Conservatism is traditionalism; as such it denotes an impulsive form of political belief and behavior, not limited historically, but also a theory behind this mental and social habitus. In that sense, it is a historical phenomenon, more specifically a state of mind of the 18th and 19th centuries, and later continued into the 20th.
To conserve and to encourage had long been the axioms of politics; this did not change until the …