The Portable Edmund Burke (Portable Library) (2 page)

In the late 1780s Burke turned much of his parliamentary energy to two causes, the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of the East India Company and legislative efforts to improve the status of Catholics in both England and Ireland. These efforts paled in significance, however, as the French Revolution dominated the last years of his life. More than any other figure in English public life, Burke mobilized sentiment against the Jacobin cause at home and abroad. In the course of this, he split the Whig party, denouncing his former colleagues for their continued sympathy with the French experiment.

Few of his contemporaries had neutral views on this amazing public career. Burke was passionately worshiped and with equal passion hated. With puffy cheeks, fiery red hair, and excessive emotion, he held forth in the senate forum that was the unreformed House of Commons until three years before his death, in 1797. Some would be moved by the fount of republican wisdom, and others would rush for the exits. Perhaps this lay behind his ultimate failure to achieve the heights of political success: his intensity and passionate involvement were not the style appropriate for the pragmatic world of political management and leadership. But this is Burke the statesman; there is also Burke the enduring philosopher of conservatism.

Burke’s conservatism is grounded in skepticism. He stands in revolt against the eighteenth century and, as he saw it, the “smugness of adulterated metaphysics.” The “faith in the dogmatism of philosophers” had led Enlightenment thinkers to place faith in reason and abstract ideas, in speculation and a priori principles of natural right, freedom, and equality, as the basis on which to reform existing government. The English had no such illusions, he argued; they understood the complexity and fragility of human nature and human institutions; they were not “the converts of Rousseau ... the disciples ofVoltaire; Helvetius [had] made no progress amongst [them].” The English, according to Burke, regarded the rampant rationalism of the French philosophers and their quest for an ideal and perfect political order with sluggish skepticism. They understood that since the nature of man was intricate and society complex, “simple governments are fundamentally defective.”
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Burke’s political skepticism was, however, by no means simply a reaction to the trauma of the French Revolution. His opposition to abstract reasoning in philosophy and social matters appeared as early as his undergraduate years at Trinity College, Dublin, during the late 1740s. It also appeared in the religious and philosophical essays he produced between his graduation and the publication, in 1756, of his attack on Lord Bolingbroke’s religious rationalism as politically extrapolated. We know, for example, that in these years Burke attacked “great subtleties and refinements of reasoning,” which, he felt, produced disorders of the brain. “Custom is to be regarded with great deference” as “a more sure guide than our theories.”
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The conservative thrust of the skepticism found in the
Reflections
on the Revolution
in
France is also seen writ large in Burke’s response to radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parliament in the early 1780s. The agitation, he declared, approached the Constitution totally oblivious to the fact that the “House of Commons is a legislative body, corporate by prescription, not made upon any given theory.” The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments when all wise men knew that “a prescriptive government never was made upon any foregone theory.” How ridiculous, then, to put governments on procrustean beds and make them fit “the theories which learned and speculative men have made.”
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Such speculators, with their ideal blueprints, were political magicians cutting up the Constitution into pieces “in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigor.”
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But this is by no means the full measure of Burke’s skepticism. It can be seen even more completely in his conception of the art of governing, and in his views on the limited rational capacity of mankind. The conservative skeptic like Burke is deeply interested in the character and style of those who govern. He is convinced that pursuit of policies, of preconceived speculative plans—in short, of what we might today call ideology—is inappropriate behavior for political leadership. The major function of a magistrate is seen as prudential manager. Stable government must eschew ideology. What matters most is not the pursuit of policy but the quality of leadership. In Burke’s writings, this theme of the importance of wise management is carefully developed.

Government for Burke was not a science with exact and precise methods and conclusions; it was an art, practiced by artists skilled in prudence. Governors had to approach political issues according to their peculiar circumstances, not in light of abstract ideas or general theories of government. In his speeches on America and the taxation issue, Burke repeatedly insisted that “metaphysical distinctions” of abstract right be kept out of the deliberation and that prudence and virtuous discretion rule the day. Good political leadership was informed by principle, not ruled by it; and, more importantly, it was guided by circumstances. The wise magistrate, Burke argued, ought to respect the temper and opinions of a particular people, the spirit of their age; and, particularly, ought to respect and not tamper with the manners of the people, which in many ways formed the basis of their laws.

However distinguished his own public career in Parliament was, Burke knew that the likes of himself were not those rightly destined to be in the front ranks of England’s rulers. No matter how much he might proclaim himself not a friend to aristocracy, the overwhelming thrust of his writings insists that only men of breeding possess this quality of prudence so fundamental to the art of governing. This, after all, was the ultimate sin of the French: their failure to recognize the prescriptive role of aristocracy and its production of qualified governors. Governors ought “to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy,” ought to stand upon “elevated ground,” “to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse.”
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Before the great families, Burke humbly denies his capacity to possess the quality of character and skills of learning required to make a prudential magistrate; thus he writes to the duke of Richmond:

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

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.