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Edmund Burke
First published Mon Feb 23, 2004
Edmund Burke, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, is known to a wide public as a classic political
thinker: it is less well understood that his intellectual achievement depended upon his understanding of philosophy. The present
essay explores the character and significance of this for his thought.
The name of Edmund Burke (1730-97) [1] is not one that often figures in the history of philosophy [2]. This is a curious fate for a writer of genius who was also the author of a book entitled A Philosophical Enquiry.
Besides the Enquiry, Burke's writings and some of his speeches contain strongly philosophical elements — philosophical
both in our contemporary sense and in the eighteenth century sense, especially ‘philosophical’ history. These
elements play a fundamental role within his work, and help us to understand why Burke is a political classic. His writings
and speeches therefore merit attention as examples of attention to both ideas and to history, of the role of this attention
in practical thought, and of an achievement that challenges the assumptions of many political philosophers.
Burke was born at Dublin in Ireland, then part of the British Empire, the son of a prosperous attorney, and, after an early
education at home, became a boarder at the school run by Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker from Yorkshire, at Ballitore in the
Blackwater Valley. Burke received his university education at Trinity College, Dublin, a bastion of the Anglican Church of
Ireland. Thence he proceeded to the Middle Temple, London, in order to qualify for the Bar, but legal practice was less attractive
to him than the broader perspective which had captured his attention early in life. It was first as a writer, and then as
a public figure that he made his career. Burke's intellectual formation did not suggest that his career would be purely philosophical.
Indeed, for those without an independent income or a clerical vocation such a way of life was not very feasible in Britain
or Ireland. Only the Scottish universities offered posts that did not require holy orders, but they were not very receptive
to non-presbyterians. Burke married in 1756, and had a son by 1758, so that a career of Humean celibacy, in which philosophy
was cultivated on a little oatmeal, was not for him.
Indeed, like Hume, Burke found that there was more money in narrative works and in practical affairs than in philosophy.
Burke's earliest writings include A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), and A Vindication of Natural Society (1756). Thereafter he was co-author of An Account of the European
Settlements (1757) and began An Abridgement of English History (c.1757-62). From 1758, at least until 1765,
he was the principal ‘conductor’ of the new Annual Register. In 1765, Burke became private secretary
to the Marquis of Rockingham, who himself had just become First Lord of the Treasury, and was elected to the British House
of Commons in the same year. He remained there, with a brief intermission in the Autumn of 1780, for nearly twenty-nine years,
retiring in the Summer of 1794. Burke, who was always a prominent figure there and sometimes an effective persuader, gave
a great many parliamentary speeches. He published versions of some of these, notably on American Taxation (1774),
Conciliation with America (1775), and Fox's East India Bill (1783). These printed speeches, though ostensibly
anchored to a specific occasion, and certainly intended to have a practical effect, were meant to embody Burke's thought in
a durable form. In that respect, they parallel his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), and Reflections
on the Revolution in France (1790), amongst other discursive works.
Burke's activity as a parliamentarian and political writer embraced a great many concerns. Prominent amongst these were
the problems of British rule overseas, in North America, India and Ireland. His name, however, has been linked most strongly
by posterity to a critique of the French Revolution. Burke was certainly more notable as a pundit than an executive politician,
holding office only twice for a few months in 1782 and 1783. His political life was punctuated by a break in May 1791 from
some of his party colleagues over the significance of the Revolution. Thereafter, assisted not least by the turn the Revolution
took in 1792-3, he became a largely independent commentator on domestic and international politics in An Appeal from the
New to the Old Whigs (1791), Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795-7), and A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796).
Burke in his last years, especially from 1792, turned his attention to his native Ireland. He failed to found a political
dynasty, and he left no lasting school of political thought: the last politician who can be regarded plausibly as a disciple,
the addressee of A Letter to William Elliot (1795), died in 1818. As Sidgwick observed, ‘though Burke lives,
we meet with no Burkites’ (Sidgwick 2000, 195). Nor did Burke bequeath a straightforward legacy to any political party
or to any ideological brand of thought, though plenty have tried to appropriate him wholly or partly. The difficulties that
others might find in colonising his thought are apparent from an account of it that emphasizes its philosophical aspects.
Burke's mind, by the time he left Trinity, had two aspects: one was an orientation towards religion, improvement and politics,
the other a philosophical method. The latter derived from his university education, the former from reflection on his personal
situation. Burke was born into an Ireland where reflective intellect had its social setting in a small educational elite,
much of it connected with the Church of Ireland. This elite contemplated a political class which owned much of the land, and
consisted primarily of a gentry and peerage, headed by the King's representative, the Lord-Lieutenant; but it saw too a tiny
professional class, and a huge, illiterate, impoverished peasantry. The aim of the educational elite, which it shared with
some of the political class, was improvement in the broadest sense, that is to say it connected self-improvement through the
influence of the arts & sciences, and through the development of intellectual skills, with moral culture and with economic
development. The Irish situation suggested a general rationale of practice to those who wished to improve themselves and others:
improvement, if it was to spread outside the educational elite, must spring from the guidance and good will of the possessing
classes: from the landlord who developed his property, from the priest who instructed and consoled the poor, and from the
lord lieutenant who used his power benevolently. Burke retained all his life a sense of the responsibility of the educated,
rich and powerful to improve the lot of those whom they directed; a sense that existing arrangements were valuable insofar
as they were the necessary preconditions for improvement; and a strong sense of the importance of educated people as agents
for change.
The orientation of Burke's mind can be understood in terms of the Irish Enlightenment. For example, some points that readers
have thought distinctively Burkean, belonged first to Berkeley. Thus Burke's unwillingness to judge institutions and practices
without first connecting them with other things, his disinclination ‘to give praise or blame to any thing which relates
to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the objectÉin all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction’
(RRF, Langford 1981-, vol. viii, 58) is a practical judgement that implies a conceptual counterpart like Berkeley's view that
‘when we attempt to abstract extension and motion from all other qualities, and consider them by themselves, we presently
lose sight of them, and run into great extravagancies’ (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, vol. ii, 84.)
In both cases, philosophical wariness matched a distaste for considering aspects of objects in permanent isolation from the
other aspects with which they were essentially connected. This suspicion of abstract ideas accompanied a suspicion of schemes
for considering people in abstraction from their present situation, and accompanied too doubts about a golden past: Berkeley
rejected ‘the rude original of society’ (Berkeley, The Querist, vol. vi, 141) and had no time for ‘declaimers
against prejudice’ who ‘have wrought themselves into a sort of esteem for savages, as a virtuous and unprejudiced
people’ (Berkeley, Discourse addressed to Magistrates, vol. vi, 206), and it need not be emphasized that Burke
shared this view. Both belonged to an elite which considered improvement to be necessary, and sought to make it through the
agencies in church, state and education that were really available at the time. But Burke was not Berkeley, and if their similarities
indicate a shared philosophical orientation, Burke had his own way of developing it. To individuate him, we must turn to the
effect of Trinity on his mind.
The Trinity syllabus by the time Burke became an undergraduate student at the age of fifteen (1744) not only gave attention
to Aristotelian manuals but also to ‘the way of ideas’ enshrined in Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding.
