Burke and revolution

Burke and revolution:
reform, revolution and constitutional conservatism in the thought of Edmund Burke

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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THROUGHOUT EDMUND BURKE’S LIFE his reputation was that of a reformer yet his posthumous fame is as a defender of conservatism, as the constructor of ‘a classic conservative critique of political radicalism’.[1] His image as a conservative thinker is associated above all with the writings which he produced from 1790 onwards in response to the French Revolution. These works, consisting of the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), and the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796-7), represent a reassertion of Burke’s long-held views on the nature of human political society in general and the British constitution in particular, given added coherence and force of expression by his profound antipathy to the Revolution in France. That antipathy had deep roots in his political convictions, and one of its chief effects was to force him to analyse and define those convictions more clearly than he had hitherto. Burke’s role was as the ‘politician, who is the philosopher in action’ rather than the ‘speculative philosopher’,[2] to use an Aristotelian contrast he drew himself in 1770; and his works were those of a committed and active politician, directly addressing particular contemporary issues, with his underlying political philosophy only emerging piecemeal through scattered references and allusions. Burke never produced a systematic exposition of his politics, and not until the advent of the French Revolution did Burke address himself in any detail to such issues as political obligation, inherited rights, contract theory, constitutional development, and the nature of sovereignty.

Burke saw the French Revolution as a phenomenon so unprecedented and dangerous that he took particular care in marshalling his arguments against it. As events in France revealed their character – and Burke took a little time to formulate his response – Burke saw in them the emergence of nothing less than a great ideological assault on the established order. There is more to Burke’s political philosophy, however, than simply a revulsion against revolutionary change. Burke certainly saw the French Revolution as uniquely dangerous, and as a direct threat to the British constitution and way of life; but he was not opposed to political change, or even necessarily revolutionary change, if it was carried through in the correct way and for the correct reasons. Revolution could be progressive, Burke believed; the creation of Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 both represented progressive revolution, in that in each case the ancient constitution had been restored and set back on its true path of gradual evolution. Burke’s central disagreement with the revolutionaries was not only that they believed in abstract rights rather than the prescriptive rights of inheritance to which he was committed, but that they also insisted on the immediate and total implementation of those abstract rights. The component parts of the British constitution, Burke claimed in the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), ‘have gradually and almost insensibly, in a long course of time, accommodated themselves to each other, and to their common, as well as to their separate purposes’; but this process of adaptation ‘as it has not been in ours, so it can never been yours, or in any country, the effect of a single instantaneous regulation’.[3] Burke saw the French Revolution as a regressive phenomenon, negating the true nature of historical progress as demonstrated by the evolution of the British constitution, and subverting the natural order of things – an order which was not static, but in the process of constant, gradual development.

A comparison between Burke’s reaction to the American Revolution and his response to the French Revolution is instructive in revealing the grounds of his opposition to the latter. In that the French Revolution was an attempt at the wholesale and instantaneous social and political transformation of society on abstract, rationalist principles, it presented a challenge to Burke’s world-view quite unlike that offered by the American Revolution, which Burke saw as essentially a problem in imperial constitutional and administrative relationships. The social and political ideas which Burke marshalled against the French Revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France were not new; his rejection of abstract political theorising and concepts such as universal rights, his belief in inheritance and slow historical development and his respect for the gradually evolving national society, his belief that the current generation is obliged to maintain what previous generations have created in the way of institutions and practices, his insistence that prejudice rather than reason holds society together, all are present in his speeches, addresses and letters on America. Yet there is nothing in Burke’s comments on America which foreshadows the violence of his reaction to the Revolution in France and the anger with which he denounced the French revolutionaries and their works. Burke had seen no threat in the abstract ‘metaphysical’ theorising which the Americans had indulged in, or their increasingly evident tendency to appeal to universal notions of right and justice which Burke believed were quite meaningless; he had simply dismissed this aspect of the American crisis and addressed himself to the grievances which lay behind it. Furthermore, he had perceived the American revolutionaries as acting in defence of the concrete rights of property rather than in the name of abstract political ideals, and, in as much as they were the defenders of particular rights against the claims of monarchical power, as the inheritors of the tradition of liberty established in England by the Whigs in their ‘Glorious Revolution’ against James II in 1688. The American crisis shows Burke the pragmatic philosophical politician , as well as the political philosopher of conservatism; he saw no need to systematise the principles of political conduct which he believed to be true in order to address what was happening in America. In France, by contrast, the revolutionaries were using abstract theories such as the doctrine of the Rights of Man, not in defence of traditional freedom or property but to subvert society; their use of abstract ‘metaphysical’ principles such as equality and liberty threatened what Burke believed were the fundamental characteristics of human social organisation.

