## 1. Introduction




The name of Edmund Burke (1730-97)
 [1]
 is not one that often figures in the history of philosophy
 .[2]
 This is a curious fate for a writer of genius who was also the author
of a book entitled *A Philosophical Enquiry*. Besides the
*Enquiry*, Burke's writings and some of his speeches contain
strongly philosophical elements--philosophical both in our
contemporary sense and in the eighteenth century sense, especially
'philosophical' history. These elements play a fundamental
role within his work, and help us to understand why Burke is a
political classic. His writings and speeches therefore merit attention
as examples of attention to both ideas and to history, and of the role
of this attention in practical thought. His work is also, as we see
shall see at the end of this entry, an achievement that challenges
assumptions held by many of our contemporaries. One way or another,
then, Burke is a vitally important figure. Yet there is very little
academic writing about Burke and philosophy outside of that
*Enquiry*. This is a significant omission from the history of
political thought, for at least three reasons. One is that though much
has been written about Burke, including work placing him in relation
to other political writers, yet how he thought has not been made
clear. A second is that the rational content of his thinking has not
been made evident, precisely because its philosophical component has
not been identified. Thirdly, because the manner and content of his
thought have not been identified in the way the case warrants, we read
of Burke's 'mystic spirit' (Spurgeon 1922, p. 100) or the
'irrationalism' of his writing (Butler 1984, p. 35). This
matters not only with respect to historical truth, important though
that is, but also because Burke is sometimes treated as a symbolic or
instructive figure for contemporary political action (cf., e.g.,
Norman 2013), and in significant ways marks an instructive contrast
with some current ways of thinking. This being so, it is especially
important to get the historical figure right. 


## 2. Life




Burke was born at Dublin in Ireland, then part of the British Empire,
the son of a prosperous attorney, and, after an early education at
home, became a boarder at the school run by Abraham Shackleton, a
Quaker from Yorkshire, at Ballitore in County Kildare. Burke received
his university education at Trinity College, Dublin, a bastion of the
Anglican Church of Ireland. Thence he proceeded to the Middle Temple
at London, in order to qualify for the Bar, but legal practice was
less attractive to him than the broader perspective which had captured
his attention at university (or earlier). It was first as a writer,
and then as a public figure that he made his career. Burke's
intellectual formation did not suggest that his career would be purely
philosophical. Indeed, for those without an independent income or a
clerical vocation  such a way of life was not very feasible in
Britain or Ireland. Only the Scottish universities offered posts that
did not require holy orders, but they were not very receptive to
non-presbyterians. Burke married in 1756, and had a son by 1758, so
that a career of Humean celibacy, in which philosophy was cultivated
on a little oatmeal, was not for him.




Indeed, like Hume, Burke found that there was more money in
narrative works and in practical affairs than in philosophy. Burke's
earliest writings include *A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful* (1757), and *A
Vindication of Natural Society* (1756). Thereafter he was co-author
of *An Account of the European Settlements* (1757) and began
*An Abridgement of English History* (c.1757-62). From 1758, at
least until 1765, he was the principal 'conductor' of the
new *Annual Register*. In 1765, Burke became private secretary
to the Marquis of Rockingham (who had just become First Lord of
the Treasury) and was elected to the British House of Commons in the
same year. He remained there, with a brief intermission in the Autumn
of 1780, for nearly twenty-nine years, retiring in the Summer of 1794.
Burke, who was always a prominent figure there and sometimes an
effective persuader, gave a great many parliamentary speeches. He
published versions of some of these, notably on *American
Taxation* (1774), *Conciliation with America* (1775), and
*Fox's East India Bill* (1783). These printed speeches, though
anchored to specific occasions, and certainly intended to have a
practical effect in British politics, were also meant to embody
Burke's thought in a durable form. In that respect, they parallel
his *Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents* (1770),
and *Reflections on the Revolution in France* (1790), amongst
other non-oratorical writings.




Burke's activity as a parliamentarian and political writer embraced a
great many concerns. Prominent amongst these were the problems of
British rule overseas, in North America, India and Ireland. His name,
however, has been linked most strongly by posterity to a critique of
the French Revolution. Burke was certainly more notable as a pundit
than an executive politician, holding office only twice, for a few
months in 1782 and 1783. His political life was punctuated in May 1791
by a break from some of his party colleagues over the significance of
the Revolution. Thereafter, assisted not least by the turn it took in
1792-3, he became a largely independent commentator on domestic
politics and international affairs in *An Appeal from the New to
the Old Whigs* (1791), *Letters on a Regicide Peace*
(1795-7), and *A Letter to a Noble Lord* (1796). Burke in
his last years, especially from 1792, turned his attention to his
native Ireland. He failed to found a political dynasty, and he left no
lasting school in parliamentary politics: the last politician who can
be regarded plausibly as a disciple, the addressee of *A Letter to
William Elliot* (1795), died in 1818. As Sidgwick observed,
'though Burke lives, we meet with no Burkites' (Sidgwick
1877 [2000, 195]). Nor did Burke bequeath a straightforward legacy to
any political party or to any ideological brand of thought, though
plenty have tried to appropriate him wholly or partly. The
difficulties that they might find in colonising his thought are
apparent from an account of it that emphasizes its philosophical
aspects.


## 3. Intellectual orientation


 Burke's mind, by the time he left Trinity, had two features of
especial interest: one was an orientation towards religion,
improvement and politics, the other a philosophical method. The latter
derived from his university education, the former from reflection on
the Irish situation. Burke was born into an Ireland where reflective
intellect had its social setting in a small educational elite, much of
it connected with the Church of Ireland. This elite contemplated a
political class which owned much of the land, and consisted primarily
of a gentry and peerage, headed by the King's representative, the
Lord-Lieutenant; but it saw too a tiny professional class, and a huge,
illiterate, impoverished peasantry. The aim of the educational elite,
which it shared with some of the political class, was improvement in
the broadest sense, that is to say it connected self-improvement
through the influence of the arts & sciences, and through the
development of intellectual skills, with moral culture and with
economic development. The ability of the educated, the politicians and
the rich to take constructive initiatives contrasted starkly with the
inability of the peasantry to help itself: peasants relieved their
misery principally through spasms of 'savagery' against
their landlords' representatives, but such violence was repressed
sternly and helped nobody. (For Burke, 'savagery' refers
to any conduct that falls below certain standards.) The Irish
situation suggested a general rationale of practice to those who
wished to improve themselves and others: improvement, if it was to
spread outside the educational elite, must spring from the guidance
and good will of the possessing classes: from the landlord who
developed his property, from the priest who instructed and consoled
the poor, and from the lord lieutenant who used his power
benevolently. The only obvious alternative was the use of
force--and that was both destructive and fruitless. Burke
retained all his life a sense of the responsibility of the educated,
rich and powerful to improve the lot of those whom they directed; a
sense that existing arrangements were valuable insofar as they were
the necessary preconditions for improvement; and a strong sense of the
importance of educated people as agents for constructive change,
change which he often contrasted with the use of force, whether as
method or as result.

