Edmund Burke: A critique of the Philosophical Origins of Modern Conservatism

In laying out this essay it is crucial to enumerate, in as succinct a fashion as possible, the context by which Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and his thought has influenced modern conservatism. Living in the 18th century with Irish noble ancestry and a clergy-connected family that stretched back at least seven generations, Burke’s life was centered on the major events unfolding in the 18th century: The Catholic emancipation movement, the American revolution and the French Revolution. He spent the decades between 1766–1794 as a member of the Whig Party in the British Parliament’s House of Commons (MP) throughout the American Revolution and just as the French revolution began unfolding. It is critical to understand the origins and details of conservatism to understand how historical and political events of great change inspire reaction and resistance. As Burke used his position of authority to write prolifically on the matters of his day and articulated what is now considered the foundation of modern conservative thought, it is important to include a thorough critical analysis of the underlying metaphysical and ethical framework that encompassed his political philosophy and to critique where it is weak.

In his native Ireland, Catholics were not allowed to become Members of Parliament, and were de jure politically persecuted. In this way, Burke’s personal attachment to his familial circumstance (his mother was a catholic and his father was baptized as one), meant that this instinctive sympathy would convert to a coherent philosophy on religious freedom and an appreciation that he later invoked when discussing the American Revolution:

“First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation, which still I hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands.” (On Conciliation with the Colonies)

Notice the invocation of the first American colonists as having “respected freedom”, the context being that the English Puritans that eventually settled in Massachusetts and other parts of New England came from a background of political persecution. The fact that Burke admires this attribute of Puritans who were willing to leave in search of religious freedom underlines Burke’s latent but cautious liberalism, especially for his time.

This won him praise from liberals and cemented his status as an influential Whig Party MP. It also speaks to a bias towards his own Anglo tradition. By invoking the American colonists as “Englishmen” Burke, knowingly or not, suggested that the character of England is tied to their kind of freedom. Put another way, the love for this kind of freedom is something approaching a natural phenomenon in the English essence. The implication here is that history judges this by the winners of various revolutions and social movements that had to enfranchise, emancipate and democratize the political system of England as time went on. This nonetheless speaks to Burke’s commitment to be an “Englishman”, despite his Irish nationality. To be “English” is not to be born into English territory, but to adopt English ideals and values. Thus, the roots for Civic Nationalism are born.

Burke has deep skepticism of those with revolutionary zeal:

“Those who are attached to the constitution of this kingdom will take good care how they are involved with persons who, under the pretext of zeal toward the Revolution and constitution, too frequently wander from their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one, and which presides in the other” (Reflections).

This is what Burke wrote to his friend and correspondent, French Aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont, following the fall of the Bastille. Here Burke summarized the opposition to the French Revolution. He wrote that the fall of the Bastille was an impasse that his prior liberalism would not cross, a road paved with good intentions leading to chaos and anarchy. In this he expresses the underlying foundations of his conservatism: constitutionality, principle, discipline and order.

In invoking the claims of constitutionality, Burke is indeed a man of his time. Following the Glorious Revolution of the 17th century, the various Parliamentary reforms of the early 18th century, and the limitations of the monarchy’s power that resulted, Burke was living during a time of great political changes in his native United Kingdom (UK). As a Whig Party member, he was opposed to the Tories, later to be known as the modern UK Conservative Party, due to their staunch opposition to absolute monarchy. In this sense Burke was quite liberal for his time, often siding with the need for expansion of basic liberties, including his support of Catholic emancipation. In terms of constitutionality, British common law makes his case for him: whatever the argument of the day, the traditional legal system will adapt as the pressure builds, but only slowly and incrementally, this is the undertone of his support for liberalization in areas of religious freedom.

