AFTER A FIRST HALF OF FAIRLY mind-boggling complexity, Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Iolanthe (1882) opens on a moonlit night in Palace Yard, near the Houses of Parliament, now rebuilt after the great fire of 1834. To the left is the Clock Tower and Big Ben, to the right Westminster Hall, scene of Burke’s great impeachment of Warren Hastings, while behind lies the House of Commons. In the centre of the stage, and bored to death of sentry duty, stands Private Willis.
Private Willis is just an ordinary soldier, albeit one whose unfathomable destiny later in the opera will be to marry the Queen of the Fairies. But being, as he informs the audience, ‘an intellectual chap’, he has been turning his mind to the mysteries of the British political system, and in particular to Britain’s two political parties. As he sings, ‘I often think it’s comical / How Nature always does contrive / That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative!’
With only the Liberal and Conservative parties then on offer, the poor voters have very limited powers of choice, according to Private Willis. But so too do their Members of Parliament, who must ‘divide’ or vote as required by their parties: ‘When in that House MPs divide / If they’ve a brain and cerebellum, too / They’ve got to leave that brain outside / And vote just as their leaders tell ’em to.’ What, then, is the point of MPs if they are just to behave like political sheep, to be penned and counted in the voting lobbies? Simply that, as Private Willis acutely observes, the alternative is even worse: ‘But then the prospect of a lot / Of dull MPs in close proximity / All thinking for themselves, is what / No man can face with equanimity.’
Many thoughtful people have uttered similarly despairing thoughts about the British political system over some 200 years. Surely, surely it must be possible to design a more intelligent system than one which offers voters just a few political parties, which forces people of goodwill to join political parties if they are to be elected, and which then subordinates their individual views to the party line?
The ‘whipping’ system, which is designed to ensure that political parties vote collectively, has come in for particular public condemnation. The whips are regularly castigated as evil enforcers trampling over politicians’ individual consciences. Politicians who vote with the whip are denounced as craven lickspittles determined to grease their way up the political pole; those who defy the whip are regularly abominated as traitors and wreckers intent on putting their own egos ahead of loyalty to their colleagues. American politics has had weaker whipping; but in many ways it is held in even lower popular regard, with its embedded preference for a two-party system and constitutional vulnerability to interest-group politics and the ‘money power’.
No human institution is perfect, of course, and many political parties are highly imperfect institutions. But the extraordinary fact is that properly functioning political parties have long been recognized in political theory as the very essence of mature democracy. Through them, ideologies clash. Different political opinions and concerns are stimulated, debated and gathered into manifestos or programmes of government. Policy ideas are developed in opposition and presented at elections. Individuals are recruited, educated in the craft and traditions of politics and taught to campaign. Power passes peacefully from one party to another. It is only through political parties and the whipping system or its equivalents that politicians are reliably able to carry into law policies on which they have been given a democratic mandate at elections. The cure for those who hate political parties is to visit countries in which there are no such parties, or only one.
In Britain a recognizable system of representative political parties emerged in the second quarter of the nineteenth century; the Conservative party is generally reckoned as the first modern political party, and traditionally traces its origins to the formation of the Carlton Club, before the Great Reform Act of 1832, and to Sir Robert Peel’s ‘Tamworth manifesto’ of 1834. In the United States, party politics was initiated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison through the Democratic Republicans in the 1790s; but it was Martin van Buren who made the full case for ‘party’ as against ‘faction’, and who built up the first fully functioning state party machine for the Democrats in the 1820s in New York.
Edmund Burke was not, then, the founder of a particular political party, or the founder of the two-party system as such. He never seems to have contemplated the idea of parties as mass-membership organizations campaigning across a nation; and their nearest eighteenth-century equivalents, the regional petitioning movements, often filled him with concern, if not alarm. The ideas of a single party whose own MPs must command a majority in the House of Commons for it to govern; of the leader of that party ipso facto becoming Prime Minister; and of the Prime Minister selecting Cabinet members without reference to the monarch, are many decades away.
