 For conservatives, abstract propositions cannot simply be applied to specific circumstances. Unlike liberals and socialists, therefore, conservatives are particularist in rejecting universal prescriptions and panaceas; they reject the Enlightenment-modernist requirement that practical rationality is liberated from all particularism (Beveridge and Turnbull 1997). This is not “particularism” in its dictionary definition of “exclusive adherence to one’s own group, party, sect, or nation”; rather, it is a philosophical sense that has an affinity with moral particularism as advocated by Dancy (2004). The parallel is incomplete, however; political conservatives do not deny that there are general principles, as Dancy does, they just deny that one should apply them. Their position is an essentially epistemic one—that one cannot know the general principles whose implementation would benefit the operation of society. According to Gray, conservatism’s fundamental insight is that