In Britain it trebled the number of private shareholders in arndecade. What is more, it was unsnobbish, rather in the mannerrnof Dickens’ Great Expectations, where the hero has to acceptrnthat the money that made him a gentleman came from arnconvict and not from a genteel old ladv. As the Emperor Vespasianrnput it, money has no smell, though the point is not a traditionallyrnconservative one. By the 1980’s democratic conservatismrnhad ceased to reek of the countrv club and thernwine-circle and had turned populist, enterprising, and brash.rnBut what, it may still be asked, is conservative about suchrnconservatives? Or, again, where (if amwhcrc) arc the realrnconservatives now? Who, that is to say, is still opposed to revolutionrnand believes in traditional virtues, the faith of one’s ancestors,rnand doing what grannv savs? Throughout the Westernrnworld the conservative idea, in the familiar sense, has suddenlvrnlost its home. It has no great party or state, that is to sa’, likernthe American Republicans or the Briti.sh Conservatives betweenrnthe two worid wars—parties that clcariv endorsed a statusrnquo and once made people feel eozv and unthreatcncd.rnWhere now is the old family attorney in democratic politics,rnexperienced, unideological, and safe? That old ‘iew even hadrnits philosophers once, though it hardly needed them, andrnMichael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics (1962), writtenrnlong before the rise of the New Right, was its classic statement.rnWe govern, Oakeshott believed, as we ride a biccle, by the scatrnof our pants. Rationalism, by which he meant theorizing, hardlyrncomes into it. Theories are bunk, and politics, as he saw it,rnwas not a science but a skill.rnNow, with monetarism and strong talk about balancing thernbudget, we are back to science, or something that claims to bernthat, and it is a worid that leaves no place for Oakeshottians.rnBut if there is no home for conservatives, there are man-rnhomes, from the sadly despairing to the ideologically militantrnand even the downright violent. In Europe the per’adingrnmood on the right is gentler, but it is no less various. In Francernas well as in Britain, there are now parties that believe that thernMaastricht Treaty infringes the age-old sovereignties of nationsrnand threatens their cultural identity. As Margaret Thatcher hasrnsaid, it is a treaty too far. There may be no violence againstrnabortion clinics, but there is a rising sentiment against sexualrnlaxit’. There are occasional bombs planted b ultranationalistrngroups like the Basque ElA or the Irish Republican Army. Andrnabove all there is a sense, less angry than sad, about a loss of thernpast.rnThe past, after all, is where conservatives were long supposedrnin nostalgic admiration to look to maintain the identity of arnpeople and a tribe. Such nostalgia can be petty, like Flemish orrnWelsh nationalism. It can also have its respectable intellectualrnside. In Beyond the New Right (1993), for example, John Grayrnof Oxford, a disciple of F.A. I layek and a partisan of the freernmarket, has recently come to acknowledge the shortcomings ofrnthe Thatcher-Reagan years: not just the technical deficienciesrnof monetarism, which are clear enough, but what he calls thern”neglect of history” by the New Right in its heyday in thern1980’s, which put its supreme trust in mechanistic devices suchrnas restricting the money supply, when “our onh support is thernvitality of our cultural traditions.” That sounds like the oldrntune conservatives used to play, breaking through the nostrumsrnof Friedman, Hayek, and their schools. Gray’s last chapter proposesrna Green conservatism as a way into the future, but it is also,rnas he knows, a way back. Green, after all, is what the ToryrnCountr}’ gentry used to be, and long before their party was takenrnover by free marketeers. Tories fought the railroads; theyrnfought the motorways; and all that for highly selfish reasonsrnthat the Green parties of today might well decline to be associatedrn\ith, in a distant age in which conservatism and eonser^’ationrnwent hand in hand. You cannot experiment in the freernmarket without discovering that, with all its virtues, there isrnnothing conservative about it. Gray, who has not abandonedrnthe idea of the market, now seeks a reconciliation with the past,rnand he knows that it is difficult: he seeks a market liberalism inrn”a historical inheritance of norms and traditions.” As he knows,rnmarket liberalism is now the almost universal demand of thernfree world, if only because it is the only system that can “protectrn’alues of liberty, independence, equity and prosperity.” That isrnan enormous admission. It means that a 19th-century liberalismrnthat our own bitter century has spent oceans of ink in tryingrnto discredit—conservative and socialist ink, communist andrnfascist—has proved, after all, to have been right. That is to understaternthe matter. It is not just that no other system is asrngood. No other system works at all. Even Chinese communistsrnnow accept that they need the market, though not, or not vet,rnthat the’ need liberalism. You trade or you starve.rnBeyond the New Right is a soberly reasoned book, at oncernconscientious and puzzled, and it recognizes the difficulties ofrnreconciling a Green program with a free market, on the onernhand, and a respect for traditional values on the other. Itsrnmood is exploring. So, on the whole, is the mood of the age. Ifrnconservatism has lost its way, no one else, in the opinion of thernelectorate, has clearly found it. Meanwhile the fragmentationrnof the right goes on. The death of socialism was bad news forrnthe right, since a dud theory made a perfect opposition. Nowrneonscr’aties face the harsh prospect of being voted for on theirrnmerits, or voted out for lack of them. It is a future to be contemplatedrnwith misgiving.rnIt will be said that we have seen the end of ideology before,rnand it did not last. But that does not alter the fact that ideologiesrnlike the New Left and the New Right have ended. Oncernagain Samuel Johnson, who deserves to be a more fashionablernauthor than he is, sums up the spirit of the age. “Most schemesrnof political improvement are very laughable things,” he oncerntold Boswell, and that sounds much like where we arc now.rnThe times, if not downright cynical, are wary. Lower taxesrnsound nice, but they can lead to a mounting national debt andrncrippling interest payments; indeed the servicing of the Americanrnnational debt now outstrips the defense budget of thernUnited States. Liberty is good, but family planning and abortionrnmay deny rather than affirm it. A right to independencernhas often been taken for granted, especially in states as ancientrnas France or Britain; but a need to trade can lead to regulationsrnthat provoke bitter waves of xenophobia and a return to nationalism.rnIn a global economy Johnson’s contemptuous remarkrnabout schemes of political improvement may hold good, butrnthe remark I began by quoting looks increasingly hard to believe.rnHastening through bypaths to private profit, as he put itrnin 1756, no longer looks certain to prevent great or suddenrnchange. Johnson wrote all that before the Industrial Revolutionrnand before the American and French revolutions. Two centuriesrnand more on, he would have been in little doubt that hasteningrntoward private profit, whether by highways or byways,rncan be destructive of ancient tradition and the sovereignty ofrnnations. The market, he would now have to admit, is radical.rn24/CHRONlCLESrnrnrn