The strongest case in general terms for resistance to large and sudden change is, however, indirect. It rests on the great number of unintended and unpredicted consequences that will emerge from change of that kind. The prevailing political system influences numerous and various aspects of life. If it is suddenly or violently transformed, a host of stabilities which provide a background of regularity within which life can be rationally and prudently led are jeopardized. A change of tailor will affect one's clothing but will have few other substantial results and, if they are objectionable, the change can easily be reversed. A change of political system is likely to influence the whole social environment. It is not only that large political changes have many unintended results that are unwelcome. They also frequently fail to achieve their intended results or achieve opposite ones.
It may be thought that this line of reasoning assumes that most change is for the worse, or, at any rate, that most unintended and unexpected change has bad results. Are these unplanned by-products of change never bonuses, never changes for the better? In the abstract, is not unplanned change as likely to be good as bad? The formation and running of a state is more like walking on a girder high above the ground or driving a car along a narrow, winding road than like tossing a coin. There are innumerable ways in which it is possible to go wrong, indeed disastrously wrong, but only a very tightly restricted number of ways in which you can go right, apart from the simple policy of staying where you are.
Conservative traditionalism does not rule out change. As Burke said in his Reflections, 'A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation'. But change should be in response both to a change in extra-political circumstances—increase in population, of the proportion of the population that is literate, a new balance between agriculture and industry—and to a widely-felt need arising from it, and it should be gradual so that unplanned detrimental side-effects be counteracted. A particular reason for hostility to revolutionary change is that revolutions, when serious and not of the palace variety, bring about a large transfer of power and, naturally, of wealth and status. The resentment of the newly deprived is likely to be violent. The ensuing civil war is likely to divert the revolutionaries from their original intentions.
(Anthony Quinton, "Conservatism," chap. 9 in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1993], 244-68, at 254)
