Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

1. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) • Born in Dublin, to a middle class family half Protestant (his father,) half Catholic (his mother) • 1750 Burke moves to London to study law, but he becomes a writer and a politician • Entered the Parliament in 1766 • No systematic work or treatise. • 1756 A Vindication of Natural Society • 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France

2. The British vs. the French Revolution • Burke opposes an idealized version of the 1688 Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution • “We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire… Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty…” (525)

3. Burke, the Conservative Enemy of the French Revolution • Pessimism • Organic view of society (Compare with both Plato & Rousseau) • Role of contingency • Uniqueness of historical processes • Against (critical) Idealism • Enemy of democracy and revolutions • (Unequal) groups over individuals • Aristocratic & hierarchical view of human nature • Politics = the “art of the possible” • Veneration of • Tradition (history) • Aristocracy • Religion

4. Burke’s Values • Property • Commerce: “the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God…” • Inequality • Essentialized ideas of nations (nations seem to preexist history…) • Prescription • Connection between property & political rule • Inheritance • Rank • Distinction • Religion: “religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and all comfort” (527) • “Good order is the foundation of all good things.” (521)

5. British Inherited Liberties • The Magna Charta proves to Burke “the pedigree of our liberties” (513) • British liberties are inherited from previous generations “as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or previous right.” (514) • “By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors…” (514)

6. The French Dishonored their past • “Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of lowborn servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.” • “gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage…” (515)

7. “France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority… • … doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life… all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new principles of equality in France.” (516)

8. “By following those false lights, • …France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings!... France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue.”(516)

9. What happens when authority… • Falls in the hands of “men not taught habitually to respect themselves; who had no previous fortune in character at stake…” (517) • (provincial) lawyers & doctors in medicine • “At present, you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of nature. The property in France does not govern it. Of course property is destroyed, and rational liberty has no existence.” (519)

10. Property • “The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal.” (518) • “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself.” (519)

11. The Rights of Man • “The nature of man is intricate… (…) The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle…” (525)

12. Government • “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” (524) • “The science of constructing a commonwealth… is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori” (524)

13. A Conservative, and not a Reactionary • “You do not imagine, that I wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood and names, and titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. …they have… the passport of Heaven to human place and honour.” (518)

14. “Society is indeed a contract… • …It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection… a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.” (528)

15. Against (direct?) democracy • “Everything ought to be open; but not indifferently to every man. No rotation; no appointment by lot; no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition, or rotation, can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty, or to accommodate the one to the other.” (518) • “our representation has been found perfectly adequate to all the purposes for which a representation of the people can be desired or devised.” (522)