Classic Political Philosophy for the Modern Man

by Andrew Lynn

  The right of the first occupier, though more real than the right of the strongest, becomes a real right only when the right of property has already been established. Every man has naturally a right to everything he needs; but the positive act which makes him proprietor of one thing excludes him from everything else. Having his share, he ought to keep to it, and can have no further right against the community. This is why the right of the first occupier, which in the state of nature is so weak, claims the respect of every man in civil society. In this right we are respecting not so much what belongs to another as what does not belong to ourselves. In general, to establish the right of the first occupier over a plot of ground, the following conditions are necessary: first, the land must not yet be inhabited; secondly, a man must occupy only the amount he needs for his subsistence; and, in the third place, possession must be taken, not by an empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, the only sign of proprietorship that should be respected by others, in default of a legal title.

  In granting the right of first occupancy to necessity and labour, are we not really stretching it as far as it can go? Is it possible to leave such a right unlimited? Is it to be enough to set foot on a plot of common ground, in order to be able to call yourself at once the master of it? Is it to be enough that a man has the strength to expel others for a moment, in order to establish his right to prevent them from ever returning? How can a man or a people seize an immense territory and keep it from the rest of the world except by a punishable usurpation, since all others are being robbed, by such an act, of the place of habitation and the means of subsistence which nature gave them in common? When Nunez Balboa, standing on the seashore, took possession of the South Seas and the whole of South America in the name of the crown of Castile, was that enough to dispossess all their actual inhabitants, and to shut out from them all the princes of the world? On such a showing, these ceremonies are idly multiplied, and the Catholic King need only take possession all at once, from his apartment, of the whole universe, merely making a subsequent reservation about what was already in the possession of other princes.

  We can imagine how the lands of individuals, where they were contiguous and came to be united, became the public territory, and how the right of sovereignty, extending from the subjects over the lands they held, became at once real and personal. The possessors were thus made more dependent, and the forces at their command used to guarantee their fidelity. The advantage of this does not seem to have been felt by ancient monarchs, who called themselves Kings of the Persians, Scythians, or Macedonians, and seemed to regard themselves more as rulers of men than as masters of a country. Those of the present day more cleverly call themselves Kings of France, Spain, England, etc.: thus holding the land, they are quite confident of holding the inhabitants.

  The peculiar fact about this alienation is that, in taking over the goods of individuals, the community, so far from despoiling them, only assures them legitimate possession, and changes usurpation into a true right and enjoyment into proprietorship. Thus the possessors, being regarded as depositaries of the public good, and having their rights respected by all the members of the state and maintained against foreign aggression by all its forces, have, by a cession which benefits both the public and still more themselves, acquired, so to speak, all that they gave up. This paradox may easily be explained by the distinction between the rights which the sovereign and the proprietor have over the same estate, as we shall see later on.

  It may also happen that men begin to unite one with another before they possess anything, and that, subsequently occupying a tract of country which is enough for all, they enjoy it in common, or share it out among themselves, either equally or according to a scale fixed by the sovereign. However the acquisition be made, the right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all: without this, there would be neither stability in the social tie, nor real force in the exercise of sovereignty.

  I shall end this chapter and this book by remarking on a fact on which the whole social system should rest: i.e. that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.[7]

  * * *

  ‘Shocked by the novelty of the evil, both rich and wretched,/ He flees his wealth, and hates what he once prayed for.’ From Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.127-28, describing Midas after being granted his wish that everything be turned to gold. ↵

  ‘Learned inquiries into public right are often only the history of past abuses; and troubling to study them too deeply is a profitless infatuation' (Essay on the Interests of France in Relation to its Neighbours, by the Marquis d'Argenson). This is exactly what Grotius has done. ↵

  See a short treatise of Plutarch's entitled That Animals Reason. ↵

  The Romans, who understood and respected the right of war more than any other nation on earth, carried their scruples on this head so far that a citizen was not allowed to serve as a volunteer without engaging himself expressly against the enemy, and against such and such an enemy by name. A legion in which the younger Cato was seeing his first service under Popilius having been reconstructed, the elder Cato wrote to Popilius that if he wished his son to continue serving under him, he must administer to him a new military oath, because, the first having been annulled, he was no longer able to bear arms against the enemy. The same Cato wrote to his son telling him to take great care not to go into battle before taking this new oath. I know that the siege of Clusium and other isolated events can be quoted against me; but I am citing laws and customs. The Romans are the people that least often transgressed its laws; and no other people has had such good ones. ↵