  This experiental orientation of
Burke's mind was turned from attitude into articulate thought
through the educational medium of the Irish Enlightenment. For
example, some points that may seem distinctively Burkean belonged
first to Berkeley. Berkeley saw no advantages in improper abstraction
or in a mythical golden age. Burke's unwillingness to judge
institutions and practices without first connecting them with other
things, his disinclination 'to give praise or blame to any thing
which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view
of the object in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical
abstraction' (RRF, W & S 1981-2015, viii.58), is a
practical judgement that implies a conceptual counterpart like
Berkeley's view that 'when we attempt to abstract
extension and motion from all other qualities, and consider them by
themselves, we presently lose sight of them, and run into great
extravagancies' (Berkeley, *Principles of Human
Knowledge* [1948-57, vol. ii, 84].) In both cases,
philosophical wariness matched a distaste for considering aspects of
objects in permanent isolation from the other aspects with which they
were essentially connected. This suspicion of abstract ideas
accompanied a suspicion of schemes for considering people in
abstraction from their present situation, and accompanied too doubts
about a golden past: Berkeley rejected 'the rude original of
society' (Berkeley, *The Querist* [1948-57,
vol. vi, 141]) and had no time for 'declaimers against
prejudice' who 'have wrought themselves into a sort of
esteem for savages, as a virtuous and unprejudiced people'
(Berkeley, *Discourse addressed to Magistrates* [1948-57,
vol. vi, 206]), and it need not be emphasized that Burke shared such
views. Both belonged to an elite which considered improvement to be
necessary, and sought to make it through the agencies in church, state
and education that were really available at the time. Above all, they
shared an intellectual temper: they sought to see things how they are,
with an eye to bettering the condition of society. But Burke was not
Berkeley, and though their similarities indicate a shared
philosophical orientation, Burke had his own way of developing it. To
individuate him, we must turn to what he acquired from the Trinity
syllabus, and how he used his acquisitions.

  This syllabus, by
the time Burke became an undergraduate student at the age of fifteen
(1744), not only gave attention to Aristotelian manuals but also to
'the way of ideas' enshrined in Locke's *Essay
concerning Human Understanding*. Such a syllabus, in its
Aristotelian aspect, indicated the unity of all departments of
literature--or learning as we now call it -- which was
congenial to one with Burke's passion for knowledge -- he
wrote of his *furor mathematicus*, *furor logicus*,
*furor historicus*, and *furor poeticus*. [3] It also indicated the
range of achievements, and the range of needs, that people had
generated. The extent and variety of human activity impressed itself
upon Burke. If his practical situation in Ireland suggested that not
reason alone but also Christianity and persuasion were necessary to
improvement, Burke could now understand these needs in terms of a
scheme of learning, and indeed had the opportunity to develop the
corresponding skills. At Trinity he founded a debating society, where
he developed his oratorical technique on theological, moral and
political topics, as well as commenting on the economic and literary
life of Ireland in a periodical run by himself and his friends. This
acquisition of skills was complemented by an opportunity for
philosophical development. This applied in particular to Burke's
antecedent bent towards the imaginative branches of literature,
especially romances of chivalry, such as the *Faerie Queen* by
Edmund Spenser (the collateral ancestor from whom he derived his
Christian name). Creations of alternative worlds by the mind now
received a philosophical warrant from another part of the Trinity
syllabus. Locke had recognized that the mind devised complex
ideas. The mind had a power to receive simple ideas from the senses
and from its own reflection on them, and to make out of this material
further ideas that had no referent in the world of
sensation. Burke's interest did not extend to the centaurs that
Locke had mentioned, but the ability to make complex ideas and to
assemble them in new ways was central to Burke's way of
proceeding. His philosophical method involved thinking in terms of
complex ideas about a connected range of matters, matters connected by
their place in a programme of human improvement. Reason was
fundamental to this method--but not reason alone, as we see in
Burke's sole work devoted wholly to philosophy, which made use
of Locke on the way to an original destination.

 ## 4. Philosophical and Historical Writings

 
Locke's *Essay concerning Human Understanding* of 1690
was the first attempt to give a survey of the mind's workings
that was both comprehensive and post-aristotelian. It soon fostered
intense interest in epistemology, psychology and ethics. Burke seems
to have worked on the imagination--the faculty of devising and
combining ideas -- as an undergraduate, and continued to do so
into the 1750s. The result, *A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful* (1757)
emphasized, unsurprisingly, the activity of mind in making ideas and
the influence of these upon conduct. It was in the first place an
exercise in clarifying ideas, with an eye to refining the ways in
which the arts affect the passions: in other words, a refinement of
complex ideas was taken to be the precondition of a refinement of
practice.

  The roots of human activity, Burke thought, were the
passions of curiosity, pleasure and pain. Curiosity stimulated the
activity of mind on all matters. Ideas of pain and of pleasure
corresponded respectively to self-preservation and society, and
society involved the passions of sympathy, imitation and
ambition. Imitation tended to establish habit, and ambition to produce
change. Sympathy did neither, but it did establish an interest in
other people's welfare that extended to mental identification
with them. The scope of sympathy could embrace anyone, unlike
compassion, which applied only to those in a worse situation than
oneself. Such width of concern had an obvious reference to the social
order (and may express also Burke's thinking about the theatre).
The passions, understood in Burke's way, suggested at once that
society as such answered to natural instincts, and that it comprised
elements of continuity and improvement alike. Burke then proceeded to
show that self-preservation and its cognates suggested the complex
idea of the sublime, and not least the idea of a God who was both
active and terrible. Beauty, on the other hand, comprised a very
different set of simple ideas, which originated in pleasure. Sublime
and beautiful therefore sprang from very different origins.




The diverse views rejected by *A Philosophical Enquiry* were
united by the pervasive assumption that human nature in an unschooled
condition, as it came from the hand of nature, and understood without
direct reference to God, was in some sense adequate to the human
condition. Rousseau's *Discourse on Inequality* was at odds
with Burke's view of the naturalness of society, and with his view
that solitude, because unnatural, was a source of pain, as well as
with Burke's position that sympathy, rather than merely compassion,
was a key emotion. Burke's view that the mind formed ideas of beauty
from the ideas of pleasure it received contradicted the view of
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson that beauty (like goodness) was a perception
presented by a sixth or moral sense. Burke's further view that our
simple ideas of pain went towards a complex idea of a God who inspired
terror, was very distant from the deists' view that He could be
understood by our natural faculty of reason alone and that as such He
was known to be benevolent and not much besides. These three positions
alike presumed that human faculties, unimproved by human effort and
considered with little relation to God, were sufficient to inspire
conduct. It is not surprising that Burke rejected them.

  Burke
not only thought that nature needed improvement, but also recognized
its ambiguity. Ambition, for instance, was the source of enterprise
and of improvement: but Burke did not suppose that the enterprise
produced by this characteristic was in all its manifestations a
benefit to its exponent, and indeed once called it 'the cause of
the greatest disappointments, miseries and misfortunes, and sometimes
of dangerous immoralities' [4]. If Burke had a forward-looking mind, and
believed that human nature both required and led to development, he
did not think that progress was necessarily an unqualified gain: for
instance, in discussing the civilizing of American
'savages,' he saw a diminution of their courage as well as
an increase in their moral goodness. (For Burke,
'savagery' contrasts with civilisation, and unlike some
other figures, did not suppose that savagery was equivalent to all
behaviour of indigenous peoples).



*A Philosophical Enquiry* suggests that Burke was developing
the loyalties of his youth through the medium of philosophical
psychology. A God who presents Himself through nature in a way that is
often found in the Bible, and who devises and sustains nature in a way
that leads man to society and facilitates the improvement of that
society, has set Himself to support Christianity, power and
improvement, and probably education too. At the same time, however,
other aspects of the book suggest that this support was delivered to
them, not on their own terms, but on the terms of a philosophy which
recognizes the ability of the imagination to transform people's
understandings of themselves and society.




Anyone who thinks in terms of complex ideas can see that these can
be framed easily in different ways, none of which need correspond to
anything found in the external world: combine the ideas of a man and a
horse, as Locke had suggested, and you have the idea of a centaur. No one who reads romances
would find difficulty in imagining a society differing beyond
recognition from its current arrangements. A classic instance of
political imagination, indeed, is Burke's own *Vindication of
Natural Society,* which presents as an alternative model of society
an organization--if that is the word--devoid of civil
government, church and significant private property.




Burke, in other words, could think through not only his own grouping
of claims but also their opposites. This reflects, no doubt, other
features of his mind apart from his understanding of complex ideas,
such as the skill in seeing the strong side and the obverse of any
argument, which Burke had acquired in his undergraduate study of
rhetoric; and it reflects, too, a habit of versatility begun in his
debating society, for there speakers were called upon to play roles;
and no doubt it is reminiscent, again, of Burke's undergraduate
interest in the theatre. Yet beyond all of these, it suggests that in
the large topics which experience had put before Burke--religion,
morals, arts and sciences--argument had not produced an
overwhelmingly decisive case. For *A Vindication* also seems to
make a case against everything he had espoused.