Such a syllabus, in its Aristotelian aspect, indicated the unity of all departments of literature — or learning as we
now call it — which was congenial to one with Burke's passion for knowledge — he wrote of his furor mathematicus,
furor logicus, furor historicus, and furor poeticus [3]. It also indicated the range of achievements, and the range of needs, that people had generated. The extent and variety
of human activity impressed itself upon Burke. If his practical situation in Ireland suggested that not reason alone but also
Christianity and persuasion were necessary to improvement, Burke could now understand these needs in terms of a scheme of
learning, and indeed had the opportunity to develop the corresponding skills. At Trinity he founded a debating society, and
developed his oratorical technique on theological, moral and political topics, as well as commenting on the economic and literary
life of Ireland in a periodical run by himself and his friends. His skills were complemented by an opportunity for philosophical
development. This applied in particular to Burke's antecedent bent towards the imaginative branches of literature, especially
romances of chivalry like the Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser (the collateral ancestor from whom he derived his Christian
name). Such creations of alternative worlds by the mind now received a conceptual warrant from another part of the Trinity
syllabus. Locke had recognized that the mind devised complex ideas. The mind had a power to receive simple ideas from the
senses and from its own reflection on them, and to make out of this material further ideas that had no referent in the world
of sensation. Burke's interest did not extend to the centaurs that Locke had mentioned, but the ability to make complex ideas
and to assemble them in new ways was central to Burke's way of proceeding. His philosophical method involved thinking in terms
of complex ideas about a connected range of matters, matters connected by their place in a programme of human improvement.
Reason was fundamental to this method — but not reason alone.
Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding of 1690 was the first attempt to give a survey of the mind's workings
that was both comprehensive and non-aristotelian. It fostered intense interest in epistemology, psychology and ethics. Burke
seems to have worked on the imagination — the faculty of devising and combining ideas — as an undergraduate, and
continued to work at it into the 1750s. The result, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful (1757) emphasized, unsurprisingly, the activity of mind in making ideas and the influence of these upon
conduct. It was in the first place an exercise in clarifying ideas, with an eye to refining the ways in which the arts affect
the passions: in other words, a refinement of complex ideas was taken to be the precondition of a refinement of practice.
The roots of human activity, Burke thought, were the passions of curiosity, pleasure and pain. Curiosity stimulated the
activity of mind on all matters. Ideas of pain and of pleasure corresponded respectively to self-preservation and society,
and society involved the passions of sympathy, imitation and ambition. Imitation tended to establish habit, and ambition to
produce progress. Sympathy did neither, but it did establish an interest in other people's welfare that extended to mental
identification with them. The scope of sympathy could embrace anyone, unlike compassion, which applied only to those in a
worse situation than oneself. Such width of concern had an obvious reference to the social order (and may express also Burke's
thinking about the theatre). This chain of argument established at once that society as such answered to natural instincts,
and that it comprised the elements of continuity and improvement alike. Burke then proceeded to show that self-preservation
and its cognates suggested the complex idea of the sublime, and not least the idea of a God who was both active and terrible.
Beauty, on the other hand, comprised a very different set of simple ideas, which originated in pleasure. Sublime and beautiful
therefore sprang from very different origins.
The diverse views rejected by A Philosophical Enquiry were united by the pervasive assumption that human nature
in an unimproved condition was in some sense adequate. Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality was at odds with Burke's
view of the naturalness of society, and with his view that solitude, because unnatural, was a source of pain, as well as with
Burke's position that sympathy, rather than merely compassion, was a key emotion. Burke's view that the mind formed ideas
of beauty fromthe ideas of pleasure it received contradicted the view of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson that beauty was a perception
presented by a sixth or moral sense. Burke's further view that our simple ideas of pain went towards a complex idea of a God
who inspired terror was very distant from the deists' view that He could be understood by our natural faculty of reason alone
and that as such He was benevolent and not much besides. All three of these rejected positions presumed that human nature,
unimproved by human effort and considered with little relation to God, was an adequate source to inspire conduct.
Burke not only thought that nature needed improvement, but also recognized its ambiguity. Ambition, for instance, was the
source of enterprise and of improvement: but Burke did not suppose that enterprise was in all its manifestations a benefit
to its exponent, and indeed once called it ‘the cause of the greatest disappointments, miseries and misfortunes, and
sometimes of dangerous immoralities’ [4]. If Burke had a forward-looking mind, and believed that human nature both required and led to development, he did
not think that progress was necessarily an unqualified gain: for instance, in discussing the civilizing of American savages,
he saw a diminution of courage as well as a gain in moral goodness.
A Philosophical Enquiry suggests that Burke was developing the loyalties of his youth through the medium of philosophical
psychology. A God who presents Himself through nature in a way that is often found in the Bible, and who devises and sustains
nature in a way that leads man to society and facilitates the improvement of that society, has set Himself to support Christianity,
power and improvement, and probably education too. At the same time, however, other aspects of the book suggest that this
support was delivered to them, not on their own terms, but on the terms of a philosophy which recognizes the ability of the
imagination to transform people's understandings of themselves and society.
Anyone who thinks in terms of complex ideas can see that these can be framed easily in different ways, none of which need
correspond to anything found in the external world: combine the ideas of a man and a horse, and you have the idea of a centaur.
No one who reads romances would find difficulty in imagining a society differing beyond recognition from its current arrangements.
A classic instance of political imagination, indeed, is Burke's own Vindication of Natural Society, which presents
as an alternative model of society an organization — if that is the word — devoid of civil government, church
and significant private property.
Burke, in other words, could think through not only his own grouping of propositions but also their inverse. This reflects,
no doubt, other features of his mind apart from his understanding of complex ideas, such as the skill in seeing the strong
side and the obverse of any argument, which Burke had acquired in his undergraduate study of rhetoric; and it reflects, too,
a habit of versatility begun in his debating society, for there speakers were called upon to play roles; and no doubt it is
reminiscent, again, of Burke's undergraduate interest in the theatre. Yet beyond all of these, it suggests that in the large
topics that experience had put before Burke — religion, morals, arts and sciences — argument had not produced
an overwhelmingly decisive case. For A Vindication also seems to make a case against everything he had espoused.
If argument did not deliver incontestable conclusions, where was one to go? Burke's answer, in his notebooks, was that
where this was so, that people should prefer the conclusions that accorded with their natural feelings. The complement
to this emphasis upon feeling was to look to the results of affective preference — that is to say, a criterion for conduct
in such a case was what tended to make people better and happier.
This was a judgement in the first place about personal conduct, and the manner of applying it to matters on the larger
scale of civil society was less obvious. Here the judgement of benefit, whether ethical or pleasurable, might be harder to
discern. In order to make it plain in A Vindication, Burke applied a reductio ad absurdum to principles
in theology that he had rejected by showing their consequences for politics.
For that is what A Vindication provided. This short work was written in the persona of the recently deceased Henry
St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751). Bolingbroke had been a Tory pillar of the state, and therefore of the church too;
but the posthumous publication of his philosophical works revealed that far from being an Anglican he had not been a Christian
but a deist. A Vindication suggested the ills that Bolingbroke had attributed to the artifice of revealed religion
could be paralleled by those generated by civil society. One logic, indeed, was attributable on these terms to both Christianity
and civil society: that just as the latter distributed the means of power unequally, so too did Christianity distribute those
of salvation unequally (for not everyone had heard, and fewer believed, the Gospel). The deism of Bolingbroke implied the
principle that God treated everyone impartially, and that the means to salvation were therefore to be found in a medium available
to all, and thus available from the earliest point of human history, namely reason. It was easy to add, as Burke did, that
if the principle that such an original nature was the mature expression of God's ordinances were to be applied to civil society,
the normative result would be a regression from complex and therefore civilised forms to a simple society, even to animal-like
primitiveness — some of the matter of A Vindication paraphrases Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality
(Sewell 1938, 97-114). So Bolingbroke the deist and Bolingbroke the politician could be made to look very much at odds with
each other. This tension offered Burke an opening. A Vindication satirized Bolingbroke's schizophrenic posture, including
a good deal of transparent exaggeration to make ‘his’ criticisms of civil (‘artificial’) society seem
very absurd: and Burke added a preface to the second edition which made the disjunctive alternatives clear so that even he
who ran might read.
