The history of thought has yet to do Edmund Burke justice. Considered the most conservative of conservatives, the arch-enemy of all change, in reality he is far from this portrait.
Looking closely at his thought, Burke is as conservative in some respects as he is liberal in others, relating the meaning of the two terms to the time in which the Irish thinker lived.
His most important and well-known writing, Reflections on the Revolution in France, immediately became the manifesto of European conservatives. This connotation has unfortunately overshadowed other equally significant aspects of Edmund Burke's political activity and thought.
If it wasn't for the Reflections, today Burke would occupy a less assigned, more dialectical place in the history of political doctrine. Even if in the United States attention towards Burke has rekindled unlike what happens in his country and in Europe.
Here Burke remains firmly in the conservative camp, as his recent biography written by Jesse Norman - a Conservative member of the House of Commons - entitled Edmund Burke: The First Conservative.
WHO DOES BURKE BELONG TO?
In a long 2013 article on “The New Yorker” Adam Gopnik wonders exactly who Burke belongs to and notices the originality and extraordinary nature of his thought even if it is difficult to define what makes it so extraordinary. Precisely this definitional difficulty leaves room for many interpretative guidelines.
It should be added that even in private life Burke was an original and an eccentric and also extravagant in his tastes. Irish, redheaded, Catholic, he lived in a country where Catholics were discriminated against and marginalized from public life and from power in a similar way to what happens in the United States with African-American people.
An attempt to better place Burke in the history of political doctrine was made by the young historian Yuval Levin in his The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (2013). For Levin, the two thinkers, arch rivals at the time, ultimately stand in the same bed that of classical liberalism.
They just see it differently. Paine sees it as a Newtonian physicist. Society must be continually reshaped on the basis of rational thinking of abstract laws and the scientific method. Burke's approach is that of evolutionary theory where mutations are gradual and reflect the inherited wisdom of the species. Human beings, in this view, live in a complex network of social relationships that pre-exist and surpass us.
BURKE POLITICIAN
A trait of Burke's political behavior and vision has in fact, as we will see better, a very topical moment in the contemporary political debate. This is the clear distinction that he draws between the institutions and whoever, at the moment, occupies them.
The harsh criticism or the tenacious fight against the person occupying an institution must never involve the institution itself, which must stay out of the political battle, even when this becomes polarized or extreme. Two trends that characterize the contemporary political scenario in many countries. For example, Burke would have been scandalized hearing slogans such as "Not my president."
If the political struggle ends up overwhelming this boundary between the institution and the occupier, the die is cast. The outlet is what Burke calls the "Republic of regicides", that is, a state with no more institutions of reference where the law of the strongest prevails and no longer the law of the constitution.
A TENDENTIALLY LIBERAL CONSERVATISM
Perhaps Burke's thinking represents conservatism at its highest and most balanced level of progressiveness.
For example, Burke was sympathetic to the claims of the American colonies, but not (like his friend Thomas Paine) an enthusiastic supporter of their independence; he loathed the French revolution but was hypnotized by the American one, harshly criticized the policy of George III, but was an adamant defender of the monarchical institution; he strongly opposed the India Company's policy of robbery, but remained a firm supporter of the British Empire; he viewed favorably a gradual emancipation of slaves, but he did not believe, indeed he abhorred, the concept of equality.
Still alive Edmund Burke was out of all the box.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ACCORDING TO BURKE
Burke's name, as we have said, is inextricably linked to his radical criticism of the French Revolution. Reflections on the Revolution in France it was published in November 1790, a year after the fall of the Bastille but before the advent of the Terror.
At the time it still seemed possible that the continuity of the monarchy, in a constitutional form, would spare France the bloodbath and institutional apocalypse which indeed occurred under the Terror.
Just Burke in the Reflections he foresaw, unlike most of his contemporaries, the drift of the revolution, the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette; the paucity of moderate revolutionary leaders; the guillotine in the squares, the advent of a military dictatorship like that of Napoleon; the long European war in which the "Republic of Regicide" would try to subjugate other nations in the name of freedom, fraternity and equality.
One of the most significant figures in French history of the twentieth century and of height , Charles de Gaulle, was not far from thinking like Burke on the development of the French Revolution, as Patrice Gueniffey shows in his very recent book Napoleon and de Gaulle (Harvard University Press, 2020) Fair to say that Burke's work influenced not only his contemporaries, but widely following generations as well.
How did Edmund Burke so accurately anticipate the course of events of the revolution in France and, by extension, of other subsequent revolutions which aimed to establish more just and equitable societies and, instead, ended up only producing despotism and terror?
This is the question that Bret Stephens, columnist of the "New York Times" asks himself, as a lever to develop a reasoning on the current situation - especially in America. His intervention in the New York newspaper, entitled Why Edmund Burke Still Matters, definitely worth the time it takes to read it. So let's leave the floor to Stephens.
Enjoy the reading!
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL TAPESTRY
The question must be addressed in the light of the two most important ideological currents in today's world: populism, which has overwhelmed a large part of the conversational world in the last five years, and radical progressivism which threatens to overwhelm the other side of the political spectrum, i.e. the left.
Underlying Burke's vision of political society is a deep concern about the fragility of institutions that can be annihilated in the name of a new moral order, nationalism and social revolution.
States, societies and identities are not constructions of Lego blocks to be disassembled and reassembled at will. They are more like tapestries, handed down from generation to generation, to be darned carefully on one frayed edge, to be gently stretched on the other, to be handled with care lest a single thread pulled too hard can unravel the entire fabric.
“Man's nature is multifaceted; the components of society are of unspeakable complexity,” wrote Burke. "And therefore no action or initiative of power can be simple or respond fully to the complexity of human nature and its social relationships".
