Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and British Conservatism’s Politics of Negation

Abstract

A distinction is often made between two traditions of British Conservative thought: the paternalist “one nation/middle way” tradition, and the more libertarian one that is associated with Margaret Thatcher. Typically, this distinction is mapped onto the ideas that Conservatives hold about equality. While “one nation” Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian counterparts, it is argued, do not. This article reassesses this distinction by comparing the political thinking of two representatives of the two traditions: Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher. Comparing Macmillan and Thatcher’s views on equality, it is argued, is inappropriate as a way of distinguishing between their respective ideologies. Instead, we should draw a distinction between the way that Macmillan and Thatcher arrived at their views about equality. On his part, Macmillan adopted a triadic logic. By conceiving of a “middle way”, he defined his conservatism in relation to the dangerous “extremes” of free market capitalism and state socialism. Thatcher, by contrast, adopted a dyadic logic. Instead of locating herself between two “extremes”, she employed a series of binary distinctions to establish her conception of conservatism. Freedom was preferred to equality; the market was preferred to the state, and so on. The article explores the implications of these differing logics, and it concludes if we are to identify different variants of conservatism, we should be just as concerned with their modes of negation as we are with the affirmative claims they make about concepts like equality.