Yet it is hard not to recognize that Burke himself was telling the reader, in a way that entered the consciousness all
the more forcibly because it accompanied entertainment, that civil society really did imply some evils, just as he
identified losses as well as gains from progress in other connexions. Burke's Vindication, speaking in the voice
of pseudo-Bolingbroke, lamented the situation of miners: and ‘the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly,
and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations’ of ‘so many wretches’ was lamented by Burke without
any persona, thirty-four years later in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Such criticism, taken in itself,
is undoubtedly telling. Burke never dissembled the existence of the real misery that he observed in civil society. Instead,
he pointed out that wretched practices could not be detached from the larger pattern of habits and institution in which they
were implicated, and that this pattern had a beneficial effect. Burke recognized misery, did not deny it, and therefore had
a lively sense of the imperfection of arrangements, however civilized they might be. His sense of duality in nature and society
resembles Adam Smith's.
Burke's position, therefore, was poised. But it was not merely a matter of pointing out what made for good and what for
ill in civil society: it was a matter of responsibility — of choosing morally appropriate words. This was so for a philosophical
reason, because of the very nature of the words involved. Burke's Philosophical Enquiry divided words into three
categories. First, there were aggregate words, which signified groups of simple ideas united by nature, e.g. man, horse, or
tree. Second, there were simple abstract words, each of which stood for one simple idea involved in such unities, as red,
blue, round or square. Thirdly, and most importantly for our purpose, came abstract compound words. These united aggregate
words and simple abstract words. As such, they did not have a referent that existed in nature. A Philosophical Enquiry
argued that no compound abstract nouns suggested ideas to the mind at all readily, and that in many cases they did not correspond
to any idea at all, but instead produced in the mind only images of past experience connected with these words. This category
included virtue, vice, justice, honour, and liberty, besides magistrate, docility and persuasion (Wecter 1940, 167-81). The
centrality of such terms to a discussion of civil society requires no emphasis. The obvious inference from Burke's philosophy
of language was that to use abstract compound words was less to discuss ideas than to raise images which touched the affections
of the listener or reader. To do this could scarcely to be thought part of a speculative activity: the effect would not be
cognitive, but practical: not to develop ideas, but to influence conduct. The question was, with what arrangements were these
words, and therefore pleasurable images, to be connected.
This understanding of the mind gave speakers and writers an unusually powerful role. It was in their hands to connect words
which suggested pro-attitudes with arrangements of their choosing: for these words had did not imply only one set
of conceptual contents, because they implied none. If one recollects the propensity to imitation that Burke found in mankind,
this choosing was likely also to be leading. So Burke was exceptionally sensitive to the role of men of letters and public
speakers in moulding opinion. By the same measure, he had an unusually lively sense of their responsibilities. It was they
who had the power to guide people to the proper ends, or elsewhere. Guidance need not be directly didactic — indeed,
it could not be, because there could be no definitions to expound — but would be a matter of providing a linguistic
context which guided listeners and readers to goals that were ethically and politically beneficial.
One crucial approach that Burke himself developed was historiographical. In works of history or in oratory, discussion
involving a compound abstract noun — such as ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ could take place in
connexion with aggregate words like ‘Indians’ or ‘the English’, and, therefore, being discussed in
relation to these, connected that noun with definite ideas rather than with further ideas that had no easily identifiable
content — or no content at all. Almost all of Burke's writings and his more important speeches have a strong historical
element. That element is cast as a narrative in a way that connects compound abstract words with specific persons and specific
transactions. Burke also wrote avowedly historical works in the years immediately after publishing A Philosophical Enquiry
The content of these histories developed the preferences of his youth for improvement by embodying these in a way that made
them integral to the origins and continuing character of modern arrangements in the Americas and in England.
Burke, like Smith again, wrote ‘philosophical’ history, that is to say gave a view of the key agencies that
had shaped human destiny over the long run of human society. Indeed, he casually implied a four-stage theory of socio-economic
history at a time when Scottish stadial history, except that in Dalrymple's Feudal Property (1757), was either unwritten
or unpublished. But his attention, primarily, lay elsewhere, as appears in An Account of the European Settlements.
This work arose from the initiative of ‘booksellers’ alive to the reading public's interest in North America,
where Britain was then at war with France, and the work was co-written with Burke's ‘cousin’ and friend William
Burke. Edmund's pen is evident in the passages which contrast savagery with civilization. The book emphasized that the coming
of Europeans to the New World brought with it a civilizing of savages, who were far from noble, through the agency of institutionalised
Christianity. This implicit condemnation of the cult of the noble savage, and of primitivism in general, provided an identifiable
complement to the implied rejections of A Philosophical Enquiry and the parody of A Vindication.
A stage of human history rather later than that of savages was delineated within An Abridgement of English History,
which Burke wrote after 1757, but did not finish. So far as it goes, this provided a continuous account that ran from the
Roman landings to Magna Carta. Christianity figured again in this narrative as a source of civilization, but the significance
of the tale was more complex. This time the story was primarily political, and showed how one of the values most prized by
Burke's contemporaries, civil liberty, came to belong to England. The Norman Conquest of England established a powerful executive
government and brought with it a uniform system of law; if these two were necessary conditions of the matching grace of civil
liberty for all, however, they were not sufficient: the required addition came from an aristocracy, which had been taught
the value of liberty by an Archbishop of Canterbury, and that had come to understand that its own power was insufficient to
extract concessions from the crown unless popular support could be won. Burke's sense of the double-edged character of civilization
thus developed into a sense that the regime required by an advanced society — the combination of strong institutions
with civil liberty — came from sources that were contrary to each other, and not always beneficial in isolation
(aristocracy as a form of government was an ‘austere and insolent domination’ (TCD, Langford 1981-, ii. 268)):
and as both a strong executive and civil liberty were needed, by the same token the forces making for each needed to be counterbalanced
from the other side on a continuing basis. This balance of forces provided a context in which ‘liberty’ had an
identifiable meaning, namely the specific civil liberties secured through political struggle and written into Magna Carta.
Burke's narratives suggested that agencies antipathetic to each other, if properly connected to one another, might produce
results that were both intelligible and valuable. One effect amongst several of this philosophy of cooperative conflict was
a rehabilitation of the Catholicism that was the historic heritage of Burke's family. An Account and An Abridgement
alike suggested that in its historical time and place Roman Catholicism, and, indeed, clericalism, whether embodied in Jesuit
missionaries or in an English archbishop, had been a constituent needed to produce social and political benefits of a fundamental
kind. As an historiographical exemplar, An Abridgement therefore showed an exceptional appreciation of the Middle
Ages, which was to cause raptures to Lord Acton. It anticipated both Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance
(1762), and, still more, a great work that set the bearings for American and British medievalists for many years, William
Stubbs' Constitutional History of England (1875-8). Burke, however, could not think in terms of an academic historiography,
still less one that would be the exclusive intellectual preoccupation of its exponents: neither of these existed in his time.
He could think, however, of subtly defusing anti-Roman prejudice in Georgian Britain.
