by Edmund Burke
Persons in your station of life ought to have long views. You people of great families in hereditary trusts and fortunes, are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be, by the rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we bear, and flatter ourselves that while we creep on the ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavor, yet still are but annual plants, that perish without season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation.6
No greater threat existed to the likes of the duke of Richmond than the French Revolution and its ideals, in Burke’s estimation. His monumental achievement was in denouncing the Revolution while all about him political and intellectual sentiment in Britain celebrated it.
For Burke’s contemporaries the Revolution was testimony to the imminence of the millennium. It was, as Shelley saw it, “the master theme of the epoch in which we live.”7 On this master theme Blake, the young Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey wrote poems of revolution. Looking back on those years, Southey, by then respectable and Tory, wrote that “few persons but those who have lived [through the 1790s] can conceive or comprehend ... what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.”8 All the poets echoed these sentiments. For Wordsworth, “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” For Blake, the friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, “the times are ended ... the morning ‘gins to break.”9 For William Hazlitt it was “that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed. opening in the same gay career with our own.”10
The radical Protestant minister Richard Price preached sermons on the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven. He informed his prosperous bourgeois audience that a heavenly city would be realized in this world. They were witness to “a progressive improvement in human affairs which will terminate in greater degrees of light and virtue and happiness than have yet been known.” There was no doubt, he noted, that the “present day world is unspeakably different from what it was.” Superstition was giving ground, “the world outgrowing its evils ... anti-Christ falling and the millennium hastening.”11 Price echoed what Hazlitt called “the spirit of the age.” “We live in happier times than our forefathers.” The “shades of night are departing,” Price noted characteristically; “the day dawns.”12
Joseph Priestley, the great scientist and also radical Protestant minister, was ecstatic about the prospects for millennial regeneration. The French and American Revolutions were, according to Priestley, “unparalleled in all history.” They opened a new and wonderful era in the history of mankind. They moved the world “from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the most exalted freedom.”13
It was against this vision of secular perfection, of the absolute elimination of evil and misery that Burke reacted in the late eighteenth century. It is because he rejected this optimism and, in turn, insisted on the inevitability of sin, suffering, and imperfection, and did it in a prose style of compelling grandeur, that he has attracted to his name the legions of disciples who spread his teachings to this day.
The principal source of these teachings is Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In it his basic tactic is to contrast the virtuous English and the radical French, which at the same time is to contrast virtuous English and radical millenarian English. Priestley and Price had abandoned the English past, and this disrespect led ultimately to the crimes of the Jacobins. The English in 1688 had no “idea of the fabrication of a new government.” Even in 1790, Burke suggests, such thoughts “fill us with disgust and horror.”
Inferior men governed France and pushed their claims in England. “Are all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded?” Burke asks. This would “pervert” the natural order of things, would “set up on high in the air what is required to be on the ground.” The radicals (French and English) are guilty of “selfish and mischievous ambition,” an ambition that is undermining the age of chivalry and its corporate-feudal worldview. Ambitious man would not find his self-fulfillment outside himself in guild, church, city, or in the secure knowledge that he kept to God’s assigned place. Ambitious man is the individualist of liberal ideology who would experience his individual dignity not as an expression of some ascribed role but as a personal achievement reflecting his own intrinsic talent and merit. Before such ambitious men the corporate medieval world would fall, and from it would grow the individualism of the new age. Burke sees all of this, and he rejects the ideology of these sinful radicals. To be virtuous for Burke is “to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society.”14 As the old order crumbles, the acceptance of one’s place in it is transformed by Burke into the love for the particular link in the chain of being that one occupies.
Burke takes the very vocabulary of the radicals and translates it back into the preliberal ethos of chivalry. Equality and happiness are transposed. They exist only in the old order where each one knows his place. Many twentieth-century disciples of Burke have drunk deep at this particular Burkean fountain.
You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognise the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid but not more happy.15
Having rejected the Lockean liberal ideal of equality, the elimination of ascribed distinctions, Burke moves on to Locke’s theory of government. In the liberal scheme of things government is a neutral arbiter, an umpire over the race for wealth. It is a necessary evil because autonomous self-directed individuals occasionally bump into each other. Usually well-meaning and rational, individuals sometimes forget themselves and interfere with one another’s natural rights. On these occasions government is called in to protect the right of the aggrieved party. But liberal government is out to do no more, neither to dictate beliefs nor to lead citizens to a just or virtuous life. Government for Burke, however, has much more to do than this passive policing function. It is a positive tool of repressing, in the real sense of the term. Burke rejects, as have generations of conservatives after him, the optimism and rationalism of the liberal theory of human nature. Deep reservoirs of evil and sin lurk in human nature, according to Burke, and government is necessary not as an occasional umpire but as an indispensable external authority to thwart and repress the antisocial inclinations of individuals. To govern is to restrain man.
The source of Burke’s ideal is, of course, religion. As the liberal optimism of the Enlightenment had been premised on the denial of original sin (about the only thing all the philosophes, including Rousseau, agreed upon), so Burke revives the staple of the chivalric worldview. Government’s function, he writes, is not to protect natural rights but to provide authority, constraint, and domination.
Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will be controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves. 16
That power is government. The focus has shifted away from the liberal’s preoccupation with freedom from government and his voluntaristic manipulation, based on the power within him, of his social environment and institutions.
