Burke and the Nature of Politics

The Age of the French Revolution

Carl B. Cone

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185958
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this second of two volumes, Carl B. Cone demonstrates once again that only through a study of Edmund Burke's active political life can one understand his thought. To Burke's important practical contributions to the art of government made prior to 1782 (Volume I, The Age of the American Revolution ) must now be added the extension of his thought to new problems of empire and finally, in more theoretical directions, to the French Revolution, which Burke saw as the greatest crisis in the history of the Christian community.

Mr. Cone frankly acknowledges the flexibility of view Burke displayed while active in politics, but he also reveals Burke's basic continuity of principle. His career as a public man was a quest for justice and good order in the affairs of men. Each of the great problems he encountered served to develop in him the belief that the duty of the statesman was to bring his society into harmony with the moral order of the universe.

Burke was absorbed in four great causes after 1782. One was domestic the constitutional and social order of England. Burke championed the independence of parliament, the supremacy of the House of Commons, and the aristocratic political system against those who asserted the prerogative powers of the crown or the necessity for parliamentary reform. As before 1782, he continued to advocate party as the instrument for giving effect to the constitutional principles that would preserve the liberties of Englishmen.

For the people of the British Empire too, Burke sought justice. With America gone, he turned his attention to the administration of India. Deeply entangled with domestic politics, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, governor general of India, for abuse of his office engrossed Burke through almost all of the last fifteen years of his life. Mr. Cone's account of the impeachment is the fullest that any student of Burke has published.

Another great imperial problem, justice for the people of Ireland, also runs through the entire period 1782–1797. As during the American Revolution, Burke desired to preserve the unity of the British Empire and the integrity of the protectionist commercial system, and so he approached the Irish problem with the conviction that justice could be attained within the superintending authority of the imperial government.

The crisis of the French Revolution dominates the last half of the book. Because it was based upon principles of man and society, the Revolution forced Burke, as no earlier crisis had done, to give the fullest expression to his philosophy in one of the great political documents of the world. Mr. Cone presents here a discerning analysis both of the nature of Burke's opposition to the basic ideas of the Enlightenment and an exposition of the historical-legal principle which had emerged in Burke's own thought from the experience of a full life.

PART ONE

The Constitution: Domestic and Imperial

CHAPTER I

Introduction

WHEN BURKE DISTINGUISHED between politics as a scramble for places or a struggle for power, he meant quite different things. Office was an end in itself, the pursuit of little persons, whereas power was a noble ambition, to be used for the enlargement of social good. When Burke described the politician as the philosopher in action, he meant that the politician should be guided by prudence or practical reason to seek the good appropriate to man in civil society, the only man in whom Burke was interested. The synonym of social good was justice.

Prudence and experience taught Burke that in politics an individual, such as Lord Chatham, was ineffective by himself. According to Aristotle, man was a political animal, and according to Burke, man was a social being. In society, men belonged to various groups as their needs dictated; in politics, the natural group, whether called faction or party, was the means by which the individual, supported by those he was joined with, sought to give effect to the measures that, according to their judgments, would promote justice. Parliamentary politics, then, was the organized pursuit of justice by contending individuals and parties. In this view, contentions arose from the unavoidable disagreements about actions and policies, not from differences as to the ultimate goal.

In 1765 Burke had become attached to the parliamentary party led by the Marquis of Rockingham. Like others, this party was not homogeneous or monolithic. It was a confederation whose components were more closely affiliated than the constituent elements of other parliamentary parties of the time, but less than the parties of a later age. From the time of its formation, shortly before Burke became attached to it, until the fall of Lord North in March, 1782, the Rockingham party had enjoyed only one year in office, yet in its adversities it had retained a more distinct identity than any other contemporary party. When Lord North’s ministry came to its end, the Rockingham party, because of its size, its history, and its relative steadfastness in opposition, seemed to deserve the opportunity to control the new ministry.

Burke’s view of party, shaped while his own party was in opposition, was exaggerated by that fact. Because in 1782, as earlier and later, fewer than half of the members of the Commons considered themselves members even of the loose parties of that day, purely party control of the Commons was not possible. Both royal confidence and the support of the unorganized members was necessary to sustain a government, as the fall of Lord North demonstrated. Moreover, strong distrust of parties still prevailed. William Wilberforce, who confused Burke’s idea of party with the kinds of “cohesions” produced by the eighteenth-century electoral structure, thought that parties were incompatible with the independence of the Commons. But he was thinking of the independence of individual members, whereas Burke, like Walter Bagehot eighty years later, was thinking of the independence of the House of Commons from either crown or popular influence. He considered party organizations the best security against extramural influences.

Obviously, Burke was thinking of parliamentary parties, not of national or constituency parties. In 1782 the best known ones were those of Lord North, Rockingham, and Shelburne. North’s, developed after his accession to power, had enjoyed the king’s support as well as that of politicians whose first loyalty was to the king, and that of many of the so-called independent members. The Shelburne party was the old Chatham connection. The Rockingham party was unusual, as it was an opposition party that had survived the natural attrition of years out of office. It had coherence and a program.

