Edmund Burke, the British statesman and political theorist, was born in Dublin in 1729. He came to London in 1750 and soon acquired a reputation as a philosopher and man of letters. In 1765 he was elected to the House of Commons, acting as party secretary and chief man of ideas to the Whig connection led by the Marquis of Rockingham. He wrote voluminously, and the eloquence he brought to expressing a high-minded but by no means unrealistic view of political possibilities has never been surpassed. He could bring out the universal element in the most parochial of issues.
Burke’s enduring importance in articulating a political tendency is particularly evident in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and subsequent late works in which he defended his criticism of the Revolution against fellow Whigs who had welcomed it as an act of liberation from an odious Bourbon absolutism. Attacked as one who had betrayed the cause of liberty, Burke agreed (in the Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs) that consistency was the highest virtue in politics, but proceeded to theorize its complex nature. In supporting the American colonists, he argued, he was in no way committed to support every movement which raised the banner of liberty, for in his view the Americans ‘had taken up arms from one motive only; that is, our attempting to tax them without their consent’ (Burke 1855, Appeal, vol. 3). Real political consistency must take account of circumstances, and cannot be deduced from principles. And it was in terms of the contrast between historical concreteness and abstract principle that Burke interpreted the challenge posed by the revolutionaries in France.
The revolutionaries were, Burke argued, amateur politicians attempting to solve the complex problems of French society with a set of theories or what he called ‘metaphysic rights’. They believed that an ideal rational constitution, in which a republic guaranteed the rights of humankind, was suitable for all societies. This belief constituted a revelation which stigmatized most existing beliefs as prejudice and superstition, and all existing forms of government as corrupt and unjust. On Burke’s historical understanding of the specificity of different societies, the beliefs and practices of any society revealed their character; indeed, properly understood, they revealed a kind of rationality much more profound than the propositional fantasies of revolutionaries. To condemn what whole societies had long believed as merely mistaken was in the highest degree superficial. Society is a delicate fabric of sentiments and understandings which would be irreparably damaged if subjected to the butchery of abstract ideas. Burke judged that, as the revolutionaries discovered that the people were not behaving according to the rationalist prescriptions, they would have increasing recourse to violence and terror. At the end of every prospect would be found a gallows. He predicted that the outcome would be a military dictatorship.
Burke’s genius lay in breaking up the conventional antitheses through which politics was then understood. He had never been, he wrote, ‘a friend or an enemy to republics or to monarchies in the abstract’ (Burke 1855, Appeal, vol. 3), and this refusal to take sides on an abstractly specified principle became a dominant strain in conservatism. The real clue to wisdom politics lay not at the level of high principle but of low and humble circumstance. This was the level of actual human experience, and, at this level, there was not a great deal that governments could achieve, and most of what they could was to prevent evils rather than promote goods. No stranger to paradox, Burke insisted that one of the most important of the rights of humankind is the right to be restrained by suitable laws. Again, Burke was prepared to agree that society was indeed a contract, but he instantly qualified this conventional judgement by insisting that it was a contract of a quite sublime kind, linking the living, the dead and those yet to be born. It is in these hesitations and qualifications of conventional wisdom to which he was impelled by the excitements of his time that Burke’s contribution to political understanding lies.
More philosophically, Burke adapted to political use the empiricist doctrine that the passions, especially as entrenched in and shaped by social institutions, are closer to reality than the speculations of philosophers, and especially of philosophes. His defence of prejudice threw down a gauntlet to the superficial rationalism of his opponents, and has sometimes been seen as expressing an irrationalism endemic to conservative thought. It is, however, an argument about the relations between reason and passion similar to that of Hegel, though in a quite different idiom.
Burke’s political judgement is a conservative modification of the English political tradition and covers many areas. On the nature of representation, for example, he argued that the House of Commons was not a congress of ambassadors from the constituencies. His defence of the place of parties in British politics contributed to the acceptance and development of party government, however limited in intention it may have been (Brewer 1971). In the indictment of Warren Hastings, he stressed the trusteeship of power and property which was never far from his thoughts. But in all his political writings, Burke wrote to the occasion, and it is perilous to generalize about him too far. His personal ambitions required manoeuvring in the complex world of late eighteenth-century politics which have led some writers (e.g. Namier 1929; Young 1943) to regard him as little more than a silver-tongued opportunist. This is to do less than justice to the suggestiveness of his prose and the momentousness of the occasions to which he so brilliantly responded.
Kenneth Minogue
London School of Economics and Political Science
References
Brewer, J. (1971) ‘Party and the double cabinet: two facets of Burke’s thoughts’, Historical Journal 14.
Burke, E. (1855) Works, London.
Namier, L. (1929) The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, London.
Young, G.M. (1943) Burke (British Academy Lecture on a Mastermind), London.
Further reading
Canavan, F.P. (1960) The Political Reason of Edmund Burke, Durham, NC.
Cruise O’Brien, Conor (1992) The Great Melody, London.
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