The fi nancial crisis and subsequent po liti cal instability left them broadly convinced of the need for a social philosophy that transcended the abstract dictates of laissezfaire: they agreed that if capitalism was going to be saved from the pressures that were continuously eroding its foundations, its core assumptions would need to be rebuilt. But they disagreed sharply and continuously when the conversation turned to identifying those aspects of the capitalist order that were sacred and those that could be revised, or those morals that might be coded as absolute and the mechanisms of enforcement that would make them so. … That these problems were posed by cosmopolitan intellectuals from around the Atlantic world, engaging together in earnest inquiry into the philosophical foundations of their social order, complicates the common assumption that the conservative project was parochial in its origins and strategic in its intent. It was the product of a collapsed rather than a rigidifi ed worldview.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 33