As a self-styled "old Whig," Edmund Burke was both a staunch partisan of the Revolution of 1688, and an unrelenting critic of the French Revolution of 1789. In general, he denied that one could define the circumstances that justify revolution. However, he did affirm the possibility of revolution when he noted,
| [T]hat a sore and pressing evil is to be removed, and that a good, great in its amount and unequivocal in its nature, must be probable almost to certainty, before the inestimable price of our own morals and the well-being of a number of our fellow citizens is paid for a revolution. |
In a political theoretical view, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had (at least) two notable effects: first, it disrupted the hereditary succession of the throne of England; and second, it assured, via the Declaration of Right, the supremacy of Parliament over the Crown. Both of these were significant, truly revolutionary changes in the English form of government. Prior to the Revolution, even before James II had ascended to the throne, those who would later become the Whigs had tried to exclude James from the line of succession. The Tories in Parliament defeated the attempt, as they "feared renewal of revolutionary disturbances if the hereditary principle were undermined" -- a seemingly Burkean concern. However, the Whig fears of a disruptive Catholic king were later vindicated, and led to the events of 1688.
Burke maintained that the English Revolution "was justified only upon the necessity of the case, as the only means left for the recovery of that ancient constitution formed by the original contract of the British state, as well as for the future preservation of the same government." Furthermore, he asserted "the perpetual validity of the settlement then made and its coercive power upon posterity." However, Burke was not so permissive with the French. To him, their Revolution was unnatural and anarchistic -- "all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies."
But given that there were true evils to be removed in France, and that the English Revolution was truly revolutionary -- and not merely restorative -- one naturally wonders why Burke cut the French so little slack. What made the English Revolution an inevitable necessity while the French Revolution was an unnatural usurpation? Burke insisted that his reaction to each revolution was consistent with his reaction to the other. But because the Glorious Revolution was not truly the retention of an ancient form, Burke's defense of it can only be consistent as a defense of a less-formal "spirit of the original compact of the state." Even at that level of generality, the question remains: how is such a project anything other than an invitation to arbitrariness?
The consistency Burke sought lay in substantive ends, not political means. Burke labeled himself as "one who wishe[d] to preserve consistency; but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end." Unlike the theorists of popular sovereignty, he was not outlining a morality of process -- a political algorithm that legitimates whatever substance it produces. Instead, he was defending the substance and fact of the British constitutional monarchy, as it had been handed down and as it was presently enjoyed. Thus Burke's defense was, in part, a post hoc, results-based justification. But in his eyes, that was its vindication: the testimony of real-world consequence set it apart from the speculating he despised.
Burke's disposition towards the two revolutions is illuminated by the way he eschewed two extremes of political theory -- the divine right of kings and inalienable popular sovereignty -- and moved, instead, to embrace a substantive "moral medium" in the conduct of state. Burke viewed the English Revolution as preserving this true moral grounding, while the French Revolution rejected it.
Burke was a staunch supporter of the hereditary English monarchy. He granted "that the awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence," and that "[He has] subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." Furthermore, he agreed that the propriety of hereditary succession "was not settled upon elective principles, in any sense of the word 'elective'." However, he did not subscribe to a king's absolute, divinely-granted right to rule.
Burke criticized the "old fanatics of single arbitrary power" who had "dogmatized as if hereditary royalty was the only lawful government in the world, just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power, maintain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of authority." Both views are equally incorrect because both are equally arbitrary: they are finally grounded only in human will, which has no necessary connection to political good. Thus Burke "[would not] assert that the destruction of an absolute monarchy is a thing good in itself, without any sort of reference to the antecedent state of things or to consequences which result from the change" No person or assemblage of people indefeasibly holds the right to govern. "But," Burke continued, "an absurd opinion concerning the king's hereditary right to the crown does not prejudice one that is rational, and bottomed upon solid principles of law and policy." A "reformed and balanced" monarchy -- administered according to right reason, one might say -- "is the best of all governments."
By Burke's time, an extreme "spirit of leveling" had become the popular political heresy. The theories of Rousseau and Paine -- assertions that legitimacy rested always and only in the People and definitions of the Rights of Man -- had become popular in many English circles. Even some of Burke's Whig colleagues concurred "that the people, in forming their commonwealth, have by no means parted with their power over it." Burke took great issue with those who would vest an abstract legitimacy in an ideal People, and criticized their reductionism: "This [philosophy] is an impregnable citadel to which these gentlemen retreat whenever they are pushed by the battery of laws and usages and positive conventions." With such thinkers, absolute popular sovereignty was an unquestioned verity: "Take it or leave it: there is no medium."