Nevertheless, as we shall see, it is Burke who first sets out and argues for a modern conception of a political party, as ‘a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed’. It is Burke who was the main architect of the first proto-political party, the Rockingham Whigs. It is Burke above all who articulated and pressed over more than two decades for his party’s leading principles of restraint on Court influence and patronage, financial reform and accountability in government. And it is Burke who shows how even party politics must give way in the face of a common enemy, the Jacobinism of revolutionary France.
In Burke’s words, party divisions are ‘things inseparable from free government’. In a looser sense, political parties are as old as politics itself, for the simple reason that political questions invite disagreement and so partisanship.
But not all political parties, or all kinds of party politics, are the same. The origin of the names ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ lies in the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, and Burke’s own analysis of party politics begins from that time. Charles II had been restored to the throne in 1660. But he was ageing, and had no legitimate sons by his wife Catherine of Braganza. The rules of succession therefore made Charles’s brother James, Duke of York the heir to the throne. However, James refused to take the oath imposed by the Test Act in 1673, which required the swearer to renounce various Catholic doctrines and practices and to take communion within the Church of England, and it became apparent that he was a Roman Catholic. This view was then publicly confirmed by James’s second marriage, to the Catholic princess Mary of Modena.
To a people raised on folk tales of the struggle of Henry VIII and Elizabeth to uphold Protestant values and the Church of England, for whom a civil war fought in part on religious grounds was a recent memory, and who associated Catholicism with bloodshed, absolutism and foreign influence, the prospect of James as king was highly unwelcome. Still more so since he had no surviving sons by his first marriage, so that a son by Mary would be his heir, raising the possibility of a Roman Catholic dynasty. Anti-Catholic feelings were heightened by allegations in the spring of 1678 of a Popish Plot to kill Charles and put James on the throne, which implicated Mary and pointed to secret links with Louis XIV.
The crisis broke in December 1678 when it was discovered that Charles himself had been in receipt of large payments from Louis in return for British neutrality in France’s continental wars. Marshalled by the Earl of Shaftesbury (among other things the patron of John Locke), a group of MPs presented a Bill in the Commons calling for James to be excluded from the succession. To prevent this, Charles dissolved Parliament and the issue was repeatedly fought over in elections, ‘Tories’ – named after an abusive term for Irish rebels – supporting the King’s (and so James’s) prerogative rights, ‘Whigs’ – a Scottish term for Presbyterian rebels – against them. There were petitions, and mass demonstrations in London, including a procession with floats showing Jesuits and cardinals, and nuns disporting themselves like prostitutes, after which a huge effigy of the Pope was burned.
In the words of Macaulay, ‘Never before had political clubs existed with so elaborate an organisation or so formidable an influence.’ These clubs were not composed of men simply forced to take sides, but nor were they purely political; they were what Burke calls ‘great’ parties. But they were united only on the religious issue, were not intended to last beyond its resolution, and did not. Parties were seen as strictly temporary combinations called into being to meet an emergency.
After three parliaments in three years, the King fought his way through the Exclusion Crisis by the simple expedient of never summoning another parliament. But the Tories lost the wider war, with James II’s flight into exile in 1688 and the exclusion of Catholics from the royal succession in the following year, a position reinforced in the Act of Settlement 1701. Thereafter the terms Whig and Tory were still in common use. But they gradually lost their original meaning during the eighteenth century, as professedly Whig politicians predominated in politics under Georges I and II, and as religious toleration spread. In the words of Horace Walpole, ‘In truth all the sensible Tories I ever knew were either Jacobites or became Whigs; those that remained Tories remained fools.’ The failure of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745 removed the last vestige of any dynastic threat from Catholicism. On his accession in 1760, then, George III did not merely rule a country in triumph over its victories in what would be called the Seven Years War; he was the first Hanoverian to reign secure from the threat of religious rebellion.
