A Liberal’s Appreciation for a Conservative Icon
Reconsidering Edmund Burke
A couple years ago I taught an adult ed course on the legacy of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, two eighteenth century political thinkers whose ideas are often considered to be the prototypical sources of modern liberalism and conservatism.
Nearly all of my students, as well as myself, identify as liberals and expected, on entering into this study, to confirm that Paine’s philosophy is preferable to Burke’s and more relevant to the issues and concerns of our own troubled times. What we found instead came as a surprise, and made us ponder the usefulness of the political labels that are so casually tossed around today.
Thomas Paine, of course, is well known as the premier propagandist of the American Revolution, the author of Common Sense and The American Crisis, writings that stirred colonists to reject British rule and monarchical government generally. After independence, he continued writing, establishing himself as “the Enlightenment’s greatest missionary,” according to one biographer, with his books The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice. He was a passionate advocate of popular democracy at a time when most political thinkers equated democracy with mob rule.
Edmund Burke served in Parliament for 29 years, establishing a reputation as an especially eloquent speaker and a conscientious reformer. As a member of the Whig faction, he opposed the excessive power of the king and court, and spoke out against slavery, harsh criminal penalties, and the corrupt administration of colonized India. He supported religious toleration, civil service reform, and, until their attainment of independence, Americans’ grievances against British governance. For most of his career, Burke was not what we would today call a “conservative.”
The outbreak of the French Revolution, however, led Burke to shift his emphasis significantly. While previously he had criticized the abuse of power by corrupt elites, he spent the remaining few years of his life condemning the concentration of power in the untethered masses. His Whiggish sense of political and social balance was offended by both extremes, but after 1789 he came to believe that the greater danger came from Jacobinism, or untempered democratic idealism.
The revolution provoked Burke to write what became his best known work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in 1790. He was so horrified by the total and violent overthrow of French institutions of government, society and religion, and by British radicals’ enthusiasm for the process as a template for regime change in his own country, that he resorted to inflammatory, over the top rhetoric that despite his political record established his reputation as a dyed in the wool reactionary. He followed up with additional writings justifying his position.
Burke’s Whig colleagues, as well as American revolutionary leaders who had admired him, repudiated what they saw as his betrayal of their Enlightenment worldview. Paine wrote The Rights of Man to refute Burke’s argument and defend the principles of the French Revolution, and the “great debate,” as Yuval Levin’s excellent summary calls it, was on. The contours of modern “left” and “right” politics began to take shape.
It was quite natural for American democrats to celebrate Paine, alongside Jefferson, as an iconic founder (although many were troubled by his religious “infidelity”), but as historian Drew Maciag explains, it has always been trickier to claim the monarchist Burke as a true father of American conservatism. Yet his influence has persisted, because alongside his rhetorical overkill and loyalty to premodern institutions Burke laid out a principled, coherent critique of revolutionary idealism that expresses the essence of philosophical conservatism.
It is a critique that progressives today should pause to consider. As Paine rhapsodized in Common Sense, we like to believe that social and political problems can be solved because “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” but Burke offers a more sober perspective, grounded in history and, arguably, in human nature.
Eighteenth century revolutionaries asserted that reason could overcome the debilitating prejudices and injustices that encrusted civilization. Political ideas, freed from the dead hand of the past, could liberate entire societies. The Enlightenment offered an optimistic, can-do attitude that spurred reform movements and regime change, utopian visions and eventually the prospect of global revolution as exemplified by communism.
Not so fast, warned Burke. Human beings, he asserted, are not primarily moved by reason, but by sentiment — by emotional attachments, loyalty to clan and heritage, faith in some power larger than ourselves. Our identities are rooted in cultures that embody all these elements. The attempt to replace these attachments with rational, abstract ideas about how society ought to be tears people from the social fabric that gives meaning and stability to their lives. However noble or inspiring the ideas, their sudden imposition is too disruptive and cannot end well. As Burke foresaw, the French revolution ended with a military dictatorship; the Communist Manifesto led, however unintentionally, to Stalin and Mao.
