Edmund Burke

The Enlightenment and Revolution

Peter Stanlis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351316743
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Two centuries after Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, his name and reputation stand alongside Locke, Montesquieu, and Hume - the other still-cited grand political thinkers of the eighteenth century. For those great nations that have fallen into what Burke called "the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow," the work of Burke supplies that sense of order, justice and freedom the present age seems to require.

This volume by Peter Stanlis has grown out of almost four decades of studying Burke. Today, Professor Stanlis is called by Russell Kirk "the leading American authority on the political thought of the great conservative reformer." The book is divided into three categories: Burke on law and politics; Burke's criticism of Enlightenment rationalism and sensibility; and Burke's theory of revolution and critique of the English revolution of 1688.

Stanlis' reasons' for linking Burke to the English Revolution rather than the later, and admittedly more decisive American and French Revolutions of his own time, is that for Burke, that earlier event was the normative pivot for judging how to make important changes in civil society. Indeed, even in his writings on the contemporary revolutions of his time,. Stanlis reminds us that Burke interpreted revolutionary events in France and Americas through the prism of the bloodless Revolution of 1688.

Part One

Burke’s Political Philosophy

1

Burke and the Moral Natural Law

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. . . . By these theorists the right of the people is almost always sophistically confounded with their power . . . but till power and right are the same, the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with virtue. . . . Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold,) the real rights of men. 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.

—Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, vol. 2, pp. 331-35.

Burke’s Supposed Utilitarianism

From at least the appearance of Buckle’s The History of Civilization in England (1857-1861) until the present, it has been the almost universal conviction of utilitarian and positivist scholars and critics that Burke had a strong contempt for the moral Natural Law, and that the ultimate basis of his political philosophy was to be found in a conservative utilitarianism. This common conviction is generally based upon the awareness that Burke frequently attacked what he called “metaphysical” or “abstract” rights, and that he generally placed against such “rights” arguments of moral prudence, legal expediency, and practical utility. Buckle was the first important critic to see in Burke’s thought a conception of politics “purely empirical,” in which “not truth” or “general principles” but “large views of general expediency” prevailed.¹ A decade after Buckle’s work, John Morley gave classic expression to what was to become a touchstone of utilitarian criticism on Burke:

The defenders of expediency as the criterion of morals are commonly charged . . . with holding a doctrine that lowers the moral capabilities, and that would ruin society if it were unfortunately to gain general acceptance. The king and the minister in 1774 entertained this view, and scorned to submit their policy to so mean a test as that prescribed by the creed of utility. If they had listened to the voice of the most eloquent and sagacious of the upholders of this test, they would have saved the empire. ... The actual bearings of circumstances, so visible to anybody who, like Burke, looked upon them from the point of high practical sense, were hidden from the sight of men who surrounded themselves with a hazy medium of abstract and universally applicable ideas. . . . Their opponents, who chose to measure their policy by the standard of convenience, of the interest of the greatest number, of utility and expediency, were guided by it to the loftiest heights of political wisdom and beneficence. The baneful superstition that there is in morals, and in the art of politics, therefore, which is a province of morals, some supernaturally illumined lamp, still survives to make men neglect the intelligible and available tests of public convenience and practical justice, which is no more than expediency in its widest shape. If Burke were among us at this day, enjoining habitual recourse in every political measure to this standard, he would find that men are nearly as disposed as ever to reason downwards from high-sounding ideas of Right, Sovereignty, property, and so forth; which have in truth no invariable conformity to facts, and which are only treated with reverence because they are absurdly supposed to be ultimate, eternal entities, incapable of further resolution.²

Morley was even convinced that the French Revolution “made conformity to general utility ... the practical standard” of government, and that therefore Burke “must have been much nearer to the best, most vital, and most durable part of the revolution than he knew, and than his successors have supposed.”³ In his second and much better book on Burke, published in 1879, Morley first recognized in Burke’s thought some vague force or law or “religious mysticism” that transcended empirical experience and history, but he still spoke of “Burke’s utilitarian liberalism” and concluded that “even when resting his case on prudence and expediency” Burke would “appeal to the widest and highest sympathies.”⁴ Morely once remarked that “as a Burkian and a Benthamite” he was much dismayed by an appeal to nature made by Chamberlain, maintaining that “right must depend not upon nature, but upon the good that the said rights are calculated to bring to the greatest number. “⁵ As the outstanding disciple of Bentham and Mill, Morley claimed Burke as his master and in two books on Burke he never once mentioned the moral Natural Law.