Politically, however, the new King did not like what he saw. Feuding between monarch and heir was a Hanoverian speciality, and George III greatly disliked his grandfather George II. He was particularly critical of what he regarded as the complaisance of both previous Georges in acceding on so many issues to the politicians of the day, such as Walpole and the Pelhams. George II had failed repeatedly in public to exercise that most important of royal prerogatives, the right of a king to choose his own ministers. His son Frederick, Prince of Wales had been a thoroughly ineffective source of political opposition, before an early death at the age of forty-four. George III himself had been hemmed in by a class of self-regarding politicians for a decade before his accession. Little wonder, then, that he now sought to spread his wings and settle old scores.
The constitutional settlement of 1688 had made clear what the King could not do, but his positive powers were far less well defined. The right to choose his ministers, the right to control Crown patronage and create peers, the right to dissolve a ministry – these were accepted prerogative powers, and George guarded them jealously. But the late eighteenth century saw a ceaseless battle between the King and a succession of politicians over exactly how far and in what areas monarchical power would, or could properly, extend. The specific issues were large and small, and the battle went in both directions. In 1765–6, for example, Rockingham had sought to ensure that the King’s supporters would vote to repeal the Stamp Act – they did not. Mindful of this, when the Rockinghamites took office in 1782 they were careful to insist on their right to remove an unprecedented number of the existing junior office-holders. On the other side, many believed that the King had gone too far in actively fomenting the destruction of the Fox–North Coalition in 1783. But even then the King could argue that he had been prevented by Fox and North’s parliamentary manoeuvring from appointing Shelburne, as he had wished.
Over several decades the powers of the King were gradually curtailed, in ways that prefigure the emergence of Britain’s constitutional monarchy in its modern form. But Burke’s fears of escalating royal influence and executive power were hardly misplaced; so much was made clear by the events of 1783, and by John Dunning’s famous motion of 1780 – passed by the narrow margin of 233 votes to 215 in the Commons – that ‘the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’. Even so, opposition was a tricky matter, and not simply because George III was very powerful, highly active and indeed the central political player in his own right. There was a longstanding hatred in all quarters of ‘faction’, and a particular dislike for ‘formed opposition’. It was one thing for a politician to disagree with the monarch on a specific matter of personal importance, quite another to attempt to enlist others to his cause. That was seen as a confession that the case could not be made on its own intrinsic merits; and more, as an attempt to challenge royal authority itself.
For Burke a hereditary monarchy was a vital component of a mixed constitution. Yet there were three recent ways in which royal influence had manifested itself in government, all of which he deemed highly defective. One was in Bolingbroke’s old idea of a Patriot King, on which George III had been brought up: a monarch acting in the national interest on rational principles, superseding all factions and parties, purging corrupt politicians and governing through men of principle and ability. The second was rule by Court favourite, in the form of the Earl of Bute, whom George had made a minister in 1760 although he was a member of neither the Lords nor the Commons, and who partly in consequence had proven a dismal failure. The third was in sporadic support for a Great Man, latterly in the form of the Elder Pitt, who sought to rule by personal influence, national reputation and oratory in the Commons. Burke’s verdict was trenchant and definitive: ‘No man, who is not inflamed by vainglory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.’
But, as his recently attributed essay of 1757 demonstrates, even before George’s accession, and less than fifteen years after the second Jacobite rebellion, Burke was looking to make the case for responsible party politics. Politics, then as now, was an inexact and occasionally bruising business, and Burke was not starry-eyed about political parties: ‘I do not wonder that the behaviour of many parties should have made persons of tender and scrupulous virtue somewhat out of humour with all connection in politics.’ ‘Connections’ had risks, but were not always a bad thing: ‘Connections in politics [are] essentially necessary to the full performance of our public duty, accidentally liable to degenerate into faction.’ But as religious tempers cooled, so the way was open not for great parties but for ‘small’ ones, which could give legitimacy to principled or ‘loyal’ opposition and make it into a respectable or even honourable calling. Britain’s mixed constitution since 1689 had created a balance of powers between King, Lords and Commons, and this recognized – indeed, it derived from the fact – that there might be disagreement and conflict between them. The question was how small political parties might translate this conflict into good government.
