Conservatism is a philosophy of love, which perhaps explains why it is so little understood in our time. Half a millennium ago Niccolò Machiavelli weighed whether it is better to be loved or feared. Those emotions—unlike their counterparts hate and contempt—were foundations on which a principate or republic could be built. Machiavelli believed fear was the better bet, and successors from Thomas Hobbes on down reckoned likewise.
Edmund Burke took up the question as delicately as he did all philosophical subjects. He was well aware of fear’s political logic, but he also knew that love—of a country or a queen or the best we can imagine of either—could civilize our otherwise savage race. The moral imagination improves our raw animal nature; love succeeds fear, and man becomes human.
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