Rivoluzione industriale e democrazia. La risposta dei conservatori inglesi: Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold (1790-1869)

The aim of this essay is to show how the English conservative thought is based, from the be- ginning, on the irremediable contradiction between economic individualism and political conservatism. Through the times, many of its representatives, starting with Edmund Burke, saw capitalism as compatible with a people’s culture and tradition, provided that the values that they embodied could continue to represent the recognized and inescapable basis of social life. However, while Burke did not entirely perceive the destructive dynamics of the new market economy and turned his barbs prevalently against the outcome of the French revolution, other writers, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, realized that capitalism and democracy, albeit different, proceeded united against the political and cultural establishment of English society. To counter such an attack, they believed that the leadership of the State had to be maintained firmly in the hands of one of the aristocracies. Burke obviously thought of the clergy and the old nobility, Coleridge and Arnold considered, in almost identical terms, a “clerisy of the nation”, while Carlyle envisioned a new élite which also included the new chiefs of industry.