IN THE 200-ODD YEARS since his death Burke’s reputation has followed a great arc. It rose steadily throughout the nineteenth century, reaching almost to apotheosis in the late Victorian era, when he was admired on both sides of the Atlantic as much as a master of English prose as a source of political wisdom. It remained high in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when the ‘Speech on Conciliation’ was regularly studied in American schools. Since then, however, it has been in decline, apart from brief rediscoveries during the Cold War and at the fall of the Iron Curtain. Academic interest is greater than it has been for many years. But for the public, with the partial exception of the Reflections, Burke’s writings and speeches lie idle on library shelves. Politics has passed him by. His struggles, his style, his passion have come to seem irrelevant, even quaint, to a world of post-modernist irony and mass culture.
In the chapters that follow, we turn from Burke’s life to his thought. We examine the social, political and intellectual context of his ideas, their shifting impact over time, and his key influences and adversaries. With luck, what will emerge is a sense both of Burke’s power and coherence as a philosopher in action and of his remarkable relevance and importance today.
Two days after his death, however, The Times of London was in no doubt about its verdict: ‘Mr Burke will live as long as strength of imagination and beauty of language shall be respected by the world.’ Inevitably, however, this view was quickly contested, and Burke was denounced by radicals and Foxites alike in a continuation of the pamphlet war he had helped to start. But there followed a series of laudatory or even hagiographic biographies, most notably a Memoir of Burke by James Prior in 1824, which portrayed him as a statesman, free of parti pris, his eye firmly fixed on the national interest and the need to preserve Britain from revolution. This picture was assisted by the rapid if selective publication of his posthumous Works, including various writings, speeches and letters. These went through a number of different editions and achieved a wide circulation.
Politically, Burke cast a long shadow forward. He was followed by a younger generation of brilliant Irishmen entering English politics; these included the future Prime Minister George Canning and the leading minister in the Commons of Lord Liverpool’s administration, Robert Stewart, later to become Lord Castlereagh. Canning had grown up under the influence of Fox and Sheridan, but was deeply impressed by the Reflections and became a follower of Pitt and a vigorous opponent of Jacobinism after 1793. Castlereagh was, characteristically, more equivocal: elected as a young and progressive reformer in County Down in 1790, he came to share Burke’s analysis of the revolution, but was opposed to the idea of a counter-revolutionary war against France. In 1794 he too joined Pitt. As acting Chief Secretary for Ireland he was closely involved in suppressing the disastrous Irish rebellion of 1798, and then helped to engineer the Acts of Union between Great Britain and Ireland shortly thereafter. It was an extraordinary political journey.
William Pitt had cuttingly described the Reflections as ‘rhapsodies in which there is much to admire, and nothing to agree with’. But he had perhaps been more influenced by Burke than he admitted on India, and also on Irish policy, through the Catholic Relief Act of 1793 and the highly controversial endowment of a seminary for Irish Catholic priests at Maynooth in 1795. After his death in 1806 Pitt was all but canonized as the saviour of the nation; and in the following decades he was specifically co-opted by sections of Tory opinion as a Christian constitutionalist, defender of the status quo against revolutionary foreign doctrines and opponent of Catholic emancipation. This ignored the inconvenient facts that Pitt’s personal views about religion were unknown; that he had supported, not opposed, both parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation; and that he had had little hesitation in suspending habeas corpus in 1794 – supported by Burke – and defying established constitutional principle for reasons of state in the struggle against Napoleon. Then as now, the propagandists did not let such trifles get in the way of a good story.
By contrast, Burke’s Irish lineage and widely known sympathy to the Catholics prevented such easy assimilation. After the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, however, Pitt and Burke became increasingly joined in the public mind. The linkage was given a more specific political slant by Benjamin Disraeli in 1835. In his early Vindication of the English Constitution in a Letter to a Noble and Learned Lord – the rather Burkean title can hardly be accidental – Disraeli identified what he saw as a continuous Tory line of succession stretching back to the early eighteenth century and including Bolingbroke, Burke and the Younger Pitt.