  The real meaning of this word has been almost wholly lost in modern times; most people mistake a town for a city, and a townsman for a citizen. They do not know that houses make a town, but citizens a city. The same mistake long ago cost the Carthaginians dear. I have never read of the title of citizens being given to the subjects of any prince, not even the ancient Macedonians or the English of today, though they are nearer liberty than anyone else. The French alone everywhere familiarly adopt the name of citizens, because, as can be seen from their dictionaries, they have no idea of its meaning; otherwise they would be guilty in usurping it of the crime of lèse majesté: among them, the name expresses a virtue, and not a right. When Bodin spoke of our citizens and townsmen, he fell into a bad blunder in taking the one class for the other. M. d'Alembert has avoided the error, and, in his article on Geneva, has clearly distinguished the four orders of men (or even five, counting mere foreigners) who dwell in our town, of which two only compose the Republic. No other French writer, to my knowledge, has understood the real meaning of the word citizen. ↵

  A fictitious person created under the law. ↵

  Under bad governments, this equality is only apparent and illusory: it serves only to ­keep the pauper in his poverty and the rich man in the position he has usurped. In fact, laws are always of use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much. ↵

  7

  Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

  introduction

  Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, when asked in 1972 about the historical impact of the French Revolution (1789-1799), is famously said to have replied that it was ‘too early to tell’. It is not wholly clear whether Zhou had fully understood which ‘revolution’ was, in fact, being referred to. But the fact that the anecdote has taken hold of the popular imagination itself reveals something widely understood, if only intuitively, by people at large: that we all live now, to a greater or lesser degree, in the shadow of that momentous event. The French Revolution was indeed in many respects the def
ining moment in the long march towards the modern ‘soft-totalitarian’ regimes that dominate the West at this moment in history. Its uniqueness stems from the fact that it marked the passing of an old order (the ancien régime of feudal traditions supporting absolutist monarchy) and the arrival of new ways of thinking, ruling, despoiling, and killing.

  Since the French Revolution is the foundational event of political modernity, there is little that could be more instructive than to learn of its principal characteristics from its foremost contemporary critic, Edmund Burke, a man who is also widely considered to be the father of modern conservatism.

  Edmund Burke (1730-1797) was both political theorist and practical politician. An Irishman by birth, Burke was was born in Dublin and studied at Trinity College, before moving to London where, still a young man, he became part of Dr Johnson’s circle. Burke’s political career was established in 1765 when he became private secretary to Charles, Marquess of Rockingham, who was then Prime Minister of Great Britain, and took a seat in the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Wendover. He came to public attention in the mid-1770s when, in the context of the rebellion that was brewing in the American colonies, he made an impassioned plea for tolerance towards the colonists who, in his view, were ‘descendants of Englishmen…devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles’; he was also an advocate of parliamentary democracy as a form of representative government in which the representative was not a delegate, tasked merely with giving effect to his constituents’ instructions, but someone who owed his constituents the benefit of his independent judgment and enlightened conscience. It was, however, Jacobinism and the French Revolution that—once he had recognized the threat that they constituted—most powerfully engaged Burke’s efforts. By the time Burke died in 1797, the French revolutionary armies were victorious over virtually the whole of Europe. Whether his political philosophy, or the conservative tradition inspired by it, has been sufficiently robust to counter its legacy will be a question for historians of the future.

  The historical outline of the Revolution is simple enough. King Louis XVI, seeking to impose a land tax, in 1789 reconvened the Estates General (les états généraux)—an assembly representing France’s clergy, nobility and middle class. The non-aristocratic ‘Third Estate’, in disagreement with the procedures for examining credentials of deputies, however, soon abandoned the name of the Estates General, and adopted for itself instead the title of National Assembly; this was followed by popular revolt in Paris, the storming of the Bastille, and agrarian revolt in the countryside; all of which led inexorably to the execution of the King, along with his wife Marie-Antoinette, and a bloody ten-month Reign of Terror (la Terreur), during which thousands of suspected enemies of the revolution were sent to the guillotine. In one sense, it was a terrible failure: the outcome of all this mayhem and bloodshed was the coup d’état of a young and successful general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte who established himself as ‘first consul’ and de facto dictator. But in one sense, at least, the revolutionaries had achieved their goals: the old order was dead, and there would be no going back.

  The French Revolution brought the ‘rights of man’ to the fore. On 4 August 1789, the Assembly adopted the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen). The document did not simply enact rights; it purported to recognize them as pre-existing under the auspices of a ‘Supreme Being’. Any society that did not guarantee these rights was not simply imperfect but (in the words of the Declaration) had no constitution at all. It declared that man was born free and equal—and that social distinctions could only be tolerated when founded upon the common good. It conferred (or ‘recognized’) the rights to liberty, property, safety, and resistance against oppression; it also required the establishment of a ‘public force’ and a ‘common contribution’ to be ‘equally distributed between all the citizens, according to their ability to pay’. In retrospect, it is evident that the Declaration prefigured the arrival of the state in its recognizably modern form: it provided that such a state would provide us with liberty of a kind (we had a right to that) and equality of a kind (we had a right to that too), although it was seemingly blind to the potential contradictions between these two rights. It was much less blind to the fact that it would need to be handsomely funded and well armed in case we were to step out of line: one of the first things it did was to bring war to the rest of Europe in the dream of spreading the fruits of the revolution.

