The Philosophy of Conservatism
 | Roger Scruton, Ph.D. Reading: Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution. Burke is of special importance for two reasons:
he is the first political thinker to have had an inkling of the link between
utopian thinking and totalitarian government – a link abundantly confirmed in
our day. And he is the first political thinker to have articulated an
explicitly conservative philosopy, as a comprehensive answer to the liberal and
egalitarian arguments of his day. Obviously the concepts and the problems have
all changed since Burke’s day; but many of the underlying arguments remain the
same, and his striking ability to combine highly original thought with
immediate popular impact has meant that Burke remains almost as influential
today as he was when he wrote. Points
to remember: Burke made his name as a man of letters before his success as a
politician, and wrote one of the most successful and influential works of
philosophical aesthetics of the eighteenth century – the short essay On the Sublime and the Beautiful. He
moved in literary circles, and rose to prominence in Parliament as a member of
the Whig faction. (He was not a Tory; though of course party lines did not
clearly exist then, and political parties only came on the scene with the
Reform Act of 1832.) His political career was hampered by his predilection for
lost causes: he wasted years of his life on the unssuccessful attempt to
impeach Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India. (Note:
Hastings was probably a hard-working and conscientious civil servant in a
difficult position. The chief charges against him concerned his extortion
of money from the rajah of Benares and the begum of Oudh, his hiring out of
British troops to the nawab of Oudh to subdue the Rohillas (a warlike Afghan
tribe), and his alleged responsibility for the judicial murder of an Indian
merchant, Nandkumar. He was impeached in 1787; but the trial, begun in 1788,
ended with acquittal in 1795, despite the bitter prosecution of Burke, Richard
B. Sheridan, the playwright and liberal MP, and Charles James Fox, leader of
the Whigs. Hastings’s fortune was spent in his defense, but the East India
Company contributed to his later support. He became popular and was made a
privy councillor (1814). Burke too was a privy councillor, but gave up his
political ambitions on the death of his son.) The Reflections on the French Revolution
remains the most read and pondered of Burke’s works, though it should be
remembered that it was, like most of his political writings, produced as a
pamphlet in the heat of the moment, with a view to influencing public opinion
at a critical time in European politics. It succeeded in dampening support for
the French Revolution, and also in awakening the political class to the dangers
of the new international situation. It is a work of immense rhetorical power,
with many lapses into bathos, but also with passages of remarkable beauty and
impact. The argument is as much concealed as revealed, however, in the passages
which unfold it, so the work must be read with care.
There is an old dispute, very much alive in the
writings of Plato and Aristotle, between rhetoric, which is the art of
persuasion, and philosophy, which is the love of truth. Obviously rhetoric can
be deployed in the cause of falsehood as well as that of truth, and it is
possible to be suspicious of rhetoric for that very reason – why are its
devices being used, if it is not to hoodwink us? Truth needs no advocate except
itself, and when clearly stated will persuade of its own accord. Such is the
assumption of the philosopher, at least. This has led people to be suspicious
of Burke’s Reflections, which are
artfully composed and brilliantly rhythmical. They also deploy an interesting
rhetorical device, which is to assume that their audience is already persuaded of the views that they
defend. Burke’s intention was to persuade the English reading public not to
listen to the radicals and egalitarians of his day, and in particular not to be
taken in by the rhetoric of the French revolution. He was seriously concerned
that people were leaning in the revolutionary direction and needed to be brought
back to the right perspective. Yet he shaped his argument as a letter to a
Frenchman, informing that Frenchman of the sound views of the English on the
matters which the French revolutionaries had put in question. His intention was
to provoke the reaction: yes, how very wise we English are, to think like that!