Disraeli’s evident desire was to be seen as a late flowering of the same tradition. But matters went horribly wrong when he was refused high office by the new Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, in 1841. It then became necessary for him to show that, far from following the true path, Pitt and his successors up to and including Peel had gone disastrously astray. Faithful to the principles of a lifetime, Disraeli therefore reversed himself completely, using his novels Coningsby and Sybil to denounce Peel as the offspring of a deviant ‘Conservative’ tradition, in contrast to Disraeli’s own true Toryism. Neither the argument nor the reversal was persuasive.
On the Whig side, feelings about Burke followed a similar path from equivocation to assimilation. By mid-century, when the Liberal party emerged from the ashes of the Whigs after the Great Reform Act 1832, many Liberals disliked Burke’s rejection of parliamentary reform and abhorred his criticisms of natural rights and of the French revolution. But they admired his support for the American colonists, his belief in religious toleration, his respect for the constitutional settlement of 1688, his hatred of undue monarchical influence and his campaigns against injustices in India and Ireland. William Ewart Gladstone, in many ways a political innovator, nevertheless regarded Burke as an ‘idol’, according to his colleague and distinguished biographer John Morley MP, who also wrote a notably successful short biography of Burke. As Morley recorded of Gladstone in 1885, ‘Though ending his seventy-sixth year … he nearly every day reads Burke: – “December 18 – Read Burke; what a magazine of wisdom on Ireland and America. January 9 – made extracts from Burke – sometimes almost divine.”’
This bipartisan esteem, and specifically the ability of different politicians to quarry what they liked from Burke’s writings, carried over to the United States as well. The hard-driving Theodore Roosevelt was a professed admirer of Burke, and in particular of his emphasis on political virtue and character, even as he tested the limits of the American constitution as President with drastic action at home and abroad. On the Democrat side, the scholarly Woodrow Wilson wrote acutely about Burke, acknowledging his hero’s weaknesses but emphasizing the coherence of his thought and his capacity to blend telling generalizations with mastery of precise detail. For Wilson, Burke is a conservative first to last in spirit, and, above all, he is English: ‘this man, this Irishman, speaks the best English thought upon politics … he remains the chief spokesman for England in the utterance of the fundamental ideals which have governed the actions of Englishmen in politics.’ These were high recommendations indeed.
But admiration for Burke was not limited to politicians or political thought. Woodrow Wilson himself made the point eloquently: ‘Burke is not literary because he takes from books but because he makes books, transmuting what he writes upon into literature … He is a master in the use of the great style. Every sentence, too, is steeped in the colours of an extraordinary imagination. The movement takes your breath and quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the matter rejuvenate your faculties.’
Exactly the same point had been made four generations earlier by the English essayist William Hazlitt:
His stock of ideas did not consist of a few meagre facts … his mine of wealth was a profound understanding, inexhaustible as the human heart, and various as the sources of human nature. He therefore enriched every subject to which he applied himself, and new subjects were only the occasions of calling forth fresh powers of mind which had not been before exerted … Burke’s was a union of untameable vigour and originality.
Hazlitt’s own enormously fertile mind constantly returned to Burke, as inspiration and as adversary, at once seductive and yet dangerous, and irresistible to weaker spirits. In his essay ‘On Reading Old Books’, Hazlitt remarks of Burke, ‘I did not care for his doctrines. I was then and am still, proof against their contagion.’ But as for his style, ‘If there are greater prose-writers than Burke, they either lie out of my course of study, or are beyond my sphere of comprehension.’
Like their contemporary Hazlitt, the early Romantic poets also acknowledged Burke’s mastery of the English language. But, initially at least, they were repelled by his politics. Wordsworth had spent an ecstatic period in France during the early revolution, whose ideals he strongly supported. In the words of his masterpiece The Prelude, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven.’ For their part, in the mid-1790s Coleridge and his then brother-in-law Robert Southey planned to establish a ‘pantisocracy’, or entirely egalitarian society, on the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. This utopian scheme came to nothing and the two men drifted apart, Southey into Jacobinism and Coleridge into rustic living, close association with Wordsworth and the creation of the Lyrical Ballads.
