End of the affair?(OTHER COUNTRIES)(Book Review)

Kieron O'Hara, After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher, Icon Books, 2005

The trials and tribulations of Britain's Conservative Party have prompted British professor Kieron O'Hara to reassess what conservatism means in Britain and offer recommendations as to where it should go in the future.

Tracing the history of conservative thought back to the ancient Greeks and the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, O'Hara examines how Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Browne helped create a recognizable form of conservatism. He then looks at how Burke, Hume, Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, and Balfour turned this line of thought into a political party, prior to an event which O'Hara clearly regards as tragic: "the invasion of the liberals," when Liberal Unionists left Gladstone's Liberal Party and joined with the Conservatives to create the Conservative and Unionist Party.

O'Hara detects two central principles and one important strategy in his examination of the principles of conservatism. The "change principle" holds that "the benefits that society brings are often not noticed by their recipients (until they have gone), and are very fragile. Change will therefore entail a risk, and the conservative point is that that risk should be weighed very carefully." The "knowledge principle," derived from Hayek but traced back to Pyrrhonism, states that "the knowledge that is relevant to the planning of a society or an economy will be distributed across that society, and furthermore at least some of it will be encoded in ...