When I awakened, it was just daylight. I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: for, as I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs. I could only look upwards.
WASHED ASHORE ON A MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself tethered and bound by the tiny Lilliputians. Such was the genius of Jonathan Swift that Gulliver’s Travels is at once an adventure story, a travel diary, a novel, a political tract, a satire and a parable, and there are few more arresting images in literature than that of Gulliver staked out helpless on the ground. Ever since the book’s first publication in 1726, that image has symbolized the soul and the self of man as an individual, brought to consciousness in a society of which he is not the author and for which he bears no responsibility, and shackled by other people’s rules, social conventions and religious dogma.
Gulliver longs to be able to throw off the tethers of the Lilliputians and stand tall. And to many people, through many histories, in many classrooms, on many editorial pages, this is the simple lesson of the past three centuries. Man, born free but everywhere in chains, has become self-conscious, risen up and thrown off his shackles. Prejudice has been replaced by tolerance; social convention by diversity; religious authority by freethinking; anecdote and dogma by science; guilds and tariffs and mercantilism by free markets; political control by free speech, universal suffrage and human rights. Reactive government has been replaced by active, expert government, which steers national economies and improves social welfare. This is the distinctive contribution of Enlightenment ideas in Britain and western Europe, spreading out to North America and now around the world – and it is the gold standard of civilization.
Not only has this happened, the conventional story goes; it must happen. The argument is over, socialism is dead and we have reached the end of history. The world has become flat, competition is global and the consumer is king. Only by massive programmes of social and economic liberalization can more traditional societies around the world become truly modern; only so can developing countries achieve the levels of wealth and prosperity that exist in the West. Compare the massive prosperity of the Western democracies with the sluggish growth of their communist counterparts after 1945. Or take Korea. In 1983, thirty years after the Korean War, GDP per capita in capitalist South Korea was five times that of communist North Korea; in 2009 it was sixteen times greater. China’s economic growth only began to accelerate in the 1980s, when it opened up special economic zones and started to implement market-oriented reforms. Trade, not aid, is pulling Africa out of poverty after decades of stagnation.
But there is a problem. The happiest countries around the world, such as Denmark and Norway, are in many ways highly traditional, while the most successful developing countries today, such as Korea and China, are in many ways rather protectionist. Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom has failed to prevent – and some have blamed it for – a succession of recent disasters. Market liberalization and a new hard-currency regime were supposed to lead to stability and growth in Russia in the 1990s; instead they led to what may be the largest appropriation of publicly owned assets in history, as a relatively small number of private individuals exploited the lack of established property rights to make themselves extraordinarily rich. The invasion of Iraq after 2003 was supposed to lead to the establishment of a Western-style free-market democracy; instead it led to a religious and ethnic civil war, as different groups fought for power in the absence of both the Baath regime and an effective new government. The deregulation of global financial markets was supposed to lead to lower borrowing costs for industry and increased economic growth; instead it led to the greatest economic crisis the West has suffered since the Depression.
And there are also signs of a deeper unease: a kind of moral panic about Western society itself. This can be seen in worry about social indicators such as levels of drug abuse, loneliness, suicide, divorce, single motherhood and teenage pregnancy, and in fears of a loss of local or national identity. It can be seen in concern about falling social mobility and the emergence of entrenched and self-selecting elites, in the growing distrust of political authority, and in suspicion that those in power are distant, unaccountable and incapable of leadership. And it can be seen in the spreading belief that basic values of respect, hard work and public service are being lost in celebrity worship, consumerism and the money culture.
Such unease was aptly summarized in 2012 in a newspaper article by the British writer and broadcaster Matthew Parris:
We have been living beyond our means. We have been paying ourselves more than our efforts were earning. We sought political leaders who would assure us that the good times would never end and that the centuries of boom and bust were over; and we voted for those who offered that assurance. We sought credit for which we had no security and we gave our business to the banks that advertised it. We wanted higher exam grades for our children and were rewarded with politicians prepared to supply them by lowering exam standards. We wanted free and better health care and demanded Chancellors who paid for it without putting up our taxes. We wanted salacious stories in our newspapers and bought the papers that broke the rules to provide them. And now we whimper and snarl at MPs, bankers and journalists. Fair enough, my friends, but you know we really are all in this together.
