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Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches

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What a heady time were the late 1700's. For hundreds, even thousands, of years, Western man had been saddled with monarchy; kings who were said to rule by divine right. But by the end of the 18th century, Martin Luther, John Locke and Adam Smith had propounded the essential framework for modern liberal capitalist democracy and the Revolution in America had launched a grand experiment based on those ideas. Then came the French Revolution and it was blithely assumed that here again Liberty was on the march. When suddenly, rising to meet the tide of history, came Edmund Burke to excoriate the Jacobins and denounce the Revolution. In so doing, he not only did mankind a great service, by sounding the alarms against unchecked liberty, he also basically gave birth to modern Conservatism. Today, after a long period in the wilderness, particularly during the Cold War, Edmund Burke has come roaring back into fashion. In a sense, he has finally won his argument with the defenders of the French Revolution, two hundred years after the fact, and is reaping the spoils.

For two centuries a controversy has raged over Burke's political philosophy, in particular whether the great defender of American, Irish and Indian rights was inconsistent in opposing the French Revolution. The very existence and the stubborn persistence of this controversy seem to demonstrate either a complete misunderstanding or a willful misrepresentation of Burke's basic arguments. One suspects it's a bit of both. The greatness of Burke lies in the fact that he was among the first, and certainly the most eloquent, defenders of democracy to recognize the dangers it entails; that power in the hands of the masses is just as great a threat to liberty as when it lies in the hand of a dictator or king. This point had been amply demonstrated in France, where the revolutionists had quickly abandoned any concern for personal freedom and had moved on to a bloody demand for equality--freedom's enemy.

It is here that we arrive at the key point that divides the modern Left and Right. The Left believes (a la Rousseau) that man is by nature "good" and all men are born with equal abilities, but that environmental factors and corrupt institutions warp individuals, making some evil and keeping others from realizing their full potentials; which if realized would make them equal to other men. The goal of the Left is therefore to remove, by any means necessary, these environmental and institutional impediments and return to an imagined state of nature where all men are good and are equally able; where Man will be governed by pure reason.

The Right, on the other hand, recognizes that man is inately "evil"; that is, evil in the sense that he is self centered and will generally act in his own interest not the interest of others. Moreover, men are inherently unequal; in the state of nature, the able will tyrannize the less able. It is for these reasons that men form governments in the first place; to protect themselves from one another. The goal of the Right is to provide each individual with the greatest personal freedom and utmost opportunity to realize his potential, consistent with the basic safety concerns that gave birth to the state in the first instance. Conservatives realize that pure reason will not lead men to treat each other with justice, by nature, men will always seek advantage over one another. The State and other institutions safeguard us against this eventuality.

This fundamental difference can not be overstated. Prior to the 18th century, the Left would have included all democrats, while the Right would have been made up of monarchists and supporters of aristocracy. But beginning with the French Revolution, this fissure separated the regnant liberal forces into two competing camps, setting the stage for the two century long contest that ended in the early 1990's with the fall of the Soviet Union. Both sides would produce great men, original theorists, brilliant writers and magnificent orators, but none of them would ever surpass Burke and his mastery of all these fields. Rare are the men who so clearly perceive the fundamental issues that confront mankind. They seem at times to be travelers from the future, come to warn us about what horrors the years to come will hold unless we obey their counsel. Rarer still are the occasions when we heed them. We can only imagine the millions of lives that would have been saved had people followed Burke's vision rather that that of Rousseau and Jefferson and Marx.

Happily, here in America, James Madison's Constitution embodies many of the same ideas and protects against many of the concerns which Burke expressed. The adoption of representative, rather than direct, democracy; the bicameral legislature and tripartite government; the careful system of checks and balances; the protection of basic rights from government interference: these are all, though we seldom discuss them in these terms, intended to protect the individual from the potentially tyrannical effects of democracy. When commentators speak of the genius of the American system, whether they realize it or not, it is to this central fact that they refer. So while critics have struggled to understand a false dichotomy in Burke's thought, we (and to a lesser extent the Brits) have enjoyed the fruits of a political system which assumes that his critique of democracy is less theory than received wisdom. For whatever reason, it took two hundred years and countless millions of lives before the rest of the world recognized what Burke (the bard) and Madison (the draftsman) had known all along; two centuries that proved them indisputably correct.

GRADE: A+

If Ronald Reagan is the great communicator, Burke must be the extraordinary communicator. Someone once said that pages of Burke are like sheets of fire.

        During the time he lived, in the 18th century, most political leaders were hereditary aristocrats, but Burke, like Cicero, did not descend from generations of prominent leaders. He earned his leadership in British politics through the power of his mind, by studying political principles and applying them to real circumstances. A superficial look at Burke's career might tempt one to dismiss him as a failure. Most of the causes to which he devoted himself were not successful in his lifetime.

