Traditional Conservatism (Part 2): Edmund Burke

^{FOR THE RECORD, THE AUTHOR OF THIS POST IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE. I AM AN ATHEIST, A DARWINIST, A GEORGIST, AND A LEFT-LIBERTARIAN LEANING SOCIAL DEMOCRAT. THE PURPOSE OF THIS POST IS EDUCATIONAL. I DO NOT NECESSARILY AGREE WITH ANY OF THE IDEAS ESPOUSED BY THE PHILOSOPHER(S) MENTIONED IN THIS POST.}

Edmund Burke

Murray Rothbard, the right-wing libertarian theorist and founder of anarcho-capitalism, was convinced that Edmund Burke started off as an anarchist. Rothbard was wrong, but it is an understandable mistake. Burke's earliest work, A Vindication of Natural Society, was intended as a reductio ad absurdum of the arguments of rationalism against religion. Burke believed that western civilization had revealed religion as its foundation. A Vindication of Natural Society was written as satire in order to demonstrate that the same sort of argumentation that led to the undermining of religious dogma also would undermine the whole foundation of civil order.

“The design was to show that, without the exertion of any considerable forces, the same engines which were employed for the destruction of religion, might be employed with equal success for the subversion of government; and that specious arguments might be used against those things which they, who doubt of everything else, will never permit to be questioned…. Even in matters which are, as it were, just within our reach, what would become of the world, if the practice of all moral duties, and the foundations of society, rested upon having their reasons made clear and demonstrative to every individual?”—Edmund Burke (Preface to A Vindication of Natural Society)

The rationalist opponents of revealed religion would point out all the wrongdoings of organized religion, thereby making the case for "natural religion" or "deism." In A Vindication of Natural Society, Burke sought to apply the same sort of arguments to an institution that nearly everyone believes is necessary—government. If all the wrongdoings of established churches proves that organized religion (Christianity) ought to be rejected in favor of natural religion (deism), then it also follows that organized society (with government) ought to be replaced with natural society (the immediate family isolated from a greater community). Surely the evils committed by government far outweigh the evils committed by the Church! So Burke tallies the number of people killed and enslaved by governments and, satirically and ironically, draws the following conclusion:

“In vain you tell me that artificial government is good, but that I fall out only with the abuse. The thing! the thing itself is the abuse! Observe, my lord, I pray you, that grand error upon which all artificial legislative power is founded. It was observed, that men had ungovernable passions, which made it necessary to guard against the violence they might offer to each other. They appointed governors over them for this reason. But a worse and more perplexing difficulty arises, how to be defended against the governors?”—Edmund Burke (A Vindication of Natural Society)

It's easy for an anarchist or libertarian to read A Vindication of Natural Society and conclude that government does need to be abolished, but that's not the conclusion that Burke actually wants his reader to draw. Instead, he wants his reader to have an instinctive reactionary response. He wants the reader to step back and think, "Well, this rationalism thing has gone too far! It is beginning to erode the very foundation of civilized society." And Burke was essentially right to think that such rationalist sentiments would logically lead to such an anti-government conclusion. Burke wrote this in 1756 and by 1840 Proudhon was already espousing the philosophy of anarchism, grounded in the rationalist rebellion against organized religion. Mikhail Bakunin turned the phrase "No gods, no masters!" into a slogan of the anarchist movement. Burke was not a precursor to anarchism, but a prophet of sorts, a man who saw where things were heading and warned against it.

Burke, like Aquinas, saw morality as coming from God-given natural law. By attacking religion, rationalists were eroding the foundation of Western civilization. They were essentially dethroning God, which entailed the destruction of natural law theory. The political theory of the Middle Ages was falling apart. If you can directly question God and call His natural law into question, then there is little basis for preserving a form of government that was specifically designed for the purpose of inducing men to act in accordance with God's law. The rationalists' attack on Christianity was in fact an attack on Western civilization altogether—a slippery slope leading to anarchy and chaos!

Deism or "natural religion" is almost like a crypto-atheism in Burke's estimation. Deists argue that natural religion without revealed religion is sufficient, but Burke wants to force the deist to take this to what he sees as its logical conclusion. Aquinas had held that mankind could not fully understand supernatural matters without the "superadded gift" of grace. Man naturally knows that God exists, but he cannot truly know God apart from supernatural divine revelation. (Compare this to the Calvinist distinction between common grace and special grace.) Fallen man may find himself with an inclination toward sin and may not be able to bring himself to behave ethically. Thus, men might actually need human law or positive law as a tool to help them behave ethically. If natural religion apart from revealed religion is sufficient, then it follows that natural society apart from artificial government is sufficient. God gave man the natural law, written upon his heart, as a natural means of governing mankind, but fallen man was unable to obey that law, so positive law was needed in order to induce men to act virtuously. If divine revelation and grace are not needed for man to know God properly, then government is also an unnecessary institution. The Church and the State go together. The distinction between natural religion and organized/revealed religion is analogous to the distinction between natural society and government. If natural religion does not need to be supplemented by revealed religion, then neither does natural society need to be supplemented by government.