That is exactly why we should beware of these dangerous ideas from France. This
rhetorical device implies two things: first that Burke was far less certain
than he pretended to be, that he was expressing the settled prejudices of the
English (still less of the British) people; secondly that many things that he
should have been arguing for he was obliged, by his rhetorical trick, to take
for granted – in particular, the overall success of the mixed and unwritten
constitution of the emerging British state, in dealing with the problems posed
by the post-Enlightenment world. At every point the negative features of the
French experiment (into which Burke had a prescient insight) are being
contrasted with an unexplored alternative, supposed to be too familiar and too
self-evidently successful to demand exposition: ‘A politic caution, a guarded circumspection, a moral
rather than a complexional timidity, were among the ruling principles of our
forefathers in their most decided conduct. Not being illuminated with the light
of which the gentlemen of France tell us they have got so abundant a share,
they acted under a strong impression of the ignorance and fallibility of
mankind. Let us imitate their caution if we wish to deserve their fortune or
to retain their bequests. Let us add, if we please, but let us preserve what
they have left; and standing on the firm ground of the British constitution,
let us be satisfied to admire, rather than attempt to follow in their desperate
flights, the aeronauts of France’ This contentious presentation of the British
constitution went hand in hand with a very vivid and prescient account of what
was happening in France. Burke’s Reflections
would have had less impact if it had not become clear, within a few years, that
his predictions of chaos and terror were well founded. Moreover, he foresaw
what was to be the shared outlook of the French Revolutionaries’ supporters,
throughout the 19th century and right down to the new Jacobins of
the Russian Revolution. His view was sneered at in every revolutionary period,
and endorsed in every revolutionary aftermath. Nowadays the French Revolution
has few unqualified defenders, of course; but it is important to see that it
needed considerable philosophical
insight to foresee when Burke wrote, less than a year after it had happened, what
would result from it. Political
Epistemology. At the heart of Burke’s argument is an epistemological
observation, similar to the observation that underlies Hayek’s theory of
spontaneous order, and Adam Smith’s account of the ‘invisible hand’. The
creation and maintenance of a free political order, he argues, cannot be
achieved through a rational plan, or through any statement of goals, however
elevated, since it is not in our power to understand how to fulfil that plan or
to achieve those goals. The knowledge that is needed to confront the complex
problems of a great society, and to guide people through all their conflicts
without violence and disorder, is not knowledge that can be contained in a
single head. It is knowledge that accumulates
in society as a whole, there to be made available in the form of customs and
traditions that have the tacit consent of the people, largely because they have
not been schooled in the art of questioning them: ‘We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on
his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man
is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the
general bank and capital of nations and ages’. The ‘we’ in that sentence refers to the (rhetorically
invoked) British people, but should in fact be read as a place-holder for
‘people of political wisdom’. Burke goes on from this statement to develop his
interesting account of prejudice. A prejudice is not, for Burke, a defective
kind of belief – i.e. a belief arrived at in advance of the evidence that might
confirm or refute it, and held on to regardless. It is part of the common
epistemic capital – a piece of wisdom, the legacy not of personal experience,
but of the experience of generations, and shaped to the needs of social action.
Prejudice provides a steady motive to
action, and makes right conduct into a habit, rather than a momentary
decision. (The thinking here echoes that behind Aristotle’s theory of virtue in
the Nicomachean Ethics.) ‘Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency;
it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and
does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled
and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of
unconnected acts. Through just prejudice his duty becomes a part of his
nature.’ Philosophers will notice the way in which the word ‘just’
has been slipped in at the last minute: in order to counter the objection that
not every prejudice embodies wisdom, and that there are prejudices among the
thinking classes, such as those that caused the French Revolution, which are a
danger to mankind. What Bruke is trying to say is that prejudices are validated
by their origins, and when they are so validated it is because their origins
lie outside the individual agent, in the accumulated experience of a community,
and because they encapsulate the motives that have enabled people to live
together in harmony. They are, if you like, solutions to permanent problems of
coordination, and embody the successful attempt to reconcile the freedom of
each person with the freedom of his neighbours, under a shared political order.
