Revolutions, and the Revolutionary Ideas of Edmund Burke

Dr Jesse Norman, an author and writer, is Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire and UK Minister for Roads. He is also one of the rising stars in the post-Cameron Conservative parliamentary party. As the author of Edmund Burke: Philosopher, Politician, Prophet (2013) and Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why it Matters (2018), Jesse Norman sees in Edmund Burke a figure who offers important messages and directions for a modern conservative. To reflect on this and Edmund Burke himself, Jesse Norman spoke for The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 11 April 2018.

REVOLUTIONS, AND THE REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS OF EDMUND BURKE

JESSE NORMAN

Thank you.  It is both an honour and a pleasure to be invited to speak at The Sydney Institute.

Today, we seem to be living in an age of revolutions and revolutionary zeal.  Some 50 rebellions and revolutions have occurred worldwide since 2010 alone, according to that indispensable scholarly resource, Wikipedia. They include the Arab Spring, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and South Sudan, Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt and a failed coup d’etat in Turkey

This evening I want to talk about Edmund Burke and his ideas, but I want to do so specifically in the context of revolutions: to ask what they are; how they come about; what Burke has to teach us about them; and how we can learn from him about revolutions and revolutionary ideology today.

Let us start with Edmund Burke himself.  Who was he?  Burke was born in Dublin in 1730, of “the middling sort”, his Protestant father a successful solicitor, his mother of Catholic, indeed Jacobite, stock.  He attended Trinity College, Dublin and then the Middle Temple, which he much disliked.  Quitting the bar, he remade himself in London in the 1750s as a successful writer and editor.

But in 1765, through a combination of luck and talent, Burke executed an extraordinary double leap.  He became the secretary to the new Prime Minister, the Marquis of Rockingham, and soon afterwards he was elected to parliament.  His election came at the height of the furore over the Stamp Act, a tax on the colonies which had infuriated opinion in America, and he made his maiden speech in the famously heated debate over the repeal of the Stamp Act.

At a time when oratory was a crucial source of political power, Burke made an immediate impression.  It was noted at the time that:

An Irishman, one Mr Burke, is sprung up in the House of Commons, who has astonished everybody with the power of his eloquence, his comprehensive knowledge in all our exterior and internal politics and commercial interests.  He wants nothing but that sort of dignity annexed to rank, and property in England, to make him the most considerable man in the Lower House. 

James Boswell said of Burke “It was astonishing how all kinds of figures of speech crowded upon him.  He was like a man in an orchard where boughs loaded with fruit hung around him, and he pulled apples as fast as he pleased and pelted the Ministry”.

Burke was not merely a great orator but a supreme prose stylist.  His talents had been recognised even before he entered parliament; he was the third member of Dr Johnson’s Club, formed in 1764 and gathering an intergalactic array of talent together over time, including Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Adam Smith and Edmund Gibbon, in addition to Johnson himself.  He was to spend the next 30 years fighting injustice in England, Ireland, America, India and France, giving some of the most memorable speeches in the English language and composing a series of works which establish him as arguably the greatest philosopher-statesman of the past 300 years.

Burke lived in an age that spanned the American and French revolutions, and he is often accused of inconsistency, dishonesty and even treachery in relation to them.  Even during his own lifetime, a myth arose that he was a lickspittle, a creature of the great Whig aristocrats; indeed worse, a turncoat and a traitor to progressive causes because he supported the American colonists and bitterly opposed the revolutionaries in France.

We can say with certainty that these claims are false.  And there is a strong contrast to be drawn with what we now know about Thomas Paine, his most vigorous detractor.  Paine was a brilliant journalist, but a moral and intellectual charlatan; a man who had been taken up and supported by Burke only to turn on him in the most slanderous and dishonourable way; a man who knew the greatest men of the era, but retained the affection of virtually none who knew him well; and who, it appears, may even have plagiarised key sections of his most famous work, The Rights of Man.

