section_path: Beliefs and principles
section_name: Beliefs and principles
paragraph_text: Beliefs and principles
  
  Scholars have tried to define conservatism as a set of beliefs or principles. Andrew Heywood argues that the five central beliefs of conservatism are tradition, human imperfection, organic society, authority/hierarchy, and property. Russell Kirk developed five canons of conservatism in The Conservative Mind (1953):
  
  Some political scientists, such as Samuel P. Huntington, have seen conservatism as situational. Under this definition, conservatives are seen as defending the established institutions of their time. According to Quintin Hogg, the chairman of the British Conservative Party in 1959: "Conservatism is not so much a philosophy as an attitude, a constant force, performing a timeless function in the development of a free society, and corresponding to a deep and permanent requirement of human nature itself." Conservatism is often used as a generic term to describe a "right-wing viewpoint occupying the political spectrum between liberalism and fascism ".
  
  Conservatism has been called a "philosophy of human imperfection" by Noël O'Sullivan, reflecting among its adherents a negative view of human nature and pessimism of the potential to improve it through 'utopian' schemes. Thomas Hobbes, the "intellectual godfather of the realist right", argued that the state of nature for humans was "poor, nasty, brutish, and short", requiring centralised authority with royal sovereignty to guarantee law and order. Edmund Burke, often called the father of modern conservatism, believed that human beings are steeped in original sin and that society therefore needs traditional institutions, such as an established church and a landed aristocracy, in order to function.