Burke’s answer comes, effectively, in six parts. First and foremost, parties bring stability to politics. Recall that Burke defines a political party as ‘a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed’. Parties allow the consistency of voting required to take forward difficult or complex legislation – or to oppose it. This was no small matter, given the significant practical difficulty of actually gathering MPs together and getting them to vote, difficulty which was experienced on all sides of Parliament throughout the eighteenth century. Moreover, unlike factions, parties do not disintegrate when they lose power. They remain united around a core of principles, and continue to make the case for those principles – and, we would add today, for policies and programmes based on those principles – even when out of office. This stability allows power to pass properly and peacefully from one party to another. Parties are thus an institutional corrective to personal, arbitrary or capricious government.
Second, parties bring openness and a focus on the national interest. Collective principles cannot be kept secret. The need to agree those principles within the parties, and the need to defend them in Parliament and in the public domain, create greater honesty in debate. Moreover, these principles will generally be framed in the national interest, for if they serve a mere group or section of society then that will be plain for all to see. Burke contrasts this commitment to public principles with Court intrigues: ‘The discretionary powers which are necessarily vested in a monarch … should all be exercised upon public principles and national grounds, and not on the likings or prejudices … of a court.’
Third, parties moderate and control government. They compete for support from the people, and are thus enabled to exercise a check on the executive: ‘It had always, until of late, been held the first duty of Parliament to refuse to support government, until power was in the hands of persons acceptable to the people, or while factions predominated in the court in which the nation had no confidence.’ Parties require government to prove its continuing value by avoiding trouble and addressing public concerns. In addressing and resolving issues through Parliament, they also thereby channel popular discontents, removing the need for them to be expressed through other outlets.
Fourth, parties remove the need for statesmen in normal politics. Burke is scathing about the tendency of that time – as of this – to despise politicians great and small: ‘It is … an effect of vulgar and puerile malignity to imagine that every statesman is of course corrupt; and that his opinion … is solely formed upon some sinister interest.’ But parties do not require statesmen: they allow people of normal decency and ability to play a part in government. As collective institutions, they are able to trap and retain wisdom and experience over time, and to share information rapidly and effectively. The result is that ‘the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value’. Indeed, parties make politicians more virtuous, because they unite them around shared public principles and not merely personal or factional interests.
Fifth, parties act as valuable gathering and testing grounds for politicians. They are not compulsory, but if a man ‘does not concur in [the] general principles on which the party is founded … he ought from the beginning to have chosen some other, more conformable to his opinions’. Party members must prove their worth by demonstrating their experience and building relationships with colleagues. Burke is emphatic about both aspects: ‘That man who before he comes into power has no friends … whose whole importance has begun with his office and is sure to end with it, is a person who ought never to be suffered by a controlling Parliament to continue in … the lead and direction of our public affairs; because such a man has no connection with the interest of the people.’ ‘The Romans … believed … that he who, in the common intercourse of life, showed he regarded somebody besides himself, when he came to act in a public situation, might probably consult some other interest than his own.’ As with all institutions, but more than many, parties are rooted in ‘manners’, in personal friendship, in shared values and identity, and in the social impulse.
But there is, sixth, an important caveat. As Burke put it in his 1774 ‘Speech to the Electors of Bristol’, ‘Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests … Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole …’ Parties are thus groupings of the people’s representatives, not of political delegates acting under instructions from their constituents, who are prevented by distance and numbers from taking part in the deliberations of Parliament. But, equally, parties should not be composed of Westminster politicians whose job is simply to spread the party line in the constituencies, for the Commons is not ‘a control upon the people but … a control for the people’. An MP’s ‘unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience’ he should not sacrifice to his constituents. But nor should he do so to his party: ‘A rule of indiscriminate support for ministers … destroys the very end of Parliament as a control and is a general … sanction for misgovernment.’