Burke himself was not a Roman Catholic, and viewed enquiry into his personal background with alarm and suspicion. This
was sensible enough in a Britain which still subliminally linked civil liberty with Protestantism, and therefore regarded
Irishness as a likely pointer to popish subversion of its political values. Burke's argumentative stance always benefited
Roman Catholics, but he never found a kind word for the Pope: Burke's was a position which emphasized the priority of civil
interests over denominational claims in civil society. Indeed Burke considered that ‘the truth of our common Christianity,
is not so clear as this proposition: that all men, at least the majority of men in the society, ought to enjoy the common
advantages of it.’ (TPL, Langford 1981-, ix 464). This was a political development of the centrality he gave to the
claims of improvement, and of the obvious necessity of its free development for the bettering of the human condition. It also
silently defused any papal claim to civil dominance on theological grounds and, more audibly, suggested that the penalisation
of Catholic beliefs was wrong if such beliefs did not cause Catholics to interfere with others' civil interests. Burke's presumptions
about the priority of civil interests and a sense of the possible irrelevance of denominational opinion to civil society suggest
a reading of Locke's Letter concerning Toleration and Two Treatises of Government, the latter of which was
common, though not prescribed reading at Trinity. It also implies that the proper terms in which to conceive civil interests
are those of natural jurisprudence, because there people are considered without reference to any specific allegiances, religious
or otherwise. Burke certainly referred to natural law and natural rights directly, though he made no theoretical contribution
to natural jurisprudence until quite late in life. His creative energies were mostly applied elsewhere.
Burke developed his thoughts about civil interests in a work that his executors entitled Tracts on the Popery Laws,
which he had drafted when he was employed as private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland. After this, Burke became
involved more immediately in political practice, and, by one means or another, contributed to it until his death and (through
the activities of his executors in publishing or reprinting his writings) from beyond the grave. This was one obvious route
of development, even besides its personal amenities. Burke's view of the compound abstract words involved in civil discussion
did not suggest that purely speculative study had unlimited potential either for the mind or for personal satisfaction, for
a strictly speculative discussion was likely to be inconclusive at best: such words became more readily intelligible in connexion
with the concrete, and therefore the practical. Hence, perhaps, Burke concluded that ‘man is made for Speculation and
action; and when he pursues his nature he succeeds best in both.’ (Somerset 1957, 87). There was, on this understanding,
intellectual benefit in political participation, and, equally, political practice might benefit from the speculative mind.
This is likely to seem an implausible position nowadays, when political activity is frenetic, and learning is a matter of
speciality; but in the eighteenth century, when an agile mind could manage at least the basics of several branches of learning,
and the British legislature was often in session for less than six months in a year, it was more plausible. Political participation,
on Burke's understanding, had besides its intellectual possibilities, an ethical potential. To the extent that thinking about
politics was necessarily uncertain, the proper conduct of affairs depended upon an honest as well as a capacious mind, and
on a well-disposed management of words.
It remains to show what Burke learnt from political activity, and what he conferred upon it. The picture is one in which
the claims of practice enriched Burke's mind and brought intellectual benefits to practice itself.
Burke's life was spent in parliamentary affairs from the mid -1760s, and this made a difference to his style of intellectual
activity. This did not lie primarily in developing the cast of his mind, and if in 1771 Burke stated that ‘I have endeavoured
all my life to train my understanding and my temper in the studies and habits of Philosophy’, at the same time he concluded
that ‘my Principles are all settled and arranged’ [5]. This did not preclude intellectual innovation. The difference lay in his reasons for applying his mind, and consequently
in how he did so. The reasons were to influence opinion and determine votes. The matter common to both of these was Burke's
view of the words central to political understanding.
An obvious inference from Burke's account of compound abstract words is that to use these is to touch the experience of
reader or listener, and that persuasion was unavoidably central to discussing politics: this befitted a practical rather than
a speculative subject. Indeed, these terms implied that the point of discussing politics must be to influence action, and
nothing much else. Burke developed great skill in managing words, begun in debating at Trinity and carried forward through
other venues, including the House of Commons. As such language was persuasive, its objective was to establish pro-attitudes
and con-attitudes in mind of listener or reader.
This was not the only philosophical aspect in Burke's political practice. His primary conceptual tool in discussing politics
was relation. Relation is one of those terms which was common to both the scholastics and to Locke. It denotes both comparison
and connexion. Comparison was an invaluable procedure because it enabled events, institutions and persons to be placed in
any number of lights which would raise or lower their significance and standing. Connexion was scarcely less valuable, because
the place that someone or something occupied could be used to sustain or criticise their role, as well as to demonstrate the
value of co-operative contraries. Best of all, relation in either sense lent itself to a myriad of uses, for as LeClerc had
remarked in his Logic (which Burke had read at Trinity) relations were beyond counting — sunt autem innumerae
relationes (Le Clerc 1692, pt. 1, ch. 4, s. 1, p. 19).
Burke's conception of philosophical history was also fundamental to his political practice. ‘Every age has its own
manners and its politicks dependent upon them’ (TCD, Langford 1981-, ii 258.) The manners Burke saw around him in England
were continuous with those he had seen in the middle ages, or projected backwards thither, in which a powerful executive government
was balanced by other agencies with the effect of securing civil liberty. Those agencies most obvious in Burke's time had
established the sovereignty of Parliament at the Glorious Revolution (1688-9), reaffirmed it in the Bill of Rights (1689)
and the Act of Settlement (1701), and confirmed it by suppressing the attempts made from 1708 to 1746 to reassert the sovereignty
of kings alone. Burke understood law in this arrangement as the guarantor of interests of the governed because it was law
passed and secured by Parliament. It was secured in Parliament by the mutual dependence of Commons, Lords and King. That sovereignty
had this public character made the British state a beneficiary of a very high degree of financial credit, and this increased
the power of Parliament. The long, slow movement of British history from a conception of the realm understood as royal property
to the state conceived as the expression of public will had in Burke's time reached a stage at which this will was expressed
through the decisions of Parliament in a manner heavily influenced by the monarch. Burke's political activities therefore
assumed parliamentary sovereignty.
If Burke had a view of words and relations that gave him practical tools, and if parliamentary sovereignty provided him
with a practical postulate, what did he assume was the proper purpose of sovereignty? We have seen that the relation between
sovereign and the governed had for a primary purpose the protection of the latter's civil interests. This much suggests continuity
between Burke the philosopher/historian and Burke the political participant. But the former might also see that there were
complications for the latter. One who sees the multiplicity of civil interests, and the variety of relations in which they
can be considered, and the variety of contraries at work, will see that to put society at ease with itself may well imply
conflict and see that such conflict is hard to avoid; he or she will see, too, that Parliament forms an arena for conducting
it in a stylised and moderated way through the representation of interests, appropriate to a civilized state of society; and,
even while participating in such a conflict, s/he might recognizes the necessity of both sides to the result. Here, opponents
may be not only enemies but also co-workers, sharing at least some common assumptions about the system within which their
lot was cast, although separated from others by the role required of them. In that situation, the question becomes, where
do you take your place? The answer may depend on your own connexions, and on how you conceive them.
Burke's method for written composition often combined (i) identification of relations, with (ii) relevant history, and
(iii) treatment in language that would attach pro-attitudes to one side or the other in a difference of opinion. This method
is seen, for instance, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). Its central statement
for our purpose is about (i) relation in the form of connexion: that the British constitution had been constructed in a manner
that required the connexion (in this case the interdependence) of the parts of the sovereign in order to achieve mutual control.