Whether members opposed or belonged to the Rockingham party, they recognized its unusual character. Burke had earlier defined a party as a body of men who agreed upon certain principles and desired office in order to give effect to them. He had helped to formulate the principles of the Rockingham party and, assisted by events, the program that would give them concrete form. Burke liked to think of them as the principles of liberty that English history had revealed, the Revolution of 1688 had confirmed, and eighteenth-century Whiggism was defending. If, as everyone now admits, there was no Whig party as a party in Burke’s time, there was something that men as diverse as Burke, Rockingham, Fox, the Duke of Grafton, and Horace Walpole accepted as Whiggism—a spirit, a set of prejudices, a collection of attitudes, and a body of aspirations needing reaffirmation and reassertion. To a great extent the political battles of the 1780’s, particularly of the years 1782-1784, were fought over the issues and the acts associated with the attempts to give stronger effect to a Whiggism that, to Burke, was still the meaning of English history.

With the French Revolution this struggle took on added significance, because the old Whig principles were challenged more threateningly than ever before. No longer a “generous contention” among English politicians, the struggle of the 1790’s was against a dogma, against a doctrine that repudiated the assumptions and traditions that earlier even Burke’s domestic political opponents had claimed to accept. If before 1789 Burke had thought that the Whig view of the constitution was at issue, then after 1789 the very foundations of the Christian social order were assaulted. In this crisis the old methods of defense were not sufficient. The tactics of normal parliamentary warfare were useless. In the ideological struggle of the 1790’s the incendiary doctrines of the revolutionaries had to be opposed by moral as well as by physical force.

Thus Burke, whose speeches and writings before 1789 had been instruments of parliamentary politics, after 1789 had to be the philosopher. He had always been a philosopher of sorts, better able than most politicians to formulate appropriate generalizations about politics and the constitution as well as the affairs of the British Empire, so that his occasional pieces retained meaning after the events that brought them forth had become history. These generalizations form a coherent body of thought, but they are scattered through his formal publications, his speeches, and his correspondence. None of these political tracts from 1765 to 1789, not even those on the American problem or the Irish question, constitutes a systematic treatise. His writings on the French Revolution, however, contain his complete political thought. Taken together, they have unity, and one of them, the Reflections on the Revolution in France, crystallizes all of value that Burke had said and thought about the nature of man and society. With its publication in 1790 Burke produced a treatise addressed to a specific event, but far transcending it. If he had ever given up to party what was meant for mankind, the universal significance of his Reflections redressed the balance.

So it was that in defense of the social order Burke willingly went beyond his customary role as a party politician and a defender of the British constitution to become the champion of the Christian order of western Europe. Had he not risen to this height, the historian would nevertheless have found him noteworthy. But a reconstruction of his pre-Revolution thought, though containing the elements of his political philosophy, would never place him in the first rank as a political thinker.

And so we might fail to perceive that even before 1789 he possessed and applied rather profound principles to the problems he encountered as a parliamentary politician. From Burke’s point of view, the contentions over the British constitution arose from the question: in which kind of political and constitutional order was justice more likely to prevail in the Empire and at home. Imperial authority that was too weak to preserve social harmony or was tyrannical, as in India (Burke believed) under Hastings, or corrupt, as in Ireland, or impolitic, as in America, must be reformed and directed toward promoting the well-being of people who lived under the superintendency of the imperial government. Justice for the people of Ireland or India was the same as justice for the people of England, though circumstances might differ from one part of the Empire to another. The French Revolution threatened destruction to the just, Christian order of western Europe because, Burke insisted, its principles were alien and hostile to the usages and principles of the social order that had developed in Europe through the centuries.

We come then to the old question, what is justice and what did Burke understand by it? Here he drew upon one of the oldest intellectual traditions of western civilization, the natural law, which had passed from Aristotle, the Stoics, and Cicero on to western Europe and thus into the mainstream of Christian moral, legal, and social thought. As understood by Burke from his college studies and his other readings, notably in Richard Hooker, it described a moral order of the universe, created by God and governed by eternal, divine law. Within this universal order existed the worldly social order whose strongest imperative is the moral law, binding men to seek justice in their social relationships, to respect the rights of others, and to perform the duties that their natural endowments of intelligence, free will, and conscience make known to them. Observance, according to the direction of right reason, of the moral law, which is the foundation of the social and political order, has enabled men throughout history to move toward fulfillment of their duty to God, to bring, as their merely human capacities will permit, the social order into closer conformity with the order of the universe. In such a social order, justice prevails, and it is the same among all men, because the mandate of the moral law is in the nature of men. Particular rights and duties, and so particular justice, may vary according to time and circumstances. It is the duty of the political rulers, as Burke said in the Reflections, to combine “the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns” in order to achieve the social order in which justice will prevail.

The affairs of men require the operation of human reason and judgment. That was why Burke insisted that men of superior judgment must govern and, in making “human Laws,” must recognize that they are only “declaring” the particular relevance of the principles of “original justice.” In all human affairs, Burke said in the Reflections, justice is a paramount consideration—“Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society.” And the quest for justice was Burke’s career as a Rockingham Whig, as a friend of America and Ireland, as the prosecutor of Warren Hastings, and as the enemy of the French Revolution. In these characters Burke lived most of his adult life, and especially his last fifteen years.

For two years after the fall of Lord North, England experienced political instability. The second Rockingham administration lasted from March until July, 1782, and when the marquis’ death terminated it, the king called upon Lord Shelburne to form a government. In February, 1783, an alliance between North and Fox defeated the preliminaries of the peace treaties, and Shelburne left office. The Fox-North alliance became a coalition government in April. It endured until December, when Pitt the Younger took office. Burke, who was paymaster general in the Rockingham and the coalition g...