If argument did not deliver incontestable conclusions, where was one
to go? Burke's answer, in his notes, was that where this was so,
people *should* prefer the conclusions that accorded with
their natural feelings. The complement to this emphasis upon feeling
was to look to the results of affective preference--that is to
say, a criterion for conduct in such a case was what tended to make
people better and happier.




This was a judgement in the first place about personal conduct, and
the manner of applying it to matters on the larger scale of civil
society was less obvious. Here the judgement of benefit, whether
ethical or pleasurable, might be harder to discern. In order to make it
plain in *A Vindication*, Burke applied a *reductio ad
absurdum* to principles in theology that he had rejected by showing
their consequences for politics.




For that is what *A Vindication* provided. This short work
was written in the persona of the recently deceased Henry St. John,
Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751). Bolingbroke had been a Tory pillar of
the state, and therefore of the church too; but the posthumous
publication of his philosophical works revealed that far from being an
Anglican, he had not been a Christian--but rather a deist. *A
Vindication* suggested the ills that Bolingbroke had attributed to
the artifice of revealed religion could be paralleled by those
generated by civil society. One logic, indeed, was attributable on
these terms to both Christianity and civil society: that just as the
latter distributed the means of power unequally, so too did
Christianity distribute those of salvation unequally (for not everyone
had heard, and fewer believed, the Gospel). The deism of Bolingbroke
implied the principle that God treated everyone impartially, and that
the means to salvation were therefore to be found in a medium available
to all, and thus available from the earliest point of human history,
namely reason. It was easy to add, as Burke did, that if the principle
that such an original nature was the mature expression of God's
ordinances were to be applied to civil society, the normative result
would be a regression from complex and therefore civilised forms to a
simple society, even to animal-like primitiveness--some of the
matter of *A Vindication* paraphrases Rousseau's *Discourse
on Inequality* (Sewell 1938, 97-114). So Bolingbroke the deist and
Bolingbroke the politician could be made to look very much at odds with
each other. This gap offered Burke an opening. *A
Vindication* satirized Bolingbroke's schizophrenic position,
employing a good deal of transparent exaggeration to make
'his' criticisms of civil ('artificial')
society seem very absurd: and Burke added a preface to the second
edition which made the disjunctive alternatives clear so that even he
who ran might read.




Yet it is hard not to recognize that Burke himself was telling the
reader, in a way that entered the consciousness all the more forcibly
because it accompanied entertainment, that civil society really did
involve *some* evils, just as he identified losses as well as
gains from progress in other connexions. Burke's *Vindication*,
speaking in the voice of pseudo-Bolingbroke, lamented the situation of
miners: and 'the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly,
unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations'
of 'so many wretches' was lamented by Burke without any such 
persona, thirty-four years later in *Reflections on the Revolution
in France*. Such criticism, taken in itself, is undoubtedly
telling. Burke never dissembled the existence of the real misery that
he observed in civil society. Instead, he pointed out that wretched
practices could not be detached from the larger pattern of habits and
institution in which they were implicated, and that this pattern had a
beneficial effect overall. Burke recognized misery, did not deny it, and
therefore had a lively sense of the imperfection of arrangements,
however civilized they might be. His sense of duality in nature and
society resembles Adam Smith's.




Burke's position, therefore, was poised. But it was not merely a
matter of pointing out what made for good and what for ill in civil
society: it was a matter of responsibility--of choosing morally
appropriate words. This was so for a philosophical reason, because of
the very nature of the words involved. Burke's *Philosophical
Enquiry* divided words into three categories. First, there were
aggregate words, which signified groups of simple ideas united by
nature, e.g. man, horse, or tree. Second, there were simple abstract
words, each of which stood for one simple idea involved in such
unities, as red, blue, round or square. Thirdly, and most importantly
for our purpose, came abstract compound words. These united aggregate
words and simple abstract words. As such, they did not have a referent
that existed in nature. *A Philosophical Enquiry* argued that no
compound abstract nouns suggested ideas to the mind at all readily, and
that in many cases they did not correspond to any idea at all, but
instead produced in the mind only images of past experience connected
with these words. This category included virtue, vice, justice, honour,
and liberty, besides magistrate, docility and persuasion (Wecter 1940,
167-81). The centrality of such terms to a discussion of civil society
requires no emphasis. The obvious inference from Burke's philosophy of
language was that to use abstract compound words was less to discuss
ideas than to raise images which touched the affections of the listener
or reader. To do this could scarcely to be thought part of a
speculative activity: the effect would not be cognitive, but practical:
not to develop ideas, but to influence conduct. The question was, with
what arrangements were these words, and therefore pleasurable images,
to be connected.




This understanding of the mind gave speakers and writers an
unusually powerful role. It was in their hands to connect words which
suggested pro-attitudes with arrangements of *their* choosing:
for these words had did not imply only one set of conceptual contents,
because they implied none. If one recollects the propensity to
imitation that Burke found in mankind, this choosing was likely also to
be leading. So Burke was exceptionally sensitive to the role of men of
letters and public speakers in moulding opinion. By the same measure,
he had an unusually lively sense of their responsibilities. It was
*they* who had the power to guide people to the proper ends, or
elsewhere. Guidance need not be directly didactic--indeed, it
could not be, because there could be no definitions to expound --
but would be a matter of providing a linguistic context which guided
listeners and readers to goals that were ethically and politically
beneficial.




One crucial approach that Burke himself developed was
historiographical. In works of history or in oratory, discussion
involving a compound abstract noun--such as
'civilization' or 'liberty'-- could take place in
connexion with aggregate words like 'Indians' or 'the
English', and, therefore, being discussed in relation to these,
connected that noun with definite ideas rather than with further ideas
that had no easily identifiable content--or no content at all.
Almost all of Burke's writings and his more important speeches have a
strong historical element. That element is cast as a narrative in a way
that connects compound abstract words with specific persons and
specific transactions. Burke also wrote avowedly historical works in
the years immediately after publishing *A Philosophical Enquiry*
The content of these histories developed the preferences of his youth
for improvement by embodying these in a way that made them integral to
the origins and continuing character of modern arrangements in the
Americas and in England.




Burke, like Smith again, wrote 'philosophical' history,
that is to say gave a view of the key agencies that had shaped human
destiny over the long run of human society. Indeed, he casually
implied a four-stage theory of socio-economic history at a time when
Scottish stadial history, except that in Dalrymple's *Feudal
Property* (1757), was either unwritten or unpublished. But his
attention, primarily, lay elsewhere, as appears in *An Account of
the European Settlements*. This work arose from the initiative of
'booksellers' alive to the reading public's interest in
North America, where Britain was then at war with France, and the work
was co-written with Burke's 'cousin' and friend William
Burke. Edmund's pen is evident in the passages which contrast 'savagery'
with civilization. The book emphasized that the coming of Europeans to
the New World brought with it a civilizing of 'savages,' who were far
from noble, through the agency of institutionalised Christianity. This
implicit distance from the cult of 'the noble savage,' and from
primitivism in general, provided an identifiable complement to the
implied rejections of *A Philosophical Enquiry* and the satire
about 'natural society' in *A Vindication*.




