How to be a liberal in revolutionary times.

"let us be satisfied to admire". Notes on Edmund Burke: the conservative liberal.

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What a pleasure to read Edmund Burke again. Of all the great English authors, might Burke be the most practical, fluent, and rational? Reflections on the Revolution is characteristic of some of his best qualities: the ability to write in quick response to events without losing his ability to think politically, philosophically, economically, historically. Unlike so many rapid responders, Burke retains his depth of learning. Burke finds admittance to the canon not just for his prescience about the Terror, and his exposition of a form of conservatism that has become international—there is a strong Burkean strand to US politics, for example, among those who think the Founders got the Constitution right and that preserving it is the best defence of liberty that modern America will find—no: Burke is also admired for his strength, flexibility, and breadth of thinking, and his clarity of expression. Few politicians are so articulate and so intellectual. (Burke warns that eloquence often disguises a lack of real substance.) His writing is part of the practical business of his time, but like his contemporaries and near contemporaries Smith, Swift, and Johnson, he draws on deep resources of learning to exposit a larger theory of society. And so he became an ancient.

Because he has become “a whole climate of opinion”, to borrow from Auden, we ought to start with what he was not. Burke is not an easy argument against capitalism. He was, for example, frequently cited by anti-Thatcher Tories, who said things like “Adam Smith is fine but don’t forget Edmund Burke.” A clear sign they had read neither very carefully. Burke is the columnist’s choice when they want to contrast the “atomised individualism” of neo-liberalism with the “little platoons” of the alternative. This is not quite right.

In a memo written for Pitt the Younger, Burke argued for a more-or-less laissez faire policy about workers’ wages. He used the phrase small platoons here, which makes it clear that he, at least, did not think of these platoons as some sort of theoretic alternative to the market.¹

Indeed, Burke very often sounds like Thatcher. In Thoughts on Scarcity, he makes a point that she often made, including in one of her most famous moments at the despatch box. If an authority “forces the buyer to a price” then you are making “an arbitrary division” of the seller’s property. In the attempt at equality, we will achieve an overall loss of prosperity.

A perfect equality will indeed be produced; that is to say, equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and on the part of the partitioners, a woeful, helpless, and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all compulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above. They never raise what is below: and they depress high and low together beneath the level of what was originally the lowest.

Nor is he above talking like a utilitarian, a sentiment he may have picked up from Hume. In his Speech on the Reform of the Representation of the Commons in Parliament, he said, “In all moral machinery the moral results are its test.” Let those who quote Burke as some sort of spiritual authority remember that! What strikes me so much reading Reflections this time is just how cautious Burke is not on principled, but on pragmatic grounds.

So, Burke has been made a part of the partisan bickerings and thus diminished. He would not be surprised. In his famous address to the Bristol electors, he told them,

As for the trifling petulance, which the rage of party stirs up in little minds, though it should shew itself even in this court, it has not made the slightest impression on me. The highest flight of such clamorous birds is winged in an inferior region of the air. We hear them, and we look upon them, just as you, Gentlemen, when you enjoy the serene air on your lofty rocks, look down upon the Gulls, that skim the mud of your river, when it is exhausted of its tide.

What will we find in Reflections if we can read it without the rage of party?

First, he is a historical thinker, more than a philosophical one. “I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” What really distinguishes him from Thomas Paine is not the substance of the claims, but the method. Burke sees everything in contingent terms. He is worried not about the coherence of ideas, but how much blood that coherence will cost.

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

This is still a huge dividing line in politics and political thinking. (The approach I took in my recent post What makes you a Classical Liberal? was Burkean in that sense.) Perhaps the most important thing we can learn from Burke, therefore, is his caution about how ideas work in the world.

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one.

An awful lot of people who write about current affairs who would not consider themselves substantively Burkean would still qualify as Burkean thinkers in this sense. How many critics of the wars of the last twenty-five years, from whatever side of the aisle, would agree with this!

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order: with civil and social manners.

Second, Burke sees the passions and contradictions of human life as essential to understanding affairs.

All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.

The ending of this paragraph surely reminds us of A Tale of Two Cities. Let us note in passing Burke’s lovely prose style. He arranges his nouns very well: the procession through anger, laughter, sadness, another form of anger, and horror well represents the wild fluctuations of emotion that characterise high political drama. Burke wishes for reason to prevail.