But all three of the Lake poets fell increasingly under the influence of Burke’s ideas. There are Burkean themes of habit and experience in Wordsworth even as early as his famous Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), now widely seen as the first manifesto for Romantic poetry. The same was true of Coleridge, whose final book, On the Constitution of Church and State, can be read as a highly idiosyncratic reworking of Burkean ideas with British common law and Church traditions, and a heavy dose of continental philosophy. It was also true of Southey, who by the 1820s blended an orthodox Burkean defence of the constitution with thoroughgoing opposition to Catholic emancipation, support for Robert Owen’s cooperative movement and an attack on the alienation and brutalizing effects of industrialization which mirrored the thought of William Cobbett and, later, Thomas Carlyle.
Amid the ferment of early nineteenth-century social, economic and political change, then, many different writers were able over time to find ideas of enduring value within Burke. Wordsworth’s late revisions to The Prelude made his own feelings all too clear:
Genius of Burke! Forgive the pen seduced
By specious wonders …
I see him old, but vigorous in age
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove. But some –
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
As a recantation, it is both elegant and complete.
Burke’s influence upon the historians was also marked. Macaulay described him as ‘the greatest man since Milton’, yet one in whom reason was yoked to passion: ‘Mr. Burke, assuredly, possessed an understanding admirably fitted for the investigation of truth – an understanding stronger than that of any statesman, active or speculative, of the eighteenth century – stronger than every thing, except his own fierce and ungovernable sensibility. Hence, he generally chose his side like a fanatic, and defended it like philosopher.’
In his brilliant essay of 1841 on Warren Hastings, Macaulay highlighted the power of Burke’s recreative and empathic imagination:
He had, in the highest degree, that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal. India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the cocoa-tree, the rice-field … All India was present to the eye of his mind, from the hall where suitors laid gold and perfumes at the feet of sovereigns to the wild moor where the gipsy camp was pitched … Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London.
For his part, the Irish historian W. E. H. Lecky in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century echoed Hazlitt: ‘No other politician or writer has thrown the light of so penetrating a genius on the nature and working of the British Constitution … He had a peculiar gift of introducing into transient party conflicts observations drawn from the most profound knowledge of human nature.’ And Lecky highlighted Burke’s wisdom: ‘there is perhaps no English prose writer since Bacon whose works are so thickly starred with thought. The time may come when they will be no longer read. The time will never come in which men would not grow the wiser by reading them.’ The great historian Lord Acton concurred, despite his own marked lack of political sympathy.
In the twentieth century, Burke has been pressed into service on numerous occasions. In the 1950s and 1960s his anti-totalitarian rhetoric was adopted by conservative American politicians and thinkers in their fight against communism during the Cold War. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, intellectuals and policymakers across eastern and central Europe drew once again on Burke’s positive theories of government in their own constitutional reflections. There has been a persistent desire by some conservative writers to relocate Burke away from a Lockean framework of natural rights and find in him a specifically Christian, indeed Thomist, doctrine of natural law.
But even from the outset Burke’s memory was hardly uncontested. The critics’ familiar refrains of inconsistency, treachery and reactionary defence of privilege were heard again, and further themes added thereto. In his Life of Sheridan of 1824, Thomas Moore went further, arguing that there were in fact two Burkes: ‘His mind, indeed, lies parted asunder in his works, like some vast continent severed by a convulsion of nature – each portion peopled by its own giant race of peoples, differing altogether in features and language, and committed in eternal hostility with each other.’
But perhaps the most consistently damaging attack purported to explain Burke in terms not of split personality but of simple self-interest. Here the prime mover was his bitter radical adversary Thomas Paine. Burke had once remarked of Paine that ‘we hunt in pairs’, but this overstates the matter; while Burke restricted himself to a defence of the colonists’ rights against the Crown, Paine made a great success of his outspoken support for the American revolutionaries in his pamphlet Common Sense. Paine had visited Burke at Gregories on more than one occasion, and had hoped for Burke’s support for the revolution in France. The Reflections was a profound disappointment to him, and fuelled an outpouring of words in which moral outrage and personal pique were equally blended.
