Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was first published in 1790, while the French Revolution was still under way. Burke's opposition to revolutionary change had a profound influence on conservatives in the decades after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The following passages contain Burke's defense of hereditary elites, his insistence on the power of tradition-here referred to as "convention"-and his criticism of the doctrine of natural rights.
He 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. . . 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. Let those large proprietors be what they will, and they have their chance of being amongst the best, they are at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth. [ . . . ]
If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executor 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. [ . . . ]
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it; and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. . . . The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men, each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience. That is which makes the constitution of a state, and the due distribution of its powers, a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strength and remedies to its distempers. 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. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics.
Source: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1791, 9th edition), pp. 75-76, 86-88, 89-90.
Questions for Analysis
1. Note that Burke does not defend hereditary elites with reference to God or a divinely inspired order. How does he justify the authority of the hereditary aristocracy?
2. What power does Burke grant to "convention" in the construction of the state and its laws?
3. What is Burke's principal complaint about revolutionaries who base their programs on "natural rights"?
Revolution in France was more influential in this new context than it had been during the 1790s, when it was first published. Burke did not oppose all change; he had argued, for instance, that the British should let the North American colonies go. But he opposed talk of natural rights, which he considered dangerous abstractions. He believed enthusiasm for constitutions to be misguided and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on what he called the “conquering power of reason” to be dangerous. Instead, Burke counseled deference to experience, tradition, and history. Other conservatives, such as the French writers Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) and Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise Bonald (1754-1840), penned carefully elaborated defenses of absolute monarchy and its main pillar of support, the Catholic Church. De Maistre, for instance, blamed the Enlightenment’s critique of the Catholic Church for the French Revolution, and he assailed Enlightenment individualism for ignoring the bonds and collective institutions (the Church, for instance, or family) that he believed held society together. As conservatives saw it, monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church were the mainstays of the social and political order. Those institutions needed to stand together in face of the challenges of the new century.
Conservatism was not simply the province of intellectuals. A more broadly based revival of religion in the early nineteenth century also expressed a popular reaction against revolution and an emphasis on order, discipline, and tradition. What was more, conservative thinkers also exercised influence well beyond their immediate circle. Their emphasis on history, on the untidy and unpredictable ways in which history unfolded, and their awareness of the past became increasingly central to social thought and artistic visions of the first half of the century.
Liberalism’s core was a commitment to individual liberties, or rights. Liberals believed that the most important function of government was to protect liberties and that doing so would benefit all, promoting justice, knowledge, progress, and prosperity. Liberalism had three components. First, liberalism called for equality before the law, which meant ending traditional privileges and the restrictive power of rank and hereditary authority. Second, liberalism held that government needed to be based on political rights and the consent of the governed. Third, with respect to economics, liberals believed that individuals should be free to engage in economic activities without interference from the state or their community.
The roots of legal and political liberalism lay in the late seventeenth century, in the work of John Locke, who had defended the English Parliament’s rebellion against absolutism and the “inalienable” rights of the British people (see Chapter 15). Liberalism had been developed by the Enlightenment writers of the eighteenth century and was especially influenced by the founding texts of the American and French Revolutions (the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man). Freedom from arbitrary authority, imprisonment, and censorship; freedom of the press; the right to assemble and deliberate—these principles were the starting points for nineteenth-century liberalism. Liberals believed in individual rights, that those rights were inalienable, and that they should be guaranteed in written constitutions. (Conservatives, as we saw earlier, considered constitutions abstract and dangerous.) Most liberals called for constitutional as opposed to hereditary monarchy; all agreed that a monarch who abused power could legitimately be overthrown.
Liberals advocated direct representation in govern-ment—at least for those who had the property and public standing to be trusted with the responsibilities of power. Liberalism by no means required democracy. In the July Monarchy in France, established after the 1830 revolution, the property qualifications were so high that only 2 percent of the population could vote. Even after the Reform Bill of 1832 in England, only 18 percent of the population could vote for parliamentary representatives. Nineteenth-century liberals, with fresh memories of the French Revolution of 1789, were torn between their belief in rights and their fears of political turmoil. They considered property and education essential prerequisites for participation in politics. Wealthy liberals opposed extending the vote to the common people. To demand universal male suffrage was too radical, and to speak of enfranchising women or people of color even more so. As far as slavery was concerned, nineteenth-century liberalism inherited the contradictions of the Enlightenment. Belief in individual liberty collided with vested economic interests, determination to preserve order and property, and increasingly “scientific” theories of racial inequality (see Chapter 23).
Economic liberalism was newer. Its founding text was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), which attacked mercantilism (the government practice of regulating manufacturing and trade to raise revenues) in the name of free markets. Smith’s argument that the economy should be based on a “system of natural liberty” was reinforced by a second generation of economists and popularized in journals such as the Economist, founded in 1838. The economists (or political economists, as they were called) sought to identify basic economic laws: the law of supply
And demand, the balance of trade, the law of diminishing returns, and so on. They argued that economic policy had to begin by recognizing these laws. David Ricardo (17721823) of Britain, for example, set out laws of wages and of rents, trying to determine the long-run outcomes of fluctuations in each.
