Jennifer TangFebruary 25, 2014Prof DwyerContemporary Civilization

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in FranceBiography

• January 12, 1729-July 9, 1797• Statesman, author, orator, political theorist,

philosopher• Born in Dublin, Ireland, raised as an Anglican,

studied at Trinity College Dublin• Moved to London to study law• Traveled through Continental Europe, tried to

support himself as a writer• Returned to London, published A Philosophical

Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

• Member of the Whig party, served in the House of Commons of Great Britain

• Defended the Americans in the American Revolution, opposed French Revolution

• Wrote his Reflections early on in the Revolution, before the “reign of terror”

• Considered the father of modern conservatism

Historical Context: The Glorious Revolution

• aka the Revolution of 1688• Successful overthrow of King James II of England by a union of English

Parliamentarians • King James II was a Catholic, made laws for religious tolerance• Members of leading political circles were troubled that the monarchy would no longer

be Protestant, which would mean there would be more Roman Catholic influence in their government

• The Glorious Revolution ended any chance of Catholicism becoming re-established in England

• Sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution (but that’s not really true)• Began modern English parliamentary democracy• Led to the Bill of Rights of 1689

“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 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.”

“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. Everything 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 tragicomic 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.”

on Liberty & Rights...

• “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights... liberty, property, and resistance to oppression” (Declaration of the Rights of Man)

• French Revolutionaries were influenced by the writings of Rousseau and his doctrine of the general will—sovereignty can only exist in the common interest of its citizens. “As long as several men assembled together consider themselves as a single body, they have only one will which is directed towards their common preservation and general well-being. Then, all the animating forces of the state are vigorous and simple, and its principles are clear and luminous; it has no incompatible or conflicting interests; the common good makes itself so manifestly evident that only common sense is needed to discern it.” “The moment there is a master, there is no longer a sovereign.” (On the Social Contract)

• Burke’s response is that these claims are too abstract and are not grounded in political and social circumstances. Too much focus on “liberty” as an abstract ideal meant not enough focus on creating a realistic civil society

• “In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to do justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupation. They 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 favor. In this partnership all men have equal rights, but not to equal things.”

• “This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.”

• “[A]m I seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate an highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights?”

• “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

on the importance of tradition...

• “The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.” (Here, Burke is referring to the Revolution of 1688)

• “If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim under the conventions of civil society rights which do not so much as suppose its existence — rights which are absolutely repugnant to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is that no man should be judge in his own cause. By this each person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for himself and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of self-defense, the first law of nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.”

• Burke Burke contrasts the French Revolution with the Revolution of 1688. The Revolution of 1688 led to the Bill of Rights and followed a “firm but cautious and deliberate spirit” and allowed for “a monarchy directed by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and hereditary dignity of a nation, both again controlled by a judicious check from the reason and feeling of the people at large acting by a suitable and permanent organ.”

• He admired the Revolution of 1688 for the same reason he defended the American Revolution—both revolutions sought to reform existing customs, liberties, and documents

• The people of England “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 liberty, not as a badge of servitude.” (Really?)

• Speaking of “hereditary wealth”:• “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and

interesting circumstances belonging to it [...] 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. With us the House of Peers is formed upon this principle. It is wholly composed of hereditary property and hereditary distinction, and made, therefore, the third of the legislature and, in the last event, the sole judge of all property in all its subdivisions. The House of Commons, too, though not necessarily, yet in fact, is always so composed, in the far greater part. [...] Some decent, regulated preeminence, some

preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.”

• “The age of chivalry is gone.”

on Enlightenment...

• Calls the spirit of the Enlightenment a “barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings,” a “mechanic philosophy”

• “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely”• “[The age of] sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe

is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! [...] This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. [...] Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power, it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners. But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. 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.”

• Burke sought order, stability, and tradition, not a naive, misdirected anger

Reform vs Revolution

• But this doesn’t mean he’s anti-reform:• Two principles of conservation and correction: “in what we improve we are never

wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete”• “A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise

constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman”

Points of discussion:

• How should society improve itself? What responsibilities do people have to each other? Is there a place for idealism in politics?

• Even though Burke was right about the violence that the French Revolution would cause, he wasn’t exactly right about how great the English Constitution was (it would be reformed over the next century). Revolutions are meaningful because they incite a spirit of reform. Would these reforms have happened without the influence of the French Revolution?

• Working within/without the system? How would Adam Smith respond? • How would Burke respond to Occupy Wall Street/violent revolutions happening in

other countries today?