Edmund Burke would have welcomed much of the history of the past 200-odd years. In general, he would have celebrated the growth of free markets, of religious toleration, of responsible and open government, and of personal liberty and the rule of law. We have so far seen him as a powerful advocate of these ideas during his own life, and as the great theorist and early practitioner of representative party politics – the hinge of our political modernity. But it is also his extraordinary achievement to be the first and greatest critic of many aspects of modernity itself. It is Burke now, more than two centuries after his death, who offers the most radical and compelling analysis of what has gone wrong, and who points the way to sources of possible recovery.
We saw earlier how developments in thought during the early Enlightenment emphasized two key themes: first, the primacy of reason, and specifically of science as a model of rational thought, able in principle to offer a comprehensive account of the workings of nature; and second, the moral value of the individual. During the past two centuries these ideas have been developed into a body of thought which has proven to be extraordinarily influential, indeed almost a modern orthodoxy today. It is not a single theory – more a collection of assumptions and theories that come together into a worldview. We can think of it under the broad heading of ‘liberal individualism’. (‘Liberal’ here is used in its British sense of ‘valuing freedom or liberty’, not to mean ‘left-wing’ or ‘progressive’ as in the US.)
To understand liberal individualism, we need to go back briefly to first principles. The word ‘individual’ originally means ‘what cannot be divided without ceasing to be itself’. Within the sciences, individuals are atoms: that is, independent and autonomous entities which form the fundamental basis for any reasoning, explanation or prediction. Within this worldview, then, the human individual is the basic unit of account in morals, in politics and in economics. Individuals do not merely have moral value; they have moral priority over society itself, and their interests are to be generally preferred over the constraints imposed by society. Indeed, the whole notion of society becomes questionable; for what, it is often asked, is society over and above the individuals that compose it? And if society is nothing more, then how can any claims be made on behalf of ‘society’ and against a specific individual or group of individuals?
If the individual is morally fundamental, the thought continues, then individual freedoms are socially, economically and politically paramount. Different people have different interests, needs or opinions; it is not for others – and specifically not for ‘society’ or the state – to decide what would make them happy, or to arbitrate between different conceptions of the good life. State and society must be, as the jargon has it, value neutral. The same is true in economics: individual freedoms should be respected, and the state should impose as little of the economic constraints of tax, subsidy, tariff or market intervention as possible. And again in politics: the individual freedom to vote, the franchise, is deemed to be fundamental. It should, then, be exercised as widely as possible, in preference to other methods of political decision-making. Liberal individualism thus emphasizes mutual tolerance, civil rights, competitive markets and popular sovereignty.
Finally, science enters the picture. Public decisions must command authority. In a context of free speech, that is, they must be rationally based and rationally defensible. Science offers the benchmark for rationality, and so on this view public decisions must be either directly based on science, or justifiable according to the standards, language and concepts of the sciences. The sciences are descriptive disciplines, not normative ones: they describe how the world is, not how it ought to be. They do not choose or promote one set of moral or cultural values over another. They too are thus value neutral.
This, then, is liberal individualism. Within politics, it has provided a unifying backdrop to many different parties and shades of opinion, from the social liberalism often associated with the left to the economic liberalism or libertarianism of the right. Its specific origins are many, varied and hard to pin down: we have seen several early ones already in the thought of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Others lie in the radical tracts of the late eighteenth century, and specifically in the pamphlet war that followed the Reflections, and in Thomas Paine’s rejoinder The Rights of Man. But a crucial influence was the work of Jeremy Bentham.
Bentham has a good claim to be the most prolific major writer on any subject in any language, producing an estimated 30,000,000 words over a lifetime of eighty-four years, on a bewildering range of topics including jurisprudence, ethics, penal theory, economics, psychology, politics and public administration, social policy and religion. He was moved to do so by his anger at what he saw as the obscurity, irrationality, unfairness and corruption of the systems of power and thought around him. In particular, he was gravely disappointed by the failure of his long-running scheme to build a Panopticon or scientifically inspired penitentiary in London, a failure which he attributed to the opposition of various aristocrats eager to protect their property holdings.