This statement contrasted with (ii) the historical statement that there was a new system of court politics which involved
disconnecting those parts in order to make the king independent. Burke's history showed the emergence of this new system,
illustrated its pernicious results for both domestic and foreign affairs. The contrast (iii) between the older system —
which was represented as having benign results — was clear, and the disposition of pro-language obvious enough. Burke's
appeal lay to the standards which his contemporaries would take for granted, namely those implied in their beliefs about parliamentary
sovereignty. As if it were not enough, the picture of the older order was reinforced by a sense of connexion in the Aristotelian
mode that Burke's society recognized and approved — that man was sociable, rather than being a solitary beast, and above
all by the annexation of the key term of connexion to the side of the dispute that Burke favoured. All of these considerations
suggested the appropriateness of ‘the good’ combining to counterbalance the efforts of court politicians, and
so to sustain parliamentary sovereignty and its benefits.
This illustrates Burke's remarkable ability to combine philosophical method and philosophical history, as well as the practical
purpose to which he put them — forming an understanding of politics which was practical in the sense of calling for
activity in one direction to counterbalance forces coming from another. It was also practical in relation to advancing very
specific interests. These considerations were used to situate quite another sense of connexion, namely political party, and
especially the party of Rockingham to which and to whom Burke had attached himself. Indeed Present Discontents was
read in draft by its leading lights before publication. On publication, the pamphlet was widely understood as a manifesto
for this party. After publication Present Discontents became a manual from which fledging politicians learnt the
rationale of their party, and, indeed, a source book for cat calls from the party colleagues from whom Burke separated himself
in 1791. The philosophical and historical element in Burke's positions is evident only to those who retrace all of his steps;
an activity which his contemporaries lacked the will, and (as not all of his major works had been published) some of the means
to do.
The educative effect of Burke's writing is not to be underestimated in a civil society, some of whose members were highly
literate but had no formal education in political science (except, sometimes, at Scottish universities). Indeed, it is likely
that Burke wrote in order to educate. Yet at the same time that the strength of his conceptual and historical arguments, and
the skill with which he developed these, excites the reader's admiration, they create unease. This is not merely because in
Present Discontents the philosophical sense of connexion is used to adumbrate the claims of a party connexion: it
is a more generalized disquiet. A politician inspires confidence, in part, because s/he is honest: and a good way to be thought
honest is to convey the impression that you are not clever enough to deceive. As a philosopher commands interest when s/he
is intellectually powerful, this impression is one that is naturally hard to achieve: but it can be done. C.D. Broad suggested
that ‘Locke, we feel, is not so much cleverer than ourselves as to be capable of playing tricks with us even if he wanted
to do so. He is the Mr Baldwin [6] of philosophy, and he derives from his literary style some of the advantages which that statesman owed to his pipe
and his pigs.’ (Broad 1952). This judgement does not apply to Burke, even though he did keep pigs. The reader carries
away from Burke a sense of great mental power, and the listener probably received other and unwelcome sensations when it was
enforced by personal raucousness. These feelings generate unease, and unease is increased by Burke's prose.
His literary style is to argue clearly, but in doing so to include a manifest carefulness of qualification that will permit
subsequent shifts of position — for instance his self-description as a ‘true but severe friend to monarchy’
is consistent with his occupying any point within the generous spectrum of parliamentary sovereignty — and, indeed,
the sense of historical change which pervades Present Discontents suggests that movement is a common experience.
Unease, perhaps, is increased even further: for against one equipped with this intellectual repertoire, the accusation of
inconsistency is irresistibly tempting and utterly useless. Again, Burke's is a very sensible way for a statesman to think,
but it is not how the public wishes politicians to appear. Still less is it reassuring about Burke's intellectual bona
fides: for this is not how people innocent of political experience, who are the majority, conceive the role of political
principles. Coleridge put his finger on an important point when he suggested that from ‘principles exactly
the same’ Burke could draw ‘practical inferences almost opposite’ in different situations (Coleridge 1983,
vol. i, 191). Burke's philosophical and historical positions are clear, but they do not translate, and were not meant to translate,
into a set of practical conclusions of permanent validity.
There was the contrast, too, between the breadth of view and of learning in the matured statements that Burke published,
on the one hand, and, on the other, the ways of the parliamentary pugilist who was audible to fellow M.P.s and legible to
others in the speeches reported in the daily newspapers. Burke's manner was anything but ‘philosophical’ as the
public understands the word. Partly this was, doubtless, because Burke was like that as a person, and not least because he
had a weak voice that had to be raised if it was to be heard in the bear garden that was the House of Commons, but partly,
too, because his Philosophical Enquiry had suggested that the best way to impart a mood to an audience was to display
it oneself. So, for instance, if Burke needed to plead for moderation, he did so immoderately. Above all, perhaps, it was
because this philosopher turned participant was not exempt from the need to win to his side a sufficiency of strength to ensure
that his side was not beaten (or, at any rate, demonstrated enough strength to remain in contention), and had at hand an exceptionally
powerful range of persuasive tools. It is an evident fact, too, that the resources of Western civilization were sometimes
invoked by Burke in order to produce votes in the House of Commons — votes, which, whatever else they were, were in
the interests of his party. But, manifestly, these resources do not supply a rationale for only one policy, still less for
only one party. The roles of thinker and party spokesman consort ill: and there were bound to be doubts about one
Who born for the Universe, narrow'd his mind,
And to party gave up, what was meant for mankind.
Tho’
fraught with all learning, kept straining his throat,
To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.
(Goldsmith,
lines 31-34).
A disparity of this sort was always likely to suggest that Burke had profoundly personal motives for narrowing his mind,
and when he was not being caricatured as an Irish Jesuit he was being satirized as a corrupt hack [7]. Yet some sort of procedure of the type pursued by Burke was implied in his sense of practical reasoning. The ‘philosopher
in action’ had the function of finding ‘proper means’ to ‘the proper ends of Government’ marked
out by ‘the speculative philosopher’ (TCD, Langford 1981-, ii. 45-51). Parliamentary votes, in the situation that
Burke found himself, were amongst the proper means.
Political participation generated scepticism about Burke as a person, some of which was unjust, though all of it was to
be expected. What is perhaps less predictable, and is certainly more interesting philosophically, is that this participation
was a precondition of the practical thought which made Burke famous in his own time and has given him a leading place in the
canon of Western political thought.
Burke's practical thinking about the dispute between the British parliament and its North American colonies began with
a situation not of his making, that is to say the rejection of the Stamp Act by the colonists, and its withdrawal by the ministry
headed by Lord Rockingham in 1765-6. The Rockingham ministry followed up this concession of letting the colonists alone with
the assertion of Parliament's right to legislate for the colonies in the Declaratory Act of 1766. Burke's task was to demonstrate
to the House of Commons the plausibility of this package. He did so by combining two complex ideas — or at least two
abstract compound nouns — in a new way. One idea was empire, which involved command. The other was liberty. These, Burke
thought, were ideas difficult to combine — a sound reflection as they are diametrically opposed — but that they
were combinable in the further idea of a British empire — one which combined legislative command with civil
liberty. This idea implied letting alone certain matters of concern to the colonists, and so allowing them in some respects
civil liberty on a de facto basis (SDR, Langford 1981-, ii. 317-18). This idea is considerably more ingenious than
the average British position that ‘all the dominions of Great Britain are bound by Acts of Parliament’ [8]. It was explanatory, because it conceptualised the situation before Burke in a way that made intelligible the points
involved and established a connexion amongst them. It was also accommodating, because it made the British executive's policy
intellectually and therefore practically respectable at the same time that it made room for colonial preferences. In short,
it was a small masterpiece of thinking about policy.
