The concept of conservatism can be interpreted extremely broadly - from one of the main political strategies to the characteristics of a person. In the history of social thought, there have been several interesting concepts based on this term.
Conservatism comes from the Latin verb conservo (to keep). In a general sense, conservatism is a guideline for preserving the existing state of affairs, strengthening existing values.
Initially, the concept of conservatism was purely political in nature. The term itself dates back to the time of reaction after the French Revolution: the writer F. R. Chateaubriand founded a magazine called Conservator, which expressed the interests of the aristocratic class who were in favor of restoration. The main theoreticians of conservatism at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries were J. de Maistre, E. Burke, S. Coleridge, L. de Bonald.
However, times changed, and the class groups, who became the first conservatives, were a thing of the past, and the concept continued to live on. The dissociation of conservatism from reactionaryism reveals the essence of this position in a new way. The political scientist S. Huntington formulated it most correctly: conservatism is a historically variable phenomenon, which consists in the desire to maintain the status quo. At the same time, the reasonable position of conservatism allows innovations, guided by the formula: "as many changes as necessary, and as much preservation as possible." This approach allows us to understand an interesting historical collision characteristic of the USSR, where communism (originally a left-wing radical political position) became a conservative trend.
There is a variant of the axiological interpretation of the term "conservatism". In this sense, conservatism is spoken of as a value system based on calmness, measuredness, stability, and order. In a broad sense, conservative is the tradition that goes from Plato and Aristotle through Dante and Machiavelli to Burke and de Tauville, opposing it with the line of Descartes, Rousseau, Marx. However, this understanding of conservatism is very broad.
The classic of conservatism E. Burke accurately formulated the main features of this trend, which can be transferred from the political plane to personal psychology in order to understand who a "conservative by nature" is. The conservative position is characterized by: continuity, trust in the experience of generations; stability, respect for values; respect for order and hierarchy - both at the state and family level; understanding freedom as finding one's place in society; pessimism and distrust of innovation.