Select Works of Edmund Burke: Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents and The Two Speeches on America. Edmund Burke
Assembly, considering that ignorance, neglect, or contempt of human rights, are the sole causes of public misfortunes and corruptions of government, have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration those natural imprescriptible, and unalienable rights.”
Noble as that sentiment may be, it presumes that the purpose of politics and of the state can be reduced to a question of rights. The end of all political associations is the preservation of rights, and denying or ignoring them is the sole cause of public misfortunes. It follows that if a nation were to get its conception of rights straight, it would have solved all the problems of society. Burke was a strong and sincere defender of people’s rights in other contexts, but he was repelled by the ideological simple-mindedness of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789).
Despite what Burke often seems to mean in his denunciations of “theory” and “metaphysics,” he did not reject principles or an overarching natural moral order. On the contrary, he often appealed to them, particularly in his arguments against political oppression in India and Ireland. His objection was to the ideological mind that reasoned in politics as if it were engaged in an exercise in geometry, proceeding from an initial principle to practical conclusions that followed with necessary logic, without regard to “the wisdom of our ancestors,” present circumstances, and the nature of the people as conditioned by their history. “For you know,” Burke wrote to Sir Hercules Langrishe in 1792, “that the decisions of prudence (contrary to the system of the insane reasoners) differ from those of judicature; and that almost all of the former are determined on the more or the less, the earlier or the later, and on a balance of advantage and inconvenience, of good and evil.”3 But the decisions of prudence were nonetheless rational judgments that should not be considered irrational because they were not modelled on mathematics.
Burke believed in a common human nature created by God as the supreme norm of politics. But he knew that human nature realizes itself in history through conventional forms, customs, and traditions, which constitute what he called the second nature of a particular people. Convention can and often enough does distort our nature, but it is not of itself opposed to it. Burke would have agreed with the remark of the late Sir Ernest Barker: “Once oppose Nature to Convention, and the whole inherited tradition of the ages goes by the board.”4 Convention, made as it should be to satisfy the needs of nature, is not nature’s enemy, but its necessary clothing. The statesman must therefore frame his policies with a practical wisdom that understands his people, their history, their traditions, their inherited rights and liberties, and their present circumstances. To do otherwise is to court disaster.
Burke thought that in the French Revolution it was the National Assembly that was courting disaster; in the American Revolution it was the British government. He never favored America’s independence from Britain, because he always strove to be an enlightened imperialist for whom the British Empire could and should be a blessing to all its member countries. But when American independence came, he was able to accept it gracefully, and he even praised the new Constitution of the United States. Or so, at least, he is reported as saying in the House of Commons on May 6, 1791: “The people of America had, he believed, formed a constitution as well adapted to their circumstances as they could.” It was, to be sure, a republican constitution, but, given the circumstances of the Americans, it had to be one: “They had not the materials of monarchy or aristocracy among them. They did not, however, set up the absurdity that the nation should govern the nation; that prince prettyman should govern prince prettyman: but formed their government, as nearly as they could, according to the model of the British constitution.”5
In regard to France, however, he was uncompromising. There he saw the Revolution as an attack not only on monarchy and aristocracy, but on the religion, morals, and civilization of Christendom, inspired by a rationalistic ideology—“rationalistic” because it was founded not on reason, but on intoxication with abstract theory.
Nor did Burke divorce reason from emotion. On the contrary, he held that our reason can recognize our nature through our natural feelings and inclinations. To cite but one example, he is reported to have said in the Commons on May 14, 1781, that the obligation of kings to respect the property even of conquered enemies “is a principle inspired by the Divine Author of all good; it is felt in the heart; it is recognized by reason; it is established by consent.”6 Burke was well aware, of course, that man is subject to disordered passions as well as to natural feelings. But for that reason he said that “the wise Legislators of all countries [have] aimed at improving instincts into morals, and at grafting the virtues on the stock of the natural affections.”7 Reason cultivates rather than tries to exterminate natural affections, because it is through them that it recognizes our natural good.
Man of his times though he was and defender of a now-defunct aristocratic order of society, Burke still speaks to us today. Harold Laski was a Marxist who did not mourn the demise of the aristocratic order; nonetheless he said that Burke “wrote what constitutes the supreme analysis of the statesman’s art” and was “the first of English political thinkers.” Laski therefore concluded that “Burke has endured as the permanent manual of political wisdom without which statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea.”8 This set of Burke’s Select Works offers a valuable introduction to that wisdom.
FRANCIS CANAVAN
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
Since E. J. Payne does not furnish the details of Edmund Burke’s biography, it will be useful to the modern reader to include a brief sketch of Burke’s life here. (See also the chronological table in volume 2 of this edition.)
He was born in Dublin on January 12, 1729, of a Roman Catholic mother and a father who, according to the most likely account, had conformed to the Established Anglican Church of Ireland (whose head, as in England, was the King of Great Britain and Ireland) in order to be able to practice law, a profession forbidden to Catholics under the Penal Laws. Of the children of that marriage who lived to maturity, the boys, Garrett, Richard, and Edmund, were raised as Protestants; the one girl, Juliana, as a Catholic.
Since Edmund was a somewhat sickly child, he was sent to live from 1735 to 1740 with his mother’s Catholic relatives, the Nagles, in the country air of County Cork. He maintained cordial relations with them throughout his life. If Burke had a personal religious problem as a result of this mixed religious family background, he solved it by maintaining that all Christians shared a common faith which subsisted in different forms in the several nations of the commonwealth of Christendom. The points on which they differed were the less important ones which could be left for the theological schools to argue about. When the French Revolution came, Burke found it easy to insist that all Christian kingdoms and churches must forget their quarrels and unite against what he called “an armed doctrine” hostile to all religion and civilization. (On a visit to France many years earlier, in 1773, he had been shocked by the rationalism and even atheism that he encountered in Paris.)
From 1741 to 1744, he attended a school in County Kildare that was conducted by a Quaker, Abraham Shackleton. Again, Burke maintained friendly relations with the Shackleton family for many years. In 1744, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, the intellectual stronghold of Irish Protestantism; he graduated with an A.B. degree in 1748 and received an M.A. degree in 1751.
By that time, he had gone to London to study law in the Inns of Court. But although in later life he displayed a considerable knowledge and understanding of law, he found the method of study distasteful and, much to his father’s annoyance, abandoned the law for a literary career.
He began this with two books that attracted much attention: A Vindication of Natural Society, a satire on the Deism of the Enlightenment, in 1756; and a treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in 1757. In the latter year, he married Jane Nugent,