How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  According to Burke, the key question that should be asked is not whether a political system conforms to some abstract ideals but whether it ‘works’ pragmatically, by which he meant whether it fosters peace, order and good government over the long term, given the particular context in which it is situated. The only reliable test for this is that of time, which alone can establish the true viability and durability of a political system. Burke believed that Britain had passed that test admirably well, perhaps better than any society ever had, and now needed to be protected from the revolutionary contagion that had overrun France. By contrast, the French revolutionary leaders built their politics ‘not on convenience, but on truth’, with predictably disastrous results. That is why the Platonic ideal of philosopher-kings is very far from Burke’s view of how a polity should be governed, since politics should address immediate practical problems, not abstract problems of logic. Plato’s belief that the prolonged study of mathematics is an essential prerequisite for enlightened political rule would have struck Burke as dangerously absurd. In this he was much closer to Aristotle, who distinguished very clearly between purely intellectual virtues and practical virtues, which require a flexible and pragmatic, rather than a philosophical, mind. The greatest political virtue for Burke (as for Aristotle) is prudence, which is not only the first of the political virtues but ‘the director, the regulator, the standard of them all’.

  Burke’s Reflections contrasts two types of revolution, one of which he supports and the other he condemns. On the one hand, like Locke it defends the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688, in which the Catholic King James of England and Scotland was overthrown by his son-in-law the Protestant king of the Netherlands. On the other hand, he attacks the revolution in France in 1789, which overthrew the Old Regime in the name of the ‘Rights of Man’. Burke was responding here to a popular sermon by the Revd Richard Price arguing that the recent revolution in France was a continuation and extension of the earlier revolution in Britain, and that both events expressed enlightened, cosmopolitan principles of freedom and progress that should be welcomed and encouraged. In Burke’s eyes, the French Revolution was the very antithesis of the moderate ‘Glorious Revolution’ that both he and Price admired. Burke agreed with Locke that the revolution of 1688 was a welcome intervention to preserve England’s ancient constitution from being usurped by the despotic tendencies of King James and his zealous royalist and Catholic supporters. Burke was convinced that the delicate balance between king, lords and commons in Britain’s parliamentary form of government had evolved over centuries through a slow, piecemeal process of trial and error, compromise and pragmatism. The advantages of the traditional British approach to politics were apparent to him in the near-perfection of the British constitution, which was ideally adapted to the specific circumstances of England (if not all of Britain) and should be altered only with the greatest circumspection and humility. A wise and prudent statesman should approach long-established institutions and practices with ‘a politic caution’ and be guided by history and experience rather than universal doctrines about man and society. Burke strongly rejected Locke’s argument that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 illustrates the abstract principle that ‘government exists by the consent of the governed’.

  The revolution in France was something altogether different and infinitely more dangerous, as far as Burke was concerned. It was a ‘philosophic revolution’, abstract, utopian and universal, with a natural tendency to spread across borders like a virus, infecting the body politic wherever it went. By its very nature, 1688 was a limited, local species of revolution that did not extend beyond its territory, unlike 1789. It was, fundamentally, just a salutary correction to a basically sound political system rather than a root-and-branch change. By contrast, what happened in France was a new and radical kind of revolution – ‘a Revolution of doctrine and theoretick dogma’. France after 1789 had become a ‘Republic of Philosophy’ governed by ‘philosophic lords’ full of hubris and enthralled to abstract first principles. These fanatical ‘politicians of metaphysics’ were intoxicated by the ideas and values of the philosophers of the Enlightenment – Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, d’Alembert, Diderot, all of whom Burke denounces by name in his Reflections. He was among the first of the Revolution’s enemies to blame the ideas of these philosophers for the disastrous collapse of political authority and social order in France in the 1790s, a view that became increasingly popular in the decades that followed. His book did much to popularize the idea of the Enlightenment as a principal cause of the Revolution.

  Burke distinguished between two different conceptions of the role of elected representatives. The first is a ‘delegate’ who expresses his electors’ will in Parliament; the second is a ‘trustee’ who uses his own conscience and judgement to decide what is best for the nation. In a famous speech to his own electors in Bristol, Burke promised them that, as their Member of Parliament, he would always follow his conscience as a trustee and never be a mere delegate – whereupon they promptly voted him out of office (an inconvenience that Burke easily overcame a month later, when he took the seat of Malton in Yorkshire, a ‘rotten borough’ in the pocket of his patron and which he likely never bothered to visit, so the question of trusteeship didn’t trouble him personally again). Burke insisted that, in their deliberations, individual Members of Parliament must consider only ‘one nation, with one interest, that of the whole’ and not be bound by the opinions and preferences of the particular area they represent. Ironically, that was also the view of the new revolutionary regime in France, whose first written constitution expressly prohibited elected representatives from acting as delegates of their electors. The fact that only 5 per cent of the population of Britain could vote in 1790 was a mark in its favour, according to the elitist Burke, whereas for the populist Rousseau it simply proved that the country really had despotism at its heart. Students of democratic politics today continue to debate the merits of these two conceptions. When asked to choose between them, many politicians mysteriously claim to be both delegates and trustees!