Bentham is best known as the founder of utilitarianism and his Greatest Happiness Principle that ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’ But this itself was only part of a far wider project, which was to found not merely morality but law, economics and politics itself on a scientific basis. For Bentham, the basic question was ‘What is the point of that?’ Every rule, practice or institution in society should, he thought, be subjected to an objective test as to its value or utility, in effect a cost-benefit analysis, and reformed or discarded if it failed the test. For Bentham, moreover, it was a simple fact of psychology that humans are governed by pain and pleasure, and he developed an elaborate ‘hedonic calculus’ by which different public or personal decisions could supposedly be evaluated in terms of their net effects on happiness. By this means he thought both morality and actual practice – what people should do and what they actually do – could be made objective, quantifiable and so scientific.
Bentham’s ideas cast a long shadow. They inspired his admirer and one-time disciple James Mill to develop a utilitarian theory of politics, on which government is treated purely instrumentally, as a means to the end of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. And they inspired James Mill’s son, John Stuart Mill, to develop his own version of utilitarianism, and to enunciate in On Liberty what would become a central tenet of liberal individualism, the so-called Harm Principle: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.’
They also inspired a revolution in economics, reconceived now not in the broad terms of Adam Smith, but as the science of the individual pursuit of wealth. Recall that, according to liberal individualism, people are seen as indivisible and independent atoms. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, this assumption and the Benthamite drive to ground public policy on the sciences inspired a generation of economists to lay the foundations of modern economics. According to this theory, people should be understood as individual economic agents. In the words of John Stuart Mill himself, economics:
does not treat of the whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end. It predicts only such of the phenomena of the social state as take place in consequence of the pursuit of wealth. It makes entire abstraction of every other human passion or motive.
Within the theory, then, the only things that matter are the individual, the desires or preferences of the individual for wealth, and the marginal costs and benefits of satisfying those desires. This became the intellectual basis for the rapid growth of economics as a discipline in the twentieth century.
Specifically, much of modern economics still arises from three basic simplifying assumptions about human nature: that individuals are perfectly rational; that they maximize their utility, benefit or profits; and that they act independently of each other, on the basis of perfect information. These assumptions have allowed economists to deploy a dazzlingly sophisticated array of mathematical techniques. As a result, economics today is full of formulae, data sets and technical terminology, and – faithful to Mill’s injunction to ‘make entire abstraction of every other human passion or motive’ – it deliberately ignores much of the messy detail of individual or collective human behaviour, which it has found impossible to model in mathematical equations. Even so, the result has been a body of theory which is an extraordinary technical achievement. In particular, economists have been able to show in a formal way and under certain very specific conditions that a market economy is at once maximally efficient and maximizes the benefit of the people in it. In theory, then, socialism, indeed any derogation from perfect competition in a market economy, not only creates inefficiency but also makes some people worse off. That’s quite a result.
Modern neoclassical economics is thus an indirect offshoot of liberal individualism, emphasizing, like its parent, the primacy of the individual and the importance of scientific rigour in public policy. It influences human language, with its talk of incentives, agents, preferences, behaviour and utility. It is used in a wide array of other contexts, from analysing crime to marriage to religion. And it shapes politics, by applying economic principles to political matters such as voting, the working of special interest groups and the behaviour of politicians – often implying that much of politics is really economics in disguise and that, deep down, politicians and bureaucrats, far from following any vocation or devotion to public service as they often profess, are in fact purely self-interested.
More widely, it is easy to see that the influence of liberal individualism as a basic worldview is now pervasive across many different areas of human life in Western countries, including attitudes towards education, race, health, globalization, religion, women’s rights, older people, international development and trade, the treatment of minorities and debates over immigration. Indeed, it has become partly constitutive of political modernity: nations, cultures or communities that do not share the basic assumptions of liberal individualism are often deemed to be ‘primitive’, ‘traditional’ or ‘backward’, whose only escape route lies through massive social and economic liberalization.
Yet those wishing to celebrate this apparently rosy picture should not do so prematurely. From a Burkean perspective, liberal individualism carries with it its own pathology, its own sources of weakness. Burke’s thought does not address modern developments directly, of course; he died too early for that. But nevertheless it carries within it a devastating analysis and critique.