Such solutions cannot be derived a
priori, because the information on which they depend is available only in the workings of society, and not in
the brain of any individual. Putting
it that way is of course to emphasize the connection with the Austrian theories
of the market, and it is not the way that Burke puts it. However, his position
should be seen, not only as a theory of Hayekian ‘spontaneous order’, but also
as empiricist. He believed that government requires knowledge; that this
knowledge, like all knowledge, must ultimately be derived from experience; and
that the experience in question is the experience of many people over many
generations, from which it is distilled in the form of prejudice. Not a foolish
theory, and one that he saw the French Revolution as confirming through its
failed attempt to refute it. Religion
and the State. Burke shared with other contemporary
conservatives the view that religion is fundamental to the body politic. He
defended the Anglican establishment (though he was of mixed Catholic and
Protestant descent, like many middle-class Irishmen). Indeed, he saw an
established religion as performing a vital political function, which is that of
‘the consecration of the state’. The state cannot enjoy the authority that it
demands, in the eyes of ordinary people, if it is not also endowed with some of
the immovable and untouchable characteristics that attach to religion. Its
ceremonies and offices stand in need of haloes, so to speak, with which to put
them beyond the reach of innovation, and with which to endow them with an
other-worldly dignity. However,
Burke also believed in religious freedom, and was less concerned about
differences of opinion in religious matters than about the dangers of radical
atheism – which was the state of mind advanced by the French Revolution, as he
saw it. For Burke ‘man is by his constitution a religious animal’; and this
means that, if you destroy the long-standing and evolved institutions of religion, as these are enjoyed in a country
like France, you create a vacuum into which other, more superstitious and more
dangerous ideas will flow. He was, like many of his contemporaries, shocked by
the anti-clerical fervour of the Revolution, not merely because of the
cruelties and excesses committed against priests, monks and nuns, and the
confiscation of their endowments – though all those measures were bad enough in
Burke’s eyes. He was shocked especially because he believed that the
revolutionaries were depriving the ordinary people of something that they need. The religious need would not lie
dormant for long: take away the long-standing religious traditions and
institutions, and it would manifest itself in other and more fantastic creeds
and symbols. In
a way Burke’s argument here is a version of the conservative anthropologist’s:
it does not presuppose the truth of any doctrine. It holds, rather, that
religious traditions are part of the epistemological inheritance of a
community. They too embody those long-standing solutions to communal needs and
impulses that are not to be shaped anew by intellectual thought. Take them
away, and you leave people exposed to
fanaticism of a new and more dangerous kind – in particular to the religion of
the State. (And Burke was perhaps the first to recognize that the State might
emerge from the revolutionary turmoil with all the trappings and privileges of
a deity.) This posture of Burke’s informs his view of the role of intellectuals
in revolutionary politics. Priests take vows to something greater than
themselves, so as to become servants of the community, purveyors of customs and
traditions that have some of the benign epistemic content that Burke attributes
to ‘just prejudice’. But intellectuals have a tendency to place themselves above all other powers, justified by
their superior learning in confiscating or destroying everything that stands
opposed to their schemes. The
New Class. Burke describes the Revolution as the work
of a ‘literary cabal’, and recent historical research confirms his judgement
that the prime movers in the revolution were people in the grip of the
anti-religious, utopian and egalitarian doctrines associated with the
Encylopedists (Rousseau, Diderot, d’Alembert etc.), and spread through the
country via the institution of the cabinets
de lecture. The characteristic of the intellectual politician, for Burke,
is the desire to impose on the organic workings of society the abstract
geometry of a rational plan. This ‘rationalism’ is dangerous for many reasons,
not the least of which being its inherent hostility towards opposition. Anyone
who is motivated by a rational plan, and who believes that he has discovered
the correct means to achieve it, is apt to believe that his opponents are not
just mistaken but also obstacles, standing in the way of what needs to be done.
