Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

1
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

• Born in Dublin, to a middle class family half
  Protestant (his father,) half Catholic (his
  mother)
• 1750 Burke moves to London to study law, but he
  becomes a writer and a politician
• Entered the Parliament in 1766
• No systematic work or treatise.
• 1756 A Vindication of Natural Society
• 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France

2
The British vs. the French Revolution

• Burke opposes an idealized version of the 1688
  Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution
• We are not the converts of Rousseau we are not
  the disciples of Voltaire Atheists are not our
  preachers madmen are not our lawgivers. We know
  that we have made no discoveries, and we think
  that no discoveries are to be made, in morality
  nor many in the great principles of government,
  nor in the ideas of liberty (525)

3
Burke, the Conservative Enemy of the French
Revolution

• Pessimism
• Organic view of society (Compare with both Plato
  Rousseau)
• Role of contingency
• Uniqueness of historical processes
• Against (critical) Idealism
• Enemy of democracy and revolutions
• (Unequal) groups over individuals
• Aristocratic hierarchical view of human nature
• Politics the art of the possible
• Veneration of
• Tradition (history)
• Aristocracy
• Religion

4
Burkes Values

• Property
• Commerce the laws of commerce, which are the
  laws of nature, and consequently the laws of
  God
• Inequality
• Essentialized ideas of nations (nations seem to
  preexist history)
• Prescription
• Connection between property political rule
• Inheritance
• Rank
• Distinction
• Religion religion is the basis of civil
  society, and the source of all good and all
  comfort (527)
• Good order is the foundation of all good
  things. (521)

5
British Inherited Liberties

• The Magna Charta proves to Burke the pedigree of
  our liberties (513)
• British liberties are inherited from previous
  generations as an estate specially belonging to
  the people of this kingdom, without any reference
  whatever to any other more general or previous
  right. (514)
• By this means our liberty becomes a noble
  freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic
  aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating
  ancestors (514)

6
The French Dishonored their past

• Respecting your forefathers, you would have been
  taught to respect yourselves. You would not have
  chosen to consider the French as a people of
  yesterday, as a nation of lowborn servile
  wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.
• gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from
  the house of bondage (515)

7
France, when she let loose the reins of regal
authority

• doubled the license of a ferocious
  dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent
  irreligion in opinions and practices and has
  extended through all ranks of life all the
  unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease
  of wealth and power. This is one of the new
  principles of equality in France. (516)

8
By following those false lights,

• France has bought undisguised calamities at a
  higher price than any nation has purchased the
  most unequivocal blessings!... France has not
  sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she
  has abandoned her interest, that she might
  prostitute her virtue.(516)

9
What happens when authority

• Falls in the hands of men not taught habitually
  to respect themselves who had no previous
  fortune in character at stake (517)
• (provincial) lawyers doctors in medicine
• At present, you seem in everything to have
  strayed out of the high road of nature. The
  property in France does not govern it. Of course
  property is destroyed, and rational liberty has
  no existence. (519)

10
Property

• The characteristic essence of property, formed
  out of the combined principles of its acquisition
  and conservation, is to be unequal. (518)
• The power of perpetuating our property in our
  families is one of the most valuable and
  interesting circumstances belonging to it, and
  that which tends the most to the perpetuation of
  society itself. (519)

11
The Rights of Man

• The nature of man is intricate () The
  pretended rights of these theorists are all
  extremes and in proportion as they are
  metaphysically true, they are morally and
  politically false. The rights of men are in a
  sort of middle (525)

12
Government

• Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
  provide for human wants. (524)
• The science of constructing a commonwealth is,
  like every other experimental science, not to be
  taught a priori (524)

13
A Conservative, and not a Reactionary

• You do not imagine, that I wish to confine
  power, authority, and distinction to blood and
  names, and titles. No, Sir. There is no
  qualification for government but virtue and
  wisdom, actual or presumptive. they have the
  passport of Heaven to human place and honour.
  (518)

14
Society is indeed a contract

• It is a partnership in all science a
  partnership in all art a partnership in every
  virtue, and in all perfection a partnership not
  only between those who are living, but between
  those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
  Each contract of each particular state is but a
  clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal
  society, linking the lower with the higher
  natures, connecting the visible and invisible
  world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by
  the inviolable oath which holds all physical and
  all moral natures, each in their appointed
  place. (528)

15
Against (direct?) democracy

• Everything ought to be open but not
  indifferently to every man. No rotation no
  appointment by lot no mode of election operating
  in the spirit of sortition, or rotation, can be
  generally good in a government conversant in
  extensive objects. Because they have no tendency,
  direct or indirect, to select the man with a view
  to the duty, or to accommodate the one to the
  other. (518)
• our representation has been found perfectly
  adequate to all the purposes for which a
  representation of the people can be desired or
  devised. (522)