Liberal political economists such as Smith and Ricardo believed that economic activity should be unregulated. Labor should be contracted freely, unhampered by guilds or unions, or state interference. Property should be unencumbered by feudal restrictions. Goods should circulate freely, which meant, concretely, an end to government-granted monopolies, trade barriers, import tariffs, and traditional practices of regulating markets, especially in valuable commodities such as grain, flour, or corn. At the time of the Irish famine, for instance, their writings played a role in hardening opposition to government intervention or relief
ADAM SMITH POINTING TO HIS BOOK THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (1776). Smith was an Enlightenment thinker whose work was popularized in the nineteenth century, and he helped to establish "political economy," or economics.
(see Chapter 19). Liberal economists believed that the functions of the state should be kept to a minimum, though they also argued that markets could not function without states to preserve the rule of law and government’s role was to preserve order and protect property but not to interfere with the natural play of economic forces, a doctrine known as laissez-faire, which translates, roughly, as “leave things to go on their own.” This strict opposition to government intervention makes nineteenth-century liberalism different from common understandings of “liberalism” in the United States today.
Liberty and freedom meant different things in different countries. In lands occupied by other powers, liberal parties demanded freedom from foreign rule. The colonies of Latin America demanded liberty from Spain, and similar struggles set Greece and Serbia against the Ottoman Empire, northern Italy against the Austrians, Poland against Russian rule, and so on. In central and southeastern Europe, liberty meant eliminating feudal privilege and allowing at least the educated elite access to political power, more rights for local parliaments, and creating representative national political institutions. Some cited the British system of government as a model; others pointed to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Most shied away from the radicalism of the French Revolution. The issue was constitutional, representative government. In such countries as Russia, Prussia, and France under the restored Bourbon monarchy, liberty meant political freedoms, such as the right to vote, assemble, and print political opinions without censorship.
In Great Britain, where political freedoms were relatively well established, liberals focused on expanding the franchise, on laissez-faire economics and free trade, and on reforms aimed at creating limited and efficient government. In this respect, one of the most influential British liberals was Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Bentham’s major work, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), illustrates how nineteenth-century liberalism continued the Enlightenment legacy and also transformed it. Unlike, for instance, Smith, Bentham did not believe that human interests were naturally harmonious or that a stable social order could emerge naturally from a body of self-interested individuals. Instead he proposed that society adopt the organizing principle of utilitarianism. Social institutions and laws (an electoral system, for instance, or a tariff) should be measured according to their social usefulness—according to whether they produced the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” If a law passed this test, it could remain on the books; if it failed, it should be jettisoned. Utilitarians acknowledged the importance of the individual. Each individual best understood his or her own interests and was, therefore, best left free, whenever possible, to pursue those interests as he or she saw fit. Only when an individual’s interests conflicted with the interests—the happiness—of the greatest number was individual freedom to be curtailed. The intensely practical spirit of utilitarianism enhanced its influence as a creed for reform. In his personal political views, Bentham went further than many liberals—he befriended Jacobins and believed in granting equal rights for women. Nevertheless, his rationalist approach to measuring the “utility” of laws and reforms nevertheless was an essential contribution to the liberal tradition.
Radicalism, Republicanism, and Early Socialism
The liberals were flanked on their left by two radical groups: republicans and socialists. Whereas liberals advocated a constitutional monarchy (in the name of stability and keeping power in the hands of men of property), republicans, as their name implies, pressed further, demanding a government by the people, an expanded franchise, and democratic participation in politics. The crucial distinction between the more moderate liberals and radical republicans, therefore, depended on the criteria they used for defining citizenship. Both groups believed that government should have the consent of citizens, but liberals were more likely to support restricted qualifications for citizenship, such as property ownership or the amount of taxes paid. Republicans were more committed to political equality and advocated more open definitions of citizenship, regardless of wealth or social standing. In thinking about the legacy of the French Revolution, therefore, liberals were likely to look favorably on the attempts by the National Assembly to create a constitution between 1789 and 1791. Republicans sympathized more openly with the Jacobins of the French Republic after 1792. Likewise, liberals remained suspicious of direct democracy and “mob rule” and sought constitutional measures that would allow propertied elites to exert their control over the political process and maintain social order. Radical republicans, on the other hand, were more likely to support civil militias, free public education, and civic liberties such as a free press and the right to assemble. In the debates between liberals and republicans, however, a general consensus about gender remained uncontroversial: only a very few liberals or republicans supported allowing women to vote. The virtues necessary for citizenship— rationality, sobriety, and independence of mind—were assumed by nearly all political thinkers of the period to be essentially masculine traits.
Where liberals called for individualism and laissez-faire, and republicans emphasized direct democracy and political equality, socialists pointed out that giving men the
QUADRILLE DANCING AT NEW LANARK, ROBERT OWEN'S MODEL COMMUNITY. Owen's Scottish experiment with cooperative production and community building, including schooling for infants, was only one of many utopian ventures in early-nineteenth-century Europe and North America.
World History