In the first part of his Rights of Man of March 1791, it will be recalled, Paine had described Burke as ‘accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself’.
He is not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.
But Paine’s critique went far beyond that; he also hinted darkly that Burke was the recipient of a ‘masked’ or secret pension. The hint was repeated in the second part of the same book, which came out the following year. Shortly afterwards Paine went still further, undertaking in a public letter to the British Attorney General to show that Burke had been ‘a masked pensioner at £1,500 per annum for about ten years’. Further writings continued the attack. As far as we can tell, the allegation was entirely untrue, and relied on a series of deliberate misrepresentations about Burke’s Civil List Act of 1782. Though Burke had long been supported financially by Rockingham and other Whig grandees, it was not in fact until July 1795 that he received any money from the Crown. Even so, Paine’s campaign to discredit Burke personally had some effect, and the charge that Burke was simply the King’s hireling gained currency from the start of the revolution controversy.
The charge did not go away. In his Observations on the State of Ireland (1818), J. C. Curwen described Burke as ‘a Whig from interest, but a Tory from principle’. Half a century later Karl Marx said of Burke in Das Kapital:
This sycophant – who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy – was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois. ‘The laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.’ … No wonder that, true to the laws of God and Nature, he always sold himself in the best market.
In the twentieth century, the idea that Burke was merely a hireling received indirect reinforcement from a quite different quarter after 1929, when the historian Lewis Namier published The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III. Namier argued that eighteenth-century politics was at root a matter not of grand parties and high principle but of personal self-interest expressed via an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of political factions. Working through detailed analysis of individual biographies and personal interrelationships, he was able to shed much new light on how patterns of patronage influenced such matters as elections, the behaviour of MPs, parliamentary process, the formation of different ministries and the workings of the Court. To the socially and often statistically minded historians that followed Namier, what mattered was the generality, the mean and median, not the exception. The standard texts divided eighteenth-century politicians into ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’, with big personalities locked in principled political debate; now these histories quickly came to seem outmoded, as did the statesmen they depicted. None more so than Burke.
By the 1950s Namier and the Namierite ‘method’ had become enormously influential among historians. Namier and his followers have been severely criticized by Burke’s admirers, notably by his biographer the distinguished Irish politician Conor Cruise O’Brien, often somewhat unfairly. True, there are some notorious instances of animus quite at odds with the Namierite insistence on detailed mastery of the facts, as when the historian Richard Pares sneeringly remarks: ‘If we regard his social origins, we can only classify as an Irish adventurer the great Edmund Burke, the theorist and high priest of snobbery.’ But in relation to Burke, the Namierites’ references were generally rather few.
And that is the point. For if they and Paine and Marx are right then their common criticism is the most damaging of all, for it cuts at the root not merely of Burke’s achievement but of his moral authority. If politics is simply a matter of patronage and self-interest, not principle, if Burke is simply a paid propagandist, a lackey wearing the livery of others, someone driven by opportunity and expediency whose personal ambition lies in acting as a mouthpiece for a sectional or class interest, then for all his literary and intellectual brilliance he cannot be worthy of our respect. He is not an independent thinker, or indeed an independent person, at all. We may admire his technical facility, but we cannot respect him. He becomes, not a great man, but a little one.
At first glance, the problem becomes still worse when one considers Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents of 1770. For this was designed to be as much a rallying cry and party manifesto as a work of deep political analysis. Its central thrust was to seek to limit the power of the monarch, which inevitably meant increasing the power of the Whig aristocrats; and these aristocrats were Burke’s patrons, as we have seen. Financial support was nothing new, of course; it was more or less the only way at the time for a young man of talent to get on in politics. But it sharpens the question: was Burke little more than a stooge?
