15. It is only recently that we started using the term conservative/conservativism to define an ideology: a frenchman will invent the term who is an aristocrat by the name of chateaubriand . Edmond burke will write reflection on the revolution of france. He argues that change must be slow, gradual and it must take into account past experience. Change must be respectful of past practices and traditions: conservatism does not simply want to turn back the clocks and return to a previous social order, like liberalism, conservatism is a complex ideology. Eleven fundamental principles that comprise conservativism: for conservatives, the meaning of the universe is given; it is not constructed (by human beings), the term universe must be understood in a large sense. We must allow the universe to unfold as it should: the meaning of the universe predates the existence of human beings.