Start with the very idea of an individual as independent and indivisible, an atom. Both philosophically and legally, Burke acknowledges the status of individuals, as we have seen; and he recognizes the power of the individual will in history and politics, such as that of Oliver Cromwell, or of Chatham in his own time. But to Burke there is little meaning in the idea of an individual human being entirely cut off from others. Man is a social being, not merely in the sense that humans tend and have tended to congregate together and cooperate with each other, but in the much deeper sense that their emotions, allegiances and identity are intrinsically social and interdependent. The self is a social self. More than this: it is an active self, whose well-being lies in its interaction with others. It is not, then, the basically passive vehicle for utility or preferences assumed by much modern economics.
More generally, liberal individualism mistakes the true order of priority between the individual and society. Society is not just an added extra, a mere epiphenomenon, which comes along after a group of individuals have decided to live alongside each other; it is there from the outset. More than this, it is what makes those individuals into human beings at all. Growing up within a given society is not simply a process by which humans become civilized; it is a process by which they become human. Indeed, not just people’s humanity, but their individual identities too are embedded in their history, and in the institutions – family, school, religion, work, play – within and through which they live. By the same token, for Burke there is no real sense to be attached to the idea of individual rights apart from a particular social context. Not that he is denying the importance of rights, as we have seen. Indeed he hints in the Reflections that in a free society the citizens have not merely wide personal freedoms, but the right to claim by talent and hard work a ‘fair portion’ of what society has to offer. This too is a right afforded by and within the social order.
But according to Burke there is a deeper mistake in seeing people as mere individual atoms. In effect it is a denial of their collective identities as participants in the social contract or trust between the generations: a denial of the covenantal nature of society itself. Like Gulliver with the Lilliputians, it seeks to assert the primacy of the individual will, and sees all social constraint as fetters to be thrown off. Liberty becomes licence: the absence of impediment to the will. The danger, then, is that liberal individualism makes people profoundly selfish; that they slip from ‘enlightened’ to ‘unenlightened’ self-interest, in the words of the great political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville; that it actively encourages them to adopt a purely egoistic perspective on their own and others’ lives, asking simply ‘How am I affected? What’s in it for me?’ Instead of grasping the intrinsically social nature of their own selves and their own well-being, they see themselves as apart from others, or from the institutions around them. It may be no coincidence that a recent in-depth study found that young people in America now have great difficulty in identifying or describing moral issues. Lacking relevant moral concepts or vocabulary, researchers found, they default to a typical position of liberal individualism: the view that moral decisions are simply a matter of personal taste.
This is the ‘ethics of vanity’, in Burke’s pungent phrase. In similar spirit, he might well have viewed with great concern the fact that the ideas of Bentham, the utilitarians and indeed modern economics have themselves now become highly influential institutions in their own right, embedded in universities, business schools and corporations around the world. Since their basic tenet is often that humans are purely economic agents, seeking gain and shunning loss, the danger is that this creates further feedback loops, inculcating successive generations into an orthodoxy of self-interest and thereby making them more selfish. What starts with an economist’s assumption ends up as a deep cultural pathology.
And not just for individuals. For there is a similar danger of collective egoism, according to Burke: a danger that whole generations may see themselves as no longer bound by the basic trust which unites past, present and future generations. They may arrogantly assert the supremacy of their own interests over those of their children and grandchildren, or of their own knowledge over that of their parents. On a small scale, any such assertion involves the loss of social wisdom, the loss of community and the loss of identity. At its most extreme, it is a recipe for social collapse; this is the lesson of the French revolution.
It is interesting to compare Burke again here with Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to James Madison written from Paris on 6 September 1789 – two months after the fall of the Bastille – Jefferson argued precisely the opposite case at length, saying ‘I suppose [it] to be self evident, “that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living;” that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.’ The issue was a particularly live one at that time. France had a huge burden of inherited debt, the previous two months had seen the ransacking of tax offices and toll gates, and tax evasion had massively increased, leading to a rapid fall in revenues. The question was increasingly asked as to whether the revolutionaries should not simply repudiate France’s debts, or nationalize the vast lands belonging to the Church.