Burke saw the British constitution as the natural product of those fundamental characteristics; it had evolved slowly and pragmatically, incorporating the accumulated wisdom of former generations in a political structure which reflected and served perfectly the political and social character of the British people. Burke’s view of the British constitution is never propounded systematically in any one place; but it is a consistent view, and the constitution is the consistent object of Burke’s veneration. What is new in Burke’s discussion of the British constitution after 1790 is the renewed vigour with which he defended it against the revolutionary threat; but the concept of the constitution which he deploys is present throughout his earlier writings and reflects a more profound view of the merits of the British constitution than merely a reaction to the revolutionary threat posed by France. Burke saw the French Revolution as a threat precisely because of his particular perception of the British constitution, the scattered expressions of which are present throughout his writings from the 1760s onwards. Crucially, a conception of change underlies the Burkean view of the Constitution; Burke argues that ‘the State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risque the loss of that part of the Constitution which it wished most religiously to preserve’.[4] Burke’s political convictions do not derive from a simple reaction against any notion of political change, but contain a conception of the historical process of gradual transformation which transcends the immediate political context within which he expresses it, to achieve a universal significance. Burke did believe in change, change which occurred slowly, gradually, and organically; what he rejected was sudden, violent, transforming change which swept aside the legacy of previous generations in favour of conceptions of political society abruptly erected on, Burke claimed, entirely meaningless concepts and abstract principles. This view implies a belief in a contract between generations rather than between the individuals of one transient generation.

In the Observations on the Late State of the Nation (1769), Burke had warned against ill-considered reform of the British constitution, characterising that constitution as an old building which ‘stands well enough, though part Gothic, part Grecian, and part Chinese, until an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. Then it may come down upon our heads altogether in much uniformity of ruin; and great will be the fall thereof’.[5] The key phrase here is ‘square it into uniformity’. The British constitution is untidy, irregular, irrational, because it has grown up through a long process of piecemeal change and accretion – the only valid way, Burke would claim, in which an effective constitution, tried and tested in all its parts and rooted in the nature of the society it represents, can develop. The implication is clear: that further small changes are permissible, and indeed essential – although Burke is never very clear on this point and occasionally falls into contradiction and paradox over when any change is permissible and how extensive it should be. However, he is certain about one thing: any attempts to rationalise this untidy structure would bring the whole edifice crashing down, and everybody would be the loser amid the resultant ‘uniformity of ruin’.

If the Letter to the Sherriffs of Bristol (1777) is compared with the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) the political ideas of the author can be seen to be entirely consistent. Burke condemns politicians who theorise about society in the abstract; in the Letter to the Sherriffs of Bristol he writes of those

... who have split and anatomised the doctrine of free government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity; and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling. They have disputed ... whether man has any rights by nature; and whether all the property he enjoys be not the alms of his government, and his life itself their favour and indulgence.[6]

Those who indulge in such abstract speculation, and persuade others to do the same, are ‘the stirrers-up of contention’ who ‘are endeavouring to tear up, along with practical liberty, all the foundations of human society, all equity and justice, religion and order’.[7] Yet Burke avoids any detailed formulation of the view of politics which he would oppose to such destructive abstract speculations: he does not offer his own view of the rights by which man holds property under a government, or what power that government may hold over a subject’s life and liberty. Indeed, the whole point of the Burkean view is that to lay down any analysis of political institutions or processes which pretends to universal applicability is futile and misguided. The only definition Burke offers of freedom is one which indicates that no general definition is possible: ‘If any ask me what a free government is, I answer, that, for any practical purposes, it is what the people think so’.[8] Furthermore, ‘social and civil freedom, like all other things in common life, are variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in different degrees, and shaped into an infinite diversity of forms, according to the temper and circumstances of every community’.[9] This multiplicity of circumstances and perceptions is best reflected in a definition of freedom resting on accepted legal obligations rather than on liberties claimed as natural rights and adopted as yardsticks against which the legitimacy of governments can be judged.

Thus Burke’s claim is that it is impossible to decide what rights people should have, what are their relationship with the government should be, on what grounds they should hold their property, and so on, simply by considering human nature in abstract, outside the context of any particular social order. Burke does not offer, in the Letter to the Sherriffs of Bristol, any alternative philosophy of what political society should be; he simply states that to devise and attempt to apply a general political philosophy of any kind is an exercise without value. In the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), Burke had similarly stressed the importance of studying particular cultural circumstances, rather than general principles, in considering the nature of political society: ‘The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of a Statesman’.[10] This work contains even less in a way of generalised observations on the constitution and the subsequent writings on the American crisis; Burke had no wish to address the question of Parliamentary as against popular sovereignty which underlay the discontents surrounding the Wilkes affair, but rather to offer his explanation of the real cause of the difficulties as lying in the subversion of Parliament by the Crown. The work is chiefly notable, apart from its significance as a representation of a particular partisan view, for its exposition of the Burkean view of party, and for its hints of the necessity for the people themselves to intervene directly when Parliament had been bribed by patronage into silence:

I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the Representatives, but by the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that these Representatives are going to over-leap the fences of the law, and to introduce an arbitrary power. This interposition is a most unpleasant remedy. But if it be a legal remedy it is intended on some occasion to be used ...[11]

Thus, Burke suggests that even popular extra-parliamentary political action is acceptable in cases where there is no other way – the representative part of the constitution having been subverted – to prevent the executive from introducing tyranny, and thus breaking faith with the seamless process of gradual constitutional development which was the British experience; not for nothing did Burke indicate that such tyranny might be introduced through ‘some capital innovation’.