Among Morley’s contemporaries, Lecky and Sir Leslie Stephen shared his view that Burke was a utilitarian. Lecky noted in 1891 that for Burke, church and state were “based upon expediency” and “defended by purely utilitarian arguments,” which “have been rarely stated more skillfully than by Burke.”⁶ The positivist Stephen, a more perceptive writer, summarized Burke’s philosophy as “theological utilitarianism” and noted a close general connection between Burke’s supposed utilitarianism and his allusions to metaphysical rights (which he opposed):

Passages may be found in Burke’s writings where language is used superficially resembling that of his antagonists. He speaks of the “natural rights of mankind” as “sacred things,” and even says that all power is “a derogation from the natural equality of mankind at large.” Elsewhere men have a natural right to the fruits of their industry. . . . These transient deviations into the quasi-metaphysical language, when more closely examined, are easily intelligible. The natural equality of mankind, in Burke’s mouth, is simply an expression of the axiom which must necessarily lie at the base of all utilitarian, as well as of all metaphysical, systems.⁷

Stephen concluded that “Burke has not solved the problem of reconciling expediency with morality”; clearly, he saw no more in Burke’s “transient deviations” into “natural rights” than an accidental accretion inherent in his supposed utilitarianism.

Charles E. Vaughan, a learned modern political positivist and recognized authority on Burke, applied to the great Whig the usual Benthamite antithesis of natural right and expediency:

From the beginning, Burke recognizes that, in method and principle, the struggle is between expedience and judicial Right. ... In his view of things, Right is always contrasted with, and opposed to, expediency. . . . In this we shall find the key to the whole discussion ... the last appeal is not to Rights but to expediency. ... He stood side by side with Hume and Bentham in their assault upon abstract ideas of Right, in their constant reference of everything to expediency.⁸

In another book Vaughan qualified his last point considerably by noting a vast difference between the simple expediency of Hume and Bentham and Burke’s supposed expediency, qualified by “higher principles” and “a tissue of moral and religious ideals.”⁹ According to Vaughan, by “expediency” Burke meant “the permanent welfare of the whole nation”; therefore, he made “expediency the ultimate principle of politics.” Vaughan thought Burke’s expediency “comprises two ideas, . . . enlightened self-interest and duty, ... and Burke refuses to mark the bounds between them.” Burke merely applied his supposed expediency in different ways at various times; in his early work it was interpreted in a generous sense and was an end in itself, but in French affairs it was placed under the sanction of the moral law and religion. “Here,” wrote Vaughan, “for the first time, Burke explicitly severs himself from Hume and the utilitarians. Here ... he deals a deadly blow at those who strive to divorce politics from morals.”¹⁰ Vaughan also noted and was deeply troubled by something in Burke’s writings on Indian affairs that Leslie Stephen had passed off as “transient deviations into quasi-metaphysical language.” Vaughan’s explanation is even more glib and unconvincing:

He slips for the moment into an admission—repeated afterwards, it must be confessed, in his assaults on the French Revolution that there is such a thing as the “natural rights of mankind,” and that they are “sacred.” . . . Burke slips almost unconsciously from Right in the distinctly abstract to Right in the strictly legal sense; from the Right inferred out of certain universal principles by the philosophers to the Right inferred out of certain particular statutes by the lawyer. . . . Such passages come as a shock to those who have carefully followed the general tenor of Burke’s utterances. . . . They have the effect of pulling the reader up short, of making him ask how in the world they ever got there. ... We are probably justified in saying that the “appeal to the abstract Right” is rather a controversial device than an expression of the author’s deliberate and reasoned judgment. ... If we are to hold Burke to the strict consequences of his words he assumes . . . some kind of moral code to have existed, doubtless in a more or less rudimentary shape, before the state and in total independence of it.”¹¹

Nothing so reveals the addiction to theory and the limited moral imagination of Burke’s utilitarian and positivist critics as this fixed refusal to take him at his own word, and the readiness to pass off his appeals to natural rights as mere rhetoric.