The repeal of the Stamp Act was followed by the passing of the Declaratory Act. Burke was practically successful in 1766
with the House of Commons because he was speaking for the executive, and Members of Parliament, ceteris paribus,
tended to vote for the king's ministers. In 1774 and 1775 he was practically unsuccessful, because he was now in opposition,
but his conceptual achievement in dealing with the American question became much greater. By 1774, the issues dividing some
American colonists from the British parliament had changed. The former now resented the attempts of the latter to levy taxation
on them directly, rather than by the authority of their own colonial legislatures, and they resented still more the project
of backing the attempt, if need be, with coercion. Burke's speech of 1774 on American Taxation, did not give up the
idea of imperial command, but rather elaborated his idea of the British empire in a new way in order to deal with the new
situation.
Burke elaborated the idea by adding a qualification. The sovereignty of the British parliament was an idea that certainly
included a right to tax: but a right to tax could be understood to be consistent with inaction as well as action. The right,
in plainer language, need not be applied. Burke could accommodate, therefore, both the claims of Westminster and those of
the colonists. To this point, of course, one might reply that Burke was merely making concessions. But this situation
also provided a cue for conceptual innovation — Burke inserted a distinction into the idea of sovereignty. He distinguished
‘my idea of the constitution of the British Empire’ from ‘the constitution of Britain’ unconnected
with overseas rule. It could be inferred that
The Parliament of Great Britain sits at the head of her extensive empire in two capacities: one of the local legislature
of this island, providing for all things at home…The other…is what I call her imperial character, in
which…she superintends all the several inferior legislatures, and guides, and controls them all without annihilating
any. As all these provincial legislatures are only co-ordinate to each other, they ought all to be subordinate to her….It
is necessary to coerce the negligent, to restrain the violent, and to aid the weak and deficient, by the over-ruling plenitude
of her power. She is never to intrude into the place of the others, whilst they are equal to the common ends of their institution.
But in order to enable parliament to answer all these ends of provident and beneficent superintendence, her powers must be
boundless
so that Burke's elaboration of the complex idea of the British empire suggests complementary roles for the British parliament
and the colonial legislatures, an elaboration which would make the question of taxation irrelevant at a stroke, whilst simultaneously
emphasizing the authority of Westminster.
Conceptual refinement provided a practical avenue that other, less gifted politicians had not devised. Burke's position
was altogether subtler than the implied tautology of a minister's claim that ‘to say we have a right to tax America
and are never to exercise that right is ridiculous’ (Sir Edward Thurlow, quoted in Gore-Brown 1953, 85), and of another
politician's despairing sense that ‘we must either insist upon their submission to the authority of the Legislature
or give them up entirely to their own discretion.’ [9]. These pundits, by failing to conceive a sufficiently complex idea of sovereignty and the sovereign's right to tax,
failed also to see that sovereignty did not imply an unpleasant choice between abrogating this right by disuse or applying
it by force.
Events soon required a further elaboration of Burke's idea of the British empire. The continued use of coercion made the
colonists more, not less recalcitrant. The practical need seemed to be for terms on which they would stay, at least nominally,
under British rule. Their crucial claim was now that their right to tax themselves by their own legislatures rested on charters
from the Crown, and that they were subordinate to the Crown alone, and not to Parliament. Burke gave still closer attention
to the idea of sovereignty. It would be tactless to emphasize the sovereignty of Parliament, but it would be self-defeating
to withdraw it explicitly and concede a sovereign right over taxation to the colonial legislatures. So now, in Burke's speech
on Conciliation with America (1775), he focussed upon only one aspect of the complex idea of a parliamentary sovereign.
The latter comprised in the British instance not only Lords and Commons, but also the king. Hence, by judicious emphasis,
the item acquiesced in by the colonists could do some conceptual work: ‘my idea of an Empire…is…that an
Empire is the aggregate of many States, under one common head; whether this head be a monarch or a presiding republick’;
and it was emphasized that the rights of the colonists depended on this superior, for ‘the claim of a privilege seems
rather, ex vi termini, to imply a superior power.’ As to a right to tax, Burke added on a later occasion, that
though it ‘was inherent in the supreme power of society, taken as an aggregate, it did not follow
that it must reside in any particular power in that society’, and therefore Parliament could delegate it to
local legislatures. In short, ‘sovereignty was not in its nature an idea of abstract unity; but was capable of great
complexity and infinite modifications.’ (SSC, Langford 1981-, iii. 193).
Whether Burke's ‘infinite modifications’ would have assisted in keeping the thirteen colonies within the fold
of the British empire is unknowable, for nothing like his proposals were tried until 1778, which was too late. It is clear,
however, that Burke's ability to make conceptual changes depended on his philosophical thinking. To think in terms of complex
ideas is to recognize that they can be elaborated by adding further ideas; to distinguish between the roles of Parliament
is to make that addition; and to analyse the powers of a sovereign parliament as a preface to relocating one of them is to
use philosophy as a tool in practical reasoning. It is noteworthy, also, that these philosophical exercises were the means
of coping, as Burke hoped, with practical changes. Neither was his work here primarily ideological, for though Burke had a
practical goal in view, and at that one consistent with the Rockingham achievements of 1766, he worked philosophically to
modify the conceptions in terms of which his contemporaries viewed their situation, rather than using his conceptual tools
as ways of defending those conceptions without modifying them. Thus he added ideas to the stock of his day. It is fitting,
though Burke's proposals were not implemented in time, and though his goal was not attained, that his American speeches figured
prominently in the schools and universities of both the U.K. and the U.S.A. well into the twentieth century. Burke, after
all, was suspicious of poor ideas: he concluded that ‘one of the main causes of our present troubles’ was ‘general
discourses, and vague sentiments’, and urged instead study of ‘an exact detail of particulars’ (SSC, Langford
1981-, iii. 185).
Burke's thinking about America also suggests a political disposition that owed something to his philosophical conceptions.
Burke's complaint in American Taxation against ministers was that ‘they have taken things…without any
regard to their relations or dependencies’, and had ‘no one connected view.’ This was in part a straightforwardly
cognitive position with prudential point: the world with which politicians dealt was complex, and to use ideas which were
insufficiently complex to capture its contents and their relations was a short way to meet the rough side of reality.
It was also, implicitly an ethical position: governments ought not to apply force to existing relations, at least those that
were legitimate. This is, in one way, an obvious point from natural jurisprudence, and one that Burke had made transparently
with respect to inroads by the government of Ireland against Catholic property. In another, and more interesting way, it reflected
his view that abstract compound nouns and complex ideas evoke specific past experiences. To interfere forcibly with someone's
experientially-based expectations, would be to break their mental association between experience and idea or word: and so
the idea or the word would become meaningless and cease to influence action. If, therefore, ‘my hold of the Colonies,
is in the close affection which grows from common names’, amongst other sources that were ‘though light as air…as
strong as links of iron’, then ‘let the Colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your
Government; — they will cling and grapple to you…But let it be once understood, that your Government may be one
thing, and their Privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation; the cement is gone; the
cohesion is loosened; and every thing hastens to decay and dissolution.’ (CWA, Langford 1981-, iii. 164). To break such
mental associations was to break communities.
This point suggested that a genuinely prudent conduct of affairs would proceed without assaulting the mental associations
of the governed, and, as change was omnipresent, would conduct its share under accepted names — in other words, by gradual
and by moderate reform of institutions and practices rather than by immediate and total replacement, which Burke stigmatised
as ‘innovation’. This, indeed, was what Burke claimed to be doing in his contributions of 1780-82 to the recasting
of the royal household. The intellectual counterpart of this prudent conduct, namely the refinement of our existing ideas,
rather than replacing them, is what he had done in his revisions of the idea of sovereignty.