As a convinced Enlightenment radical, Jefferson came down firmly on the side of the revolutionaries. In his words:
What is true of every member of the society individually, is true of them all collectively, since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of individuals … The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.
But from Burke’s viewpoint this whole doctrine is profoundly mistaken. Indeed it is madness. What is worse, it is the madness of reason gone mad. It abolishes whole swathes of settled human life in pursuit of a utopian project, according to a set of abstract ideas divorced from any practical or social context that could give them meaning. But again here Burke seems to have a deeper philosophical point in mind as well. Concepts from mathematics and the exact sciences can be given precise definitions, which are not tied in any way to a particular time or place: for example, a circle can be defined as a set of points an equal distance from a given point, and we do not doubt that this will hold now or 1,000 years hence, here or in a distant galaxy. Similarly, axioms or postulates and rules of inference can be precisely specified, such as in Newton’s Second Law, that Force equals Mass multiplied by Acceleration. But the same is not true in relation to the conduct of human life and human affairs. Here the principles are imprecise, and their meaning heavily governed by context, and the ‘distinguishing colour and discriminating effect’ of circumstance.
According to Burke, moreover, it is a deep mistake in logic to seek to apply abstract principles out of context to human affairs: ‘Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions us, and with great weight and propriety, against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all sophistry.’ Universal principles are thus never sufficient in themselves to guide practical deliberation. Their imposition always involves a degree of fallacy or logical error; in extreme cases that error may prove to be disastrous, leading to huge and often damaging unexpected consequences. When Burke talks of the age of ‘sophisters, economists and calculators’ in the Reflections, it is this error that he has in mind.
But, more than this, Burke suggests that absolute consistency is neither available nor desirable in the conduct of human affairs, since there will inevitably be conflicts between different principles and values, all of which are deeply and sincerely held. Political and other leaders must act; they must make choices, however incomplete the facts or theory. They must thus accept such conflicts, and the obligation those conflicts impose to think through the right course of action in concrete situations all things considered, rather than seek to create, or obey, a foolish and ideological consistency.
In effect, then, Burke identifies a cluster of further risks inherent in liberal individualism. The first is that the belief in the supremacy of individual reason may tip over into an ignorant arrogance among those in authority. Instead of attending to circumstance, working to reconcile the demands of conflicting interests and principles and governing modestly with the temper of the people, they may launch utopian and ultimately counterproductive schemes of their own. In Burke’s words, ‘It seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart, and an undoubting confidence, are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator. Far different are my ideas of high office. The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.’
Secondly, the attempt to impose uniform and universally valid principles on to human nature and a given social order – what Kant referred to as the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ – is fraught with peril. It is in effect a modern version of the ancient Greek myth of Procrustes, who invited strangers on the road to Eleusis to spend the night on his bed, but insisted they fit it exactly, stretching those who were too short and cutting off the limbs of those too tall. Thus on this view Bentham’s desire to subject every institution in society to a cost-benefit analysis is not a genuine move towards reform, but a move to eradicate many or all such institutions altogether. Social institutions are historical artefacts, which rarely if ever have a purely rational basis; and if they start on such a basis, they soon outgrow it. Individuals are creatures of habit as much as of economic incentive. Furthermore, Bentham and his successors illegitimately reverse the burden of proof. In a free society, without independent cause for concern, the burden should not be on institutions to justify themselves; it should be on those in power to make the case for their abolition or reform.
These are not superficial criticisms. On the contrary, the effect of this line of thought is to destroy the central intellectual project lying behind the idea of liberal individualism: the reduction of politics to science, and so the abolition of political choice in favour of expert technocratic government. The point is not simply that abstract principles such as Bentham’s Greatest Happiness Principle and John Stuart Mill’s Principle of Harm can never in fact be universally applied in a way which is at once exact, consistent and worthwhile. Nor is it that the attempt to apply such principles implies a radical divorce of ends and means, as though the ends or purposes of policy are brute and cannot be affected by the means available for their achievement.