The issue has been debated for generations. In 2012, however, an important new piece of evidence emerged, with the ascription to Burke of an early essay on political parties, in a leading academic journal. This has been dated to 1757, during Burke’s first flowering of work with the publisher Robert Dodsley, thirteen years before publication of the Thoughts. In the essay, Burke attributes early party conflict between Whigs and Tories to the religious arguments of the late seventeenth century, before suggesting that, far from being sources of division, parties can be used within the constitution to promote political moderation and good government. Citing a wide range of historical precedents, he then denounces factions as ‘cabals fomented by ambition swelled up by popular madness and nothing more. Hence it is that party is always useful, faction always pernicious, which has hardly been enough considered.’ Genuine political parties are capable of principled opposition, he argues; indeed they are required by the need for balance within the constitution. However:
we have at the present no party properly so called among us … but … mere factions: without any design, without any principle, but only a junction of people intriguing for their own interest … there can be no body of people united by a bond strong enough to hold them together, or animated by a principle vigorous enough to give them activity … when they have not some general scheme and some fixed object.
The distinction between faction and party was hardly new, of course. Nevertheless, this essay is a decisive rebuttal to Paine, Marx and Namier. It shows clearly that at a very early stage, well before Burke had even begun to make his way in politics – indeed eight years or so before he had met Rockingham or entered Parliament – he had already mastered a large body of historical thought and political reflection on factions and parties. He was already arguing the case, not merely against factional politics but, what was far more novel, in favour of parties as a source of good government – and doing so in terms that strikingly anticipated the Thoughts. If we take this with the evidence of Burke’s letters and other activities, we can see that, far from being merely his master’s voice or just a mouthpiece for the Whig aristocrats, by 1770 Burke was working to turn the Rockingham Whigs into a vehicle for a constitutional theory much of which he had developed over a decade earlier.
William Hazlitt said, ‘It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.’ We have seen that Burke is not a stooge, but can we allow him to be a great man? Should we? The answers are Yes and Yes. We can indeed recover a proper sense of Burke’s greatness, and not merely as a politician and a writer, but as a thinker. But to do this we need to shift gear, and move from history and biography to analysis and argument. We need to analyse Burke’s ideas, and see what light they can shed both on his own time and on ours.
What we will discover is unexpected, and extraordinary. In the first place, Burke becomes the hinge or pivot of political modernity, the thinker on whose shoulders much of the Anglo-American tradition of representative government still rests. But he is also the earliest post-modern political thinker, the first and greatest critic of the modern age, and of what has been called liberal individualism: a set of basic assumptions about human nature and human well-being that arose in the nineteenth century, long after Burke’s death, in reflection on the Enlightenment, and that govern the lives of millions, nay billions, of people today.
The great paradox is that, thus understood, Burke the anti-radical becomes a far more radical thinker even than Karl Marx himself. But to see why this is so we need to turn back to the eighteenth century, to the Enlightenment itself – and to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is against Rousseau that Burke most sharply defines himself; and here too his critique begins almost a decade before he entered Parliament.
Almost every aspect of what we still call ‘the Enlightenment’ has been disputed by scholars. But there is no doubt that something extraordinary took place in European thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the year 1600 the old certainties of Aristotle and his followers were breaking down. The Aristotelians had taught that the sublunary world was imperfect, the celestial world divine; that the circle was the perfect form in nature; and that science should be concerned with the search for basic causes and first principles. But Copernicus and Kepler had undermined the traditional view of the solar system, with their arguments for heliocentrism and elliptical planetary orbits. Tycho Brahe and Francis Bacon had highlighted the value of precise observation, both of the heavens and of the everyday. Galileo had used the new telescope to discover unexpected imperfections in the surface of the Moon, and showed how mathematics could be employed to explain physical forces and natural phenomena.
