Further Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

      In the two hundred years since Edmund Burke produced his writings on the French Revolution, the question of how to achieve liberty within a good society has remained a pressing one. Simon Schama’s masterful chronicle of the French Revolution, Citizens, argues that the Revolution attempted to create two entities, “a potent state and … a community of free citizens,” whose interests were irreconcilable. It was impossible, Schama states, to serve one without damaging the other.¹

      Burke’s alternative to revolutionary freedom and the revolutionary state may be found throughout this volume, especially in his description of what liberty is. “Practical liberty,” as Burke calls it in the first work printed here, differs in almost every respect from the revolutionary liberty of the French on both the individual and corporate levels. The individual that Burke describes is the “gentleman,” a member of a “natural aristocracy.” This gentleman is educated to respect the ancients, for they anticipate the errors of the moderns, and to revere God. His upbringing includes a respect for parents, for we “begin our public affections in our families,” as Burke says in Reflections on the Revolution in France.2 The gentleman enjoys his liberties in and through his social, economic, religious, and political institutions. They mediate his liberties through his obligations to them. Those obligations are not at war with the Englishman’s liberties: rather, they provide the means for him to develop fully into the virtuous, free human being that God intended (p. 161). Aware of the hostility of the revolutionaries to the ideal of the gentleman, Burke writes: “The great object of your tyrants is to destroy the gentlemen of France …” (p. 54).

      By contrast, the individual suited for revolutionary liberty is the “citizen.” To quote Schama on the cultural construction of the French citizen: “In this new world [of the French citizen,] heart was to be preferred to head; emotion to reason; nature to culture… . To possess un coeur sensible (a feeling heart) was the precondition for morality.” ³ Rousseau, the chief educator of the revolutionary generation of French citizens, taught that liberty was to be enjoyed after the individual had removed his existing social, economic, religious, and political obligations.

      Practical liberty differs from revolutionary liberty in its corporate construction also. This difference is epitomized by the distinction between Burke’s “Constitution” and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Burke’s critics, such as Thomas Paine, jeered that Britain lacked a constitution altogether, for there was no single piece of paper with that title. Burke’s defense of the Constitution, especially in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs and A Letter to a Noble Lord, shows the simple-mindedness of Paine’s criticism. Paper declarations and manifestoes of “universal” rights for abstract “man” do nothing to further liberty, argued Burke. Burke’s words on the American crisis in 1775 are apropos. The Americans, he said,

      are not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.⁴

      By the “sensible objects” of liberty, Burke means the actual practices of the assemblies, courts, churches, and commercial institutions of an actual people. The liberty pursued by Burke and the other Rockingham Whigs, he says in A Letter to a Noble Lord, “was a Liberty inseparable from order, from virtue, from morals, and from religion…” (p. 287). Burke consistently denied the possibility of discussing liberty in abstract terms and denied that liberty and constitutional law could ever truly be separate.

      A fundamentally different approach to reality underlies the contrast between the practical liberty enjoyed by the gentleman under the British Constitution and the revolutionary liberty of the French citizen. To Burke, every principle such as liberty must be mediated by actual practices. To put it another way, a spiritual truth becomes real only insofar as it becomes flesh. By contrast, the revolutionary finds that the limitations of the flesh enchain the spirit, and he therefore attempts to strip away appearances—conventions, habits, prejudices, customs, and traditions—in order to recover the essential reality beneath them, as Jeffrey Hart has explained.⁵ The spirit of revolutionary liberty is disembodied, and pervades an