Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,
the author’s only important work of political thought, has assured him a
place in the Pantheon of modern conservatism. Burke’s critique, which
seemed overwrought in 1790 but prophetic in 1793, marks the end of
Enlightenment confidence in scenic hypotheses. Where Hobbes, at
the beginning of this era, was driven by the English rebellion of the
1640s to construct an originary model in defense of the monarchical
order it challenged, Burke’s experience of this rebellion’s more radical
French descendant leads him to condemn all such models as products of
the worst kind of hubris. What he offers in their place is not
traditional thought but a self-conscious appeal to historical tradition,
a reasoned defense of historical gradualism that the twentieth century
might have done better to heed. For Burke, the revolutionary scene is a
demonstration that implementing the Enlightenment’s radical anthropology
produces not a more rational human order but a return to originary
chaos:
All circumstances taken together, the French revolution
is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The
most wonderful things are brought about, in many instances by means the
most absurd and ridiculous, in the most ridiculous modes, and apparently
by the most contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of nature in
this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes
jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous
tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and
sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate contempt and
indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror.
(11-12; all page numbers refer to the first [1790] edition)The
emotions associated with this scene vary between “laughter and tears”
insofar as their subject feels himself or not in danger; their object is
“out of nature” in either case. Our feeling toward the Revolution
alternates not between love and hate, but between distant “contempt” and
proximate “indignation.” “Tragicomic” is not taken in its
literary-historical sense; it is a “monstrous” mixture of tragedy and
comedy–a blend of sublimity and ridiculousness that, a couple of
generations later,
Victor Hugo would extol as the romantic “grotesque.” (I will touch on Burke’s own theory of the sublime in conclusion.)
For Burke, the scene that founds the political order lies outside it.
His concept of the “social contract” is in deliberate opposition to the
scenic models of the Enlightenment:
Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for
objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure–but
the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a
partnership agreement . . . to be taken up for a little temporary
interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be
looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in
things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and
perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in
all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the
ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it
becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between
those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great
primeval 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. This law is not
subject to the will of those who by an obligation above them, and
infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law.
(143-44)The contract that binds us to the state is a
“partnership in every virtue and all perfection” across many
generations; it cannot be figured as a
scene of human accord.
In the place of such an accord, Burke substitutes a scene explicitly
both originary and transcendental, “the great primeval contract of
eternal society.” This is no mere rhetorical gesture but the postulation
of an originary hypothesis as required by the logic of Burke’s
argument. The foundation of human society lies “outside” it, at its
unique and unrenewable point of origin. The “eternality” of the human
society thus founded is what guarantees in turn the “clauses” that
define individual states. Burke’s originary scene is theistic because
only an external sacred can guarantee both the universality of what is
in effect a model of morality and the value of its specific historical
manifestations. (This is the point of
Kant’s far more explicit
argument that the existence of God is necessary to individual moral
existence.) If the “social contract” is indeed a partnership between the
living, the dead, and the yet to be born, then it is an
anthropological
rather than merely political contract; it legitimizes no particular
social order, but denies legitimacy to any order that disregards its
specific place in the continuum that links it with its origin.
But I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to
anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple
view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the
nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances
(which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every
political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.
The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme
beneficial or noxious to mankind. (7-8)Burke’s
characterization of the construction of a political model on the basis
of a “simple view” of human actions and concerns as
metaphysical
is the first of the long series of such critiques that mark the
bourgeois era’s emerging awareness that the originary function of human
“reason” is the cultural deferral of violence. The Enlightenment had
identified metaphysics with scholasticism, opposing Reason’s clarity to
the obscurities of the historical sacred. (“Let us put at the end of
nearly every chapter of metaphysics the two letters used by Roman judges
when they didn’t understand a plea: N. L.,
non liquet, this is unclear”–Voltaire,
Dictionnaire philosophique portatif,
1764.) For Burke, what is metaphysical is precisely these Enlightenment
appeals to reason. Metaphysics hypostatizes the philosophical
proposition, the context-free declarative sentence, as if it sprang
full-fledged from the brow of
homo sapiens instead of evolving
from more elementary forms, the most primitive of which is the ostensive
re-presentation of what is already present. (See
Richard van Oort’s Epistemology and Generative Theory in
Anthropoetics I, 1.)
“Restraint upon [the] passions” rather than their sacrifice on the
altar of “reason” is the central operation in Burke’s political
anthropology :
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights,
which may and do exist in total independence of it, and exist in much
greater clearness and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection;
but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a
right to everything they want everything. Government is a contrivance of
human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these
wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be
reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon
their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of
individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as
well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be
thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into
subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not,
in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those
passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the
restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among
their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times
and circumstances and admit to infinite modifications, they cannot be
settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss
them upon that principle. (88-89)Men’s potentially violent
“passions” and “inclinations” must be subjected to “a power out of
themselves.” For Burke, in contrast to Hobbes, subjection to central
authority does not arise from voluntary self-interested agreement. Its
modalities “vary with times and circumstances” and cannot be determined
by an “abstract rule,” but the source of this power is always external
to the political scene.
Pace the French revolutionaries, man is a “religious animal.”