A stage of human history rather later than that of 'savages' was
delineated within *An Abridgement of English History*, which
Burke wrote after 1757, but did not finish. So far as it goes, this
provided a continuous account that ran from the Roman landings to
Magna Carta. Christianity figured again in this narrative as a source
of civilization, but the significance of the tale was more
complex. This time the story was primarily political, and showed how
one of the values most prized by Burke's contemporaries, civil
liberty, came to belong to England. The Norman Conquest of England
established a powerful executive government and brought with it a
uniform system of law; if these two were necessary conditions for the
matching grace of civil liberty for all, however, they were not
sufficient: the required addition came from an aristocracy, which had
been taught the value of liberty by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and
which had come to understand that its own power was insufficient to
extract the requisite concessions from the crown unless popular
support could be won. Burke's sense of the double-edged character of
civilization thus developed into a sense that the political regime
required by an advanced society--the combination of strong
institutions *with* civil liberty--came from sources that
were contrary to each other, and not always beneficial in isolation
(aristocracy as a form of government was an 'austere and
insolent domination' (TCD, W & S, 1981-2015,
ii. 268)): and as both a strong executive and civil liberty were
needed, by the same token the forces making for each needed to be
counterbalanced from the other side on a continuing basis. This
balance of forces characterised a situation in which
'liberty' had an identifiable content, namely the specific
civil liberties secured through political struggle and written into
Magna Carta.




Burke's narratives suggested that agencies antipathetic to each other,
if properly connected to one another, might produce results that were
both intelligible and valuable. One effect amongst several of this
conception of cooperative conflict was a rehabilitation of the
Roman Catholicism that was the historic heritage of Burke's family. *An
Account* and *An Abridgement* alike suggested that in its
historical time and place Roman Catholicism, and, indeed, clericalism,
whether embodied in Jesuit missionaries or in an English archbishop,
had been a constituent needed to produce social and political benefits
of a fundamental kind. As an historiographical exemplar, *An
Abridgement* therefore showed an exceptional appreciation of the
Middle Ages, which was to cause raptures to Lord Acton. It anticipated
both Richard Hurd's *Letters on Chivalry and Romance* (1762),
and, still more, a great work that set the bearings for Anglo-American
medievalists for many years, William Stubbs' *Constitutional
History of England* (1875-8). Burke, however, could not think in
terms of an academic historiography, still less one that would be the
exclusive intellectual preoccupation of its exponents: neither of
these existed in his time. He could think, however, of subtly defusing
anti-Roman prejudice in Georgian Britain.




Burke himself was not a Roman Catholic, and viewed enquiry into his
personal background with alarm and suspicion. This was sensible enough
in a Britain which still subliminally linked civil liberty with
Protestantism, and therefore regarded Irishness as a likely pointer to
popish subversion of its political values. Burke's argumentative
stance always benefited Roman Catholics, but he never found a kind
word for the Pope: his was a position which emphasized the priority of
civil interests over denominational claims in civil society. Indeed
Burke considered that 'the truth of our common Christianity, is
not so clear as this proposition: that all men, at least the majority
of men in the society, ought to enjoy the common advantages of
it.' (TPL, W & S 1981-2015, ix.464). This was a political
development of the centrality he gave to the claims of improvement,
and of the obvious necessity of its free development for the bettering
of the human condition. It also silently defused any papal claim to
civil dominance on theological grounds and, more audibly, suggested
that the penalisation of Roman Catholic beliefs was wrong if these did not
cause Catholics to interfere with others' civil interests. Burke's
presumptions about the priority of civil interests and a sense of the
possible irrelevance of denominational opinion to civil society
suggest a reading of Locke's *Letter concerning Toleration*
and *Two Treatises of Government*, the latter of which was
common, though not prescribed reading at Trinity. It also implies that
the proper terms in which to conceive civil interests are those of
natural jurisprudence, because there people are considered without
reference to any specific allegiances, religious or otherwise. Burke
referred to natural law and natural rights directly when such
reference advanced his own arguments, though he made no theoretical
contribution to natural jurisprudence until quite late in life. His
creative energies were mostly applied elsewhere.




Burke developed his thoughts about civil interests in a work that his
executors entitled *Tracts on the Popery Laws*, which he
drafted when he was employed as private secretary to the Chief
Secretary for Ireland in the early seventeen-sixties. After this,
Burke became involved more immediately in political practice, and, by
one means or another, contributed to it until his death and (through
the activities of his executors in publishing or reprinting his
writings) from beyond the grave. This was one obvious route for
practical development, even besides the amenities of status that it
brought to Burke. For his view of the compound abstract words involved
in civil discussion did not suggest that purely speculative study had
unlimited potential either for the mind or for personal satisfaction,
because a strictly speculative discussion was likely to be
inconclusive at best: such words became more readily intelligible in
connexion with the concrete, and therefore the practical. Hence,
perhaps, Burke concluded that 'man is made for Speculation and
action; and when he pursues his nature he succeeds best in
both.' (Somerset 1957, 87). There was, on this understanding,
intellectual benefit in political participation, and, equally,
political practice might benefit from the speculative mind. This is
likely to seem an implausible position nowadays, when political
activity is frenetic, and learning is a matter of speciality; but in
the eighteenth century, when an agile mind could manage at least the
basics of several branches of learning, and the British legislature
was often in session for less than six months each year, it was more
plausible. Political participation, on Burke's understanding,
besides its intellectual possibilities, had an ethical potential. To the
extent that thinking about politics was necessarily uncertain, the
proper conduct of affairs depended upon an honest as well as a
capacious mind, and on a well-disposed management of words.




It remains to show what Burke learnt from political activity, and
what he conferred upon it. The picture is one in which the claims of
practice enriched Burke's mind and brought intellectual benefits to
practice itself.


## 5. Political style: some parliamentary applications




Burke's life was spent in parliamentary affairs from the mid-1760s,
and this made a difference to his style of intellectual activity. This
did not lie primarily in developing the cast of his mind, and if in
1771 Burke stated that 'I have endeavoured all my life to train
my understanding and my temper in the studies and habits of
Philosophy', at the same time he concluded that 'my
Principles are all settled and arranged'
 .[5]
 This did not preclude intellectual innovation. The difference made by
participation lay not least in his reasons for applying his mind, and
consequently in how he did so. The reasons were to influence opinion,
both in Parliament and from his position as a member of the
legislative, and to determine votes in the House of Commons itself. The
matter common to both of these was Burke's view that words were central
to political understanding.




An obvious inference from Burke's account of compound abstract words
is that to use these is to touch the experience of reader or listener,
and that persuasion was unavoidably central to discussing politics:
this befitted a practical rather than a speculative subject. Indeed,
these terms implied that the point of discussing politics must be to
influence action, and nothing much else. Burke developed great skill in
managing words, begun in debating at Trinity and carried forward
at other venues, including the House of Commons. As such language
was persuasive, its objective was to establish pro-attitudes and
con-attitudes in mind of listener or reader.




This was not the only philosophical aspect in Burke's political
practice. A major conceptual tool in discussing politics was
relation. Relation is one of those terms which was common to both the
scholastics and Locke. It denotes both comparison and connexion.
Comparison was an invaluable procedure because it enabled events,
institutions and persons to be placed in any number of lights which
would raise or lower their significance and standing. Connexion was
scarcely less valuable, because the place that someone or something
occupied could be used to sustain or criticise their role, as well as
to demonstrate the value of co-operative contraries. Best of all,
relation in either sense lent itself to a myriad of uses, for as
LeClerc had remarked in his *Logic* (which Burke had read at
Trinity) relations were beyond counting--*sunt autem
innumerae relationes* (Le Clerc 1692, pt. 1, ch. 4, s. 1, p.
19).




Burke's conception of philosophical history was also fundamental to
his political practice. 'Every age has its own manners and its
politicks dependent upon them' (TCD, W & S, 1981-2015, ii 258.) The
manners Burke saw around him in England were continuous with those he
had seen in the middle ages, or projected backwards thither, in which a
powerful executive government was balanced by other agencies with the
effect of securing civil liberty. Those agencies most obvious in
Burke's time had established the sovereignty of Parliament at the
Glorious Revolution (1688-9), implied it in the Bill of Rights
(1689), exercised it in the Act of Settlement (1701), and confirmed it by
suppressing the attempts made from 1708 to 1746 to reassert the
sovereignty of kings alone. Burke understood law in this arrangement as
the guarantor of interests of the governed because it was law passed
and secured by Parliament. It was secured in Parliament by the mutual
dependence of Commons, Lords and King. That sovereignty had this public
character made the British state a beneficiary of a very high degree of
financial credit, and this increased the power of Parliament. The long,
slow movement of British history from a conception of the realm
understood as royal property to the state conceived as the expression
of public will had in Burke's time reached a stage at which this will
was expressed through the decisions of Parliament in a manner heavily
influenced by the monarch. Burke's political activities therefore
assumed parliamentary sovereignty.