Burke’s writings on both the domestic political issues of the 1760s and the contemporary controversies over the East India Company reflect his concerns with what he saw as infringements, whether by the increasing ‘influence’ of the crown or the intervention of the government in a purely commercial concern, with the protection of customary rights and practices: ‘You are going to restrict by a positive arbitrary Regulation the enjoyment of profits which should be made in Commerce ... you are going to cancel the great line which distinguishes free Government ... remember that you are the first Civilised Nation that ever divested property fixed by Law’.[12] Testifying before the East India Select Committee in April 1772, Burke asserted that the Company’s charter:

ought to be held inviolable ... Parliament might indeed alter anything in the forms of religion and Government; so far from being incompetent to such acts they sat there for the very purpose of making and unmaking all sorts of laws. But the faith of Parliament is a very different thing from its Legislative powers. The contracts of Parliament bind Parliament as much as they do a private person.[13]

It is from this concern with property rights and the inviolability of contract that Burke’s doctrine of prescription ultimately emerges; he devotes large sections of the Reflections to justifying the theory of prescriptive rights as the only just and natural basis of the Constitution:

You will observe, that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity ... This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it.[14]

The closest thing to a detailed and systematic exposition of Burke’s theory of prescription emerges only in the pages of the Reflections under the pressure of the revolutionary threat from France, but it is not simply a reaction to that threat. It reflects Burke’s consistent concern with the protection of customary rights and privileges from invasion in the name of government or supposed rational principles of ‘uniformity’. Constitutions cannot be shaped anew in an instant; they develop over centuries and each brief generation inherits its customs, laws and liberties in the same way in which it inherits its property rights – and both inheritances must be protected from ill-considered intervention and alteration.

Burke was not a systematic political philosopher, but he did possess and expound a political philosophy incorporating principles that he held to be applicable beyond the particular historical circumstances he was addressing. However strong his dislike of generalised universal principles, his conceptions of political society, continuity, historical development and gradual evolution are such principles, although Burke claimed that they were not abstract and ‘metaphysical’ but based firmly on the observable reality of the way in which human communities have organised themselves. Burke placed great weight on the lessons of history and the way in which political development had taken place in the past: ‘It is the historical emphasis in his thought that refutes persons who find in the antirevolutionary crusader the opponent of change and the apologist of reaction’.[15] The principles which are stated in a particularly compelling and coherent form against the French Revolution are not simply a reaction to the threat posed by revolutionary ideas; they are products of long held views on the nature of the British constitution, of political society, and of the role of justifiable political change, that are present in Burke’s writings from the beginning of his political career.

© Ralph Harrington 2005. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

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Notes

1. M. Freeman, Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism, p. 237.

2. Quoted in C. B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution, p. xv.

3. Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, in Writings and Speeches, vol. VIII, p. 333.

4. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings and Speeches, vol. VIII, p. 72.

5. Burke, Observations on the Late State of the Nation, in Writings and Speeches, vol. II, p. 175.

6. Burke, Letter to the Sherriffs of Bristol, in Works (Bohn edn.), vol. II, pp. 29-30.

7. Burke, Letter to the Sherriffs of Bristol, in Works (Bohn edn.), vol. II, p. 30.

8. Burke, Letter to the Sherriffs of Bristol, in Works (Bohn edn.), vol. II, p. 29.

9. Burke, Letter to the Sherriffs of Bristol, in Works (Bohn edn.), vol. II, p. 30.

10. Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, in Writings and Speeches, vol. II, p. 252.

11. Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, in Writings and Speeches, vol. II, p. 252.

12. Burke, Speech on the East India Dividend Bill, in Writings and Speeches, vol. II, p. 372.

13. Burke, Speech on East India Select Committee, in Writings and Speeches, vol. II, p. 372.

14. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Writings and Speeches, vol. VIII, p. 83.

15. C. B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution, p. 331.

Bibliography

Works by Burke

The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-)
-- Volume II. Party, Parliament, and the American Crisis 1766-1774, ed. Paul Langford (1981)
-- Volume VIII. The French Revolution 1790-1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell (1989)
-- Volume IX. I: The Revolutionary War 1794-1797; II: Ireland, ed. R. B. McDowell (1991)

The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Bohn edition (London: George Bell, 6 vols., 1883-6)
-- Volume II, for A Letter to the Sherriffs of Bristol
-- Volume III, for An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

Some further reading

C. B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution (2 vols, Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1957-64)

H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld, 1977)

Michael Freeman, Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)

Iain Hampsher-Monk, The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke (London: Longman, 1987)

Paul Lucas, ‘On Edmund Burke’s doctrine of prescription; or, an appeal from the new to the old lawyers’, Historical Journal, vol. XI, no. 1 (1968), pp. 35-63.

C. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)

F. O’Gorman, Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973)

J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Burke and the ancient constitution - a problem in the history of ideas’, Historical Journal, vol. III, no. 2 (1960), pp. 125-43.