This style of thinking gave Burke a very lively sense of the corrosive power of new ideas. Even new questions
could have unpleasant results. When the innovations of the British government unsettled the colonists, ‘then…they
questioned all the parts of your legislative power; and by the battery of such questions have shaken the solid structure of
this Empire to its deepest foundations.’ The proper way to avoid such shakes to civil society was to ‘consult
and follow your experience’ (ATX, Langford 1981-, 411, 457), for ‘experience’ according to Burke's philosophy
of language was a condition of continuity of mind, and, on the basis of mind, of a sustainable practice. His was therefore
a philosophically conditioned attitude to practice, and one that was very sensitive to the hiatus that speculation could cause
in the latter. Burke's sensitivity can produce apodictic language in order to persuade people to make use of the ideas they
have inherited, by urging ‘a total renunciation of every speculation of my own; and… [by recommending] a profound
reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors’ (CWA, Langford 1981-, 139). Indeed, Burke can be found, sometimes, on rational
grounds, deprecating all explicit appeal to speculation of whatever hue, if it had a disturbing effect: ‘reason not
at all — oppose the ancient policy and practice of the empire, as a rampart against the speculations of innovators on
both sides of the question’ (italics added) (ATX, Langford 1981-, 166). His deprecation of speculation was
logically anterior to taking sides in politics.
It was also, in effect, an appeal for ideas adequate to governing. This is evident in Burke's criticism of ‘vulgar
and mechanical politicians’,
a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who therefore, far from being
qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated
and rightly taught,…ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial
existence, are in truth every thing, and all in all,
so that ‘little minds’ could not govern ‘a great empire’ (CWA, Langford 1981-, 139), or, evidently,
any empire at all, whereas better results might be expected from ‘men truly initiated and rightly taught.’
Burke himself, however much he might try to hide the logic of his thought under the rich foliage of words generated by
his skill with words — he is perhaps the only classic of political thought in the English language who is also a literary
classic — was a philosophical thinker. As such, his practical conclusions could change, and did, as we have seen. Practical
conclusions changed because they were meant to be serviceable in a world that itself was changing. Burke's philosophical equipment,
however, served him in the face of all external changes.
Burke's name is indissolubly connected to his Reflections on the Revolution in France, though a more perceptive
account of the causes of the Revolution of 1789 can be found in A Letter to William Elliot (1795), and the Letters
on a Regicide Peace (1795-7) investigate the character and consequences of the Revolution from 1791 in a more thoroughgoing
way. In an important sense, however, the judgement of posterity is right for our purposes, because Reflections illustrates
very clearly the central importance of philosophy and ‘philosophical’ history for Burke's writing about one of
the greatest changes of his day.
This is true, in the first place, in terms of insight. Reflections was published on 1 November 1790, less than
eighteen months after the storming of the Bastille. The intervening period had been characterised by a mixture of popular
violence and peaceable, if feverish political activity in France, as its absolute monarchy gave way to a constitutional monarchy.
A detached observer would be unsure of the future — whether destruction and violence would predominate or whether an
enduring constitutional order would emerge was a question which events had not answered. In the event, of course, the Revolution
would be characterised by both violence and constitutional development, at different times, but this was as unknowable in
1790 as it is obvious in 2004.
Burke's Reflections may be divided (for the author did not provide any formal divisions) into two portions of
unequal length. Both of these are concerned with relations. The first portion, about two-thirds of the text, suggests that
the French, in their enthusiasm for the idea of liberty, had failed to understand that liberty was only one amongst a range
of benefits, all of which were required in mutual connexion for a life under civil government that was civilized
in the proper sense. The results which flowed from this deficiency of understanding included constitutional arrangements which,
because they did not reflect an understanding of liberty that was subtle enough to grasp that the liberty of the many was
power, did not qualify popular sovereignty in a way that would restrain the demos effectively. As if an unrestrained
populace was not bad enough, an understanding of life only in terms of liberty swept away preceding elaborations of our ideas.
This mattered, because the refinement of ideas had been a precondition of refinement of conduct and therefore of the progress
of society in many respects. One key instance of these was the respectful treatment of women encouraged since the middle ages
by Christian learning and by chivalry. But there was a newer philosophy: ‘on this scheme of things, a king is but a
man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order’. The retrogression of
humanity itself to animality was not far in the future with ‘a swinish multitude’. The result, as people would
no longer be moved by opinion, which had embodied refined ideas, would be that they would need to be governed by force. Force,
too, was the ultimate destination of the second portion of Reflections. This suggested that the idea of equality
had been connected only too pervasively with the institutional arrangements of the judiciary, the legislative and the executive
power — and therefore had produced not the authority of command in government but institutionalised feebleness. At the
same time, the perverse results of equality in fiscal arrangements had caused popular discontent and financial instability.
The result was a situation which could be controlled only by the force of the military — if, indeed, military order
was sustainable when soldiers had absorbed the idea of equality. France, it seemed, tended towards either the rule of force
or the disintegration of order.
Burke's philosophical repertoire and historical understanding thus provided the structure of Reflections, and,
perhaps more importantly, suggested insights into the character of the Revolution. The inattention of the revolutionaries
to the relations that needed to be comprised in a modern government, especially in connexion with liberty, was matched by
the inappropriateness to a sovereign regime of structuring its institutions around equality rather than around effective command.
These insights suggested that a mis-structuring of the new constitution that proceeded from an inadequate philosophical grasp.
Such misunderstanding was matched by a failure to understand the history which had produced the elaboration of ideas about
conduct that had underwritten government by opinion, and this failure suggested that the Revolution would cause retrogression
from this civilized condition towards a less gentle way of proceeding, as well as a less effective one. In other words, Burke's
understanding of philosophy, and of the history of Europe, conceived ‘philosophically’, provided grounds for making
fundamental claims about the Revolution.
Whether Burke was right in these claims about the Revolution, of course, is another question, and one that can never be
answered: any French reader of Reflections could take its lessons to heart, and perhaps modify the course of events.
Indeed, none of this is to say that Reflections was intended to be an academic work, or even an accurate factual
statement, about the Revolution. It was calculated to produce a practical result, which was to dissuade the British from admiring
the Revolution and so to dampen any propensity they might feel to imitate it: and thus to protect civilization in Britain.
In the course of pursuing this goal, Burke was willing to satirize the Revolution and its English sympathizers unmercifully
in order to make them as unattractive as possible to any sane reader, and he matched the satire with a panegyric on British
social and political arrangements. There is, indeed, much in Reflections besides the elements that have been emphasized
here (and indeed much in Burke's later views on the Revolution which is not in Reflections): but without those elements,
the book, and Burke's understanding of the Revolution would have been impossible.
Whilst Burke's thought has never lacked interpreters, on the whole understanding has been attempted without the persistence
of historical insight and the strength of conceptual grasp required to do justice to him. Hence he has suffered an ironic
fate for one who urged breadth and precision of thought. That is to say, he has figured as the spokesman for a very limited
number of points. This type of treatment began in the nineteenth century, when Burke was invoked as an antidote to the confidence
of the French Revolution by liberal thinkers who prized its principles, saw their narrowness, and required a sense of historical
development to situate them properly. It went further in the twentieth, when Burke was pressed into service as a counter-revolutionary
agent in the anti-Communist cause. He himself could hardly have complained that his work has been put to practical
use, but it remains true that academic justice has yet to be done to him. Chapters and essays on individual themes in his
writings have been more plausible than attempts at general interpretation, which usually concentrate on a theme of choice,
or subordinate Burke's thought to it, and give the impression (deliberately or otherwise) that this is the whole of Burke,
or at any rate that this is what matters about him.