If Burke's view of words and relations gave him practical
tools, and if parliamentary sovereignty provided him with a practical
postulate, what did he assume was the proper end of sovereignty? We
have seen that the relation between sovereign and the governed had for
a primary purpose the protection of the latter's civil interests. This
much suggests continuity between Burke the philosopher/historian and
Burke the political participant. But the former might also see that
there were complications for the latter. One who sees the multiplicity
of civil interests, and the variety of relations in which they can be
considered, and the variety of contraries at work, will see that to put
society at ease with itself may well imply conflict and see that such
conflict is hard to avoid; he or she will see, too, that Parliament
forms an arena for conducting it in a stylised and moderated way
through the representation of interests, appropriate to a civilized
state of society; and, even while participating in such a conflict,
s/he might recognizes the necessity of both sides to the result. Here,
opponents may be not only enemies but also co-workers, sharing at least
some common assumptions about the system within which their lot was
cast, although separated from others by the role required of them. In
that situation, the question becomes, where do you take your place? The
answer may depend on *your* own connexions, and on how you
conceive them.


## 6. Burke's practical reasoning




Let us turn to how Burke's thinking was informed by his philosophical thinking, especially to his use of relation. Burke's method for written composition often combined (i)
identification of relations, with (ii) relevant history, and (iii)
treatment in language that would attach pro-attitudes to one side or
the other in a difference of opinion. This method is seen, for
instance, in his *Thoughts on the Cause of the* *Present
Discontents* (1770). Its central statement for our purpose is
about (i) relation in the form of connexion: that the British
constitution had been constructed in a manner that required the
connexion (in this case the interdependence) of the parts of the
sovereign in order to achieve mutual control. This statement
contrasted with (ii) the historical statement that there was a new
system of court politics which involved disconnecting those parts in
order to make the monarch independent of the other parts of the
political sovereign. Burke's history showed the emergence of this new
system, and illustrated its pernicious results in both domestic and
foreign affairs. The contrast (iii) between the older system --
which was represented as having benign results--was clear, and
the disposition of pro-language obvious enough. Burke's appeal lay to
the standards which his contemporaries would take for granted, namely
those implied in their beliefs about parliamentary sovereignty. As if
it were not enough, the picture of the older order was reinforced by a
sense of connexion in the Aristotelian sense that Burke's society
recognized and approved--that man was sociable, rather than
being a solitary beast, and above all by the annexation of the key
term of
*connexion* to the side of the dispute that Burke favoured. All
of these considerations suggested the appropriateness of 'the
good' combining to counterbalance the efforts of court
politicians, and so to sustain parliamentary sovereignty and its
benefits.




This illustrates Burke's remarkable ability to combine philosophical
method and philosophical history, as well as the practical purpose to
which he put them--forming an understanding of politics which
was practical in the very particular sense of calling for activity in
one direction to counterbalance forces coming from another. It was
also practical in relation to advancing very specific interests. These
considerations were used to situate quite another sense of connexion,
namely political party, and especially the party of Lord Rockingham to
which and to whom Burke had attached himself. Indeed *Present
Discontents* was read in draft by his party's leading lights before
publication. On publication, the pamphlet was widely understood as a
manifesto for this party. After publication *Present
Discontents* became a manual from which fledging politicians
learnt the rationale of their party, and, indeed, a source book for
cat calls from the party colleagues from whom Burke separated
in 1791. The philosophical and historical element in Burke's positions
is evident only to those who retrace all of his steps; an activity
which his contemporaries lacked the will, and (as not all of his major
works had been published) some of the means to do.




The educative effect of Burke's writing is not to be underestimated
in a civil society, which boasted many highly literate members but had very few with any
formal education in political science (except, sometimes, at
Scottish universities). Indeed, it is likely that Burke wrote in order
to educate. Yet at the same time that the strength of his conceptual
and historical arguments, and the skill with which he developed these,
excites the reader's admiration, they create unease. This is not merely
because in *Present Discontents* the philosophical sense of
connexion is used to adumbrate the claims of a party connexion: it is a
more generalized disquiet. A politician inspires confidence, in part,
because s/he is honest: and a good way to be thought honest is to
convey the impression that you are not clever enough to deceive. As a
philosopher commands interest when s/he is intellectually powerful,
this impression is one that is naturally hard to achieve: but it can be
done. C.D. Broad suggested that 'Locke, we feel, is not so much
cleverer than ourselves as to be capable of playing tricks with us even
if he wanted to do so. He is the Mr Baldwin
 [6]
 of philosophy, and he derives from his literary style some of the
advantages which that statesman owed to his pipe and his pigs.'
(Broad 1952, 39). This judgement does not apply to Burke, even though
he did keep pigs. The reader carries away from Burke a sense of great
creative power, dialectical skill, and verbal ingenuity: in short, a
sense of being overborne by intellectual force. The listener probably
received other and unwelcome sensations when these were seconded by
personal raucousness. Such feelings generate unease, and unease is
increased by Burke's prose.




His literary style is to argue clearly, but in doing so to include a
manifest carefulness of qualification that will permit subsequent
shifts of position--for instance his self-description as a
'true but severe friend to monarchy' is consistent with
his occupying any point within the generous spectrum of parliamentary
sovereignty--and, indeed, the sense of historical change which
pervades *Present Discontents* suggests that movement is a
common experience. Unease, perhaps, is increased even further: for
against one equipped with this intellectual repertoire, the accusation
of inconsistency is irresistibly tempting and utterly useless. Again,
Burke's is a very sensible way for a statesman to think, but it is not
how the public wishes politicians to appear on most occasions. Still
less is it reassuring about Burke's intellectual *bona fides*:
for this is not how people innocent of political experience, who are
the majority, conceive the role of political principles. Coleridge put
his finger on an important point when he suggested that from
'*principles* exactly the same' Burke could draw
'practical inferences almost opposite' in different
situations (Coleridge, *Biographica Literaria*, vol. i,
191). Burke's philosophical and historical positions are clear, but
they do not translate, and were not meant to translate, into a set of
specific practical conclusions of permanent validity.




There was the contrast, too, between the breadth of view and of
learning in the matured statements that Burke published, on the one
hand, and, on the other, the ways of the parliamentary pugilist who
was audible to fellow M.P.s and legible to others in the speeches
reported by the daily newspapers. Burke's manner was anything but
'philosophical' as the public understands the word. Partly
this was, doubtless, because Burke was like that as a person, and not
least because he had a weak voice that had to be raised if it was to
be heard in the bear garden that was the House of Commons, but partly,
too, because his *Philosophical Enquiry* had suggested that the
best way to impart a mood to an audience was to display it
oneself. So, for instance, if Burke needed to plead for moderation, he
did so immoderately. Above all, perhaps, it was because this
philosopher- turned-participant was not exempt from the need to win to
his side enough minds to ensure that his side was not beaten (or, at
any rate, demonstrated enough strength to remain in contention), and
had at hand an exceptionally powerful range of persuasive tools. It is
an evident fact, too, that the resources of Western civilization were
sometimes invoked by Burke in order to produce votes in the House of
Commons--votes, which, whatever else they were, were in the
interests of his party. But, manifestly, these resources do not supply
a rationale for only one policy, still less for only one party. The
roles of thinker and party spokesman consort ill: and there were bound
to be doubts about one



> Who born for the Universe, narrow'd his mind,
>   
> 
>  And to party gave up, what was meant for mankind.
>   
> 
>  Tho' fraught with all learning, kept straining his throat,
>   
> 
>  To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.
>   
> 
>  (Goldsmith, lines 31-34).