Like Leslie Stephen and Vaughan, John MacCunn, one of Burke’s better critics, also recognized Burke’s appeals to natural rights, and expressed his great bewilderment: “Manifestly he does not hold, as Bentham did, that these rights have no existence. Why, then, should he cry havoc on the men who made it their business to declare them to the world?” In answering his own question, MacCunn offers yet another dubious explanation of the apparent dilemma: “Burke does not attack the doctrine as a theorist denouncing a theory, but as a politician whose interest is fixed on the application of the doctrine to politics.”¹² By “rights” MacCunn assumed Burke meant civil rather than natural rights,¹³ so that he concluded: “To Burke, as to Bentham, all rights, in so far as they are substantial, are not ultimate but derivative.” MacCunn’s analysis of Burke on natural rights came closer than any predecessor to the truth, yet he too failed to sift the problem beyond Burke’s supposed utilitarianism.

Most twentieth-century scholars on Burke, such as Halevy, Whitney, Osborn, and Lester, have simply repeated with variations the false contentions of Morley and his successors.¹⁴ It is not surprising, therefore, that practically every popular textbook in which Burke’s political ideals are discussed contains statements such as the following: “He was primarily a utilitarian, a worshiper of the expedient, who was convinced that the mere fact that any custom or institution had grown up over a long period of time established an overwhelming presumption in its favor. The whole business of appealing from tradition to reason and nature was distasteful to him.”¹⁵ Such has been the grand consensus of positivist opinion on Burke for the past century or more. Alone among Burke’s modern critics, Sabine refined upon the prevailing judgment by drawing out the historical consequences to the moral Natural Law of Burke’s supposed utilitarianism:

Burke made an important contribution to the nineteenth century proposal to replace the system of natural law. ... In a sense Burke accepted Hume’s negations of reason and the law of nature. Burke showed precisely ... the reaction that was to follow upon Hume’s destruction of the eternal verities of reason and natural law. ... It is true that he never denied the reality of natural rights. . . . However, like Hume, he believed that they were purely conventional, . . . they arise not from anything belonging to nature or to the human species at large, but solely from civil society. . . . Accordingly, Burke not only cleared away, as Hume had done, the pretense that social institutions depend on reason or nature but far more than Hume he reversed the scheme of values implied by the system of natural law.¹⁶

It is impossible here to analyze in detail the nature and origins of the various errors of omissions, irrelevant intrusions, false distinctions, misinterpretations, and contradictions that run through the evaluations of Burke’s utilitarian and positivist critics. The “sophisters, economists, and calculators” who Burke predicted would triumph after his era, garbled his principle of moral prudence, misunderstood his distrust of abstract metaphysical rights, failed to consider his conception of the law of nations, and refused to treat seriously his appeals to normative “nature” even when they were aware of them; yet they claimed him for themselves and imposed their claim on the twentieth century. Not that many individual aspects of the work of Burke’s utilitarian critics are not valid. But those who supposed Burke a utilitarian warped his essential philosophy out of its true orbit. The failure of a century of scholars to consider whether Burke adhered to the moral Natural Law was a fatal omission, because the true nature of Burke’s cardinal political principles cannot be understood apart from their connection with the Natural Law.

Burke’s Knowledge of the Natural Law Tradition

Since “very early youth,” Burke confessed in 1780 to a gentleman interested in reforming parliament, he had “been conversant in reading and thinking upon the subject of our laws and constitution, as well as upon those of other times, and other countries,” and a decade before his death he stated in parliament that “he had in the course of his life looked frequently into law books on different subjects.” Burke’s interest in the law began at least as early as 1747, when his father entered his name at the Middle Temple. Early in 1750 Burke went to London to study law, and although he soon abandoned his studies to take up first literature and then an active life in politics, his speeches reveal that he had acquired a profound knowledge and enduring respect for the law. “No man here,” he said in 1770, “has a greater veneration than I have for the doctors of the law,” and four years later, in his speech on American taxation, he voiced his greatest tribute to the law: “The law . . . is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences; a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberate the mind exactly in the same proportion.” Burke always believed that nothing sharpened the mind like the study of the law; he therefore cautioned his colleagues in March 1775 not to underestimate the resources of the American colonists, who had bought as many copies of Blackstone’s Commentaries as the British: “This study [law] renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources.”

In addition to his frequent remarks in parliament, Burke’s interest in the law is suggested in the volumes of his library, which included the works of many writers, both ancient and modern, on Natural Law jurisprudence.¹⁷ Among 664 items in his library were works containing discussions of the Natural Law by Aristotle, Cicero, Epictetus, Bacon, Coke, De Lolme, Prynne, B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE: BURKE’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
• PART TWO: BURKE’S CRITIQUE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
• PART THREE: BURKE AND REVOLUTION
• Index