No, the critique is still more fundamental: it is that if the attempt to apply mathematical and scientific concepts and principles to politics always involves logical error, as Burke implies, then Bentham’s ‘hedonic calculus’ and its offshoots can never succeed even in principle. This raises the fascinating further possibility that the same may be true for modern economics as a whole: that the simplifying assumptions required to push economics towards the hard sciences, and to make economics into a mathematically tractable discipline, may themselves import logical error in the way identified by Burke and attributed by him to Aristotle.
What, then, when a given generation decides to take matters into its own hands? What about revolutions? Surely all revolutions are basically the same – an expression of the fundamental human desire for freedom and autonomy, a yearning to throw off the shackles of society? And if so, isn’t Burke hopelessly inconsistent, in supporting the American colonists and bitterly opposing the Jacobins?
The answers are No and No. In fact, directly or indirectly, Burke accepted or supported not one but at least five separate uprisings against authority: the Glorious Revolution of 1688; the rights of the colonists in the American War of Independence; the Corsicans’ struggle for freedom after Corsica was sold to the French in 1764; the War of the Bar Confederation, by which the Poles sought to eject the Russians from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth after 1768; and several revolts against the East India Company under Warren Hastings in India. In each case, he is supporting the underdog; each is, broadly, a communal uprising against the imposition of some arbitrary and oppressive innovation, in the name of existing liberties and established custom. Each is seeking to preserve its social order and its way of life.
Thus, in Burke’s eyes, the revolution in America came about in reaction to specific grievances, and specific claims of right, over taxation. It arose from a wrongful and arbitrary assertion of power by the British government, not by the revolutionaries. It was at root a conflict over a specific conception of English liberty; as he says in the ‘Speech on Conciliation’, ‘The colonists [are] not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object.’ Thus, although it involved war and the overthrow of British rule and monarchical power, it did not involve the overthrow of much of British culture and values in America. Nor did it lead to the destruction of America’s society or institutions; and, there being as yet no constitution or federal government, it would not have done so even if the British had been successful in suppressing it. And it took place 3,000 miles away. To Burke, then, the American conflict is an uprising against an illegitimate imposition of authority – a partial revolution and not a total one.
However, the conflict in France was very different. It did not seek the redress of specific grievances as such. It involved what Burke saw as a wrongful and arbitrary assertion of power by the revolutionaries, through long periods of mob disorder and violence. It was an uprising conducted not to defend an existing way of life but in the name of abstract universal rights, slogans whose true meaning was unclear and uncertain. It led from the outset to a wholesale destruction of existing French institutions, including the monarchy, much of the aristocracy and much private property – although property rights were specifically defended as natural and imprescriptible in Article 2 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It expropriated and nationalized the lands of the Church. And it took place just 22 miles away, posing by its force and example a grave threat to Britain itself. It was a true and total revolution.
John Locke had taught that civil government depends on the consent of the governed, and that the governed had a right of revolution against tyranny or the abuse of power. Burke accepts the Lockean distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority. But for him there is a further distinction to be drawn between partial revolution against political authority (which Burke sometimes condones), and total social revolution; and far from being wholly inconsistent, this underlines the fundamental coherence of his thought. But Burke does much more than this: he invents the modern idea of revolution itself. For Aristotle, a revolution is a partial or total change of constitution. The pre-modern conception was a literal one derived from cosmology, science and the seasons: a revolution was a turning of the wheel of life, which restored what existed before and allowed new growth. This is the language of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But Burke’s idea is very different: it is one of a rapid and violent upheaval that succeeds in engulfing not merely politicians and constitution but the whole of society, and which obliterates what was there before. This is the sense in which we think of revolution today.
For Burke what matters is the preservation and improvement of the social order. In cases of extreme necessity rebellion may be necessary in order to preserve what matters in a social order or a way of life. But there can never be a right to revolution. Rights are largely derived from society; but revolution threatens the destruction of society itself.
Where, then, does this leave us? Burke’s ideas suggest that liberal individualism, despite its many attractions and achievements, also has some deep intrinsic flaws. It underplays or ignores the basic nature of man as a social being; it wrongly asserts the priority of the individual over society; and it threatens to undermine the habits and institutions that give meaning to people’s lives. And this is not all, for it also carries with it inherent risks: a risk of encouraging selfishness in society, at both the individual and generational level; a risk of encouraging ill-informed and arrogant decisions by politicians and officials; at the limit, a risk of stimulating revolution, with potentially ruinous consequences.