An apparent disruption of this sort was always likely to suggest that Burke had
profoundly personal motives for narrowing his mind, and when he was
not being caricatured as an Irish Jesuit he was being satirized as a
corrupt hack
 [7].
 Yet some sort of procedure of the type pursued by Burke was implied
in his sense of practical reasoning. The 'philosopher in
action' had the function of finding 'proper means'
to 'the proper ends of Government' marked out by
'the speculative philosopher' (TCD, W & S, 1981-2015,
ii. 45-51). Parliamentary votes, in the situation that Burke found
himself, were amongst the proper means.


## 7. Burke and the American Revolution




Political participation generated scepticism about Burke as a person,
some of which was unjust, though all of it was to be expected. What
was perhaps less predictable, and is certainly more interesting
philosophically, is that this participation was a precondition of the
practical thought which made Burke famous in his own time and has
given him a leading place in the canon of Western political
thought. One very important example of this is his treatment of the
American Revolution. This was informed, no doubt, by where Burke
happened to find himself on the spectrum of practical politics in the
years that followed 1766. But his conclusions for practice were
informed also by his understanding of ideas - meaning ideas in a
philosophical, precisely in a Lockean sense - and how these could be
combined. In other words, the content of his political thought was
informed importantly not only by where he was practically but also who
he was philosophically.




Burke's practical thinking about the dispute between the British
parliament and its North American colonies began with a situation not
of his making, that is to say the rejection of the Stamp Act by the
colonists, and its withdrawal by the ministry headed by Lord
Rockingham in 1765-6. The Rockingham ministry followed up this
concession by way of letting the colonists alone with the explicit
assertion of Parliament's right to legislate for the colonies in the
Declaratory Act of 1766. Burke's task was to demonstrate to the House
of Commons the plausibility of this package. He did so by combining
two complex ideas--or at least two abstract compound
nouns--in a new way. One idea was empire, which involved
command. The other was liberty. These, Burke thought, were ideas
difficult to combine--a sound reflection as they are
diametrically opposed--but that they were combinable in the
further idea of a *British* empire--one which combined
legislative command with civil liberty. This idea implied letting
alone certain matters of concern to the colonists, and so allowing
them in some respects civil liberty on a *de facto* basis (SDR,
W & S 1981-2015, ii. 317-18). This idea is
considerably more ingenious than the average British position that
'all the dominions of Great Britain are bound by Acts of
Parliament'
 .[8] 
 Burke's view was explanatory, because it conceptualised the situation
before Parliament in a way that made intelligible the points involved
and established a connexion amongst them. It was also accommodating,
because it made the British executive's policy intellectually and
therefore practically respectable at the same time that it made room
for colonial preferences. In short, it was a small masterpiece of
thinking about policy.




The repeal of the Stamp Act was followed by the passing of the
Declaratory Act. Burke was practically successful in 1766 with the
House of Commons because he was speaking for the executive, and a
majority amongst Members of Parliament, *ceteris paribus*,
tended to vote for the king's ministers. In 1774 and 1775 he was
practically unsuccessful, because he was now in opposition, but his
conceptual achievement in dealing with the American question became
much greater. By 1774, the issues dividing some American colonists
from Parliament had changed. The former now resented the
attempts of the latter to levy taxation on them directly, rather than
by the authority of their own colonial legislatures, and they resented
still more the project of backing the attempt, if need be, with
coercion. Burke's speech of 1774 on
*American Taxation* did not delete the idea of imperial
command, but rather elaborated his complex idea of the British empire
in a new way in order to deal with the new situation.




Burke elaborated the complex idea in a way to which complex ideas lend
themselves, that is to say, by adding a qualification. The sovereignty
of the British parliament was an idea that certainly included a right
to tax: but a right to tax could be understood to be consistent on
principle with inaction as well as action. The right, in plainer
language, need not be applied. Burke could accommodate, therefore,
both the claims of Westminster and those of the colonists. To this
point, of course, one might reply that Burke was *merely*
making concessions. But observe: this situation provided a cue for
conceptual innovation--Burke inserted a distinction into the
idea of sovereignty. He distinguished 'my idea of the
constitution of the British Empire' from 'the constitution
of Britain' unconnected with overseas rule. It could be inferred
that



> The Parliament of Great Britain sits at the head of her
> extensive empire in two capacities: one of the local legislature of
> this island, providing for all things at home...The
> other...is what I call her *imperial character*, in
> which...she superintends all the several inferior legislatures,
> and guides, and controls them all without annihilating any. As all
> these provincial legislatures are only co-ordinate to each other, they
> ought all to be subordinate to her....It is necessary to coerce
> the negligent, to restrain the violent, and to aid the weak and
> deficient, by the over-ruling plenitude of her power. She is never to
> intrude into the place of the others, whilst they are equal to the
> common ends of their institution. But in order to enable parliament to
> answer all these ends of provident and beneficent superintendence, her
> powers must be boundless




so that Burke's elaboration of the complex idea of the British
empire suggests complementary roles for the British parliament and the
colonial legislatures, an elaboration which would make the question of
taxation irrelevant at a stroke, whilst simultaneously emphasizing the
authority of Westminster.




Conceptual refinement provided a practical avenue that other, less
gifted politicians had not devised. Burke's position was altogether
subtler than the implied tautology of a minister's claim that 'to
say we have a right to tax America and are never to exercise that right
is ridiculous' (Sir Edward Thurlow, quoted in Gore-Brown 1953,
85), and of another politician's despairing sense that 'we must
either insist upon their submission to the authority of the Legislature
or give them up entirely to their own discretion.'
 .[9]
 These pundits, by failing to conceive a sufficiently complex idea of
sovereignty and the sovereign's right to tax, failed also to see that
sovereignty did not imply an unpleasant choice between abrogating this
right by disuse or applying it by force.




Events soon required a further elaboration of Burke's idea of the
British empire. The continued use of coercion made the colonists more,
not less recalcitrant. The practical need seemed to be for terms on
which they would stay, in some sense or senses, under British rule. Their
crucial claim was now that their right to tax themselves by their own
legislatures rested on charters from the Crown, and that they were
subordinate to the Crown alone, and not to Parliament. Burke gave still
closer attention to the idea of sovereignty. It would be tactless to
emphasize the sovereignty of Parliament, but it would be self-defeating
to withdraw it explicitly and concede a sovereign right over taxation
to the colonial legislatures. So now, in Burke's speech on
*Conciliation with America* (1775), he focussed upon only one
aspect of the complex idea of a parliamentary sovereign. The latter
comprised in the British instance not only Lords and Commons, but also
the king. Hence, by judicious emphasis, the item acquiesced in by the
colonists could do some conceptual work: 'my idea of an
Empire...is...that an Empire is the aggregate of many States,
under one common head; whether this head be a monarch or a presiding
republick'; and it was emphasized that the rights of the colonists
depended on this superior, for 'the claim of a privilege seems
rather, *ex vi termini*, to imply a superior power.' As to
a right to tax, Burke added on a later occasion, that though it
'was inherent in the *supreme power* of society, taken as
an *aggregate*, it did not follow that it must reside in any
*particular* power in that society', and therefore
Parliament could delegate it to local legislatures. In short,
'sovereignty was not in its nature an idea of abstract unity; but
was capable of great complexity and infinite modifications.'
(SSC, W & S 1981-2015, iii. 193).