This is an epistemological error (since correct solutions emerge over time,
through dialogue between opponents, and the achievement of compromises that are
then built into customs). But it is also a serious moral threat. Intellectuals
animated by ‘rational’ plans grant themselves total licence to silence those
who stand in their way, even to the extent of murdering them. (This was already
beginning to happen, but it should be noted that Burke wrote before the
Terror.) Those
who had usurped the power of the state in Burke
made another important observation. The ‘literary cabal’ sees the state and its
institutions not as an inheritance to be respected, but as a tool to be used.
And since it knows what is right, and is absolutely entitled by its knowledge
to rule over lesser mortals, the cabal uses the state to consolidate its own
power – to ensure that it occupies all the offices of government, and to
eliminate all the institutions (such as the judicial ‘parliaments’ of the old
regime) in which other forces than its own might be heard. In this way it
builds up its own position as a new class – assigning to itself important
positions and powers which are every bit as unequal as those enjoyed by the old
aristocracy, but without the authority of custom or the limits imposed by a
proper ‘division of powers’. (Burke anticipated the abolition of judicial
independence in France: and this was to be critical in precipitating the
Terror.) Furthermore
this new class, which has a monopoly control of the state, will apply the power
of the state – which is the only power it knows how to use – in all kinds of
spheres where it is both out of its depth epistemologically, and also a
negative force. The assault on the free economy, on the currency, and on the
military were all to be foretold once the new class had arrived on the scene.
Its first reaction to any problem of economics or social order is to absorb the
matter into the functions of the state, by confiscating property, issuing phony
currency in the form of assignats,
and trying to impose as a command what can only exist as the by-product of free
agreements. Much
that Burke says about the literary cabal applies, with even more truth, to the
communist revolutions of more recent times, In particular he identified two
features which have been characteristic of revolutions throughout modern times:
(a) what certain more recent thinkers (e.g. Eric Voegelin, Alain Besan?on (The Intellectual Origins of Leninism))
call ‘gnosticism’ – the view that intellectual enlightenment brings with it an
absolute title to government, and (b) the use of the state in order to create a
new class, bound together by privileges which are generated at the political
level, rather than at the level of society. The
Rights of The literary cabal had seized power in the
name of an ‘armed doctrine’ (Burke’s expression for what we might now call an
‘ideology’). This was the doctrine of ‘natural rights’ or the ‘Rights of Man’.
In calling this an armed doctrine Burke meant to emphasize its all-justifying
character: it recognized no limitations of history, national boundary or
custom, and authorized any action whatever carried out in its name. (He
therefore predicted the successive declarations of war which the revolutionary
government made on the governments of Europe, in the name of the ‘people’ whom
those governments ‘oppressed’.) Burke
acknowledged that there are natural rights, and saw the British Declaration of
Right of 1689 as embodying them. But (a) these rights are procedural rights –
rights to a fair trial, to private property justly acquired, to a rule of law,
and so on – as opposed to claims against the property and liberty of others;
and (b) they become a political reality only when embodied in an enduring
constitution. When declared as abstract doctrine, without reference to the
inherited procedures whereby they have come down to us, the ‘rights of man’ become
a danger – a licence to oppress minorities in the interests of those with
majority power, and so on. ‘ from Magna Carta to the Declaration of
Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to assert our
liberties as an entailed inheritance derived
to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity’ Burke anticipated modern conservative
