Edmund Burke

According to Adam Smith, there was but one "man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communication which passed between us," and that man was Edmund Burke. Burke was not an economist nor a philosopher, but a politician. He was a "Rockingham" Whig* who spent thirty years in Parliament, much the same kind of politician as Jesse Jackson or Jack Kemp: provocative ideas, inspiring oratory; but too passionate to ever be trusted with leadership. He is not noteworthy for his political successes—he failed in almost all his practical efforts—but for his political principles, which, however discarded in his own time, stand for posterity as the fundamental principles of conservatism.

The most important of Burke's conservative principles is an instinctive, knee-jerk, almost pavlovian reverence for the wisdom and virtue of our ancestors and the traditions we inherit from them. "The individual is foolish … but the species is wise." Political legitimacy arises not from the blessings of political theorists or even from the votes of workable majorities but from an inherited accumulation of common custom and convention. In this sense, Burke revered the English Constitution because it was prescriptive, and because its sole authority is that it has existed from time immemorial.

Also fundamental to Burke is a view of society as having divine origins and an acquiescence to the divine ordering of things. Hierarchy and distinction are natural; equality is not. Ideas and values and morals and people all have their greatest and their least and degrees between. Men are created equal before God, but their equality ends there. This exposes atheistic (or pantheistic) liberals as either amoral hedons or as hypocrites: to whom does a society endear itself with pity and benevolence to its downtrodden, if not to God? The burdens and trials of life's many sufferings are admitted and tragic, but are permanent and unyielding. Compromising the good for the bad, in egalitarian attempts to blur the difference, is an unworthy and ultimately fruitless exercise. A more workable path is the illumination of virtue through a vigorous public and private morality.

This does not mean that Burke believed in state-dictated religion and morals legislation. He had a very deep devotion to personal freedom and minimal government, and adhered generally to the other liberated Whiggish legacies: suspicion of monarchical power, religious toleration, distaste for foreign ventures, and the great levelling of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. His was not a top-down notion of morality, but a bottom-up one. Morality was not something so unnatural as to need infusion, it was something to be bred, passed on from the wise repository of generations past to the spring chickens of today. His concern was not that the state should have a role in this, though that is the common misrepresentation by detractors. Rather, the public interest is that those who are to serve a government in legislative, judicial, or civil-servant capacities should be of the highest moral character and have a thorough respect for time-tested institutions. One of the more jarring tenets of Burkean thought is the fossilized demand for the acceptance of aristocracy; aristocracy not by birthright, but a natural, inevitable aristocracy of virtue.** The rule of society by mediocrity is decidedly unnatural. Such distinctions are unfathomed even today. Indeed, the lowering of public discourse to boxers-or-briefs and the elevation of questionable characters to high office illustrates that the standard is beneath the mediocrity Burke feared. And while it horrifies some, the very triumph of baseness is heralded by others as another rung in the progression to equality.

Burke's central work is Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), a vehement smackdown of the designs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and ilk and the inevitable abuses of revolutionaries who follow such false creeds. Of major concern was the rumbustious and brutal methods used in so much juvenile rebelliousness, like the brats from Lord of the Flies, as in this passage: "look with horror on those children of [France], who are promptly rash to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father's life." Indeed, latent Burke devotees exist in any household with insolent teenagers and fight-the-power diabolics. But the larger lesson is that abstract political theories themselves are odious. On this point he is diametrically opposed to libertarians and doctrinaire individualists.

Burke may be contrasted on this score with the pamphleteer and pretensive philosopher Thomas Paine, of Common Sense fame. After pounding the pavement for the American cause, Paine found his raison d'etre in the French Revolution, as did Burke in its disabuse. Just as Burke was not quite an individualist, so Paine was not quite anti-individualist; they both defined their political thinking rather in terms of the value of political upheaval and the reasonable limits of change. Like the green, pseudo-intellectual academic activists of our time, Paine let activism drive his thinking, not vice versa. Like a giddy pyromaniac in search of a cold day, he appears all too cozy with the idea that there not be any revolution where he wouldn't stoke the bonfire: "a nation has at all times an inherent indefeasible right to abolish any form of government it finds inconvenient, and establish such as accords with its interest, disposition, and happiness."

Burke did not so much oppose change but rather the imposition of an unnatural, abstract, or foreign order. In general, change as reform occurs moderately, unconsciously, not by design. Conscious change assisted by reason can also be positive, but only if carried out with respect for our own fallibility and our tempocentric perspective. While the French Revolution occupied the crucial fourth quarter of Burke's engagement in public life, the warmup three were anything but reactionary: support for the American revolution; a greater respect for local concerns in his home dominion of Ireland; and easing of imperial rule in India. All four are mosaic tiles of the same Burke, for all four show an enduring respect for in-grown cultural heritage. With the French, it was the defense of the heritage of an established order from the enemy within. With the others, it was the reclamation of native heritage from a foreign, inescapably arrogant Britain.

William Pitt, the good Whig leader of the time, once said of Burke, "Much to admire, and nothing to agree with." To Pitt and many other contemporaries, Burke's ideas were persuasive, but so against the tide of a sea change age. Like Churchill's concern with the rise of Nazi Germany a century and a half later, his alarm at the revolution in France was nothing if not prescient: it started a conflagration of twenty-six years in which power passed from King Louis to radicals to fanatics to brutes to a dictator (one being responsible for the most deadly war Europe had yet seen) and ultimately back to another king Louis. Do rebellions against one's own traditions ever go swimmingly, do they ever not turn full circle? Can a nation be trusted to the men of the present instead of the customs of the past? Is it not better to have the likes of Burke ask these questions, than to have the likes of Robespierre and Napoleon answer them? As Burke himself once said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

* Rockingham Whigs, a faction of the Whig Party in late 18th century Britain, were followers of the Marquess of Rockingham (P.M., 1765-1766) and were noted for their aristocratic sympathies and their support of the rebellious colonies in America. As opposed to "Chatham" Whigs or "Grenville" Whigs.
** John Adams also wrote much about the "natural aristocracy" in Discourses on Davila (1790), which has much of Burke's influence. In the somewhat mistaken impression that he was a proponent of it, he was attacked in the press as a monarchist.