Since government is not a
mechanical umpire merely called upon when rights need protection, but a positive agency constraining the evil tendencies inherent in human nature, it follows that government is much more than the simple, efficient, and cheap policeman envisioned by radical theorists. Its proper functioning requires a deep understanding of human nature, rare skills acquired only with long experience. Governing, according to Burke, is “a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill.” One can’t simply renovate it, or reform it from some preconceived idea. To govern requires “more experience than any person can gain in his whole life.” Cheap, simple, limited government is illusory, as is the notion of simple, swift, and radical social surgery.
The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suited either to man’s nature or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them.17
Radical man knows no limits, no boundaries to his excesses, which is well illustrated by the Jacobin attack on, and humiliation of, the queen of France on October 6, 1789. Burke’s Reflections reach their literary, emotional, and theoretical crescendo in the passages he devotes to the queen. All his literary genius, all the frenzy of his fury, is in the service of his consummate artistry as he manipulates the reader with this poignant and unforgettable tale of radical savagery. Roused from her peaceful sleep, this gentle soul, “glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendor and joy,” is forced to flee her palace “almost naked.” Her guards are butchered, and her rooms in that “most splendid palace in the world” are left “swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.” The queen and her husband flee Versailles, and have their subjects avenged this humiliation? They have not. It is this which prompts Burke to lament the demise of the ancien régime, its institutions and its values.
Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.18
Burke moves immediately from this condemnation of the failure to respect the exalted rank of the queen to a basic repudiation of the liberal notion of freedom. What he had begun by giving government a positive role in repressing the evil inclinations of unbridled individualism, he completes now by a redefinition of freedom. In liberal theory, freedom is the simple and empirical experience of the lack of constraint. It consists in the independence and autonomy of the self-willing ego. Burke sees this very freedom as the death blow to the old order, and rightly so. It is this new notion of freedom that accounts for no one rising to champion the queen. What it has replaced is what freedom means for Burke, whose definition differs profoundly
Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom!19
The corporate-feudal world of hierarchy where everyone knows and loves his “little platoon” is thus revived in Burke’s assault on the new age of sophistry, economists, and calculators. Burke’s notion of freedom denies the very basis of the new liberal ideal. The exalted freedom of a hierarchical social structure is in reality the absence of “selfish and mischievous ambition.” Man is free in his little platoon, .subordinate and obedient to those above him, in the sense that he is free of striving, free from ambition, free from the restless anxiety associated with ambition. Man is free from competition. His exalted freedom is the serenity and peace of mind that comes from knowing and loving his place. Man is free who has ambition neither to lift himself above his platoon nor to topple and replace those set above him like the queen.
What has passed is a social order characterized by what Burke calls “a noble equality”—a far cry from liberal notions of equality. Noble equality recognizes rank and “the gradations of social life.” It is the principle of “love, veneration, admiration, or attachment” to persons. It is the “old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty.” The mechanistic and abstract philosophy of the rights of man, of individual freedom, has no respect for this nobler equality that unites in personal bonds people who are fundamentally unequal. Radical man levels all such noble distinctions; he dissolves all that softened private society with “the new conquering empire of light and reason.”
All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded, as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.20
The theme of man’s inadequacy, his basic limitation, is here reintroduced. In his essence man is defective and imperfect. He requires “the pleasing illusions,” the myths and superstitions that make life livable and tolerable. The radical who seeks to free man from the past, from tradition, myth, and religion, and who sets him to live by his own light and reason, is unaware of man’s intrinsic weakness and fallibility. The rationalism and utopianism of the radicals is rejected here, as is the basic Enlightenment assumption of the unbounded horizons of the empire of reason. It is the eighteenth century itself that Burke repudiates in his proud admission that
we are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, (and they seldom fail,) they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason.21
It is all here, the cornerstone of Burke’s counterrevolution, and with it a great deal of the future conservative creed. The most basic Enlightenment assumptions are written off with the stroke of a pen. Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy. But he is free, as the radicals construe freedom. This is indeed where their freedom leads, and why virtuous men pull about them their cloaks of unfreedom. In this wardrobe there are, according to Burke, two basic outfits: the “spirit of a gentleman” and the “spirit of religion,” of “nobility and the clergy.”22 It is the prescription of aristocracy—the ancient and received institutions of hierarchy—and the prejudice of religion—the ancient and received ideas of God and his mercy—that rescue man from his shivering fearful self. They ennoble life; they rescue the individual by submerging his individuality in the “general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Who is man, then, to question his social institutions, to envy his betters, to seek perfection in this world? He is puny and ineffectual, Burke answers, meanin
gless and irrelevant on his own. He is someone only when guided by “ancient opinions and rules of life.” Freed from the wisdom and experience of the ages, ungoverned by prescription and prejudice, men are no more than a “swinish multitude,” or “little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.”23
The liberal sees the state as a mere contractual arrangement, a voluntaristic creation of self-seeking and autonomous individuals concerned primarily with the secure enjoyment of their property rights. But the state is more to Burke, much more than the joint stock company arrangement of liberal theory, which he ridicules as the paltry vision of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” The state is, he wrote, “better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties,”24 Men ought to look to the state with more reverence than to the East India Company. Political and social life involves more than the scramble of mortal individuals for wealth and profit, for self-fulfillment, oblivious to those who have lived before or who will live hereafter. Whatever the liberal touches becomes, in Burke’s mind, a matter of economics and commercial calculation. “Let us not,” he pleaded in the House of Commons, “turn our everything, the love of our country, our honour, our virtue, our religion, and our security to traffic—and estimate them by the scale of pecuniary or commercial reckoning. The nation that goes to that calculation destroys itself.”25