objections to the idea of ‘social justice’, arguing that when rights are
rewritten, not as procedures limiting the exercise of power, but as goals to be
advanced by power, it becomes possible to commit any kind of injustice against
the individual citizen. He was particularly opposed to the confiscations of
property that were carried out in the name of the ‘rights of man’. Here was an
instance, in Burke’s eyes, of the way in which the doctrine of natural rights
could be used by one group of citizens to oppress and rob another. The
problem, as Burke saw it, lay not in the idea of natural rights, which had the
authority of a long tradition of legal and political thinking. It lay in the
illusion that this idea contains a complete description of the aims and the
methods of government: ‘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.’ This
complaint is often echoed today. The UN Declaration of Human Rights, for
example, contains (art 26) a ‘right to education’. This is not a freedom right
but a claim right (see class on freedom, earlier). So on whom does the duty lie
to provide for this right? Obviously the state, and that means the taxpayer. If
this really is a ‘natural right’ – i.e. a right upheld by natural law, on a priori grounds that all rational
beings must acknowledge – then there is an a
priori reason for the existence of state educational systems, and the
economy that goes with them. This is one of many examples in which the doctrine
of natural right (‘human rights’) can be used, and is being used, to advance
statist solutions to social needs and interests, and to give legitimacy to
socialist policies. Moreover it raises in acute form the question how you
justify the claim that something is or is not a natural right. Burke’s choice
of procedural rights (rights falling
under the aegis of ‘natural justice’) is animated by a belief that these are
indeed justifiable by a priori
argument: there are no rights at all, if there is no procedure whereby the
individual can claim them. Therefore, if there are any rights, there is the right to such a procedure – an a priori proof. But this leaves the
field wide open as to what other rights there might be. And that, Burke is
saying, is how it should be. Those other rights express the long-standing and
slow-forming agreements and compromises of an actual historical community, as
opposed to the belligerent abstractions of an intellectual doctrine. At
other points, however, Burke is prepared to state universal rights. But the
emphasis is always on freedom rights, rather than claim rights, e.g.: ‘Whatever
each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to
do for himself.’ That is, in effect, an anticipation of Mill’s ‘harm’ principle.
Also, in the state ‘all men have equal rights, but not to equal things’, a
statement that needs much unpacking, if it is not to look as though it takes
away with one hand what it gives with the other. Apart from such abstract
negative principles, however, Burke believes that convention is the source of
our concrete rights, and that convention is the outcome of history. History
and Political Obligation. This brings us to the Burkean idea of
historical right. The new class of intellectuals was, in Burke’s view, at
‘inexpiable war with establishments’. The fact that something had existed
already and had stood the test of time mattered not at all to the cabal.
‘Duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done
before their time’. However, this
progressive and innovative quality in the new class does not betoken any real
understanding of, or ability to secure, the future. ‘People will not look
forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors’; and it is
precisely through giving a proper place to those ancestors that societies
achieve the stability on which future generations depend. The
social contract, as Rousseau had outlined it, and as the Revolutionaries,
following Rousseau, had conceived it, was a contract between living people, for
their mutual benefit. To this Burke made the reply (a) that society is indeed a
contract, but (b) that the state is
not to be seen as a kind of commercial deal, replaceable at will by some better
arrangement. On the contrary, a political community is founded on a ‘contract
between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born’.
