Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

      Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is his most famous work, endlessly reprinted and read by thousands of students and general readers as well as by professional scholars. After it appeared on November 1, 1790, it was rapidly answered by a flood of pamphlets and books. E. J. Payne, writing in 1875, said that none of them “is now held in any account” except Sir James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae.¹ In fact, however, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, Part 1, although not the best reply to Burke, was and remains to this day by far the most popular one. It is still in print.

      Burke scorned to answer Paine directly, but in 1791 he published a sequel to his Reflections under the title An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.² In it, he quoted several pages from Paine’s book without acknowledging their source, and took them as representative of the views of all the British sympathizers with the French Revolution. Paine came back with The Rights of Man, Part 2. Burke ignored it, so in fact there was no debate between him and Paine. The two men talked past each other in appeals to the British public.

      THE RADICAL

      DEMOCRATIC IDEOLOGY

      Burke had been personally acquainted with Paine, but it is unlikely that he had him in mind when he wrote the Reflections. He already knew the radical democratic ideology that inspired part of the demand for expanding the people’s right to vote for members of the House of Commons. Typically but wrongly, he attributed that ideology to most of the parliamentary reformers, as he did in his Speech on the Reform of the Representation of the Commons in Parliament in 1782.³

      The premise of the radical ideology was that men by nature are individuals endowed with natural rights but not, as Aristotle had thought, political animals designed by nature to live in organized political societies. In the prepolitical “state of nature,” there was no government and every man was a naturally sovereign individual with an absolute right to govern himself. Only he could transfer that right to a government, and even he could not transfer it totally. The only civil society that he could legitimately enter was one in which his natural right to govern himself became the natural right to take part on equal terms with every other man in the government of civil society.

      This view translates into the principles of political equality and majority rule. Civil society is a purely artificial institution created by independent individuals who contract with one another to set up a government whose primary purpose is to protect them in the exercise of their natural rights. Its basic structural principles are dictated by the nature of man as a sovereign individual. In this theory, natural rights are prior to social obligations.

      BURKE’S REACTION TO

      THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

      Burke encountered this theory also in A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, a speech which a Dissenting minister, Dr. Richard Price, delivered on November 4, 1789, to the Revolution Society, a group that met annually to celebrate the English Revolution of 1688. This speech (which Burke did not read until January) was delivered two days after the French National Assembly confiscated the estates of the Catholic Church in France. Burke’s reaction to the French Revolution had been slow in forming, but events in France in the fall of 1789, such as the confiscation of Church property, opened his eyes to how radical the Revolution there was. Dr. Price’s speech awakened a fear in Burke of a similar ideology’s bringing about a similar revolution in Great Britain.

      On February 9, 1790, he gave a speech in the Commons on the Army Estimates that marked the beginning of his eventual complete break with his political party, the Whigs, now led by Charles James Fox, who admired the French Revolution. In the meantime, Burke was working on what was to become Reflections on the Revolution in France. It had begun with a letter, written in November 1789, to Charles-Jean-François Depont.⁴ Depont, a young Frenchman who had visited the Burke family in 1785, now wrote to ask Burke to assure him that the French were worthy of the liberty that their Revolution was bringing them. Burke’s reply was a calm and cool analysis of the Revolution. When Dr. Price spurred him to respond to his praise of the French Revolution, Burke couched his reply in the form of another letter to Depont. But it grew into a book addressed in reality to the British public in a highly rhetorical style.

      Yet there is more, much more, to the Reflections than rhetoric. E. J. Payne, the editor of this set of volumes, who was very English and very much a man of the nineteenth century’s Victorian age, could say, “No student of history by this time needs to be told that the French Revolution was, in a more or less extended sense, a very good thing.”⁵ (When the bicentenary of the Revolution was celebrated in 1989, scholars were no longer quite so sure about that.)⁶ Payne also, like most students of Burke who were educated in the British Isles, reflects the empiricism and positivism that are so strong a strain in English thought and make it difficult for British students of Burke to perceive that there is a genuine philosophy wrapped in the gorgeous rhetoric of the Reflections.

      It is not that Burke was or claimed to be a philosopher. Nor is his book a detached philosophical