Conservatism as a distinct political term is 180 years of age, coming into general usage after the Great Reform Act of 1832 in Great Britain. The word meant opposition to reform. In general, conservatives wish to preserve present or past value rather than to create or adopt new ones. The well-known figure is Edmund Burke as an English elite spokesman. He rejected French Revolution which only brought the disaster. He stated ‘change in order to conserve’. Moreover Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America has been recognized as an indispensable starting point for understanding American politics through Puritanism. Even at the early nineteenth-century America must be struck by its aloofness from many of the main currents of Western thinking. The Lockean tradition of the right of Englishmen to protect their property through representative organs; Rousseau’s concept of equal rights of every individual and the right of the sovereign people; Montesquieu advocacy of checks and balances; and Joseph de Maistre’s ideas on conservatism as reflected in the Essay on the Generative Principles of Political Constitutions.

        Kata kunci: conservatism, American politics, tradition values, European elites, and government