But, as we have seen, Burke also attacks, indeed destroys, the Enlightenment dream of founding all public decision-making and all government on science. Politics and political choices, then, are inevitable; they cannot be reduced to economics or expert decision-making, and economics itself can never become a hard science. There can never be a wholly rational orthodoxy about politics – including the orthodoxy of liberal individualism.
This may strike many people as a rather sad result, given the present dire levels of trust in our elected representatives, and the public desire for certainty and official reassurance in difficult times. But actually, to all but the most committed anarchists or science-fetishists, Burke’s critique should be good news, for three reasons. First, because it shows that there is and must always be a wide scope for the debate, exchange of views and trading off of different priorities that is the very essence of politics. Should you build this road or save this wilderness? Should you fund low-cost housing or put extra money into support for disadvantaged children? Should you cut taxes or spend more on the armed forces? These trade-offs cannot be abolished by relying on official expertise. Moreover, there can and must be debate even about the nature and limits of democracy, social liberalism and free markets, however obviously good these may seem to be.
Secondly, the Burkean critique reminds us that politicians are not economic automata, and that there is genuine scope for them to be moved not merely by self-interest but by ideas of duty and public service. It implies that politicians should be amateurs, in the best sense: highly professional in their actions, of course; ideally, expert in certain areas of policy or national life, but not wholly captured by a given profession or body of thought. We should see them as the ancient Greeks saw them, as citizens first and foremost, in whom a temporary, limited and qualified trust has been placed to exercise public power on our behalf. As soon as they adopt a particular professional viewpoint – be it that of the businessman, the environmentalist, the doctor, the social worker, the soldier or the economist – it becomes more difficult for them to strike the right balance. Expertise can only get you part of the way. More valuable by far are experience, wisdom, independent judgement – and common sense.
Thirdly, Burke’s analysis implies that the desire to see humans as mere atoms, indivisible and cut off from others, is vain. In effect, Burke fills up the empty space between the state and the individual. He suggests there is a third category – that of institution, and specifically of society itself. We are social animals. Society is relational and networked. It is not a mere composition of individuals, but includes their institutions, customs, habits and practices in it. It is not another thing – it is an arrangement of things. To use a modern analogy, it is like a molecule in chemistry. You cannot look at its different atoms individually in advance and always say exactly what the final shape of the molecule will prove to be – that depends on how the atoms link together. But on the molecule’s final shape and composition depends much if not all of its power and effect.
Moreover, because we are social animals, we can never even in principle step outside our skins and ask – as great thinkers from Immanuel Kant to John Rawls have demanded – what we would do if we were not ourselves. Liberal individualism may aspire to be value neutral, but it is not value free, and its values bring problems of their own. More deeply, a value-free description of morality or politics can never be achieved; indeed, a world free of values is not a world we should ever want to inhabit. Human reason is a wonderful thing, but Burke insists we are above all creatures of sentiment, emotion, passion and allegiance, for good or ill. What matters and should matter to us is not abstract liberties, but the liberty to live our lives well alongside others and in our communities. Ultimately, it is not merely in his hatred of arbitrary power, but in his rejection of rationalism itself, that W. B. Yeats’s Great Melody is to be found in Burke.
Now this is all fine and good, and it is a powerful and stimulating critique of the basic aspects of liberal individualism, which seems to be current orthodoxy in many parts of the world. However, it faces a key question: is it true? Is Burke right to insist with Aristotle that man is a social animal, with all that that implies?
In the next chapter, we will look at this issue in more detail. But there’s a hint of the answer in Gulliver’s Travels itself. For Gulliver does not in fact cast off his shackles and rise up a free man. He is initiated into the culture of the Lilliputians, and learns their language and customs. His shackles are removed by mutual agreement, and replaced by social ties. As a result, Gulliver enjoys all the benefits of a free life in Lilliput, at least for a period. Even in 1726, then, it looks as though Swift, like Burke, is rejecting liberal individualism in advance.