All other nations [than France] have
begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by
establishing originally or by enforcing with greater exactness some
rites or other of religion. (54)
We know, and what is better, we feel
inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of
all good and of all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this,
that there is no rust of superstition with which the accumulated
absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of
ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not
prefer to impiety. . . . If our religious tenets should ever want a
further elucidation, we shall not call on atheism to explain them. . .
. Violently condemning neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor,
since heats are subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the
Protestant, not because we think it has less of the Christian religion
in it, but because, in our judgment, it has more. We are Protestants,
not from indifference, but from zeal.
We know, and it is our pride to know,
that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is
against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot
prevail long. But if, in the moment of riot and in a drunken delirium
from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell, which in France is
now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness by throwing
off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and
comfort, and one great source of civilization amongst us and amongst
many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind
will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading
superstition might take place of it. (134-35)
. . . I beg leave to speak of our church
establishment, which is the first of our prejudices, not a prejudice
destitute of reason, but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom. I
speak of it first. It is first and last and midst in our minds. For,
taking ground on that religious system of which we are now in
possession, we continue to act on the early received and uniformly
continued sense of mankind. That sense not only, like a wise architect,
hath built up the august fabric of states, but, like a provident
proprietor, to preserve the structure from profanation and ruin, as a
sacred temple purged from all the impurities of fraud and violence and
injustice and tyranny, hath solemnly and forever consecrated the
commonwealth and all that officiate in it. . . .
The consecration of the state by a state
religious establishment is necessary, also, to operate with a wholesome
awe upon free citizens, because, in order to secure their freedom, they
must enjoy some determinate portion of power. To them, therefore, a
religion connected with the state, and with their duty toward it,
becomes even more necessary than in such societies where the people, by
the terms of their subjection, are confined to private sentiments and
the management of their own family concerns. All persons possessing any
portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea
that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct
in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.
(136-38)
Burke anticipates Durkheim in considering religion to be not
only the foundation of government but the “basis of civil society,” one
that can be replaced only by superstition. To abandon religion is to
fall into the “drunken delirium” of revolution. Nor is Burke’s notion of
religion that of the deist’s si Dieu n’existait pas, il fallait l’inventer [if God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him]. Established
religion is the foundation of society, provided this establishment is
perpetually accessible to and renewable by the citizenry. When Burke
says “[w]e are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal,” he is
referring to the “zealous” affirmation of the Christian sacred by a
community of Bible readers who make it part of their own experience–the
religious equivalent of the electorate in England’s constitutional
monarchy. This is about as specific as Burke gets about religion; the
single word “Protestant” added to the overall institution of
Christianity is the sum of his theology.
Burke is not, however, loath to define the Christian sacred by
opposition to its “Other.” A corollary of his self-conscious
traditionalism is an emergent modern anti-Semitism:
[The English revolutionaries] were not
like Jew brokers, contending with each other who could best remedy with
fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin
brought on their country by their degenerate councils. (70)
The next generation of the [French]
nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers,
usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, betimes their
masters. (72)
Are the church lands to be sold to Jews
and jobbers or given to bribe new-invented municipal republics into a
participation in sacrilege? (80)
These “councils,” like those of the Elders of Zion, make the Jews “sometimes [the] masters” of the French nobility and, presumably, of France itself–a harbinger of Drumont’s France juive. Nor can Burke’s twelve-times-repeated reference to “Old Jewry,” the “dissenting meeting house” in which a Dr. Price delivered a pro-revolutionary sermon that is the proximate catalyst of the Reflections,
be deemed a coincidence; it cements the association between the “bad
scene” of Price’s un-Christian sermon and those who have rejected the
scene of the Cross.
After Hobbes, with the exception of Vico, the Enlightenment abandons the idea of foundational violence. The conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide
presents the exchange system as the means to defer the mimetic violence
that predominated in the rest of the story–the produce of Candide’s
famous garden is sold at the market in Constantinople–but the passage
from violence to exchange is contrastive, not generative. Now Burke,
having witnessed the reemergence in France of the Hobbesian state of
nature, realizes that the preservation of human society from chaos
cannot be achieved through politics alone. The scene on which
representations are exchanged requires a guarantee beyond these
representations themselves; society must have a sacred basis.
This intuition of the foundational status of the deferral of violence
is already visible in Burke’s other major work, usually entitled On the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, over thirty years before Reflections. In terms not uncongenial to evolutionary psychology, Burke derives the sublime from our terror of “pain and danger”:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of
pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is
conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to
terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (I, 7)The
sublime is our “strongest emotion” because we are more concerned with
“sublime” threats to survival than “beautiful” enhancements of it. It is
not, however, the actual experience of “pain and danger,” but their
“ideas” that generate the sublime, which typically characterizes not a
source of uncontrolled violence but an ultimately benevolent power; the
book of Job provides many of Burke’s examples. What we now call Burke’s
“gendering” of the sublime-beautiful opposition is prophetic: in
contrast with the general verdict of Enlightenment
sensibilité in
Condillac, Rousseau, Diderot, et al., Burke anticipates
Girard
in recognizing that (masculine) violence and its deferral are more
central to our survival than (feminine) sympathy and beauty. The
cultural memory of the revolutionary violence of seventeenth-century
England provides Burke with an intuition that applies all the more to
eighteenth-century France. The
Reflections were a key influence
on the post-revolutionary renewal of respect for the sacred cultural
forms indispensable to human survival.