But there is also a serious intellectual mistake at the centre of the charge against Burke.  This is the idea that all revolutions are basically the same – an expression of the fundamental human desire for freedom and autonomy, a yearning to throw off the shackles of society.  If this is so, then it is easy to see how Burke could be portrayed as disingenuous and inconsistent, in supporting the American colonists and bitterly opposing the Jacobins in France.

In fact, directly or indirectly, Burke accepted or supported not one but at least five separate rebellions against authority: the Glorious Revolution of 1688; the rights of the colonists in the American War of Independence; the Corsicans’ struggle for freedom after Corsica was sold to the French in 1764; the war of the Bar Confederation, by which the Poles sought to eject the Russians from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after 1768; and several revolts against the East India Company under Warren Hastings in India.  But if we look deeper, we can see there is no real inconsistency here.  In each case, Burke is supporting the underdog; each is, broadly, a communal uprising against the imposition of some arbitrary and oppressive innovation, in the name of existing liberties and established custom.  Each is seeking to preserve its social order and its way of life.

Thus, in Burke’s eyes, the revolution in America came about in reaction to specific grievances, and specific claims of right, over taxation.  It arose from a wrongful and arbitrary assertion of power by the British government, not by the revolutionaries.  It was at root a conflict over a specific conception of English liberty; as he says in the Speech on Conciliation, “The colonists [are] not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles.  Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.  Liberty inheres in some sensible object.”

Thus, the revolutionary cause demanded an accommodation with, and of course ultimately a struggle against, British rule.  But it did not involve the overthrow of British culture and values in America.  Nor did it lead to the destruction of America’s society or many of its established institutions.  And it took place 3,000 miles away.  To Burke, then, the American conflict is properly thought of as a rebellion; that is, a partial revolution and not a total one.

However, the conflict in France was very different.  It did not seek the redress of specific grievances as such.  It involved what Burke saw as a wrongful and arbitrary assertion of power by the revolutionaries, through long periods of mob disorder and violence.  It was an uprising conducted not to defend an existing way of life but in the name of abstract universal rights, slogans whose true meaning was unclear and uncertain.  It led from the outset to a wholesale destruction of existing French institutions, including the monarchy, much of the aristocracy, and much private property – although, ironically, property rights were specifically defended as natural and imprescriptible in Article 2 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.  It expropriated and nationalised the lands of the church.  And it took place just 22 miles away, posing by its force and example a grave threat to Britain herself.  It was a true and total revolution.

The great seventeenth century philosopher John Locke had taught that civil government depends on the consent of the governed, and that the governed had a right of revolution against tyranny or the abuse of power.  Burke takes a different and more nuanced view, as we have seen.  But he does more than this:  he invents the modern idea of revolution itself.  For Aristotle, a revolution is a partial or total change of constitution.  The pre-modern conception was a literal one derived from cosmology, science and the seasons:  a revolution was a turning of the wheel of life, which restored what existed before, and allowed new growth.  This is the language of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  But Burke’s idea is very different:  it is one of a violent and rapid upheaval engulfing not merely politicians and constitution but the whole of society, which obliterates what was there before.  This is the sense in which we think of revolution today.

For Burke, what matters is the preservation and improvement of the social order.  In cases of extreme necessity, rebellion may be necessary in order to preserve what matters in a social order or a way of life.  But, contrary to Locke, there can never be a right to revolution as such.  Rights are largely derived from society; but revolution threatens the destruction of society itself.

Burke was famous in his own time for his almost instant recognition that the revolution in France was a total, all-engulfing revolution.  It gave him the reputation as a seer, a man of astonishing political foresight who predicted the course of the revolution even through to the emergence of Napoleon, sometime after Burke’s own death in 1797.  How was he able to know this?  The answer is through a remarkable combination of historical understanding and moral imagination.

