Burke

Edmund Burke

When the Revolution broke out across the Channel and much of liberal Europe cheered, Edmund Burke looked at France and saw not the dawn of liberty but a people tearing up the inheritance that made liberty possible. The book he wrote in alarm, Reflections on the Revolution in France, became the founding text of modern conservatism, and it is the great paradox of his life that its author was, in almost every other cause he touched, a reformer. Burke championed the American colonists, fought for relief of Ireland's Catholics, and spent years prosecuting the abuses of the East India Company. What he could not abide was not change but a particular way of pursuing it: the attempt to rebuild a whole society overnight from abstract first principles, sweeping away the slow accumulated wisdom of generations.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads Burke from the collected Works by way of Project Gutenberg, all firmly in the public domain: the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), his masterpiece; the early Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757); and the satirical Vindication of Natural Society (1756). Because the Reflections is a single continuous essay, the chat cites it by work title; it cites the Enquiry by its part and section. Expect citations by work, and by part and section for the Enquiry (Part II, Section i).

Life. Burke was born in 1729 in Dublin, an Anglo-Irish Protestant with a Catholic mother, and took his degree at Trinity College Dublin before crossing to London to make his way first by his pen and then in politics. He became private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham and the leading intellect of the Rockingham Whigs, and from his seat in the Commons he threw himself into one reforming cause after another: conciliation with the American colonies on grounds of prudence rather than abstract right, economical reform to curb the crown's patronage, relief for Irish Catholics, and above all the long impeachment of Warren Hastings for the plunder of India, which Burke pursued for years as a matter of moral principle. He was, in short, no defender of every established abuse. That is what makes his stand against the French Revolution so striking, and his political philosophy continues to anchor the conservative tradition it founded.

Where to begin. Start with the Reflections, which contains the whole of his political vision in the heat of argument. Turn next to the Enquiry for the aesthetics that made his early name, and then to the great speeches on America and on the impeachment of Hastings, where the philosopher of tradition shows himself a practical reformer with a conscience about empire.

The sublime and the beautiful. Burke's first major book was not political but aesthetic. The Enquiry draws a sharp line between two sources of strong feeling. The beautiful is what we love, and Burke traces it to smallness, smoothness, delicacy, and gentle gradation. The sublime is what overwhelms us, and he roots it in vastness, power, obscurity, and above all terror experienced from a position of safety, a delightful horror tied to the instinct of self-preservation. The distinction proved enormously fertile: Immanuel Kant took it up and rebuilt it in the Critique of Judgment, and Burke's Enquiry stands near the head of modern aesthetics.

Against abstract reason. Burke's quarrel with the Revolution was at bottom a quarrel with a method. The revolutionaries proposed to deduce the just society from the abstract rights of man, as if politics were geometry, and to demolish whatever inherited institution failed the test. Burke distrusts the private reason of any individual or generation, which he thought small and apt to err, and trusts instead the wisdom that has been tested and refined across ages and stored up in institutions, manners, and custom. The theorist with his diagram is the most dangerous of statesmen, because the society he means to perfect is the only one we have.

Prejudice and prescription. Hence Burke's startling defense of prejudice, by which he means not bigotry but pre-judgment, the inherited disposition that lets a person act rightly and promptly without reasoning everything out from scratch. Prejudice in this sense is, he writes, the general bank and capital of nations and of ages, and the wise community draws on it rather than squandering it. With prejudice goes prescription: long usage itself confers a title. An institution that has served for centuries carries a presumption in its favor that no individual's bright speculation should be allowed lightly to overturn.

Society as a partnership across generations. The deepest image in Burke is the state as a covenant that binds the dead, the living, and the unborn. The social bond is not a commercial contract to be dissolved at pleasure, not a partnership in a trade of pepper and coffee, but a sacred partnership in every science, art, and virtue whose ends reach far beyond any single lifetime. Rights and liberties are an entail, an inheritance held in trust and to be handed on improved, not abstractions to be minted anew. When Burke mourns that the age of chivalry is gone and that the decent drapery of life is being stripped away, he is mourning the loss of the manners and reverence that clothe naked power and make a free society possible.

Reform in order to conserve. Nothing has been more misunderstood in Burke than this. He was not the enemy of all change; he wrote that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Reform should be organic and gradual, the repair of a beloved old building rather than its demolition, and Burke reformed exactly so, in America, in India, in Ireland, in order to preserve the constitution he loved. He opposed the Revolution not because he cherished the abuses of the old regime but because revolution by abstraction tears down the concrete, working liberties that patient reform secures, and puts an unproven theory in their place.

Inherited rights, not the rights of man. Against the universal rights the revolutionaries proclaimed, Burke set the particular rights of Englishmen, the concrete liberties secured by Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution and handed down as a patrimony. Real freedom, he held, is found in a particular living tradition, not in a deduction that holds everywhere and therefore protects nothing in particular. An abstraction can be made to justify anything; an inheritance has limits written into it by long use.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Burke founded modern conservatism, and his influence runs far past any single party: defenders and critics alike still argue with him about tradition, prudence, and the limits of reason in politics. Read now, he is the philosopher of society as an inheritance and of reform as the careful conservation of what works. He learned his distrust of abstraction from the skepticism of David Hume and drew his account of inherited rights and limited government partly from John Locke, even as he turned Locke's contract from a revolutionary instrument into a conservative one. His Reflections provoked the most famous reply in the history of political pamphleteering when Mary Wollstonecraft answered it with her Vindication of the Rights of Men; his analysis of the sublime fed straight into the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant; and he stood against the revolutionary rationalism whose patron saint was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His question, whether a society can be remade from abstract principle without destroying the inherited wisdom that makes liberty possible, has never stopped being asked.