Most deeply of all, the mathematician and philosopher René Descartes had dismissed Aristotle’s basic categories altogether. Descartes deliberately started from a position of extreme doubt, about his own existence and that of the world around him. What emerged from his reflections was the idea that the physical universe is not made up of an indefinite array of different kinds of thing, each sui generis and unique in its own way; it simply consists of objects extended in space. Because objects are extended, they and their relations and interactions can be measured, ranked and counted. Body is thus separated from mind and from God, and astronomy and physics can be studied in isolation from theology. Nature becomes quantifiable.
This was a revolution in thought, whose effects continue to reverberate today. It was given stupendous influence and prestige by the publication in 1687 of Isaac Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. As the name implies, this was designed to show that, in the words of Galileo, ‘The book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics.’ It did so in the most dramatic way possible, by laying down a set of ‘axioms’ and ‘postulates’ – basic laws and assumptions – in the manner of the ancient Greek geometer Euclid, from which a dazzling array of explanations and predictions could be derived about the stars and planets. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Principia Mathematica demonstrated a means by which Newton – or in principle any suitably trained mathematician – could give the exact position of every large body in the universe at any time in the past, present or future. True, Newton’s version of the calculus (which he had also invented, independently of his great German contemporary Leibniz) was so difficult that for many years few others could master it; but this only added to his mystique. So it was little wonder that Alexander Pope wrote his famous epitaph for Newton thus: ‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; / God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.’
Newton’s achievement caught the imagination of all Europe. Building as well on the work of scientists such as Robert Boyle, new physical laws were discovered, were tested in an array of increasingly sophisticated experiments, and slowly started to find their way into technological applications. Channelled through the Royal Society, through the printing press and through vigorous correspondence, the spirit of discovery radiated outwards into other experimental sciences such as chemistry, which underwent its own mathematical revolution in the hands of Antoine Lavoisier, a French contemporary of Burke’s who was guillotined by the revolutionaries in 1794. The influence of science reached into ancient disciplines such as history, and shaped new ones, as it did after Adam Smith distilled and greatly extended early thinking on economics into The Wealth of Nations.
Yet if anything the scientific revolution had still greater impact in the arts, in culture, in society. To many people it seemed as though the key had been found to unlock nature herself, and that her mysteries now lay for the first time accessible to human thought. Darkness had been dispelled, reason was triumphant, and opinion and prejudice had yielded to rational inquiry. Man had been the measure of all things, and by measuring had tamed them.
But if this were really true, then what about tradition, authority and faith? If science was now the true canon of inquiry, then tradition started to look irrelevant, for what evidential weight could tradition ever have? If nature and human history were to be judged by individual reason alone, then surely scriptural, ecclesiastical and political authority must also be judged by reason alone, and yield to individual rights? If Cartesian doubt was the order of the day, then what role could there be for God and faith? Aristocratic privilege? Monarchy? Across all Europe, from Spinoza to Montesquieu to Bayle to the philosophes Voltaire, d’Alembert and Diderot, to David Hume and Adam Ferguson and Edward Gibbon, different thinkers began to explore the possibilities.
These were highly unsettling developments. In Britain the official reaction was in many ways a relatively calm one, for in the early eighteenth century Britain was becoming a beacon of tolerance and openness to the rest of Europe. Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters of 1733, written after a two-year period of exile in Britain, celebrated the British constitution, which had imposed limits on monarchical power and given the people a share of government. The British were often rather coarse and vulgar, but Britain was a place where property could not be seized without due process, and private individuals enjoyed wide freedoms of thought and expression. The contrast with the autocratic and personal monarchy of the Bourbons, the intolerance of the Church hierarchy and the political weakness of the Parlement was evident, and Voltaire’s book unleashed a wave of ‘Anglomania’ in France.
But Britain’s openness to new ideas was not shared elsewhere in Europe. Across the continent ruling dynasties looked with horror and alarm at the spread of Enlightenment ideas, with their emphasis on individual rationality, economic materialism, democratic rights, moral equality and scientific advance. It was one thing to establish learned institutions for the promulgation of knowledge, on the model of the Royal Society, quite another to tolerate atheism, religious dissent and radical reform. That way led, surely, to upheaval, perhaps even – the scientific word now used in a social sense – to revolution.