Third, Burke is an essentially constitutional thinker. If he is a conservative, it is primarily in this sense.

This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary, sess. 2. ch. 2.) is the cornerstone of our constitution, as reinforced, explained, improved, and in its fundamental principles for ever settled. It is called ‘An act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown.’ You will observe, that these rights and this succession are declared in one body, and bound indissolubly together.

He illustrates his ideas with an explanation of British history: the Civil War, the Act of Succession. These changes have taken time, and were arrived at slowly. We know that they work, Burke says. To make radical, sudden changes to these arrangements would be to risk the liberty they do currently preserve. Unlike the anti-Jacobin writer of the 1790s, who were constantly alarmed about the fall of the country, Burke makes more sensible arguments.²

He gives the example of the Petition of Right as an instance of a constitutional settlement that preferred “practical wisdom” to the “theoretic science”.³ Burke sees this as inherent in the evolution of the British state: “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”

So, fourth, although Burke tells us “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors” this part of his thinking is hugely contingent. He is not a simple instinctive ancestral conservative who wants no change, but someone who believes in the evolved British constitution as a better preserver of liberty than a new theoretical one erupting in France. As he wrote to his French correspondent: “You set up your trade without a capital.”

Fifth, Burke is not an egalitarian. Maxims make this point succinctly: “those who attempt to level, never equalize”; “Every thing ought to be open; but not indifferently to every man.” To this extent, he is also an advocate of a balanced constitution that represents property as well as ability.⁴

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. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction which attends hereditary possession (as most concerned in it) are the natural securities for this transmission.

How many modern Burkeans would agree with this, I wonder. Though, it must be said, Burke is no “creeping sycophant” or one of the “blind abject admirers of power” who over admires “hereditary wealth, and the rank which goes with it”.

Sixth, Burke is a liberal. Burke loves liberty. “I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit of rational liberty,” he says early on, clarifying that he loves “a manly, moral, regulated liberty.” Like so many of his age, he worried about the slippage from liberty to licence. He admires the British constitution because it is the best guarantee of liberty, which he values very highly: “a jealous, ever-waking vigilance, to guard the treasure of our liberty, not only from invasion, but from decay and corruption, was our best wisdom and our first duty.” So attached to individual liberty is Burke that he sometimes sounds like J.S. Mill.

Men … have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.

Would the revolutionary Founders in the USA have found anything to object to in this passage? Where they disagree is on the question of natural rights. Burke is often quoted as a balance against “excessive” freedom, but in fact he is in favour of freedom; the question is about how freedom should be secured.⁵ “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them.”⁶

Seventh, Burke thinks like an economist. He has read Smith. Richard Bourke, in his superb intellectual biography, says Burke follows Smith, not having original economic opinions. At various points, Burke discusses the state of coinage in France, the advantages of indirect over direct taxation, the problems of overtaxation, the burden of excise duties on large cities, and many other topics. In a letter to a constituent, on the issue of free trade for Ireland, he not only defended trade with Ireland but said it would improve prosperity in Britain, and that he hoped we would never do anything to prevent “improvement”, which means economic growth. His practical wisdom makes him a friend to economists, which is quite contrary to the impression given by the endlessly repeated quotation about Marie Antoinette: “the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.” Burke was one of those economists. It is even the case that Burke told his correspondent that the new French government would not do well in the bond markets. And he was on the side of the market.

It remains only to consider the proofs of financial ability, furnished by the present French managers when they are to raise supplies on credit. Here I am a little at a stand; for credit, properly speaking, they have none. The credit of the antient government was not indeed the best: but they could always, on some terms, command money, not only at home, but from most of the countries of Europe where a surplus capital was accumulated; and the credit of that government was improving daily. The establishment of a system of liberty would of course be supposed to give it new strength; and so it would actually have done, if a system of liberty had been established. What offers has their government of pretended liberty had from Holland, from Hamburgh, from Switzerland, from Genoa, from England, for a dealing in their paper? Why should these nations of commerce and œconomy enter into any pecuniary dealings with a people who attempt to reverse the very nature of things; amongst whom they see the debtor prescribing, at the point of the bayonet, the medium of his solvency to the creditor; discharging one of his engagements with another; turning his very penury into his resource; and paying his interest with his rags?

Eighth, Burke knows what makes someone fit for government. He is able to assess the people involved in a scheme, as well as their ideas. Recent political events in many Western countries have shown us how little appreciated is this skill.