In attacking the Revolution, Burke constructed a rogues' gallery of French politicians, and placed alongside them quite
a number of French thinkers. This was by way of setting up straw men stuffed with the prejudices of his British audience.
More significantly for our purposes, Burke's censure of the philosophes was implicitly about the inadequacy of a
limited range of simple principles to meet satisfactorily the connected and various needs of human nature. He preferred to
emphasize that numerous principles, and practical moderating to combine these, were necessary to accommodate human needs,
and that this accommodation involved practical activity rather more than speculative design. Correspondingly his own political
writings provide less a political philosophy than a political style that included philosophical elements — a style which,
indeed, implicitly suggested that political philosophy was not a feasible activity, and, if it was, certainly not
one sufficient to human needs.
These views emphasize the importance of combining a wide range of principles, and remembering that principles, however
numerous, are only one element in a satisfactory conception of practice. There can be no doubt that analysis was involved
in Burke's proceedings: ‘let this position be analysed,’ he instructed the House of Commons critically in 1794,
‘for analysis is the deadly enemy of all declamation.’ [10] Though Burke could certainly conduct effective analyses of ideas and words even after more than twenty years at Westminster,
as his Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) demonstrates, his accent lay upon the necessity of synthesising ideas,
and including non-conceptual elements in any adequate understanding of politics. There is nothing in a style of doing philosophy
that centres upon analysis that is logically inconsistent with these procedures. The temper of mind, however, which sometimes
accompanies this manner of philosophising is antipathetic to Burke, and there is much in contemporary opinions about politics
that he would have found dangerously naïve. Amongst these a belief in popular — rather than parliamentary — sovereignty
is only the most obvious example. If Burke is unlikely to be the darling of some analytical philosophers and political pundits;
still less will he be of those who suppose that in discussing a small number of principles they provide a prescriptive and
adequate guidance for the conduct of policy; and even less of anyone who asserts that ‘one very simple principle’
is ‘entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control’
(Mill 1859, ‘Introductory’). The complexity of ideas, their connexions with each other, and a tempering in practice
suggest a different sort of mind. It is not surprising that Burke has been quietly ignored by many thinkers, or dismissed
from consideration by being labelled (with more wit than judgement) as a ‘conservative’ — but it is of great
interest that he has found many admirers amongst those who succeed in the conduct of practical affairs. Whilst Burke would
have been the first to point out that his specific conclusions belong to a time and a place, his style of thinking is one
with which serious thought about politics, whether reflective or practical, needs to engage.
Burke's thought is philosophical in two senses. One is that it involves the use of philosophical concepts, especially complex
ideas and in particular relation, as well as involving significant positions in philosophical psychology and the philosophy
of language. The other is that it develops an account of the American and European past which is philosophical in an eighteenth-century
sense. Put together, these senses inform a style of practical reasoning about politics which emphasizes the importance of
synthetic as well as analytical thinking for practice, and suggests that a progressive practice implied not only the fruits
of past effort but also the intelligent application of mind to their development. Burke is perhaps the least studied of political
classics, but he is certainly amongst the small number with whom anyone who aspires to have an adequate political education
must engage.
Primary Literature
There is no complete edition of Burke's works: their quantity, the character of some of his manuscript materials and the
manner in which many of his parliamentary speeches are preserved all make it very likely that this situation will continue.
The fullest collection by far, as well as the best edited, in nine, large substantive volumes, is:
- Langford, P., 1981-, (general ed.), Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Oxford, Clarendon Press, (approaching
completion.)
| [ATX] |
American Taxation. |
| [CWA] |
Conciliation with America. |
| [RRF] |
Reflections on the Revolution in France. |
| [SSC] |
Second Speech on Conciliation. |
| [SDR] |
Speech on Declaratory Resolutions. |
| [TCD] |
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. |
| [TPL] |
Tracts relating to Popery Laws. |
- Burke, Edmund, and William Burke, 1757, An Account of the European Settlements, London (and later editions).
- Somerset, H.V.F, ed., 1957, A Notebook of Edmund Burke, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Besides Burke's writings, the most useful printed source for his opinions is:
- Copeland, T.W., 1958-78, (general ed.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Cambridge and Chicago, Cambridge
University Press and University of Chicago Press, (ten volumes).
Smaller, but significant quantities of further letters have been edited in:
- Lock, F.P., 1997, 1999, 2003 ‘Unpublished Burke Letters’, English Historical Review, 112: 119-141;
114: 636-657; 118: 940-982
There is further unprinted correspondence in various repositories. The primary collections of Burke manuscripts are at
Sheffield Archives and Northamptonshire Record Office, but there is further material by Burke in a wider range of places;
the material in manuscript bearing on him is extremely bulky, diverse and scattered.
Secondary Literature
There is relatively little recent literature primarily on Burke's philosophical writings, however ‘philosophical’
is defined, though there is much that makes reference to or use of them: thus a bibliography of writings about his views on
beauty, gender, and political organization, as well as his literary temper and practical activities would be disproportionately
long. The reader is therefore invited to range freely. The secondary literature as a whole is listed up to about 1980 in Clara
I. Gandy and Peter J. Stanlis, 1983, Edmund Burke: A Bibliography of Secondary Studies to 1982, New York, Garland.
There are annual listings in the Modern Humanities Research Association's volumes.
For matters discussed here, the reader is referred to:
- Burke, Edmund, 1958, Philosophical Enquiry, ed. J.T. Boulton, London, Routledge (later edition, Oxford, Blackwell,
1987)
- Canavan, F., 1957, ‘Edmund Burke's College Study of Philosophy’, Notes and Queries, n.s.4: 538-543.
- Sewell Jr, R.B., 1938, ‘Rousseau's Second Discourse in England from 1755 to 1762’, Philological Quarterly,
17: 97-114.
- Wecter, D., 1940, ‘Burke's Theory of Words, Images and Emotions’, Publications of the Modern Language
Association, 55: 167-181.
Other works cited
- Berkeley, G, 1948-57, The Works of George Berkeley, eds. A.A.Luce and T.E.Jessop, 9 volumes, London, Nelson.
- Broad, C.D., 1952, Ethics and the History of Philosophy, London, Routledge.
- Coleridge, S.T., 1983, Biographica Literaria, eds. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Princeton, Princeton University
Press.
- Freeman, M., 1992, ‘Edmund Burke’, in Laurence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker, eds., Encyclopaedia
of Ethics, 2 vols., Garland, New York, vol.i, pp.109-11.
- Gore-Brown, R, 1953, Chancellor Thurlow, London, Routledge.
- Goldsmith, Oliver, 1774, Retaliation: a poem, London, G. Kearsly. [Available online].
- Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1905, Report on the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Lothian, London, Stationery
Office.
- Hull, C.H., and H.W.V. Temperley, eds., 1911-12, ‘Debates on the Declaratory Act and the Repeal of the Stamp Act’,
American Historical Review, 17, pp.563-586.
- Le Clerc, J, 1692, Logica: sive ars ratiocinandi, London, Awnsham & John Churchill.
- Mill, J.S., 1859, On Liberty, London, Longman.
- Robinson, Nicholas K., 1996, Edmund Burke: a life in caricature, New Haven, Yale University Press.
- Sidgwick, H., 2000, Essays on Ethics and Method, ed. Marcus G. Singer, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
- Williamson, P., 1999, Stanley Baldwin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
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