        Prior to the American Revolution, he wrote brilliantly on behalf of conciliation between Britain and the American colonies. He argued for fair treatment of India by Britain. He argued for fair treatment of the Irish by the British and for Catholic emancipation in England. In time these positions won acceptance, but the acceptance came after Burke's death.

        Fortunately, he did live long enough to see the triumph of the greatest work of his life: his effort to awaken his country to the fundamentally destructive but superficially attractive nature of the French Revolution. His thorough and, I believe, inspired condemnation of the French Revolution swept British majority opinion. To Burke, more than any other politician of his time, goes the credit for creating the intellectual force which saved Europe from revolutionary chaos and dictatorship.

        Modern-day conservatives are also profoundly in his debt, as his writings against the French revolution provided the philosophical foundation for anti-communism in particular and ordered liberty in general. Read Burke. All his writings on government and politics are a rich ore, studded with gems of wisdom.

~Edmund Burke: Selected Writings and Speeches~ is a great anthology of conservative luminary Edmund Burke's political and social writings. Burke is considered by many to be the godfather of conservatism. The Irish-born British conservative entered Trinity College at Dublin in 1744 and later moved to London in 1750. In 1770, in his tract entitled the 'Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,' he scolded George III for his efforts at undoing the hard-won liberties that were thought to have been secured by the Glorious Revolution. Burke was a champion of the rule of law, and surmised that prerogatives of the king may not usurp that law, and that even the magistrates are to be constrained by the law. He defended the constraining hand of Parliament against the king's usurpations and cronyism in political appointments. He supported principled, calm, deliberative criticism of royal prerogatives by Parliamentarians, which he held to be a vital link in the preservation of the British constitution and ordered liberty.

Burke was an Old Whig, and on the Right side of the political spectrum and had no rosy delusions about human nature. His contemporaries on the Left like Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a positive and a optimistic view of human nature, and in his eyes humanity merely needed to be liberated from the decadent enslaving institutions of civil society. On the other hand, Burke recognized man's sinful nature and innate depravity and incorporated the Augustinian-Christian doctrine of original sin into his political philosophy. "Whatever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man," declares Burke. What is more, Burke does not see equality as self-evident, but he astutely observes that inequality is part of the natural order of things. The ideal equality to strive for was equality before the law, not equality of condition or even opportunity. Burke recognized that the illusive search for equality was in fact destructive of the liberty that was to accompany it because egalitarian ideology was fundamentally at odds with human nature. For this reason, Burke was opposed to the French Revolution and scolded the Jacobin rebellion for its barbarity, its egalitarian tyranny, and the unattainable antinomy of absolute freedom that was sought after. He likewise abhorred the initial English enthusiasm for the events across the sea in France and lamented that such an upheaval would never afflict England. Yet Burke, an Old Whig was a champion of the Rights of the Englishmen, and spoke out on behalf of the American, Irish and the Indian colonials. "Good order is the foundation of all things," quipped Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution. Burke offered much prescriptive wisdom about reforming and bettering civil society while conserving the vital remnants and traditions so vitally requisite to the continuity of civil society. He yielded his acquiescence of support to the American Cause of 1776 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Burke assailed the abuses perpetrated against American colonials in exploitative taxation, arbitrary suspension of the rights of colonials and an overall condescending attitude of contempt that pervaded the attitude of government towards the colonial subjects therein. Burke worked tirelessly for conciliation between British and American colonials, though the Tories prevailed and their efforts to spite and to subjugate the colonials only led to the American colonials' victorious secession by force of arms. Furthermore, Burke was opposed to the aggrandizing of power and the corruption of the law, and recognized that ordered liberty must be upheld. Burke observed, "Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny." He was practical and pragmatic to the extent needed without discarding first principles, as he accepted that, "All government-indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act-is founded on compromise and barter." Yet Burke was mistrustful of concentrated power and observed, "Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief."

The reductionism and sophistry of modern critics casts conservatives as knaves who nostalgically seek preservation of the status quo irrespective of whatever tyrannies and social pathologies afflict the people. However, Burke above all shows that classical conservatism is not quixotic sentimentalism about tradition but rather a desire to conserve those vital remnants so necessary to continuation of ordered liberty while improving civil society through patient, contemplative, informed and calmly deliberative political dialogue. Sometimes standing up to sheer tyranny through resistance and civil disobedience is in order. Though, "Our patience will achieve more than our force," avowed Burke. Burke justly condemned the barbarity of the French Revolution and no doubt considers the interposition of the lesser magistrates as requisite in combating the usurpations of higher magistrates, ministers, and leaders.

All things considered, this brilliant anthology of Burke's more renowned works is certainly a great introduction to the perennial conservative.