Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata . So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.
Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative†as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
So, according to Kirk, if the argument is ideological, then it is not conservatism, which will help to pull the rug out from a number of the more doctrinaire posters here who would banish folks from the temple for lack of ideological purity.
Not exactly - there are some ideologies that are indeed necessary. Some taken for granted by tradition, some set in stone by common sense. For instance, our traditions and laws are inexorably bound to the Judeo-Christian Ethic. To supplant that moral sense with something else (liberalism's sense of moral relativity, or Mohammedanism's Sharia, as examples) intrinsically must damage the whole - at it's very root - and in that, cannot be Conservatism - Or at least, not the American sense of it.