  The Revolution heralded the arrival of a new kind of political practice adapted to a more democratic era. Political players needed above all, from this point on, to find ways of working with (or more commonly upon) the masses. They learned to do this by way of social pressure and public commitments: the earliest revolutionaries’ green ribbon (cockade)—intended originally as a symbol of spring, hope, and liberty—became so prevalent that it was soon dangerous to be seen outdoors without one. They did it by way of misinformation and fake news: despite its status as the symbol of an oppressive regime, it is now known that the Bastille rarely held more than ten prisoners, including, in the spring of 1789, four forgers, a Count whose family had arranged for him to be imprisoned for incest, and a mentally disturbed Irishman who believed himself to be, alternately, Julius Caesar and God. And they did it by making use of hoax events and political shills as when, for example, a crowd of market-women marching upon Versailles was infiltrated by men dressed as women (all in the pay of the Duc d’Orléans and other agitators) to demand the acceptance of their political demands.[1]

  The main thrust of Burke’s political thinking, in the revolutionary context, is that we ought to view our rights as an inheritance—the ‘rights of Englishmen inherited from their forefathers’ in Burke’s words—rather than as abstract principles in the revolutionary form of ‘rights of man’. This approach in no way rules out the possibility of justified resistance to arbitrary rule: Burke explicitly, and approvingly, points back to England’s own ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, when William of Orange was invited to ascend the throne upon James II’s supposed abdication, and on this occasion the Declaration of Right expressly referred to the ‘ancient rights and liberties’ and ‘true ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom’. Resistance, for Burke, can be fully and properly justified by calling upon the native tradition of rights in an act of national revival and reinvigoration; it is not rights per se, but the overturning of the native tradition and its replacement with alien and abstract principles, that he deprecates.

  Burke’s political thinking was based not on any nostalgia or antiquarianism but rather on his uniquely organic view of the world. What motivated his philosophy was a spirit of analogy: the British political system coincided with the order of the universe, in the sense that it was the ‘kind of existence possessed by a permanent body with temporary parts’, journeying through ‘a varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression’. Within it, the principles of conservation and transmission meet with the principle of improvement, and the advantages that can be obtained through the process of gradual renovation and reform can be locked in for posterity.

  There’s a lot that Burke throws out in the Reflections that remains of the greatest relevance today. Burke was experienced enough in the ways of the world to grasp that the revolutionary firebrands who wanted to bring down their betters would not be willing to subject themselves to the same levelling or equalisation (‘those who attempt to level never equalise’); he was likewise clear that men naively overestimate what share they will have in the property of the wealthy once that property is redistributed, and that, in any event, those who lead them in revolution never intend to make such a distribution. Burke was cognisant of the demoralization programme that the French revolutionary party had effected against the people: in order to justify the overturning of the established order, the French had to be encouraged to view themselves as ‘lowborn se
rvile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789’, and this act of psychological warfare had ‘slain the mind’ of the country. He hinted darkly at conspiratorial forces guiding revolutionary activity from behind the curtain, and he drew attention to the ‘compulsory paper money’ that was to be made available to facilitate ‘plunder by devaluation’. He anticipated that if this generation of revolutionaries had been small-town lawyers and curates, the next generation would constitute a still less impressive new ‘nobility’ of craftsmen (‘artificers’), peasants (‘clowns’), and money men.

  In the final analysis, though, it is Burke’s conception of our rights and liberties that is most important today. Burke provides a sober-minded and critical view of rights and their origins: he sees that natural rights—insofar as the term is meaningful at all—are those we have in nature, and yet when each man has a right to all things (as in the state of nature) he has a right to nothing. Government is our way of providing for our human wants—not for the ‘rights’ that in the state of nature had left us so hopeless—and the most basic want is, of course, that other men be restrained so that we may be free to enjoy our lives, liberties, and property. The way that we manage all of the various wants of mankind is a matter of convention and not natural rights; it is a process of achieving balances between varieties of good, compromises between good and evil, and sometimes also balances and compromises between evil and evil. None of this is easy: causation is not always immediately apparent, so that granting certain persons a particular ‘right’ now may have devastating consequences for the well-being of many others further down the line; restraining the desire for satisfaction of our wants today may, conversely, promote the realization of our ‘rights’ further out in the future. This is a view that the simplistic abstract rights asserted by the French revolutionaries, and the similar ones promoted by ‘human rights’ advocates around the world today, cannot, it seems, fully comprehend.