In other words, the state is not founded in a contract, properly speaking, but
in a condition of trusteeship. The
state does not exist to confer the accumulated benefits and savings of past
generations on whomesoever should seize temporary control of it – which is the
danger in any democracy, and especially a democracy that is declared by a band
of self-righteous intellectuals. The state exists precisely to prevent that kind of conduct: ‘lest the
temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have
received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act
as though they were the entire masters’. This
aspect of Burke is probably his most profound contribution to conservative
philosophy. His attack on the revolutionaries was fundamentally an attack on
their presumption of absolute ownership
of the accumulated assets and institutions of France. By abolishing all
obligations to ancestors and by refusing to be bound by all obligations, trusts
and bequests of the previous regime, the revolutionaries were in effect disenfranchising the dead, and thereby disenfranchising their own successors. To
respect future generations one must also respect the dead, and all that the
dead have set aside for the lasting well-being of the community. There
is a powerful point here, both psychologically and logically. Trusteeship is a
different relation from contract, and incorporates the diachronic nature of our
obligations, in a way that contract fails to do. Conservatism and conservation
are in fact two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of
husbanding resources. These resources include the social capital embodied in
laws, customs and institutions; they also include the material capital
contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free but
law-governed economy. The purpose of politics, on this view, is not to
rearrange society in the interests of some over-arching vision or ideal, such
as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to
the entropic forces that erode our social and ecological inheritance. The goal
is to pass on to future generations, and if possible to enhance, the order and
equilibrium of which we are the temporary trustees. Love
and Hate. The theme of trusteeship connects with an
underlying moral vision in Burke. At several places he points to the negative
energy of the revolutionaries. They express themselves in the language of love:
but what they love are abstractions – liberty, equality, fraternity, defined
without reference to any concrete human beings, and in abstraction from any
real policy that would show how to achieve these goals. On the other hand their
deeds are animated by an extraordinary hatred: hatred of religion, custom,
institutions, classes. And their political discourse is full of hatred towards
those whom they wish to punish, usually for ‘crimes’ for which they are not in
any way personally responsible. As Burke saw it, the ‘cabal’ was animated by a
need to hate which was in no way balanced by the purely abstract declarations
of love with which it excused its persecutions. He did not express the point in
the terms used by Nietzsche; but it is quite clear that he identified in the
Revolution the very force that Nietzsche condemned by the name of ressentiment – the burning hatred
towards those who possess the good things of life, and the desire to cast them
down from their eminence. This purely negative emotion aims always to destroy,
but as a rule has no idea of what to put in place of the thing that it
destroys. And of course you don’t have to read much about the Russian
revolutionaries to agree that resentment played a large part in animating their
project. Burke’s insight into the Jacobins anticipated the observations of
Dostoevsky and Conrad concerning the early Russian nihilists, and those of
later writers concerning the spirit of the communist revolution. The desire to destroy
is uppermost, urgent and concrete; the protestations of love (for ‘le peuple toujours malheureux’, as
Robespierre described (and made) them) subdued, unfocused and abstract. Here
begins a theme to which I will return at the end of the semester. There is an
important motive underlying conservatism – a motive that distinguishes it from
liberalism, and which sets it in radical opposition to socialism in all its
forms, and that motive is love – love of ‘the given’, of the actual and
inherited social order, with all its imperfections. This love quickly turns to
mourning when that order is too much changed; it always has an anticipatory
grief attached to it. And this explains the impact of Burke’s prose – that,
even when flawed by sentimentality and moroseness, it is turned constantly in
the direction of something loved, maybe idealized, but loved as a concrete and
existing thing. Socialist literature, when it deals with the actual, is usually
fuelled by animosity, often towards some class, such as the bourgeoisie,
targeted as exploiters, usurpers or whatever. Burke was perhaps the first
conservative to see that this emotion is a vital source of radical politics and
precedes its target. Hence it brooks no rational argument. Burke produced arguments, comparisons,
analogies. But he also identified a state
of mind, which entered politics with the French Revoluton and has been part
of politics ever since. It is this state of mind which is expressed, for Burke,
equally in utopian schemes (whose very abstraction liberates the ‘hatred of the
actual’ which is their real motive) and in the totalitarian forms of government
which inevitably result from them – forms of government bent on destroying the
Other, the one who is attached to things as they are. Recent thinkers (Fran?ois
Furet, for example) have come to agree with Burke in seeing this state of mind
at work in the French Revolution. Others, like Milosz and Solzhenitsyn, have
had much to say about its presence in the totalitarian revolutions of our time.
This
takes us out of the realm of pure philosophy into that of psychology. But it
has a bearing on political philosophy, since it raises in a new form the
question of which beliefs, which conceptions, which political analyses, are
‘ideology’, in the Marxist sense, and which are science. Leftists dismiss
Burke’s pamphlet as ideology. But he could reply that the utopian thinking to
which he is opposed has a far greater claim to the title, since it exists as a
mask of love over the face of hatred. |