M.I.Degtyaryova concerns herself with the question of what tradition was to two outstanding conservative thinkers, Josиphe de Maistre and Edmund Burke: a model, i.e. a cultural standard possessed of a stabilizing, normative function, or an "open perspective", a "possibility, one in the making", of changes whose purpose is, nevertheless, conservation of the vitality of a given political system. The views of these two representatives of conservative thought on transformations being marked by serious differences derived, to a considerable extent, from the respective historical contexts in which they worked, both, however, failed to ground the opposition of tradition and change, the author maintains. As for Burke, it was not change as such, change in general that he opposed to tradition, but change that ignores tradition in its capacity of a state of formation, and therefore proves to be a threat to free development; whereas de Maistre, for all the complicacy and contradictoriness of his reasoning, finally waived his opposition even to the change of the very content of the European tradition disintegrating into "self-dependent projects".