At the time, virtually all of British political opinion regarded the French revolution in the light of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – as they saw it, bloodless, constitutional, yielding a new, more inclusive and prosperous order.  Burke alone saw it differently. He had seen mob rule first hand, having lived through the dreadful anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, in which mobs had roamed the streets destroying Catholic property, raided distilleries, released prisoners from Newgate Prison and made a sustained attempt to capture the Bank of England.  For him the correct historical precedent was not 1688, but 1641, and the outbreak of what used to be known as the English Civil War.

But Burke is also a peerless analyst of revolutionary ideology and its causes.  If we read him closely, we can see that even from early in his career he takes certain things to be the marks of a society potentially slipping into revolution.  In his own time, such marks included contempt for public authority, attacks on private property, economic weakness and the erosion of religion, a popular yearning to ignore inconvenient facts and rush to judgement.  But there are also crucial linguistic and conceptual changes:  a willed ignorance of history, a certain debasing of language, a worship of abstract nouns such as “liberty” or “equality”, appeals to a mythical and utopian state of nature, all these factors uniting in a desire to abolish existing institutions and begin again from Year Zero. T

Above all, there is a move from respectful disagreement with opponents to personal contempt for them, and public denigration and denunciation of them as enemies of society.  And alongside this there comes the loss of any interest to understand the other’s point of view, their motivations or values, or any of the detail of their ideas, for to understand might in due course be to sympathise with them.  The ultimate result of such trends can only be the supersession of politics, or peaceful exchange and reconciliation of views, by violence

So then, what can we do?  We must – its falls to us all – to make the case once more for decency, for mutual respect, and for representative government.  These are the foundations of modern democratic society.

That means several things, I would suggest.  First, it means recognising the signs in the coarsening of our public discourse, and their potential long-term implications.  Secondly, it means taking on and dispelling the myths.  Take the widely-fêted French Revolution.  There is astonishing public ignorance of what it actually was, and its effects.  The French Revolution was expected to end privilege, destroy elites, enfranchise the poor and break the power of the church.  In fact, it did none of those things; it led to violence, bloodshed, anarchy, terror and civil and then international war, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.  For all the revolution’s egalitarian bombast, 30 years later the level of the franchise in France had barely altered.  In many ways it was an utter catastrophe.  Similarly, the Cuban revolution has had the long-term effect of massively impoverishing that country.  Communism nearly destroyed the economies, societies and environments of Eastern Europe.  For all their weaknesses, markets are the greatest force for human economic development and freedom ever created.

Thirdly, and correlatively, it places on us all a duty to understand and celebrate the institutions that make Britain so remarkable in historical terms:  notably, the rule of law, and parliament itself.  Let me do so, in closing, on Burkean terms.

The fundamental constitutional principle in Britain is one not of popular sovereignty, but of parliamentary sovereignty.  Parliament is a deliberative assembly, not an assemblage of the people’s delegates.  It is parliament that represents, distils, debates, constrains and ultimately balances the different views and interests in society.  Statutes, laws, are not directives handed down from some sovereign overlord to the people.  They are agreements negotiated between monarch, Lords and Commons; that is, created by the nation for itself.

For Burke, elected politicians are representatives, not delegates; they act not upon instructions, but upon their own judgement; majority popular rule by itself is arbitrary rule, because it is unconstrained and breaches the fundamental principle that no person or group shall be judged in their own cause; and effective government cannot be merely according to law, but must take into account the temper of the people, and the great interests that make up society and the body politic.

By contrast, Burke thinks of democracy as the direct and unbounded expression of the popular will; and in this sense he is no democrat.  But he is insistent that power must be accountable, and that it must be publicly exercised at all levels on behalf of the people.  These are strikingly modern, indeed democratic, thoughts.  The irony is that ever since Burke it has been the existence of political parties – which are, as he says, “things inseparable from free government” – and the capacity of a nation to change its government after a general election, that have been taken as the true emblems of democracy.  In this sense, Britain was a democratic country, albeit a partial one, long before the franchise was made universal.  We must not denounce our political parties, or our other great institutions – that way lies revolution and absolutism.  Rather, we must reform and remake them for a modern age.