The Portable Edmund Burke (Portable Library) (3 page)

That power is government. The focus has shifted away from the liberal’s preoccupation with freedom from government and his voluntaristic manipulation, based on the power within him, of his social environment and institutions.

Since government is not a mechanical umpire merely called upon when rights need protection, but a positive agency constraining the evil tendencies inherent in human nature, it follows that government is much more than the simple, efficient, and cheap policeman envisioned by radical theorists. Its proper functioning requires a deep understanding of human nature, rare skills acquired only with long experience. Governing, according to Burke, is “a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill.” One can’t simply renovate it, or reform it from some preconceived idea. To govern requires “more experience than any person can gain in his whole life.” Cheap, simple, limited government is illusory, as is the notion of simple, swift, and radical social surgery.

Radical man knows no limits, no boundaries to his excesses, which is well illustrated by the Jacobin attack on, and humiliation of, the queen of France on October 6, 1789. Burke’s Reflections reach their literary, emotional, and theoretical crescendo in the passages he devotes to the queen. All his literary genius, all the frenzy of his fury, is in the service of his consummate artistry as he manipulates the reader with this poignant and unforgettable tale of radical savagery. Roused from her peaceful sleep, this gentle soul, “glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendor and joy,” is forced to flee her palace “almost naked.” Her guards are butchered, and her rooms in that “most splendid palace in the world” are left “swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.” The queen and her husband flee Versailles, and have their subjects avenged this humiliation? They have not. It is this which prompts Burke to lament the demise of the ancien régime, its institutions and its values.

Burke moves immediately from this condemnation of the failure to respect the exalted rank of the queen to a basic repudiation of the liberal notion of freedom. What he had begun by giving government a positive role in repressing the evil inclinations of unbridled individualism, he completes now by a redefinition of freedom. In liberal theory, freedom is the simple and empirical experience of the lack of constraint. It consists in the independence and autonomy of the self-willing ego. Burke sees this very freedom as the death blow to the old order, and rightly so. It is this new notion of freedom that accounts for no one rising to champion the queen. What it has replaced is what freedom means for Burke, whose definition differs profoundly

The corporate-feudal world of hierarchy where everyone knows and loves his “little platoon” is thus revived in Burke’s assault on the new age of sophistry, economists, and calculators. Burke’s notion of freedom denies the very basis of the new liberal ideal. The exalted freedom of a hierarchical social structure is in reality the absence of “selfish and mischievous ambition.” Man is free in his little platoon, .subordinate and obedient to those above him, in the sense that he is free of striving, free from ambition, free from the restless anxiety associated with ambition. Man is free from competition. His exalted freedom is the serenity and peace of mind that comes from knowing and loving his place. Man is free who has ambition neither to lift himself above his platoon nor to topple and replace those set above him like the queen.

What has passed is a social order characterized by what Burke calls “a noble equality”—a far cry from liberal notions of equality. Noble equality recognizes rank and “the gradations of social life.” It is the principle of “love, veneration, admiration, or attachment” to persons. It is the “old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty.” The mechanistic and abstract philosophy of the rights of man, of individual freedom, has no respect for this nobler equality that unites in personal bonds people who are fundamentally unequal. Radical man levels all such noble distinctions; he dissolves all that softened private society with “the new conquering empire of light and reason.”

The theme of man’s inadequacy, his basic limitation, is here reintroduced. In his essence man is defective and imperfect. He requires “the pleasing illusions,” the myths and superstitions that make life livable and tolerable. The radical who seeks to free man from the past, from tradition, myth, and religion, and who sets him to live by his own light and reason, is unaware of man’s intrinsic weakness and fallibility. The rationalism and utopianism of the radicals is rejected here, as is the basic Enlightenment assumption of the unbounded horizons of the empire of reason. It is the eighteenth century itself that Burke repudiates in his proud admission that

