The usefulness of the conservative ideology in justifying any existing order is manifest from the above summary of Burkeian principles. Nowhere in that summary is there any indication of the character of the institutions which these ideas might be used to defend. In this respect conservatism differs from all other ideologies except radicalism: it lacks what might be termed a substantive ideal. Most ideologies posit some vision as to how political society should be organized. The words "liberalism," "democracy," "communism," "fascism," all convey an intimation as to what should be the distribution of power and other values in society, the relative importance of the state and other social institutions, the relations among economic, political, and military structures, the general system of government and representation, the forms of executive and legislative institutions. But what is the political vision of conservatism? Is it possible to describe a conservative society? On the contrary, the essence of conservatism is that it is literally, in Mühlenfeld's phrase, "Politik ohne Wunschbilder."
It may be argued, for instance, that the Portuguese political system is closer to the authoritarian ideal than the British and American systems, that the British system is closer to the socialist ideal than the Portuguese and American systems, that the American system is closer to the democratic ideal than the British and Portuguese systems, and that all three systems are far from the communist ideal. But which of the three is closest to the conservative ideal? Portugal? Great Britain? The United States? It is impossible to say because no conservative ideal exists to serve as the standard of judgment. No political philosopher has ever described a conservative utopia. In any society, there may be institutions to be conserved, but there are never conservative institutions. The lack of a conservative ideal necessarily vitiates the autonomous definition of conservatism.
The ideals of nonconservative ideologies change from thinker to thinker and generation to generation, but their fundamental characteristic remains the same: the ascription of value to theoretically-defined formulations and the appraisal of existing reality in terms of those formulations. Non-conservative ideologies are thus ideational or transcendent in nature, while conservatism is institutional or immanent. All the common ideational ideologies of modern western society approach existing institutions with an "ought demand" that the institutions be reshaped to embody the values of the ideology. In this sense all ideational theories involve some degree of radicalism, i.e., criticism of existing institutions. The greater the gap between existing institutional reality and the ideal of the nonconservative ideology, the more radical is the ideology with respect to that reality. Radicalism is thus the opposite of conservatism, and, like conservatism, it denotes an attitude toward institutions rather than a belief in any particular ideals. Conservatism and radicalism derive from orientations toward the process of change rather than toward the purpose and direction of change.
(Samuel P. Huntington, "Conservatism as an Ideology," The American Political Science Review 51 [June 1957]: 454-73, at 457-8 [italics in original])
Note from KBJ: Huntington's radicalism is my progressivism. These paragraphs explain why I classify libertarianism as progressivism. Libertarians criticize existing institutions with the aim of reshaping them "to embody the values of the ideology."
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 