  The prophetic powers that Burke displayed in his Reflections extended far beyond the revolutionary events in France. He glimpsed a new and vulgar age emerging in Europe, dominated by ‘sophisters, economists, and calculators’, a trend that was just beginning in his time and is rampant in our own. His warnings about the application of ambitious, abstract theories to everyday politics without regard to context and his general political scepticism, emphasizing the delicate complexities and fragility of social life, are as relevant today as they have always been. That change should normally be undertaken with humility is an essential and eternal piece of political wisdom that Burke expressed with wonderful force and eloquence. But his horror and revulsion at the revolutionary mobs in Paris seem to have led him to a naïve trust that a traditional paternalistic elite, allied with a rising class of propertied gentlemen, would benevolently look after the wellbeing of everyone, a prominent feature of British political culture that needed little reinforcement (then or now). Such awed deference prompted Karl Marx to dismiss Burke contemptuously as a ‘sycophant’. It is a criticism that Burke’s contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft made a generation before Marx. His political scepticism sometimes seems suspiciously and conveniently selective.

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  Mary Wollstonecraft: The Feminist

  Mary Wollstonecraft was an impoverished, 33-year-old English spinster, former governess and school headmistress when she optimistically (some would say naïvely) sailed alone to France just as the revolution she supported there was reaching its most violent and extreme phase. This was the political equivalent of storm-chasing. By then she was used to swimming against the tide of circumstances as an independent woman writer and advocate of gender equality in an age that strongly disapproved of both. Now she was voluntarily in the very eye of the revolutionary storm that was raging in Europe. She arrived in Paris just in time to see the king carried to his execution, as he ‘passed b
y my window’ on the way to the guillotine, she later recorded. The republican Wollstonecraft was surprisingly moved by this poignant image, writing to a friend that it ‘made the tears flow insensibly from my eyes when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going to meet death’. Soon it was her own head that was at risk. Barely two weeks later France declared war on Britain, and British nationals in France were rounded up in their hundreds and imprisoned as alleged spies or counter-revolutionaries. Even the radical Anglo-American writer Thomas Paine was arrested by the regime, despite being an active supporter of the French Revolution and an honorary citizen of France, appointed to the National Convention in Paris. Wollstonecraft was a friend and ally of Paine’s and had every reason to expect that she too would be imprisoned and possibly even executed in the frenzy of violence that was then raging in France.

  Yet, like Paine, Wollstonecraft survived the ‘Reign of Terror’ that followed, as the Jacobins purged France of tens of thousands of ‘enemies of the state’ via that efficiently ‘humane’ killing machine, the guillotine. ‘I am grieved’, she wrote ruefully to a friend, ‘when I think of the blood that has stained the cause of freedom in Paris’. But her faith in the fundamental principles of the French Revolution was unbroken, and probably unbreakable. She even wrote An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) to explain and justify her optimism that a ‘reign of reason and peace’ would eventually rise from the horrors and excesses of the age. Unfortunately, the hope Wollstonecraft had for humanity did not extend to her own personal life. A year after writing these upbeat words she twice attempted to kill herself to relieve the pain of a broken heart. When she did eventually find contentment in her relationship with the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, it was very short-lived; she died just a few months after their marriage from complications arising from the birth of their daughter Mary, who would become the author of Frankenstein and the wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Wollstonecraft was just 38.

  The work for which Mary Wollstonecraft is now best known is her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published the year she moved to France. It is a radical work for its time, when women in Europe had few legal rights, were excluded from public life and very tightly constrained by social norms and conventions from entering most careers and professions. For the greater part, women were confined to the domestic sphere and received little in the way of an education for anything beyond it. When a woman married, she lost most of her limited legal rights to her husband, on the traditional view that her legal personality was merged with his. That is why Wollstonecraft describes home life as often a ‘gilt cage’ and a ‘prison’ where most women cannot realize their full human potential. She suffered directly and personally from this state of affairs. That is one reason she avoided marriage until the last year of her life, despite enormous social pressure on women at the time to marry and bear children. Prior to her success as a writer, Mary Wollstonecraft was compelled to work at menial jobs that were stultifying to a woman of her natural talents and ambitions. For example, she served as the governess to a wealthy family in Ireland, a role she found demeaning and oppressive. As a single woman without means, pursuing a career as a self-supporting author in the face of such odds was a brave and risky choice, and it proved as much an inspiration to later feminists as her writings, which established her as the mother of modern feminist thought.