In terms of principle, discipline and order, Burke notes:

“Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has broken prison upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.” (7, Reflections)

Burke would argue that the Great Terror during the French Revolution was inevitable as the radical Jacobin faction began engaging in a reckless and fundamentally unprincipled approach to its own goals, “I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force…with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners.” (8, Reflections) Following the entirety of Burke’s list would be to suspend the revolution right in its tracks. To his point, the “terror” of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety was, by virtually all historical accounts, deadlier and more murderous than the monarchy of Louis 16th that it had deposed. Despite calls for democratization, the Committee acted with tyranny, creating a circumstance where any criticism was deemed counter-revolutionary and would result in execution by guillotine. France had gone through a coup d’état and was engaged in fighting many of the other great European powers at once, with an utterly devastated economy, and was anything but peaceful or orderly.

What Burke intends to illustrate is first underline his principle that liberty is not a metaphysically abstract concept devoid of political reality. He does the same in his discourse on the American Revolution, “Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inherits in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.” (On Conciliation with the Colonies). By “abstract liberty” Burke is challenging the notion that ideals can be forced into existence by the will of men in power, as opposed by a coherent respect for the “sensible object”, namely the practical properties of the situation in front of them.

His initial warning invoking constitutionality is that the ideals of the French revolution, radical enfranchisement, abolition of the monarchy, and clergy and aristocratic reforms were bound to either not work as intended or not happen at all. The defining metaphysical implication is that the material conditions “reality? must be, in a sense, “ready” for this kind of radical action and for it to be ready, it must go through a long process of incremental changes before reaching the desired goal. The “must” here is interpretable as “contingent upon”. The properties of the kind of liberty that Burke supports is strictly linear, derived directly from the practical political conditions, and not moveable to the radical will of men. It follows a logic: with each emergent liberty a function of a predetermined event. Liberty in this view is not utopian but grounded in emergent properties.

Burke’s position on the American Revolution was that the Colonists were not invoking necessarily abstract ideas of liberty into their cause, but simply reacting to already pre-agreed philosophical conceptions essential to their status as Englishmen.

“…great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates; or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise…On this point of taxes the ablest pens, and most eloquent tongues, have been exercised… the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments, and blind usages, to reside in a certain body called a House of Commons.” (On Conciliation with the Colonies)

What Burke is alluding to is the English concept of “taxation with representation”, that those who are taxed must be politically represented for such policy to be legitimate. He notes that it was unique to England and that, although historians may debate this point, it was key for Burke’s nascent English bias that the American colonies would make this point in their list of grievances. Of course, the colonists would rebel, in Burke’s political account, for they are essentially of the same English roots (On Conciliation with the Colonies). There is a material basis for these changes, but more importantly, liberty acts as an operating bedrock, in “sensible objects”, and that the qualitative form of this manifested liberty is English in nature. Burke notes: “They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles” (On Conciliation with the Colonies). It can be claimed that Burke’s English pre-nationalism formed the basis of modern nationalism in English Conservative movements, and more broadly, nationalism as a driving ideal. By merging the concept of “liberty” and “english” as one in the same, Burke creates a kind of mythology of English politics as being one that is intrinsically of liberty.

This is echoed in his rejection and rebuke of any usage of the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 that many pro-French Revolution Whig Party members invoked, “The third head of right, asserted by the pulpit of the Old Jewry, namely, the ‘right to form a government for ourselves,’ has, at least, as little countenance from anything done at the Revolution, either in precedent or principle, as the two first of their claims. The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.” (Burke, 26, Reflections). As stated earlier, Burke’s conception of liberty and rights stem from not only a practical understanding of circumstance, but as the default state of the English’ natural rights, they are one in the same. In contrast to the French Revolution’s radical democratization,which served to tear down the old order and spring up a new one, states that the Glorious Revolution was, in Burke’s view, a preservation of the preexisting rights and liberties enjoyed by the English. This serves to underline his support of the American Revolution in contrast as being a sort of miniature Glorious Revolution, a war to preserve pre-existing liberty, not to establish a new order.