Where, then, did this leave Edmund Burke? He was, in many ways, an Enlightenment figure: highly educated, making his way in London amid the hubbub of new ideas, conversing with men of the genius of Hume, Smith and Johnson. Through the Annual Register, he had read and reviewed some of the greatest thinkers of the period, including Smith, Rousseau and Montesquieu, while the papers published as his Notebook include a highly critical early note on Voltaire. In writing the Account with Will Burke, and his own unfinished Essay, he had been much influenced by Enlightenment thinking on history and historiography. And in his own life, he had worked unceasingly to promote reforms consistent with Enlightenment ideals. He had argued for religious tolerance in Ireland and for humane treatment of slaves as a preliminary to abolition of the slave trade; he had defended the rights of American colonists, and pressed for the East India Company to be held to public account; he had practised scientific agriculture on the farm at Gregories.
However, Burke’s first instinct is always to protect and enhance human society. In his view genuine reforms do not overturn or undermine society; on the contrary, over time they strengthen it by addressing social needs and reducing grievances. Enlightenment beliefs in all-conquering reason and universal individual rights were quite different, he thought, precisely because they had the potential to threaten the basis of society itself, by providing a justification for revolution.
Burke’s thought provides a deep critique of the legacy of the Enlightenment in contemporary Western politics and society, as we shall see. But his own preoccupation was with the Enlightenment as a spur to revolution in his own time. In particular, he singles out for attack the malign influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau had become a cult figure to the Jacobins, and his remains were ceremonially reinterred in the Pantheon in 1794, a mark of the highest honour that revolutionary France could bestow. Burke had published respectful reviews of Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert and Emile for the Annual Register in 1759, and some have seen his denunciations of Rousseau in the Reflections and the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly as the product of a late turn against him and an embittered retirement. This is a mistake. In general Burke’s thought is remarkably stable and consistent, even as it develops throughout his life. The same is true of his devastating critique of Rousseau’s ideas, which begins as early as 1756 and A Vindication of Natural Society.
Fêted by the political left, reviled by the right, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the most colourful figures of a colourful age. Born into a middling family in Protestant Geneva, the home of Calvinism, in 1712 he lost his mother soon after childbirth and later quarrelled with his father. He became an itinerant tutor and secretary, relying emotionally, sexually and financially on his older patron Madame de Warens, before moving to Paris. In Paris he met the philosophe Denis Diderot, wrote for the great Enlightenment digest of knowledge, the French Encyclopédie, and started to make his name through a succession of works including the Discourses, the Social Contract, Emile and the Confessions. While in Paris, in 1745 Rousseau met Thérèse Levasseur, an illiterate laundry maid by whom he had five children, all of whom were given up at his insistence not to various aristocratic women who had offered to take them, but to almost certain death at a foundling hospital. He married Thérèse in 1768 and died, after a long period of physical decline, ten years later.
For Rousseau, in thought as in life, man is first and foremost a creature of nature, a solitary and self-sufficient individual. As such he has absolute freedom, and with freedom comes the capacity to exercise rational choice and so to be morally autonomous. These features are not incidental to his humanity; rather, they are what make him a human being at all: as Rousseau says in the Social Contract, ‘To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man.’ It follows for Rousseau, then, that any abridgement of man’s freedom is an abridgement of his humanity, which pushes the individual towards the status of a slave, or even of an inanimate object.
The counterpart of this for Rousseau is that in any but an ideal society most people will be in a state of dependence or slavery on others: in his famous words, ‘Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.’ Society itself, and specifically the unequal institution of private property, is thus a source of corruption, which privileges the few and enslaves the many. In society, men’s natural desire for self-preservation is transformed into self-love or pride. The arts and sciences are not great human achievements or marks of civilized society, but merely expressions of that pride and corruption. Material progress becomes a means by which governments are enabled to suppress individual liberty and self-expression. That corruption can be avoided either in a state of nature or in what he terms a civil society, in which man is redeemed by the use of human reason, allowing man’s natural compassion for others to flow.