It is undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical; but in general, those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults, are unqualified for the work of reformation: because their minds are not only unfurnished with patterns of the fair and good, but by habit they come to take no delight in the contemplation of those things. By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. It is therefore not wonderful, that they should be indisposed and unable to serve them.

Finally, ninth, although he was Irish, and a part of the Irish Enlightenment, Burke wrote as a British thinker, and grounded all of his ideas and ideals (in the Reflections at least) in the British system of government.

I think our happy situation owing to our constitution; but owing to the whole of it, and not to any part singly; owing in a great measure to what we have left standing in our several reviews and reformations, as well as to what we have altered or super-added… standing on the firm ground of the British constitution, let us be satisfied to admire rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights the aëronauts of France.

Note, by the way, how the wonderful description of the “aëronauts of France” echoes his criticism of “The highest flight of such clamorous birds” who create the rage of party.”

The problem with writing about Burke is that he is too lovely a writer not to keep quoting, and so the page swells with his splendid phrases. But too much quotation spoils the appetite. The best thing I can do is to encourage you to read Burke for yourself. He is not the thinker you have heard quoted on the news. He is not the soundbite you have seen in columns. He is not the meme you are familiar with. Discover him for yourself, all of him. See what a liberal conservative he is, how difficult he is to co-opt for our own purposes. See him think.

I will end with perhaps his best quotation, though not one you will see very often. If only he could be remembered for this, instead of all the other little snippets that have been taken from him.

We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same – troublous storms that toss the private state, and render life unsweet. These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious appearance of a real good. You would not secure men from tyranny and sedition, by rooting out of the mind the principles to which these fraudulent pretexts apply? If you did, you would root out every thing that is valuable in the human breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actors and instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magistrates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving, that there should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of the gospel; no interpreters of law; no general officers; no public councils. You might change the names. The things in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes of evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you will be wise historically, a fool in practice.

Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man’s labour and that of another, from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am quite sure, from my best observation, that any given five men will, in their total, afford a proportion of labour equal to any other five … there will be one possessing all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and the other three middling, and approximating to the first and the last. So that in so small a platoon as that of even five, you will find the full complement of all that five men can earn. Taking five and five throughout the kingdom, they are equal: therefore, an error with regard to the equalization of their wages by those who employ five, as farmers do at the very least, cannot be considerable.

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We ought not, on either side of the water, to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by the counterfeit wares which some persons, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit bottoms, as raw commodities of British growth though wholly alien to our soil, in order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this country, manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved liberty.

The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried; nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial. They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as a grievance; as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution.

3

In the famous law of the 3d of Charles I. called the , the parliament says to the king, ‘your subjects have inherited this freedom,’ claiming their franchises not on abstract principles ‘as the rights of men,’ but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers. Selden, and the other profoundly learned men, who drew this petition of right, were as well acquainted, at least, with all the general theories concerning the ‘rights of men,’ as any of the discoursers in our pulpits, or on your tribune; full as well as Dr Price, or as the Abbé Seyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen, to that vague speculative right, which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild litigious spirit.

4

Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not represent its ability, as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant in the representation. It must be represented too in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. The great masses therefore which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations. The same quantity of property, which is by the natural course of things divided among many, has not the same operation. Its defensive power is weakened as it is diffused. In this diffusion each man’s portion is less than what, in the eagerness of his desires, he may flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the accumulations of others. The plunder of the few would indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the distribution to the many. But the many are not capable of making this calculation; and those who lead them to rapine, never intend this distribution.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.

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what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. Grand, swelling sentiments of liberty, I am sure I do not despise. They warm the heart; they enlarge and liberalise our minds; they animate our courage in a time of conflict. Old as I am, I read the fine raptures of Lucan and Corneille with pleasure. Neither do I wholly condemn the little arts and devices of popularity. They facilitate the carrying of many points of moment; they keep the people together; they refresh the mind in its exertions; and they diffuse occasional gaiety over the severe brow of moral freedom. Every politician ought to sacrifice to the graces; and to join compliance with reason. But in such an undertaking as that in France, all these subsidiary sentiments and artifices are of little avail. To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a true government; that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind. This I do not find in those who take the lead in the national assembly. Perhaps they are not so miserably deficient as they appear. I rather believe it. It would put them below the common level of human understanding. But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides of the people. If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards; and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper and moderate on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.

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