Whether Burke's 'infinite modifications' would have
assisted in keeping the thirteen colonies within the fold of the
British empire is unknowable, for nothing like his proposals were tried
until 1778, which was too late. It is clear, however, that Burke's
ability to make conceptual changes depended on his philosophical
thinking. To think in terms of complex ideas is to recognize that they
can be elaborated by adding further ideas; to distinguish between the
roles of Parliament is to make that addition; and to analyse the powers
of a parliamentary sovereign as a preface to relocating one of them is to
use philosophy as a tool in practical reasoning. It is noteworthy,
also, that these philosophical exercises were the means of coping, as
Burke hoped, with practical changes. Neither was his work here
primarily ideological, for though Burke had a practical goal in view,
and at that one consistent with the Rockingham achievements of 1766, he
worked philosophically to modify the conceptions in terms of which his
contemporaries viewed their situation, rather than using his conceptual
tools as ways of defending those conceptions without modifying them.
Thus he added ideas to the stock of his day. It is fitting, though
Burke's proposals were not implemented in time, and though his goal was
not attained, that his American speeches figured prominently in the
schools and universities of both the U.K. and the U.S.A. well into the
twentieth century. Burke, after all, was suspicious of poor ideas: he
concluded that 'one of the main causes of our present
troubles' was 'general discourses, and vague
sentiments', and urged instead study of 'an exact detail of
particulars' (SSC, W & S 1981-2015, iii. 185).


## 8. Philosophical Character of Political Disposition




Burke's thinking about America also suggests a political disposition
that owed something to his philosophical conceptions. Burke's complaint
in *American Taxation* against ministers was that 'they
have taken things...without any regard to their relations or
dependencies', and had 'no one connected view.' This
was in part a straightforwardly cognitive position on which Burke laid an emphasis with prudential point: the world with which politicians dealt was complex, and to use
ideas which were insufficiently complex to capture its contents and
*their* relations was a short way to meet the rough side of
reality. It was also, implicitly an ethical position: governments
ought not to apply force to existing relations, at least those that
were legitimate. This is, in one way, an obvious point from natural
jurisprudence, and one that Burke had made transparently with respect
to inroads by the government of Ireland against Catholic property. In
another, and more interesting way, it reflected his view that abstract
compound nouns and complex ideas evoke specific past experiences. To
interfere forcibly with someone's experientially-based expectations
would be to break their mental association between experience and idea
or word: and so the idea or the word would become meaningless and
cease to influence action. If, therefore, 'my hold of the
Colonies, is in the close affection which grows from common
names', amongst other sources that were 'though light as
air...as strong as links of iron', then 'let the
Colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with
your Government;--they will cling and grapple to you...But
let it be once understood, that your Government may be one thing, and
their Privileges another; that these two things may exist without any
mutual relation; the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and
every thing hastens to decay and dissolution.' (CWA, W & S
1981-2015, iii. 164). To break such mental associations was to
break communities.




This point suggested that a genuinely prudent conduct of affairs
would proceed without assaulting the mental associations of the
governed, and, as change was omnipresent, would conduct its share under
accepted names--in other words, by gradual and by moderate
reform of institutions and practices rather than by immediate and total
replacement, which Burke stigmatised as 'innovation'. This,
indeed, was what Burke claimed to be doing in his contributions of
1780-82 to the recasting of the royal household. The intellectual
counterpart of this prudent conduct, namely the refinement of our
existing ideas, rather than replacing them, is what he had done in his
revisions of the idea of sovereignty.




This style of thinking gave Burke a very lively sense of the corrosive
power of new ideas. Even new *questions* could have unpleasant
results. When the innovations of the British government unsettled the
colonists, 'then...they questioned all the parts of your
legislative power; and by the battery of such questions have shaken
the solid structure of this Empire to its deepest foundations.'
The proper way to avoid such shakes to civil society was to
'consult and follow your experience' (ATX, W & S
1981-2015, ii.411, 457), for 'experience' according
to Burke's philosophy of language was a condition of continuity of
mind, and, on the basis of mind, of a sustainable practice. His was
therefore a philosophically conditioned attitude to practice, and one
that was very sensitive to the hiatus that speculation could cause in
the latter. Burke's sensitivity can produce apodictic language in
order to persuade people to make use of the ideas they have inherited,
by urging 'a total renunciation of every speculation of my own;
and... [by recommending] a profound reverence for the wisdom of
our ancestors' (CWA, W & S 1981-2015,
iii.139). Indeed, Burke can be found, sometimes, on such rational
grounds, deprecating all explicit appeal to speculation of whatever
hue, if it had a disturbing effect: 'reason not at
all--oppose the ancient policy and practice of the empire, as a
rampart against the speculations of innovators on
*both sides of the question*' (italics added) (ATX,
W & S 1981-2015, ii.166). His deprecation of speculation was logically
anterior to taking sides in politics.




It was also, in effect, an appeal for ideas adequate to governing.
This is evident in Burke's criticism of 'vulgar and mechanical
politicians',



> a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is
> gross and material; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be
> directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel
> in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly
> taught,...ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of
> such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in
> truth every thing, and all in all,




so that 'little minds' could not govern 'a great
empire' (CWA, W & S 1981-2015, iii.139), or,
evidently, any empire at all, whereas better results might be expected
from 'men truly initiated and rightly taught.'




Burke himself, however much he might try to set the logic of his
thought in a rich foliage of words generated by his literary skill
with words--he is perhaps the only classic of political thought
in the English language who is also a literary classic--was a
philosophical thinker. As such, his practical conclusions could
change, and did, as we have seen. Practical conclusions changed
because they were meant to be serviceable in a world that itself was
changing. Burke's philosophical equipment, however, served him in the
face of all external changes. The most dramatic of such changes came
during the last eight years of his life with the French
Revolution. 


## 9. The Revolution in France




Burke's name is indissolubly connected to his *Reflections on the
Revolution in France*, though a more perceptive account of the
causes of the Revolution of 1789 can be found in *A Letter to
William Elliot* (1795), and the *Letters on a Regicide
Peace* (1795-7) investigate the character and consequences of the
Revolution from 1791 in a more thoroughgoing way. In an important
sense, however, the judgement of posterity is right for our purposes,
because *Reflections* illustrates very clearly the central
importance of philosophy and 'philosophical' history for
Burke's writing about one of the greatest changes of his day.




This is true, in the first place, in terms of insight.
*Reflections* was published on 1 November 1790, less than
eighteen months after the storming of the Bastille. The intervening
period had been characterised by a mixture of popular violence and
peaceable, if feverish political activity in France, as its absolute
monarchy gave way to a constitutional monarchy. A detached observer
would be unsure of the future--whether destruction and violence
would predominate or whether an enduring constitutional order would
emerge was a question which events had not answered. In the event, of
course, the Revolution would be characterised by violence and
constitutional development alike at different times, but this was as
unknowable in 1790 as it is obvious in the twenty-first century.




Burke's *Reflections* may be divided (for the author did not
provide any formal divisions) into two portions of unequal length. Both
of these are concerned with relations. The first portion, about
two-thirds of the text, suggests that the French, in their enthusiasm
for the idea of liberty, had failed to understand that liberty was only
one amongst a range of benefits, *all* of which were required in
mutual connexion for a life under civil government that was civilized
in the proper sense. The results which flowed from this deficiency of
understanding included constitutional arrangements which, because they
did not reflect an understanding of liberty that was subtle enough to
grasp that the liberty of the many was power, did not qualify popular
sovereignty in a way that would restrain the *demos*
effectively. As if an unrestrained populace was not bad enough, an
understanding of life only in terms of liberty swept away preceding
elaborations of our ideas. This mattered, because the refinement of
ideas had been a precondition of refinement of conduct and therefore of
the progress of society in many respects. One key instance of these was
the respectful treatment of women encouraged since the middle ages by
Christian learning and by chivalry. But there was a newer philosophy:
'on this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a
woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest
order'. The retrogression of humanity itself to animality was not
far in the future with 'a swinish multitude'. The result,
as people would no longer be moved by opinion, which had embodied
refined ideas, would be that they would need to be governed by force.
Force, too, was the ultimate destination of the second portion of
*Reflections*. This suggested that the idea of equality had
been connected only too pervasively with the institutional
arrangements of the judiciary, the legislative and the executive
power--and therefore had produced not the authority of command
from a s strong government but institutionalised feebleness. At the
same time, the perverse results of equality in fiscal arrangements had
caused popular discontent and financial instability. The result was a
situation which could be controlled only by the force of the
military--if, indeed, military order was sustainable when
soldiers had absorbed the idea of equality. France, it seemed, tended
towards either disintegration or the rule of force.