How can redemption come through civil society? In particular, if there must be some sovereign power in a state, how can Rousseau square this with man’s essential freedom? After all, he believes that any derogation from freedom is an intolerable act of enslavement. The answer is supposed to lie in his idea of a general will: when man is thinking rationally, has been relieved of inequality and is able to deliberate freely, he will understand that his desires are completely congruent with the general will of the people as a whole. As he identifies his will with the general will, his will is realized without any submission to the wills of others. Thanks to the perfect congruity of his will with the sovereign power, he remains free, and so morally autonomous. In giving himself to all, he gives himself to no one. A civil society is thus one in which people achieve their full rights and freedoms as citizens, by a social contract through which they create their own laws and so avoid enslavement and dependency on others.
Rousseau thus takes Enlightenment ideas of the supremacy of reason, social equality and the rights of man, and turns them against society itself. The individual and nature are exalted, while society is seen as intrinsically corrupt and capable of redemption only by means of a utopian project of wholesale reconstruction through which it and its individual members can be identified in the general will. With their shared emphasis on nature and the will, it is easy to see how Romanticism has roots in Rousseau’s thought; so also do much Marxist, communist and fascist ideology, such is the way his arguments cut across later political categories. And it is easy to see why Rousseau’s ideas were so enthusiastically taken up by the Jacobins during the French revolution. Was not the ancien régime a perfect example of the luxury and idleness, arrogance and pride of ‘civilized’ society? What were the assemblies, if not institutions whose purpose was to disclose the general will? What were the opposition, if not corrupted aristocrats and reactionaries, indeed subhuman animals consumed by self-love and incapable of understanding their own true needs through the general will? Was not the revolution itself the perfect expression of man’s inalienable rights and liberties?
For Burke, as we shall see, these questions are themselves the result of a deep social pathology, one created out of Enlightenment ideas by the perverse and paradoxical genius of Rousseau himself. We can see this even at the very outset of his public thought. In the Vindication of 1756, his very first published work, he had mocked the suggestion that civilized society was a social evil responsible for war and oppression, and that man should return to a state of nature unmediated by social institutions.
Officially at least, the satire is an attack on Lord Bolingbroke’s ‘natural religion’; it does not mention Rousseau’s name at all. But Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality had been published in France in 1755 and reviewed by Adam Smith in the same year, and many similar arguments were the fashionable talk of the day in London. There are, moreover, significant overlaps of structure and thought between the Discourse and the Vindication. It is hard, then, to read Burke’s essay without seeing it also as an attack on Rousseau. This impression is strengthened by Burke’s publication of a rather mixed 1759 review of the Letter to d’Alembert, which decried ‘a tendency to paradox, which is always the bane of solid learning, and which threatens now to destroy it, a splenetic disposition carried to misanthropy, and an austere virtue pursued now to an unsociable fierceness’. And the same line of thought was repeated three years later in a review of Emile, also published by Burke in the Annual Register, which identified ‘very considerable parts that are impracticable, others that are chimerical; and not a few highly blameable, and dangerous both to piety and morals’.
In other words, even as early as the 1750s – ten years before he entered politics – Burke is intellectually very sure of his ground, and able to identify and attack a line of thought with which he would only fully clash some four decades later. In the 1790s, his central political and intellectual project became the need to prevent the destruction of European society and preserve its institutions against the spread of revolutionary ideas, many of them derived from Rousseau. Far from great inconsistency and incoherence, then, there is evidence here that Burke’s thought is in fact remarkably coherent over time. Far from being the productions to order of a paid lackey, his ideas put down their roots a full decade before he became a public figure.
Between the 1750s and the 1790s Burke argued for a new conception of representative government in Britain, and fought injustice and oppression over Ireland, over the American colonies and over India. In the following chapters we will see how these campaigns sprang from a single and extraordinarily powerful body of ideas. But to understand Burke better, we must grapple with his thought directly and in its own terms. To this we now turn.