Burke thus strikes a subtle balance: political parties must be strong and disciplined enough to hold government to account, and to provide the stability and openness on which a successful political system relies. But they must not be made so partisan that they lose sight of the public interest and undermine the deliberative function of Parliament: its capacity to debate the issues of the day and to scrutinize legislation. And they must not be so regimented that they prevent MPs from generally acting as representatives, and exercising their own mature judgement. Party politics should not mean invariably ignoring one’s own conscience on important matters or, in modern terms, slavishly following the whips. Far from being just a party hack, then, Burke is in fact acutely aware of what happens when political parties fail to reconcile collective discipline with individual creativity and independent thought.
It is interesting to compare Burke’s ideas about party with those of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the USA. Jefferson has the distinction of being the first man to found, organize and lead a new political party to electoral victory. He is regarded with reverence today as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, and for his remarkably successful presidency. Fewer people remember the ugly side of Jefferson as party politician: it is astonishing to record that as Secretary of State he took active steps to undermine publicly his own President, George Washington; and then as Vice President to destroy the reputation of John Adams, his closest friend. He did this by establishing, funding (in part via a federal stipend) and feeding with information a muckraking journalist named Philip Freneau in Philadelphia, who set up the National Gazette to make the case for Jefferson personally and for his ideas, and to discredit Washington, Adams and other Federalists.
Jefferson was an Enlightenment rationalist. He believed that political parties should be the direct expression of the popular will, receiving instructions from the people which would be ratified and authorized through elections. On this view, parties are the instruments of majority rule, working strictly through the terms and procedures of the constitution. Burke would have disagreed at every point. For him, elected politicians are representatives, not delegates; they act not upon instructions, but upon their own judgement; popular majority rule is arbitrary rule, because it is unconstrained and breaches the fundamental principle that no person or group shall be judge in their own cause; and effective government cannot be merely according to law, but must take into account the temper of the people, and the great interests that make up society and the body politic.
As between the two, Jefferson’s is simpler, clearer and founded in the common-sense politics of eighteenth-century radicalism. But Burke’s view is more subtle, more enlightened and closer to the realities of government, as Jefferson’s own presidency – which tested the limits of the constitution at several points – later underlined. And it has a further important consequence: parties start to move away from being merely private institutions or associations, and to play, at first informally, a public role within the constitution itself.
In essence Burke is extending within political practice a recognition of two vital countervailing principles within the British constitution. The first is what we would now call a democratic principle: that political control ultimately derives from the consent of the governed, as renewed at general elections. The second is a constitutional principle: that the popular will should be moderated through institutions which are not tied to the electoral cycle, but which reflect other views, other interests and other values, and which permit and encourage collective vision and a long-term perspective. As Burke puts it, ‘No legislator, at any period of the world, has willingly placed the seat of active power in the hands of the multitude. The people are the natural control on authority; but to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible.’ Sovereignty in Britain thus resides not in the people, but in Parliament.
It is sometimes forgotten, and Jefferson himself sometimes appears to forget, that the US constitution contains a parallel attempt to restrain the direct expression of the popular will and inhibit partisanship. The genius of the American founders, and above all of Jefferson’s Virginian colleague James Madison, was to take a similarly institutional perspective, and amend and generalize it: to engineer a constitution that deliberately constrained and fragmented the power of government between state and federal levels; between executive, legislature and judiciary; and between House of Representatives and Senate. Each was thereby placed as a check and balance to another, forcing all into debate both on the issues of the day, and on the proper scope and limits of government itself.
This is a check not merely on government but on popular sovereignty as such. It creates what John Adams called a ‘government of laws, not of men’, making it all but impossible for any group of people or political party to take overall control of American government. For the founders as for Burke, then, the role of the constitution is not merely to exercise power, but to inhibit and channel its exercise. In both the UK and the US, democracy itself requires institutional constraints on the popular will. This remains the basic insight behind representative democracy today.