For further analysis, the strengths of Burke’s conservatism are laid in its metaphysical framework and in its practical warnings, but its weaknesses severely betray what would otherwise be coherent standards. In asserting, multiple times in different speeches and writings, that the Englishman (women are excluded from any talk of politics, even with the radical French jacobins) has a natural liberty, he betrays his critique of liberty as an abstraction. What could be more metaphysically abstract than asserting that a given group of people, by circumstance, are endowed specified liberties? Without giving a historical account for this, Burke relies on a revised look at his nation’s history where liberty isn’t politically constructed, but is simply pre-existing and all wars or social movements in that vein are subject to that pre-existing English liberty. That it is effectively “natural” is a metaphysical claim that Burke does not account for with any anthropological case.

What is interesting about this perspective, is that it forces Burke into a corner — if liberty is a property of a given nation and all appropriate politics stick to this condition, then the conclusion is a fixed given set value of liberty that can be reached at any particular moment. but without the social, political movements and conflicts — how would we know for sure where that value hits its metaphysical ceiling? In other words, Burke wants to at once claim that liberty is conditional on the grounds by which it is laid (be it the material conditions and how that endows a nation) and not a mere abstraction of man’s will. However, he goes on to actively participate in the Catholic emancipation movement — which is a clear show of how humans can force changes on their society successfully. Would Burke have said that his society was “not ready” had he failed? There seems to be an oddly ill-defined determinism that is nascent in his political framework. Liberty is either the result of human action or it is immutable to such action, it cannot be both.

Burke’s warnings about the differing intentions in the French Revolution would be eventually betrayed due to the “lack of principle” and “adherence to constitutionality” may be true in a given context, they by no means are necessarily true. What if the French Revolution did not devolve into the Great Terror? was it inevitable? Over two hundred years since Burke’s death, societies have seen how social movements, including radical ones, have forced changes unto society without necessarily falling prey to the conditions of violent approach. The movement for India’s emancipation, led by Mahatma Gandhi, was largely peaceful, Burke may have simply asserted that it was only because it was the “right time”. But this seems to fall apart because by the logic of Burke’s political philosophy, all changes are subject to the governing metaphysical laws in motion contained in concepts like liberty and thus political successes are by definition ‘ready’ and in accordance to the wider conditions. But how would we possibly know? Burke doesn’t give an answer, in his Reflections he actually takes a somewhat ‘wait and see’ approach to the ending of the French Revolution.

And in not providing an answer, the bias will always lean towards the status quo. By his own logic every social and political movement for change risks upsetting a natural order of liberty that pre-exists and is revealed or graduated in time. Every instance of change must be weighed against its potential unintended consequences, and this does not motivate for any real cause unless the conflict is serving a claim of adhering to a form of natural liberty such as his claim that the Glorious Revolution sought to preserve the ancient laws and liberties of the English nation.

This complicates things rather than simplifies them. If a conflict can be engaged in the name of preserving pre-existing liberty or in revealing liberty in accordance with the material conditions, then what is to stop any movement from claiming this? Would it not have been correct for the Indian Nation to have fought for independence and won it prior to its peaceful independence? According to Burke it should have only if this is according to some metaphysical condition of Indian liberty and independence. Only then would that conflict have been justifiable under the grounds that he himself has established.

That Burke grounds his concept of liberty on the practical conditions of the time is a subtle but innovative concept because it allows a formulation of liberty as a dynamic concept as opposed to as a fixed concept, but Burke betrays this by insisting that liberty is pre-existing. This idea would later be centered in a lot of political philosophy, especially post-Marx, where political dynamics would be thought of as directly resulting from underlying material conditions. But if liberty pre-exists, then all forms of democratization and liberalization that have taken place since Burke’s death must have been there all along. If that is the case, then any additional movement for enfranchisement or liberalization must also be inevitable, making Burke’s political philosophy one of somewhat arbitrary caution, and a kind of crude predecessor to Dialectical idealism. He had not satisfyingly gave an approach to the thresholds reached for when or how a social movement is ready to finalize. As a result, Burke’s political philosophy leaves us with more questions than it answers.