"Show me an absurdity in religion, and I will undertake to show you a hundred for one in political laws and institutions. If you say that natural religion is a sufficient guide without the foreign aid of revelation, on what principle should political laws become necessary? Is not the same reason available in theology and in politics? If the laws of nature are the laws of God, is it consistent with the Divine wisdom to prescribe rules to us, and leave the enforcement of them to the folly of human institutions? Will you follow truth but to a certain point?

"We are indebted for all our miseries to our distrust of that guide which Providence thought sufficient for our condition, our own natural reason, which rejecting both in human and divine things, we have given our necks to the yoke of political and theological slavery. We have renounced the prerogative of man, and it is no wonder that we should be treated like beasts. But our misery is much greater than theirs, as the crime we commit in rejecting the lawful dominion of our reason is greater than any which they can commit. If, after all, you should confess all these things, yet plead the necessity of political institutions, weak and wicked as they are, I can argue with equal, perhaps superior, force, concerning the necessity of artificial religion; and every step you advance in your argument, you add a strength to mine. So that if we are resolved to submit our reason, and our liberty to civil usurpation, we have nothing to do but to conform as quietly as we can to the vulgar notions which are connected with this, and take up the theology of the vulgar as well as their politics. But if we think this necessity rather imaginary than real, we should renounce their dreams of society, together with their visions of religion, and vindicate ourselves into perfect liberty."—Edmund Burke (A Vindication of Natural Society)

Burke was not intending to really make an argument for anarchy here. What he was trying to do is demonstrate that the arguments against organized religion were of such a nature that they could also apply to government. The arguments of the rationalists and deists really undermine the whole foundation of Western civilization. This was not, according to Burke, a reason to reject government, but rather a reason to call into question the whole anti-Christian agenda of the rationalists.

What mattered most to Burke was peace and order. Christian tradition, as passed down from the Late Middle Ages, and represented in Thomism, was what established peace and order in Europe. Burke saw revolution as a great evil, a disruption of peace and order, to be avoided if at all possible. Burke spoke in Parliament, encouraging the British government to do everything it could to appease the American colonies. He thought it important to avoid war at all costs. Burke did not want to see a revolution or a civil war in the colonies. When it came to the French Revolution, Burke looked on in horror. The French Revolution appeared to Burke to be the rise of atheism and anarchy in Europe. He had the following to say about the French Revolution:

"The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures....

"Our present danger from the example of a people, whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger of being led through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy. On the side of religion, the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from atheism; a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction, accredited, and almost avowed."—Edmund Burke (from The Works of Edmund Burke With a Memoir)

The French Revolution was a threat to peace and order because it was a rebellion against hierarchy. According to Burke, inequality is a necessary part of civil society. Social hierarchy comes with civil society. Men created governments in order to protect their own interests. In order to be more secure in their liberty, men had to give up some of their liberty. By entering into this arrangement, men agreed not to act as their own judge and executioner and to delegate those tasks to others. It is hard to conceive of civil society without hierarchies arising from legal and judicial institutions. Men are not entitled to equal shares of power within society simply because different men have different roles. A judge must necessarily have more power than a police officer, and a police officer must necessarily have more power than an ordinary citizen. Furthermore, social inequalities stemming from wealth might also be regarded as just. Every individual is entitled to the product of his own labor. If some individuals work harder than others, thereby earning more, then inequality is not only acceptable but ethically right by definition.

“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. He that has but five shillings in the partnership has as good a right to it as he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock; and as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention.

“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.”—Edmund Burke (Reflections on the French Revolution)

The political spectrum of left vs. right originated with the French Revolution. Supporters of the King and the status quo sat to the left of the president of the National Assembly, whereas supporters of the revolution sat to his left. Those loyal to the king generally supported the preservation of traditional hierarchies and inequality. The revolutionaries to the left tended to advocate the abolition of hierarchies, holding that both wealth and power ought to be distributed in a more egalitarian manner. The term "left" came to mean egalitarian, progressive, or revolutionary and the term "right" came to mean conservative, hierarchical, or reactionary. Burke's entire philosophy is clearly on the right. To him, property was almost sacred: "We entertain a high opinion of the legislative authority, but we have never dreamt that parliaments had any right whatever to violate property..."(ibid.) This meant too that inequality was fundamentally just since "[t]he characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal."(ibid.)

With the French Revolution, we saw the emergence of the idea of delegative democracy—the idea that politicians ought not to be representatives, but delegates. It was held by people on the left that representatives ought to be replaced by delegates with an imperative mandate "in which parliamentary deputies can only enact policies in accordance with concretely transmitted preference by their electors."(Wikipedia) Burke rejected these proposals, holding that such a thing would require the delegates to vote against their own conscience and better judgement any time that the will of their constituents didn't align with their own opinion. Any parliament or congress must be a deliberative assembly, where politicians debate and discuss policies. The constituents form their opinions prior to that deliberative process and do not hear the arguments that take place in parliament. Instead of voting on issues, people must be content to vote for wise and just representatives, people whom they can trust to make good decisions for them.

“Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

"My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?

"To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to consider. But authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience,--these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.

"Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.”―Edmund Burke (Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 3 Nov. 1774)

This was the conservatism of Burke. His ideas would heavily influence all subsequent conservative thinkers.