MANAGING COMPLEXITY
Burke's major criticism of the French revolutionaries is precisely that they paid too little attention to this complexity.
“They were men of theory, not of practice,” Burke writes.
Experienced men tend to be cautious about making radical changes to what has been painstakingly built. Men of theory tend to be rash with what they have inherited without building it.
“They've built an underground magazine that they're going to blow up, with one big explosion. The past will blow up, the treaties, the laws, the Parliament will blow up. On their side they have 'the rights of man'. Limitations cannot be accepted in the name of these rights”.
Not that Burke was against "rights" per se. Burke's caricature has him as the "grand conservative," a politician for whom any kind of change was dangerous in practice and anathema in principle.
This caricature of the Irish thinker would have astounded his contemporaries, who knew him as the champion of Catholic emancipation — the civil rights movement of his day — and other reformist (and usually unpopular) causes.
A MORE APPROPRIATE PLACEMENT FOR BURKE
A more correct placement of Burke would put him in the area of "quasi-liberals", or "quasi-conservatives". Burke challenges the easy categorizations of his time and even ours. He believed in reasonably small government, gradual reformism, the sovereignty of parliament and, with certain limitations, individual rights.
He thought that to guarantee rights it was not enough simply to declare them on paper, codify them in law and claim them as the gift of God or of the general will.
The conditions of freedom were to radiate from the example of public power, from moral education, from loyalty to the nation and to one's country, and from a healthy respect for the "wisdom latent" in long-established customs and beliefs.
Burke lacked Thomas Jefferson's clarity and idealism, but the Irish thinker didn't suffer from that much hypocrisy that instead afflicted the American statesman, a supporter of egalitarianism, but not for people of color. The landowner Thomas Jefferson, who had many slaves, never said a word against slavery which, on the other hand, Burke opposed without ever becoming an advocate of an equality principle.
BURKE ON TRUMP
What has been said may be suspicious to modern readers, especially progressive ones. But consider what Burke might have thought about Trump and Trumpism. He would have been horrified at Trump's words to "drain the swamp". The metaphor would have reminded him that by destroying all life within the swamp, only the slime is left in the end.
He would have been disgusted by the self-promotion of the Trump family. Among the great causes in Burke's life were the impeachment fight of Warren Hastings, the de facto governor general of India, at the head of a corrupt and cruel administration.
Above all, Burke would have been disgusted by Trump's manners.
“Good manners are more important than the laws,” he wrote with conviction.
GOOD MANNERS AND PUBLIC DECENCY
“The law affects us, but partially and sporadically. Good manners, on the other hand, are what annoys us or comforts us, corrupts us or purifies us, exalts us or demeans us, barbarizes us or civilizes us… They give shape and color to our lives. According to the quality of manners, morals are strengthened or weakened”.
Burke's view of the centrality of manners over norms, of norms over morals, of morals over culture, and of culture over the political order means that he would not be impressed by claims that Trump "won" with the appointing conservative judges or reducing the corporate tax rate. Those would have been trifles immersed in a much more dangerous context.
Trump's true legacy, in Burke's eyes, would have been his tireless debasement of political culture, of personal correctness, of respect for institutions, of love for tradition, of citizens' trust in civil authorities.
All of these are ingredients of a society that believes — and is right to do so — in its own basic decency.
"To be able to love our country", he wrote, "our country must be a beautiful and decent place".
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
On the other hand, Burke would have been no less lenient with the far left. "You have begun to feel uncomfortable," he told the French revolutionaries, "because you have begun to despise everything that belongs to you."
For Burke, the materials for positive social change were to be found in what the country already had—historically, culturally, institutionally—and not in what it lacked.
Britain had become the most liberal society of its time, Burke argued, because it had lived up to what he called "our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties," handed down "as the heritage of our ancestors. This legacy ”, he added,“ is a sure principle of continuity; which does not exclude the principle of improvement at all”.
RESPECT FOR INSTITUTIONS
The people who now daub the statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and spray paint "1619" on their monuments think they can expose the racial hypocrisy of the founding fathers.
If Burke were still alive, he'd probably notice that people who trade old freedoms—freedom of speech, for example—for new rights (example, freedom of laid down by the word) may soon end up with neither.
Burke would argue that it is not easy to teach respect for democratic political institutions when paint is thrown contemptuously on the monuments of the founders of those institutions.
It would suggest to protesters eager to demand greater equality for all Americans that it is better to enlist the memory of the founders to one's cause than to turn their defense over to political opponents.
It would warn that destructiveness towards property tends to pave the way for violence towards people.
It would warn that the damage to civil order, to public property and, above all, to the values demonstrators claim to uphold, could be difficult to repair. "Anger and frenzy destroy more in half an hour than prudence, reflection and foresight have built in a hundred years".
BECAUSE BURKE STILL HAS SOMETHING TO TEACH
Because Burke advocates a different concept of freedom than is popular today, it can be easy to dismiss his teachings as interesting but ultimately irrelevant. George Will, in his magnum opus The Conservative Sensitivity, speaks of Burke as a conservative "throne and altar" of little relevance to his contemporaries.
Whatever else one may say about events like those in Portland or Seattle or other places in the world (after Floyd's death), it is not the storming of the Bastille, and the vigils are not Jacobinism - or, at least, Not yet. Time to write Reflections on Revolutions in America and around the world it's still far away.
Reading and admiring Burke doesn't require you to own his thinking, much less treat him as a prophet. But it's an opportunity to learn something from a man who he saw, more clearly than most people, how “very credible programs, with very promising beginnings, often end up developing into shameful and deplorable systems.