Burke's philosophical repertoire and historical understanding thus
provided the structure of *Reflections*, and, perhaps more
importantly, suggested insights into the character of the Revolution.
The inattention of the revolutionaries to the relations that needed to
be comprised in a modern government, especially in connexion with
liberty, was matched by the inappropriateness to a sovereign regime of
structuring its institutions around equality rather than around
effective command. These insights suggested that a mis-structuring of
the new constitution proceeded from an inadequate philosophical
grasp. Such misunderstanding was matched by a failure to understand
the historical development which had produced the elaboration of ideas
about conduct that had underwritten government by opinion, and this
failure suggested that the Revolution would cause retrogression from
this civilized condition towards a less gentle way of proceeding, as
well as a less effective one. In other words, Burke's understanding of
philosophy, and of the history of Europe, conceived
'philosophically', provided grounds for making fundamental
claims about the Revolution.




Whether Burke was right in these claims about the Revolution, of
course, is another question, and one that can never be answered:
French readers of *Reflections* could take its lessons to
heart, and, anyhow, events have a way of modifying tendencies
independently of intention and interpretation. Indeed, none of this is
to say that *Reflections* was intended as an academic work, or
even an accurate factual statement, about the Revolution. It was
calculated to produce a practical result, which was to dissuade the
British from admiring the Revolution and so to dampen any propensity
they might feel to imitate it: and thus to protect civilization in
Britain. In the course of pursuing this goal, Burke was willing to
satirize the Revolution and its British sympathizers unmercifully in
order to make them as unattractive as possible to any sane reader, and
he matched the satire with a panegyric on British social and political
arrangements. There is, indeed, much in *Reflections* besides
the elements that have been emphasized here (and indeed much in
Burke's later views on the Revolution which is not
in *Reflections*): but without those elements neither the book nor
Burke's understanding of the Revolution would have been
possible.


## 10. Problems of Interpretation




It is clear by now that neither 'mystic spirit' nor
'irrationalism' characterise Burke helpfully. These
examples might be taken as extreme. At the same time they witness
interpretative difficulties. Whilst Burke's thought has never lacked
interpreters from his own day to ours, on the whole they have not
brought to bear the combined persistence of historical insight and
strength of conceptual grasp required to do justice to him. Hence he
has suffered an ironic fate for one who urged breadth and precision of
thought. That is to say, he has figured as the spokesman for a very
limited number of points or as one preoccupied with a limited number
of themes. This type of treatment began in the nineteenth century,
when Burke was invoked as an antidote to the confidence of the French
Revolution by liberal thinkers who prized its principles, saw their
narrowness, and required a sense of historical development to situate
them properly in a viable civil society. It was continued when Matthew
Arnold tried to treat Burke as a (pre-Home Rule) Gladstonian spokesman
about Ireland. It went further still in the twentieth century, when
Burke was pressed into service as a counter-revolutionary agent in the
anti-Communist cause, and when the twenty-first dawned some were
treating Burke as proponent of postmodernism. He himself could hardly
have complained that his work has been put to *practical* use,
but it remains true that academic justice has yet to be done to
him. Chapters and essays on individual themes in his writings have
been more plausible on the whole than attempts at general
interpretation, which usually concentrate on a theme or themes of
choice, or subordinate Burke's thought to it or them, and so give the
impression (deliberately or otherwise) that this is the whole of
Burke, or at any rate that this is what matters about him. One
response to this situation is to concentrate primarily on telling the
story, and it is interesting that a number of recent works have taken
this path.




In attacking the Revolution in France, Burke constructed a rogues'
gallery for French politicians, and stocked it also with quite a
number of French thinkers. The figures who appeared to be rogues,
however, were most of them only straw men, stuffed according to the
prejudices of a British audience. More significantly for our purposes,
Burke's censure of the *philosophes* attributed to them
complicity with the style of thought that had set up a limited range
of simple principles as the norm for politics, and which was wholly
inadequate to satisfy the connected and various needs of human nature
under modern conditions. Burke preferred to emphasize that numerous
principles, and practical thinking to combine them, were necessary to
meet these needs, and so to sustain improvement, and emphasize, too,
that such accommodation involved much more practical activity than
speculative design. Correspondingly his own writings develop, not a
political philosophy but rather a political style that had at its core
philosophical elements--a style which, indeed, implicitly
suggested that *political* philosophy was not feasible as a
sort of knowledge, and, if it was, certainly not one sufficient to the
task of 'the philosopher in action'. The latter, at least as embodied
by Burke himself, when he mentioned political philosophy, assumed that
it was highly practical. It for its goal regulating opinion in order
to produce good political results and to prevent bad ones. "It
has ever been the great primary object of speculative and doctrinal
philosophy to regulate opinion", he wrote. "It is the
great object of political philosophy to promote that which is sound,
and to extirpate what is mischievous, and which directly tends to
render men bad citizens in the community, and mischievous neighbours
out of it" (RP2, W & S ix.295).




Such a style of thought emphasises the importance of combining a wide range of
principles, and of remembering that principles, however numerous, are only
one element in a satisfactory conduct of practice. There can be no
doubt that analysis was involved in Burke's proceedings: "let
this position be analysed," he instructed the House of Commons
critically in 1794, "for analysis is the deadly enemy of all
declamation." [10]
 Though Burke could certainly conduct effective analyses of ideas and
words even after more than twenty years at Westminster, as his
*Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe* (1792) demonstrates, his
accent lay more decidedly upon the necessity of connecting ideas with
each other, and the inclusion of non-conceptual elements in any
treatment of politics that aspired to intellectual and practical
validity. There is nothing in a style of doing philosophy that centres
upon analysis that is logically inconsistent with these
procedures. One temper of mind, however, which sometimes accompanies
this manner of philosophising is antipathetic to Burke, whilst there
is much in contemporary opinions about politics, including those held
by at least some analytical philosophers, that he would have found
dangerously naive. Amongst these a belief in a continuing popular
sovereignty (the modern term of art for this is
'democracy')--rather than parliamentary sovereignty
is only the most obvious example. If Burke is unlikely at present to
be the darling of some philosophers and of some pundits; still less
will he be of those who suppose that in discussing a small number of
principles they provide a prescriptive and sufficient guidance for the
conduct of policy; and even less of anyone who supposes it logically
adequate to claim that 'one very simple principle' is
'entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the
individual in the way of compulsion and control' or any other
matter (Mill 1859, 'Introductory'). The complex character
of ideas, their connexions with each other, the need to understand
practice in terms of such relations, and to conduct it with attention
to habitual linkages amongst people's ideas and activities, suggest a
different sort of thinking. So it is not surprising that Burke has
been quietly ignored by many recent thinkers, or summarily dismissed
from consideration by being labelled as a
'conservative'--but it is of great interest that he
has found many admirers amongst those who succeed in the conduct of
practical politics. Whilst Burke would have been the first to point
out that his specific conclusions belong to a time and a place, his
intellectual style, is one with which any serious thinking about
politics, whether reflective or practical, needs to engage.


## 11. Conclusion




Burke's thought is philosophical in at least two senses. One is that
it is constituted in part by thinking in terms of philosophical
conceptions, especially complex ideas, particularly those of relation,
as well as involving significant positions in philosophical psychology
and the philosophy of language. The other sense is that it develops an
account of the American, British and European past which is
philosophical history, as the eighteenth-century understood the
term. These senses, once put together, inform a style of practical
thinking about politics which emphasizes the importance of synthetic
as well as analytical thinking for practice, and suggests that a
progressive practice requires not only the yields of past effort but
also the intelligent application of mind to their further development
if progress, rather than regress, is to result. Burke is perhaps the
least studied of political classics, but he is certainly amongst the
small number with whom anyone who aspires to have an adequate
political education must engage.