According to Burke, the problem with such a view is that it is dangerously incomplete. He noted that "Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract perfection is their practical defect." Instead, "Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants." Thus, "the circumstances and habits of every country . . . are to decide upon the form of its government." To look to a unitary people for all political legitimacy is both to seek a false homogeneity, and to vest supreme power in a fiction, for "[i]n a state of rude Nature there is no such thing as a people."
Natural inequalities inhere in the human condition. Burke warned that the political leveling implied by popular sovereignty would blind the state to such a circumstantial reality. There is only a proper "People" where different people serve their own different functions in society, "under that discipline of Nature." Thus, for example, Burke lauded the worth of "a 'natural' aristocracy, without which there is no nation:"
| For man is by nature reasonable, and he is never perfectly in his natural state but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated and most predominates. . . . Men, qualified in the manner I have just described, form in Nature . . . the leading, guiding, and governing part. It is the soul to the body, without which the man does not exist. |
In Burke's view, society is truly a corporate body. Unity is effected by cooperation amongst different parts, not by sameness. By overemphasizing political equality -- such as renders the king a mere agent of the People, for example -- the levelers deny the need for different stations in political society. Thus they assert the right of each man to be what he cannot be -- namely, all men. Such a view engenders a hubristic hatred of political privilege. Burke wrote:
| [W]hen you break up this beautiful order, this array of truth and Nature, as well as of habit and prejudice -- when you separate the common sort of men from their proper chieftains, so as to form them into an adverse army -- I know longer know that venerable object called the "people" in such a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds." |
Furthermore, Burke challenged the theorists, popular sovereignty cannot attain the perfection required by its theory:
| The power of acting by a majority . . . must be grounded on two assumptions: first, that of an incorporation produced by unanimity, and secondly, a unanimous agreement that the act of a mere majority (say of one) shall pass with them and with others as the act of the whole. |
There has never been such universal consent. To pretend that it exists -- that there is a unitary and infallible general will -- is as much a usurpation as claiming divine right. Burke observed that "such constructive whole, residing in a part only, is one of the most violent fictions of positive law that ever has been or can be made on the principles of artificial incorporation."
One of the greatest dangers Burke saw in a popular view of sovereignty was that its overemphasis on consent leads to a false sense of moral autonomy. Political society is an amalgam of obligations and duties -- much more than of self-existent rights -- and is therefore within the province of moral jurisdiction. Thus, "if we owe to it any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and will are even contradictory terms." To make civic obligation depend solely on personal consent "is ultimately to vest the rule of morality in the pleasure of those who ought to be rigidly submitted to it -- to subject the sovereign reason of the world to the caprices of weak and giddy men."
Instead, Burke urged that "We have obligations to mankind at large which are not in consequence of any special voluntary pact. They arise from the relation of man to man, and the relation of man to God, which relations are not matters of choice." Much like a parent's obligation to his child, the covenant of civil society
| attaches upon every individual of that society without any formal act of his own. This is warranted by the general practice arising out of the general sense of mankind. Men without their choice derive benefits from that association; without their choice they are subjected to duties in consequence of these benefits; and without their choice they enter into a virtual obligation as binding as any that is actual. |
Thus no reference to human will -- even if it be unanimous consent -- places state action beyond criticism. To be legitimate, any public power must "be exercised with sound discretion -- that is to say, it is to be exercised or not, in conformity to the fundamental principles of this government, to the rules of moral obligation, and to the faith of pacts."
Burke was also concerned about the dangerous anarchy of mob rule. He wrote that "it is more safe to live under the jurisdiction of severe but steady reason than under the empire of indulgent but capricious passion." Consequently, just as "[i]t is not necessary to teach men to thirst after power," it is not wise to flatter the multitude with declarations of their sovereignty. "[I]n the hands of the multitude," Burke observed, "[power] admits of no control, no regulation, no steady direction whatsoever . . . to exercise and to control together is contradictory and impossible." The people, as a mass, do not have the continuity needed to exercise power wisely. Burke did agree that "[t]he people are the natural control on authority": no one can divest the masses of their ability to revolt. But the natural check of spontaneous revolt does not depend on the philosophy of popular sovereignty. If at all, such an extreme measure should occur only as a reflexive necessity, not by anticipatory calculation.
In sum, Burke objected to the doctrine of popular sovereignty because it removes politics from the natural realm of moral duty that exists apart from will and consent. In a sense, such a philosophy mistakes the will of the masses for the will of God. Burke declared that "[t]hese doctrines concerning the people . . . tend, in my opinion, to the utter subversion, not only of all government in all modes and to all stable securities to rational freedom, but to all the rules and principles of morality itself."