Let us briefly sum up. In the roughly two decades between the 1757 essay and his 1774 election speech in Bristol, Edmund Burke developed what is still the fundamental conception of a representative political party. The political context was quite different from that of today, of course, and there are many aspects of modern parties that he did not anticipate. But his thought was not merely the distillation of the conventional wisdom, or of the work of others. It was in large part an original act of creation and reflection by Burke himself, which he developed before and in the Thoughts and simultaneously sought to put into action through and with the Rockingham Whigs. Over time, these ideas and practices were more widely adopted, and became absorbed into the British constitution, and many of them, by a parallel process, into US political statecraft. As Britain’s influence and prestige grew in the nineteenth century, so too did the influence of its system of representative political parties. Today such parties are widely recognized as the very touchstone of modern democracy. Truly, then, Burke can be said to be the hinge of Anglo-American, and indeed the world’s, political modernity.
But Burke’s thought is not restricted to reflection on political parties. It extends yet more widely and deeply, to the nature of politics itself, political change, political leadership, and political character and virtue.
It is important to remind ourselves that government in the late eighteenth century was very different from what it is today. Broadly, it consisted of maintaining public order, managing foreign affairs and trade, and waging war. The Poor Law apart, there was no national social safety net or welfare state, and so no great spending programmes on healthcare, social security, education or pensions of the kind seen in most modern political economies. British public spending after the American Revolutionary War returned to its peacetime average of below 10 per cent, a level it would maintain until the 1870s–80s. In part for this reason, vastly fewer areas of national life were subject to political decision-making.
Even so, Burke’s conception of politics was shaped as much by his wider views on the nature of society as by circumstance. In his view, perfection is not given to man, and so politics is an intrinsically messy business, in which any large decision risks doing damage to the innumerable private arrangements and understandings that make up the social fabric. People naturally aspire to support themselves and their families, to exercise their personal freedoms and capacities, and to acquire property and status. The function of politics, then, is primarily one of reconciliation and enablement: to provide a forum and a framework of law and practice within which individual differences and grievances can be redressed, individual freedom can be reconciled with the demands of the social order, and public deliberation extended via man’s inherent capacity for self-government.
The corollary of this emphasis on custom and practice is a highly distinctive conception of political leadership. For Burke government is not merely about passing laws or aggressive law enforcement, for ‘nations are not primarily ruled by laws: less by violence … Nations are governed by the same methods … by which an individual without authority is often able to govern … his equals and his superiors; by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious management of it.’ Again and again, Burke returns in his writings and speeches to the idea of governing ‘with the temper of the people’, insisting that ‘The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought … to be the first study of a statesman.’
This is a thought utterly foreign to contemporary notions of political leadership, which focus on forward planning, motivating ideology, great programmes of legislation, decisive action and the vigour of a leader’s personal will. What, then, does Burke mean?
Recall that, for Burke, the point of politics is to preserve and enhance the social order, in the national interest. A social order is invariably distinctive and sui generis: a unique and unfathomably complex set of interlocking institutions, habits and shared practices. But it is not merely a set of relationships and interests; it is also a set of embedded values and changing opinions. As with individuals, then, every nation and every people has its national character. Political leaders must start with history and what would now be called sociology; they must take pains to understand how their specific social order evolved as it did, and where people’s feelings really lie. Opinion polling was not available in Burke’s day, of course; but it is clear that he has in mind a much deeper understanding of the basic drivers of popular sentiment, and how they react to different kinds of change, than that offered by even the most sophisticated pollsters today.
Political leadership thus begins with respect for the social order, which is sublime – that is, it begins in modesty. The same is true of political change itself. The political leader knows in advance that all change, however well intentioned, will disrupt the social fabric, with unforeseeable and potentially serious negative consequences. Still more is this true of sweeping, radical change – what Burke calls ‘innovation’ – which abolishes whole tracts of settled human understanding and social wisdom. For radical change to be genuinely worthwhile, it must bring overwhelming social benefit, or be the product of the most extreme necessity. Contrary to some views, then, Burke is not innately hostile to change as such, or even to radical change, as we shall see. But he argues that extreme measures of any kind, let alone revolution, are in practice almost never the path of good government. Rather, as he said in a 1789 letter to his young French friend Depont, ‘moderation is a virtue not only amiable but powerful. It is a disposing, arranging, conciliating, cementing virtue.’