It is all here, the cornerstone of Burke’s counterrevolution, and with it a great deal of the future conservative creed. The most basic Enlightenment assumptions are written off with the stroke of a pen. Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy. But he is free, as the radicals construe freedom. This is indeed where their freedom leads, and why virtuous men pull about them their cloaks of unfreedom. In this wardrobe there are, according to Burke, two basic outfits: the “spirit of a gentleman” and the “spirit of religion,” of “nobility and the clergy.”
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It is the prescription of aristocracy—the ancient and received institutions of hierarchy—and the prejudice of religion—the ancient and received ideas of God and his mercy—that rescue man from his shivering fearful self. They ennoble life; they rescue the individual by submerging his individuality in the “general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Who is man, then, to question his social institutions, to envy his betters, to seek perfection in this world? He is puny and ineffectual, Burke answers, meaningless and irrelevant on his own. He is someone only when guided by “ancient opinions and rules of life.” Freed from the wisdom and experience of the ages, ungoverned by prescription and prejudice, men are no more than a “swinish multitude,” or “little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.”
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The liberal sees the state as a mere contractual arrangement, a voluntaristic creation of self-seeking and autonomous individuals concerned primarily with the secure enjoyment of their property rights. But the state is more to Burke, much more than the joint stock company arrangement of liberal theory, which he ridicules as the paltry vision of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” The state is, he wrote, “better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties,”
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Men ought to look to the state with more reverence than to the East India Company. Political and social life involves more than the scramble of mortal individuals for wealth and profit, for self-fulfillment, oblivious to those who have lived before or who will live hereafter. Whatever the liberal touches becomes, in Burke’s mind, a matter of economics and commercial calculation. “Let us not,” he pleaded in the House of Commons, “turn our everything, the love of our country, our honour, our virtue, our religion, and our security to traffic—and estimate them by the scale of pecuniary or commercial reckoning. The nation that goes to that calculation destroys itself.”
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Calculating and reckoning man is irrevocably and misguidedly mired in the present. Focused on the individual and his rights, he has no sense of continuity, of roots in the past, or of obligations to the future. Burke and conservatives after him turned to a partnership of generations that transcended individual egos. The state involves a contract serving nobler ends. It is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the yet unborn in all of life’s dimensions: art, sciences, virtue, and perfection. Individuals, then, can never be free and autonomous for yet another reason. They always bear with them the constraints of the past. They have duties and responsibilities to the past as well as to the future.

Rationalists, the skeptic Burke holds, have too exalted a view of man and of his rational capacities. The restlessness of mind that has produced the tumult of ideological politics is seen as symptomatic of a general malady that besets modern man: his prideful belief in his own superiority. Burke’s is the most developed and articulate of all indictments of ideology and of what the skeptic perceives as the prideful quest for perfect schemes and ideal politics. Burke saw the stock of reason in man as small. Despite this, men still fled their basic limitations in flights of ideological fancy. They recognized no barrier to their powers and sought in politics to make reality match their speculative visions. Burke devotedly wished that men would appreciate the weakness of their own minds, what he called in the Vindication
of
Natural Society their “subordinate rank in the creation.” The cosmology embodied in the medieval concept of the chain of being was revived in all its glory by Burke to remind man of his lowly place in God’s divine scheme; for Burke “assumes that the awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence.” In doing this, God has “subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned to us.” And that place is to know the limits of one’s rational and speculative faculties.
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Woodrow Wilson, writing just before the centenary of Burke’s death, noted that Burke’s every sentence was “stamped in the colors of his extraordinary imagination. The movement takes your breath and quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the matter rejuvenates your faculties.”
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Wilson was right. For generations, pulses have been quickened and breath taken away by Burke’s words; more often than not, the pulses and breath belonged to conservatives.

People have even learned to write good English by reading Burke. In the late nineteenth century his Speech on Conciliation
with
the Colonies was made a part of the basic school English curriculum. Generations of Americans deep into the twentieth century learned how to construct topic sentences and write extended outlines of prose on the model of Edmund Burke’s works. It was no accident, of course, that of the master’s works this particular piece was chosen. Until the cold war of the 1950s it was as an opponent of the “American War” that Burke was primarily known in America.And this older identification still lingers. The week of March 22, 1975, found the Christian Science Monitor and the Philadelphia
Bulletin
using Burke in their editorials on the bicentenary of his great speech. On the twenty-second itself the CBS television network chose Ronald Reagan (a subtle and all too clever choice) to read Burke’s words on its nightly “200 Years Ago Today.”