Count Otto von Bismarck, known as the Iron Chancellor, was a Prussian Junker, and therefore a notable man of the land, and the lord of a German manor.  He was also a servant of his State and of his God, and, to the extent that the word ‘conservative’ still has any meaning, about as conservative as any man at any time could be.  That did not prevent him from becoming the de facto master of Europe by reference, if necessary, to ‘blood and iron’. 

Nor did it prevent him from achieving the following.  The unification of Germany.  The grant of universal suffrage in the German democracy.  And the beginning of the Welfare State. 

As it happened, the first would lead to the most appalling consequences for not just Europe but the whole world in two world wars – but Bismarck could not be held responsible for either.  The second was alarmingly ‘progressive’ for its time, and the third even more so.  History does not give Germany or Bismarck sufficient credit for laying the foundation of the Welfare State – which the United States still refuses to accept.

In 1883 and 1889, Bismarck pushed through legislation for accident insurance for workers and then old age and disability insurance.  For the first, the German government said it had put an end ‘to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter …and asserts the role of the state’. 

Nearly thirty years later, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill followed that lead in England with the People’s Budget.  They spoke of the ‘business of the state’ in looking after the infirm and the aged.  They provoked a constitutional crisis.  The English averted revolution by having the King threaten to create enough peers to get the legislation passed.  They followed the precedent of the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832.  In each case, the ancient safety valve saved the day.

Bismarck was a most extraordinary man.

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

As my friends know, that accords exactly with my view of the common law, which underlies our constitution, and politics.  That may not be all that surprising, because that in my view is the Anglo-Saxon – and therefore German – preference for experience over theory, which so distinguishes England from Europe – including Germany.  That is not meant to be confusing.  The roads by which we got where we are have never been straight.

Bismarck had God and could accommodate Him.

A statesman cannot create anything himself.  He must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment…. I am content when I see where the Lord wishes to go and can stumble after him.

Some, especially right now, may wish, like Hamlet, to substitute Providence for God in detecting even the fall of a sparrow.

I have never been a doctrinaire…. Liberal, reactionary, conservative – those I confess seem to me luxuries….

Can you imagine a better statement of the sheer banality of politics today either here or in places we once respected?

Bismarck spent his whole political life dealing with people he could not respect.

There are white men, there are black men, and there are monarchs.

God only knows what fate would await someone rash enough to say that now.

For his scheme of social insurance, Bismarck was content to accept the label ‘progressive’, even ‘socialist’!  A J P Taylor said:

German social insurance was the first in the world, and has served as a model for every other civilized country…At the end, he [Bismarck] talked of ‘the right to work’ and thought of insurance against unemployment – this was the final step to the welfare state of the twentieth century…. He was a despairing conservative, staving off a dreaded though inevitable future, clinging to the present for the fear of something worse.  Real conservatism is rooted in the pride of class.  Bismarck had no feeling for the Junkers from whom he sprung.  In taste and outlook, he was nearest to the rich merchants of Hamburg.

Well, they don’t write history like that anymore.

Nations crave security.  So do their subjects.  The king commanded his subjects to hold him and the state securely.  People now elected governments so that the state would keep the people securely.  That was change indeed.

Bismarck was a soldier who never read Clausewitz.  Ranke was his favourite historian, but he had a soft spot for Taine.  He soaked himself in the Bible and Shakespeare, but he fancied the novels of Dumas.  He naturally had no time for philosophy – Kant, let alone Hegel – and he dismissed Wagner as a monkey. 

In other words, he was ein mensch with whom you knew where you stood – and when you should stop.  What would we give to have on record what passed between this German and Benjamin Disraeli?  A J P Taylor said:

Both had the brooding melancholy of the Romantic movement in its Byronic phase; both had broken into the charmed circle of privilege…. both had a profound contempt for political moralizing…. In politics both had used universal suffrage to ruin liberalism…. Both genuinely advocated social reform….

So much, then, for pigeon holing people.

I referred above to the banality of our politics.  Hannah Arendt, who had some of the most piercing insights of her time, got into trouble talking about the banality of evil.  We now have to live with the evil of banality.  Those vacuous standard-bearers of theory and ideology, who falsely claim to be prophets of ‘conservatism,’ should look on the works of Bismarck and despair.