Instead, good political leadership must focus on ‘reform’. Burke’s comments on the nature of effective reform are scattered, but we can identify seven key characteristics. It should be early, anticipating the emergence of a problem before its full effects are felt. It should be proportionate to the evil to be addressed, to limit collateral effects. It should build on existing arrangements and previous reforms, so that it can draw on any lessons learned from them. It should be measured, so that those making the change and those affected by it can adjust their behaviour appropriately. It should be consensual, so that the process of reform can avoid unnecessary conflict and outlast the leader’s own period in office. It should be cool in spirit, to maintain consensus throughout the process of change. And finally, each step must be practical and achievable in itself.
But political leadership is never simply about reform, or laws, or policy: it is also about the virtue and character of leaders themselves. In his own time Burke was dismissive of Chatham’s pet phrase ‘not men, but measures’, regarding it as a kind of self-regarding cant designed to disguise Chatham’s own insistence on personal pre-eminence and control. What really mattered, he thought, was how ministers exercised their powers, and this was overwhelmingly a matter not of ‘measures’ but of personal character. For Burke, as we have seen, the prerequisites for an effective politician include wide personal experience, a deep connection with ‘the interest of the people’, and the ability to build relationships with colleagues.
But true leadership demands more. The modesty of a leader must extend not simply to respect for the social order but to the limits of his own powers, ‘his own private stock of reason’, which is so very much smaller than ‘the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages’. With experience and shared wisdom comes judgement – that is, the capacity to fit political action to political circumstances. Moreover, since individuals’ reason is limited, effective leaders will seek to have other people of high ability and experience around them, whom they can trust. And they will seek to develop their own virtues, for virtue is the result of good habit: ‘It is therefore our business carefully to cultivate in our own minds, to rear to the most perfect vigour and maturity, every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs to our nature.’
Above all, a political leader must be committed body and soul to public service. All power brings accountability, and for Burke the supreme duty is that of the political leader towards the preservation of society itself. That society is the nation, and nation is a moral essence, and not a merely civic, ethnic or geographical expression. It can survive despite the loss of any specific individual or group. But it can also be damaged, broken or destroyed. The ultimate test of political leadership thus lies in preservation of the nation.
Burke’s conception of political leadership is thus one not merely for normal times, but also for crisis, war and revolution. As he acknowledges in his thought and practice, in the face of a grave national threat there will be an overwhelming need for politicians to put their differences aside and come together in a supreme collective effort to repel and destroy the enemy. This may mean the temporary suspension of crucial parts of the constitution, as Pitt suspended habeas corpus in 1794. It may even mean the temporary abolition of party politics in favour of an emergency coalition, as Burke and later the Portland Whigs acknowledged when they crossed to join Pitt. It will certainly mean vigorous and decisive action. But for Burke the essentials of political leadership remain the same: modesty, restraint, attention to history, judgement in fitting the action to the need, trust, consensus, coolness, a wholehearted commitment to public service and the preservation of the nation. Indeed, extreme political pressures and the exigencies of the moment may make these qualities more important, not less.
Burke’s political philosophy, and specifically his views on parties, political leadership and political change, thus spring naturally from his deeper reflections on the nature of society and human well-being, explored in the last chapter. But they were also shaped, of course, by direct personal experience.
In particular, they shed a pitiless light by implication on the crisis in the American colonies. From a Burkean perspective, this provides a case study in inept political leadership. The dispute arose over a radical change in policy, the imposition of taxes for the first time on trade with America. The new policy was implemented quickly, without consensus-building at home or consultation with those affected. It was not measured, proportionate or cool in spirit. As Burke highlights in the ‘Speech on Conciliation’, it reflected no genuine understanding of the temper of the American colonists, either as Englishmen overseas or as the tough, highly independent-minded and legally grounded people which their own developing customs and ideas had made them. There was no continuity either in the policy or in British government itself, even after the advent of Lord North in 1770; and when there was such continuity, the administration continued to misread colonial feeling. Opportunities to prevent the war or to end it early were missed; and such was the domestic reaction in Britain that the eventual peace terms were almost certainly more generous than required. A heavy share of the blame for this debacle must go to George III.
