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Conservatism and Personality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Herbert McClosky
Herbert McClosky
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

If justification were needed for taking notice once again of the liberal-conservative distinction, it would be sufficient, I suppose, merely to observe that this division has been injected into the politics of Western nations for at least two centuries and, depending on the nature of one's criteria, perhaps longer.

The distinction between the two camps has not always been sharply drawn, of course, for both have been compelled, as a condition for survival, to hold important beliefs in common. Moreover, each has reversed itself on certain issues, such as government regulation of the economy, casting off old views in favor of beliefs previously cherished by the other. Competing for popular support in elections, and succeeding one another in office, the two camps have, of necessity, taken on many values in common, tempering their programs and adjusting their courses to the practical requirements of political contest. In a system like ours, where the parties have functioned less as ideological movements than as brokerage organizations hoping to attract majority support from almost every segment of the electorate, the distinction has tended to be dulled even further, until, at the actual scenes of daily political struggle, it has often faded entirely.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 27 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1958

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References

1 The doctrines expressed in these paragraphs have been drawn from the writings of such acknowledged conservative spokesmen as Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Hearnshaw, F. J. C., Conservatism in England (London, 1933)Google Scholar; White, R. J., ed., The Conservative Tradition (London, 1950)Google Scholar; Hogg, Quentin, The Case for Conservatism (Harmondsworth, 1947)Google Scholar; Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar; Rossiter, Clinton, Conservatism in America (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Wilson, Francis G., The Case for Conservatism (Seattle, 1951)Google Scholar; Viereck, Peter, Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; and others. In addition, books and articles by numerous commentators were consulted, including such recent articles as Huntington, Samuel P., “Conservatism as an Ideology,” this Review, Vol. 51 (June 1957), pp. 454–73Google Scholar.

2 We have described the procedures employed in the development of these scales in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 40 (1951), pp. 360–366Google Scholar; and Vol. 47 (1952), pp. 73–80.

3 I should like to acknowledge the generous assistance of the Minnesota Poll and of its director, Sidney Goldish, for assistance in selecting this sample and administering the questionnaire.

4 Among the most important and interesting of such response sets is the tendency exhibited by some respondents to agree—or to disagree—with statements regardless of their content. This tendency obviously distorts the response scores of the individuals who possess it. A number of special procedures were introduced to correct for this phenomenon, and to eliminate, as far as possible, the spurious influence of this factor. The procedures and findings bearing upon this “unthinking,” “uncritical,” of “acquiescent” tendency will be described elsewhere in a forthcoming technical monograph.

5 This conclusion receives at least implicit support from the findings of Stouffer, Samuel, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (New York, 1955)Google Scholar in which leadership groups were found to be uniformly more tolerant of diversity and non-conformity than the general population.

6 Hoffer, Eric, The True Believer (New York, 1951)Google Scholar, Ch. 1, and passim.

7 For a full scale development of this thesis, cf., for example, Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955)Google Scholar. Interestingly enough, a belief in the predominance of a liberal tradition in America has frequently been advanced by new conservative writers, who point to it as an obstacle to a victory for conservatism. For example, Clinton Rossiter, op. cit. p. 68, asserts that: “The American political tradition is basically a liberal tradition, an avowedly optimistic idealistic way of thinking about man and government. It is stamped with the mighty name and spirit of Thomas Jefferson, and its articles of faith, an American Holy Writ, are perfectibility, progress, liberty, equality, democracy, and individualism.”

8 Adapted and revised from the California Ethnocentrism scale, the original version of which is reported in Adorno, T. W. et al. , The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950)Google Scholar, Ch. 4.

9 For a fascinating get of data on conformity as measured in an experimental group situation that fit, even in detail, with the findings presented here on conservatism, see Crutchfield, Richard S., “Conformity and Character,” American Psychologist, Vol. 10 (1955), pp. 191–198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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