Burke, who was well versed in the English common law tradition, believed that durable social change unfolds gradually, as experience widens and accommodates new ideas over time. Learning from experience is wisdom, a more reliable guide to governance and social reform than ideological certainty. The French Revolution convinced Burke that Enlightenment idealism had “exceeded a manageable pace of progress” due to its “naive rationalism”; he believed “that no single generation could acquire enough knowledge to design civilization anew”(Maciag).
Wisdom values balance, moderation, and what Burke called “public tranquility.” In a letter written at the outbreak of the revolution, Burke stated “Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to everybody else. … To form a solid constitution requires wisdom as well as spirit…”
Burke believed that a culture is held together by manners, traditions, and respect for established institutions, because these have evolved during a people’s long accrued experience. He knew that they are never perfect — recall that as a politician he was a leading reformer — but felt that they embody a cultural endeavor to give human beings a solid place in an uncertain world. He did not share in the spirit of self-interested individualism that Thomas Hobbes and John Locke introduced into modern thought; he believed instead that people are essentially shaped and nourished by culture. (See Patrick Deneen’s thought-provoking discussion of this topic.)
To reject traditions and institutions wholesale is to invite chaos, because no faction, no set of ideas, is wise enough to build a coherent culture from scratch. “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity,” he wrote. Existing cultures are compromises hammered out over many years to address this complexity. They can become stifling for many, and they can be reformed over time, but their dissolution is dangerously disorienting.
Now, the notion that people must be qualified for freedom is anathema to the liberal insistence on universal human rights. The advice that social change takes time is a bitter message to those who have been systematically denied freedom for generations. “Public tranquility” too easily becomes a euphemism for oppression and an excuse for apathy.
Even so, I think Burke has something to teach us. We should ponder what happens to a society when the insistence on rights and freedom is unbalanced by a concern for social responsibility, self-restraint, cultural cohesion and the common good. I think we get the hyper-polarized, self-righteous individualism and angry populism that are tearing apart our culture at this very moment.
The great hopes of the Enlightenment were seriously dampened by the carnage and genocides of the twentieth century, and in recent years some leading intellectuals have pronounced it a failure. We may have to accept that we really cannot “make the world over again” but must work more patiently with what Isaiah Berlin called the “crooked timber of humanity.” We cannot afford to renounce the Enlightenment’s highest ideals of reason, justice and human rights, but perhaps we ought to temper our expectation that societies will achieve these on demand because they seem to us so obviously right.
As a liberal, I appreciate Edmund Burke, not as an eighteenth century advocate of monarchy, aristocracy and a state-established church, but as a timeless voice of wisdom, patience and balance. If we demand too much cultural change too quickly, any short term victories we achieve will be pyrrhic. The loss of cultural mooring will almost inevitably result in alienation, resistance, and irrational reaction that will set us back. This is exactly what we are seeing today.
This does not mean that I accept many specific conservative policies, for in my judgment they will hamper rather than maximize human flourishing. But I recognize that a solid portion of our society does not share my judgment, and it simply seems wise to work for social reform in ways that acknowledge rather than dismiss their concerns. Conservative caution is a necessary complement to progressive idealism; I think we should heed Burke’s warning about the dangers of self-reinforcing utopian ideology.
Most modern “conservatives” are not Burkeans; rather, they are fervent cheerleaders for unalloyed capitalism, despite the fact that it is driven by an ethos of “creative destruction” that chews up communities, resources, landscapes and many individual livelihoods as it funnels wealth and influence to a powerful elite — results that Burke would surely have hated.
It is ironic that corporate capitalism still relies on Burke’s friend Adam Smith’s justification for laissez faire policies, for Smith, like Burke, assumed that economic enterprise would take place in the context of a morally rooted culture, a shared sense of the common good, which globalized capitalism has largely eroded.
I think the agrarian critic of industrialism Wendell Berry comes much closer to exemplifying the relevance of Burke’s worldview for our time. Yuval Levin’s summary of Burke’s philosophy could just as easily apply to Berry’s: “We cannot simply be argued out of our vices, but we can be deterred from indulging them by the trust and love that develop among neighbors, by deeply established habits of order and peace, and by pride in our community or country.”
My students and I were not converted to new political views by studying Burke, but we gained a new appreciation for the limitations and blind spots of our own liberalism. I, for one, am still mulling over these considerations.
