Muddling through: The Rhetoric on Conservatism and Revolution in the London Times, 1789-2010

Abstract

Historians have devoted a great deal of attention to analysing the vocabularies and political and philosophical languages that emerged during the modern era. For instance, they have explored the ‘isms’ of the period (romanticism, liberalism, fascism, republicanism, communism, and so on), often in specific national settings and in specific periods. This article harnesses the strength of computer-assisted humanities’ research methods to map a single aspect of the language of conservatism in everyday reading material over a longer period of time. On the basis of the London Times, the article examines the way the concept of ‘revolution’ figured in relation to ‘conservatism’ in so-called value-laden semantic fields. These textual fields involve ideas and beliefs, have normative connotations, are highly iterative and vary over time in complex ways. Four such fields figured in the London Times, roughly marked by 1780, 1830, 1900, 1970 and 2010 as milestone years. Often reflecting on violent revolutions outside Britain, the journalists and commentators of the Times conceptualised British conservatism primarily as anti-reformist rather than anti-revolutionist. In the end, revolution even became an ironical term, applicable to anyone with a penchant for change, including conservatives themselves.