  Wollstonecraft’s best-selling A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which sold out in just three weeks, was her first major political work. In it she presents herself as the voice of the simple, solidly middle-class (essentially Protestant) virtues of hard work, frugality, modesty and self-discipline. She also champions Enlightenment values such as reason, progress and liberty against what she sees as Edmund Burke’s overwrought and flowery (even feminine) defence, in his Reflections, of tradition, aristocratic privilege and hereditary monarchy. Wollstonecraft did not offer her readers an entirely original or systematic political theory or programme in this work. She was more of a public moralist than a political philosopher in the narrow sense, closer in style to her friend and fellow radical Thomas Paine than to Thomas Hobbes. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she believed that the society she inhabited was morally bankrupt and pervaded with unhappiness and hypocrisy as a result, which is why she supported the revolution in France. She thought that significant and lasting political reform was very unlikely without a fundamental moral reformation, starting with attitudes towards women.

  Wollstonecraft’s case for women’s rights challenges the conventional separation between the public and private spheres which goes back to Aristotle and pervades virtually the whole history of Western political thought. The slogan of the twentieth-century feminist movement, that ‘the personal is political’, was already there in her argument that traditionally non-political institutions such as marriage and the family were the real source of the oppression of women and directly related to conventionally political issues. That is why she makes social attitudes a matter of political debate. Political rights, while necessary, are insufficient in themselves to emancipate women without a radical transformation of the wider culture and morality. For Wollstonecraft, meaningful political change is dependent on a fundamental and sweeping overthrow of traditional beliefs about the capabilities of women and on a broader moral revolution of the kind that the philosophers of the French Enlightenment that she admired had campaigned for. Although she enthusiastically supported the French Revolution, she demanded something even more radical than it was prepared to offer women, which was disappointingly little. It had failed to extend political rights to women, let alone institute a broader social revolution in gender relations. She believed that changing the relationship between citizens in the public sphere required fundamental alterations to the relationship between husbands and wives in the private sphere so that they are equal companions in a partnership, just as politics should be based on civic friendship among equal individuals of both sexes. She denounced conventional marriage as ‘legal prostitution’ and condemned the popular image of women as passive and frivolous adornments of their husbands, on whom they are made to depend and whose pleasure is their main purpose in life. Wollstonecraft wanted men and women to be treated the same in all spheres because treating them unequally in one would necessarily undermine equality in the others. The French Revolution was a good start, she thought, but far from sufficient to emancipate women, who were excluded from the rights of citizenship yet again.

  A central theme of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman is the way that the education, upbringing and domestic lives of women have weakened and narrowed their minds in the process of making them pleasing to men. It has made them into ‘creatures of sensation’ rather than intellect, ruled by their overdeveloped passions rather than their reason, with deliberately weak and comparatively underdeveloped minds. Their unbalanced outer lives are a reflection of their unbalanced inner lives. When she writes that she hopes to persuade women ‘to become more masculine’, she means that she wants to enlarge and strengthen their minds so that they can think and act for themselves, just as men do. Traditional notions of femininity have stressed delicacy, sensuality and refinement, which Wollstonecraft claims have left women weak in mind and body and therefore dependent on men and unable to function outside of the domestic sphere. Her questioning of the conventional conception of gender, like her criticisms of the conventional distinction between public and private spheres, was very radical at the time and would remain so until the feminist movement in the West after the Second World War.

  Wollstonecraft called for a radical transformation in the education of women as a key part of their broader political emancipation. Her first published book was Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which offered its female readers practical advice on child-rearing based on solidly bourgeois values such as honesty, self-discipline and reason. Although she embraced Rousseau’s progre
ssive principles for a child-centred education, she denounced his arguments for separate, gender-based educations for boys and girls and devoted long passages in her second Vindication to challenging his attitude towards women in general. Despite his radical ideas about politics and education, Rousseau was in the mainstream of Western thought in his insistence on the strict separation of private and public spheres, each governed by its own principles. He believed that women posed a threat to the public sphere because they lack a natural sense of justice, and so should be kept to the private sphere. But Wollstonecraft replied that, if Rousseau is right about this lack, it is only because women have traditionally been denied access to the public sphere to develop a sense of justice and political virtue. It is a matter of bad nurture, not bad nature. She strongly opposed conventional, gender-based approaches to education in favour of a single, co-educational system, much as Plato had done in his Republic. Education for boys and girls should emphasize analytical thinking and practical skills that would enable everyone to lead independent lives outside the home, irrespective of sex, and which would enlarge the mind to participate actively in the duties of citizenship. Wollstonecraft insisted that the freedom and equality that should prevail in the public world must also prevail in the private realms of marriage, family and work. You cannot have one without the other, something that Rousseau and the French revolutionaries failed to understand.