Nature and State in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

The French Revolution alarmed Edmund Burke because it was unnatural. "All circumstances taken together," he stated, "the French Revolution is the most astonishing thing that has hitherto happened in the world." While many of his contemporaries, such as Dr. Price, heralded the change as a triumph of abstract rights and rational political philosophy, Burke was moved to "alternate scorn and horror" by the fact that "[e]very thing seem[ed] out of nature in th[at] strange chaos of levity and ferocity." He admitted that his own reaction was prompted "by the inborn feelings of [his] nature," and was not "illuminated by a single ray of this new-sprung modern light."

In Burke's eyes, the source of his reaction--inborn nature rather than naked reason--was its vindication. In civil society, "it becomes absurd to talk of [metaphysical rights] as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity;" Consequently, the exigencies of politics require the natural deliberation of experience, rather than the detached reason of philosophy.

Nature and State

In Burke's view, nature, or--more specifically--the nature of man, is both positive and teleological: man's being and his becoming cannot be severed. Nature both defines man and his context, and challenges man to fulfill his excellence: man's nature is both the present reality--of habits, needs, and wants--and the aspiration to virtue. In some sense, then, there are two inextricable human natures. Burke admiringly notes that:

[t]he legislators who framed the antient republics knew that . . . [t]hey had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensitive that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination.
At its best, then, the state "is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature." Rather, it "link[s] the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place." The state is part of the created order. Burke boldly states that "He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection--He willed therefore the state." Thus the telos of any political system is "[to be] placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world."

But the question remains: how, in practical terms, can the state become consonant with man's full nature? Burke admits that "[a]t once to preserve and to reform" requires "a vigourous mind, steady persevering attention, various powers of comparison and combination, and the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients." Such efforts, however, cannot be reduced to syllogism. In fact, Burke maintains, the abstract perfection of any government is inevitably its practical defect.

Experience as the Method of Nature

Just as abstract thought is only one component of any person's life, an underlying political philosophy is only one component of any civil order. To shape a government completely according to metaphysical calculation is to try and swallow the whole into a part. In essence, Burke complains that it is not reasonable to treat man as only rational. Political life is--as all human life is--also a matter of the heart. Every state is comprised of people with reflexes, habits, prejudices, and affections. Every person participates in a proper civil order only through experience, and any state must look to this past experience for its future vitality. Burke lauds the British for these reasons, because "[we] have chosen nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges."

Thus, in order to create and maintain a natural state, the conduct of state should be guided by philosophic analogy to past experience, not by ground-up philosophizing. Burke chides the French because they "chose to act as if [they] had every thing to begin anew." Instead, he contends, they might have revisited their own distant past in order to "buil[d] on those old foundations." In politics, it is more important that we look to past experience than that we abstract from past experience. We should be analogizing particulars rather than abstracting principles.

While such a semantic distinction seems rationally inconsequential, it is temperamentally crucial as a source of stability and grounded progress. For, while the particulars of the past can be made to say many things, they cannot be made to say just anything, and, unlike abstract principles of action, they are known also in their real-world consequences. Even though the voice of the past does not always speak clearly, it is better for us to argue about what it says, than to ignore it: having to contend for the legitimation of the past introduces the salutary need for deliberation and compromise. In turn, that need produces "that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe."

Furthermore, this emphasis on the particulars of past experience--rather than mere abstracted principles--instills a proper perspective, an esteem for the larger project of humanity, of which each generation is only a small part. Past experience is a human narrative of circumstance and personality, not syllogism. Through it, the citizens of today--by recognizing themselves in their forebears--are pulled outside of "a selfish temper and confined views." By recognizing their true connection with past generations they learn both self-respect and obligation to future generations. This inherited self-respect is important because men who think themselves to be little more than animals will act little better than animals. Without this sense of real continuity and the nobility of the larger project of humanity, "[n]o one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer."

Consequently, in reconciling the state to nature, Burke urges the state to look to and build upon the natural institution of the family. "By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature," Burke writes of the English, "we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit . . . our lives." Like the family, the state should incorporate affections, heredity, and descent into its own workings. And, in fact, patriotism must begin with familial affections: "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind."

Likewise, because excellence is often inherited and virtue is usually inculcated, and because family is the most natural vehicle of both inheritance and education, a wise state will cultivate some form of hereditary aristocracy. While Burke does not "wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood, and names, and titles," he does argue in favor of a rebuttable presumption of aristocratic virtue. The aristocracy should be open, admitting those who possess a "rare merit" that has "pass[ed] through some sort of probation." "Every thing ought to be open," he writes, "but not indifferently to every man. . . . Some decent regulated pre-eminence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic." In the state, as in families, "the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement."

In the same way, the rights and benefits of government are best seen as a hereditary legacy rather than as self-existent abstractions. "The rights of men in governments are their advantages," and those real-world advantages flow from institutions and allegiances that precede any single generation. When we see those benefits both as a inheritance we have received and as an legacy that we will leave to our children, we are imbued with the gratitude of a fortunate child and the care of a nurturing parent. Instead of presuming to reform solely according to our own speculations, we attend to the business of state with a practical seriousness and humility.

Thus Burke looks to human experience and guide form and conduct of the natural state. Each generation should see itself as part of the true continuum of humanity, as part of an old and noble family, rather than as standing new-sprung in an imagined and unreal state of nature. For, at any one time,

[the state] is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy.
The Danger of Philosophy

Mere philosophy, however, is no substitute for experience. Ideas, pulled from their context, lose the nuance and complexity of natural reality. As such, they lack the power to reform and improve the state:

[N]o name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, can make the men of whom any system of authority is composed, any other than God, and nature, and education, and their habits of life have made them. Capacities beyond these the people have not to give. Virtue and wisdom may be the objects of their choice; but their choice confers neither the one nor the other on those upon whom they lay their ordaining hands. They have not the engagement of nature, they have not the promise of revelation for any such powers.
By stripping away the essentials of nature and circumstance from their political deliberations, revolutionists dehumanize the conduct of state, and lose the beneficial restraints of respect and gratitude. "All the decent drapery of life," Burke asserts, "[is] necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation." Furthermore, such tangible artifice and habitual allegiance provide the cement of society. Thus Burke condemns the French for jettisoning their old, familiar provinces in favor of the false homogeneity of the cantons. Those revolutionists "are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart."

According to Burke, "The worst of these politics of revolution is this; they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions." By contemplating revolution, we become too familiar with the extraordinary. We trivialize it. And, as Dr. Johnson observed, "what men allow themselves to wish they will soon believe, and will be at last incited to execute what they please themselves with contriving."

For this reason, Burke insists that revolution may be recognized as it occurs, but never anticipated through a principle of action. To try and systematize the conditions which justify revolution against what has come before is to revert to an imagined state of nature which none has experienced: it is unnatural. Revolution, according to Burke,

is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or force; but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed.
For this reason, habitual critics and professional theorists are "unqualified for the work of reformation: because their minds are not only unfurnished with patterns of the fair and the good, but by habit they come to take no delight in the contemplation of those things. By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little." Burke laments, "It is with them a war or a revolution, or it is nothing."

Conclusion

Edmund Burke condemned the advent and the method of the French Revolution

because it is natural that I should; because we are so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity . . . ; because in those natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; . . . because . . . we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things.
By rejecting experience, analogy, and family in favor of abstract reason, the French unmoored themselves from the salutary restraints that might have kept them from the Terror that followed. As Burke presciently states, "This was unnatural. . . . They have found their punishment in their success."

[All Burke quotations taken from Reflections on the Revolution in France (Penguin Books, 1986).]



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