Yet Burke’s thought is not merely a generalization from personal experience; it is itself a timeless source of political wisdom and understanding. We can see this by moving forward a century or so into the future: to the early 1860s, the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. For Lincoln is himself the very model of a Burkean political leader.
At first sight this claim may seem absurd. There is virtually no evidence that Burke’s writings exercised any influence on Lincoln, and what little there is, is negative. Indeed, Lincoln read and much admired Burke’s radical adversary Thomas Paine. Burke had had an elementary, school and university education, as well as studying at the Inns of Court; Lincoln grew up near the frontier, had very little formal education at all and learned much of the law from painstaking immersion in the Commentaries of Blackstone. Unlike Burke, Lincoln was not regarded as a great orator or prose stylist. He had to be, perforce, a managerial politician in a way that would have been barely comprehensible a century earlier. And under no circumstances would Lincoln ever have made the case, as Burke did, for a system of government which included aristocracy and monarchy. He was to his fingertips, and saw himself as, a democrat and a believer in ‘government of the people, for the people, by the people’.
Yet, grounded as Lincoln was in Blackstone and in the Whig beliefs of his hero Henry Clay, his leadership is Burkean through and through. Lincoln was a great student of history, who sought to master the detail of an issue before committing himself. His political persona was modest and mild almost to a fault, so much so that he was regularly criticized for not being more publicly assertive, and for being too lenient with mischievous or incompetent subordinates. He did not trade solely ‘on his own stock of reason’, but famously reached out to build a ‘team of rivals’ from the defeated candidates in the 1860 election. He was adept at building personal relationships both within the fledgling Republican party and across parties and states, using his extraordinary frontier experiences and unending fund of stories and off-colour anecdotes to break down barriers. He was assiduous in seeking to cultivate his own personal virtues, hiding his melancholy and taking huge personal and familial setbacks with outward equanimity. Indeed he wrote his so-called ‘hot letters’ in private and then destroyed them, to manage his own feelings of rage and despair at the poor progress of the Civil War. He avoided confrontation unless absolutely required to achieve his goals, arguing for conciliation in his first Inaugural Address and refusing to fire first on those who were illegally besieging Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
Like Burke, Lincoln insisted on reform over innovation. His Cooper Union address of 1860 contains a simple and powerful statement of belief: ‘What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so on evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand.’ To the despair of abolitionists, despite his strong personal feelings Lincoln was initially rather measured in his public condemnation of slavery. He supported Henry Clay’s efforts to resettle slaves in Liberia in the 1830s, and confined himself to opposition to the extension of slavery in the new states through the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854. He voted to accept slavery in states where it already existed and countermanded General Frémont’s proclamation in Missouri in 1861 freeing the slaves of those who had abetted the confederacy. He rejected regional attempts at emancipation, canvassing alternatives and renewing efforts to settle freed slaves overseas. Even after drafting the Emancipation Proclamation in the summer of 1862, he waited for the military success which finally came at the battle of Antietam before publishing it. This provided the basis in turn for the 13th Amendment, outlawing the institution of slavery itself.
Lincoln’s highest priority was that of Burke himself: to preserve and sustain his nation – that is, to save the Union. Lincoln is less prone than Burke to moralize, and far more willing to reach out and energize the mass of the people; but the two men share a conception of leadership which fundamentally demands the projection of moral character and virtue. Neither patronizes his audience. Rather, both invariably make the case, seeking to bring others along by personal example, by evidence, by argument and on occasion by some of the most beautiful and moving words in the English language. Lincoln’s extraordinary leadership during the American Civil War came three or four generations after Burke hammered out his own ideas of representative party politics and of political leadership. But in celebrating Lincoln’s leadership we are celebrating an ideal of the statesman given canonical expression by Burke.
But Burke’s wisdom is not confined to the politics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is not merely the forgemaster of our political modernity; he is also, as we have noted, the first post-modern political thinker. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, he challenges, even more than Marx himself, the assumptions underlying present-day Western politics, society and economics, in ways from which we still have much to learn.