Thus Burke decried both extreme views of sovereignty as false abstractions. He opposed the French Revolution for its reliance on such a theory. However, he lauded the English state -- as it resulted from the Glorious Revolution -- as being grounded in the "moral medium" of fact and compromise. Such a reality cannot be theoretical, and must be contextual: "there is no medium besides the medium itself. That medium is not such because it is found [in the Reflections], but it is found there because it is conformable to truth and Nature."
In general, "the foundation of government is [laid] . . . in political convenience, and in human nature -- either as that nature is universal or as it is modified by local habits and social aptitudes." The virtue of government is its provision for human wants -- a complex and tangible aspiration. Thus, in the business of the state, "widespread interests must be considered -- must be compared -- must be reconciled, if possible." Such an endeavor is a far cry from chasing down a unitary source of ideal legitimacy.
Burke asserts that "in all political questions the consequences of any assumed rights are of great moment in deciding upon their validity." In such a consequential view, history and continuity become crucial, as the guiding light of past experience. In their revolution, the English at least did not style themselves as being novel. For example, William of Orange at least claimed that they were returning to their "ancient charter." In contrast, by justifying their revolt according to a theory, the French were culpably presumptuous.
The only political theorizing Burke allows is analogy to actual experience -- "a theory drawn from the fact of our government." The British constitution had worked, providing stability while allowing for change. It had protected true liberty, "a liberty connected with order, and that not only exists with order and virtue, but cannot exist at all without them." Thus, in Burke's view, the English constitution was presumptively good. Proposed changes to it -- and not the constitution itself -- bear the burden of proof.
The British constitution, Burke observed, "consist[s] of the three members, of three very different natures." In fact, he asserts, the real-world harmony it produced was a function of theoretical tension and compromise: "The whole scheme of our mixed constitution is to prevent any one of its principles from being carried as far as, taken by itself and theoretically, it would go." Thus, for example, the monarchy and Parliament must be supported "on grounds that are totally different, though practically they may be, and happily with us they are, brought into one harmonious body." There is a sort of trinitarian mystery to the English constitution; its truth lies only in its being and its operation. Given that the excellence of the English system lies in its ability to foster "perpetual treaty and compromise," Burke asserts that "[a] man could not be consistent in defending such various. . .parts of a mixed constitution, without that sort of inconsistency with which Mr. Burke stands charged."
Burke sought consistency and legitimacy in moral -- not metaphysical -- reality. He wrote that "[p]olitical problems do not primarily concern truth or falsehood. They relate to good or evil. What in the result is likely to produce evil is politically false; that which is productive of good, politically true." Thus, because he was not primarily concerned about form, he did not have to contort reality in order to avoid formal antagonisms:
| He is not to apprehend that his raising fences about popular privileges this day will infer that he ought on the next to concur with those who would pull down the throne; because on the next he defends the throne, it ought not be supposed that he has abandoned the rights of the people. |
In this sense, Burke fits G.K. Chesterton's paradigm of the sane man: "If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them." To hold otherwise, that "having done any thing in a certain line [imposes] the necessity of doing every thing has political consequences of other moment than those of a logical fallacy." It blinds us to the nuance of reality by forcing us to formal extremes. And that lost nuance is often the cement of political society:
| Duties, at their extreme bounds, are drawn very fine, so as to become almost evanescent. In that state some shade of doubt will always rest on these questions when they are pursued with great subtlety. But the very habit of stating these extreme cases is not very laudable or safe, because, in general, it is not right to turn our duties into doubts. They are imposed to govern our conduct, not to exercise our ingenuity. |
Thus, by their emphasis on theory, the French would destroy public duty in the name of popular sovereignty: "By what they call reasoning without prejudice, they leave not one stone upon another in the fabric of human society. They subvert all the authority which they hold as well as all that which they have destroyed."
In contrast, Burke maintained, the virtue of the British constitution lies in its present existence and its past success -- not in its consonance with an abstract theory. Burke was not concerned with an algorithm that would legitimate revolution. Instead, he defended the English state because it actually participated in the rough-edged, natural moral order, which takes into account human differences, natural affections, and real duties that exist apart from personal consent. Its truth resided in its success: "Profound thinkers will know it in its reason and spirit. The less inquiring will recognize it in their feelings and their experience . . . which, in the most essential point of this great concern, will put them on a par with the most wise and knowing."
