Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

style the story of those violent changes which had taken place in ancient Rome, and in modern Sweden and Portugal. His sensationalism had secured him an extraordinary success. Warburton, indignant at “the present fondness for the cheat, and its yet unsuspected importance,” proves the system false in itself, “injurious to the country it dismembers,” and destructive to all just history.

      That this form should wonderfully allure common readers, is no way strange. The busy active catastrophe of revolutions gives a tumultuous kind of pleasure to those vulgar minds that remain unaffected with the calm scenes that the still and steady advances of a well-balanced state, to secure its peace, power, and durability, present before them. Add to this that the revolution part is the great repository of all the stores for admiration, whose power and fascination on the fancy we have at large examined; whereas the steady part affords entertainment only for the understanding, by its sober lessons on public utility.

      It is not only passively useless; it tends to disgust us with the system of society altogether; “to think irreverently of it, and in time to drop all concern for its interests.” But, it may be objected, this kind of history best discovers the nature and genius of a people. “Ridiculous!” says the critic, “as if one should measure the benefits of the Trent, the Severn, or the Thames, by the casual overflowing of a summer inundation.” He goes on to complain of the injustice inflicted on Englishmen [xxxv] by this “historical method.” We, “the best natured people upon earth,” are branded by these charlatans, on the score of our struggles to preserve our inherited liberties, “with the title of savage, restless, turbulent revolutionists.” It is easy to trace here the argument of Burke. For fifty years and more, when Burke was writing, the French people had been coming to believe in Revolutions, and to look to their neighbours on the other side of the water for authentic revolutionary methods. The facts on which this belief was based were ill selected and ill understood. But the craving for change had developed into a social necessity. The Frenchman still turned in his desperation to England, and the Englishman at once repulsed him as an enemy and despised him as a slave. In Warburton’s time, the “Anglomania” of which this was but one form was a novelty. Innovation is always jealous of rivalry: and this circumstance no doubt helped to attract Warburton’s wrath. But that which was a novelty in 1727 had become inveterate in 1789. The sense of historical and political truth had become more and more obscured, and the morbid demand for change had grown little by little into a madness. Practical political life, the soul and school of true political doctrine, was extinct. The old fabric of the state was decayed, and none knew how to repair it. But this, fact as it was, was hardly within the comprehension of Englishmen.

      To this day it may be said that the mutual criticisms which Englishmen and Frenchmen have bandied at each other are generally based on some misunderstanding. It was far more so a century ago. In more than one topic of the present work Burke transfers to French matters ideas which were really only proper to England. In Burke’s famous delineation of European society, at its best, as he believed, in this country, there was little or nothing to interest or instruct the Frenchman. Those parts of the work which are best calculated to their end are the arguments which are to be found scattered up and down the book which deduce from English society the higher laws which ought to govern civil life in general. On this ground we have Burke at his strongest.

      To the cherished tradition of the English philosophy of the State, the incidents of the French Revolution administered an unexpected and powerful impulse. Burke conceived the English [xxxvi] political creed to be threatened and misunderstood: his ready intellect at once traced this creed to its most imposing deductions, and his fiery and poetical fancy moulded it into new and more striking forms. We have in the present work, for the first time, a deliberate retrospect of what European society in its old-fashioned and normal shape has done for the human race, heightened by all that passion and rhetoric can do to recommend it. Burke had caught inspiration from his opponents. Just as the Revolutionist in his dogmatism displays all the bitterness and the intractability of an ecclesiastic, so Burke communicates to his philosophy of society something of the depth and fervour of religion. The state, according to his solemn figure, which reflects alike the mode of thought of the great statesman and philosopher of Rome, and of our English philosophical divines, is an emanation of the Divine Will.¹

      The political philosophy of Burke, though in itself systematic and complete, makes no pretence to the character of what is understood by a scientific theory. It rests on ignorance, and, in technical language, may be described as sceptical. The best formula afforded by the present work to express it is that which describes the human race as a “great mysterious incorporation.”² Society, though a changeable and destructible system, is not like a machine which can at will be taken to pieces, regulated, and reconstructed. Its motive force is as incomprehensible as that of the individual man. All analysis is evaded by those ties which bind together the obligations and affections of the individual into an intelligible and operative whole; and it is exactly so with those which bind together the system of the State. Society, to repeat a trite formula, is an organism, not a mechanism. As life itself is an insoluble mystery, so is the life of that invisible entity which is understood by the term “society.” The attempt to defy this mystery is as fatuous and presumptuous as would be, in the mechanical world, the attempt to animate a mass of dead parts. Society is not made, it grows; and by ways as dark and mysterious as those which from its earliest germ conduct and limit the destination of life in the individual. Φύσει πολιτικὸν ζω̑ον ἄνθρωπος. The elementary nature expressed in each word of this profound expression of Aristotle, is involved in an equal degree [xxxvii] of obscurity. Neither Man nor the State can escape from the character of original mystery impressed upon them by the life and the nature in and by which they are generated. Frankly admitting this, and drawing our conclusions only from the positive character which the moral and political man in his several aspects actually reveals, we shall be safe; but in the fruitless effort to lift the veil we cannot but err. The true method of politics, as of all branches of practical knowledge, is that of experiment. Examine the face of society. Observe, as Newton did in the planetary system, the strong gravitating forces which draw its particles into congruous living shapes; but with the wisdom of Newton, discard all tempting hypotheses, and penetrate no further. Trust and cherish whatever you find to be a motive power, or a cementing principle, knowing that, like the wind that blows as it lists, it is a power over which you have no control, save to regulate and to correct. Deal reverently, as one that has learnt to fear himself,¹ and to love and respect his kind, even with the errors, the prejudices, the unreasoned habits, that are mixed in those powers and principles. You cannot understand them, you cannot disregard or defy them; you cannot get rid of them. You must take the frame of man and of society as a Power above you has made them. To guide you in dealing with them, you have the experience of many who have gone before you, presumably not your inferiors in qualifications for the task, and who may have been free from special difficulties which stand in your own way.

      Burke’s doctrine on the origin of society corresponds to this view of its nature and foundation. More than one of the uses which help to keep society together have in theory been adopted as its possible origin, but these uses all germinate from the instinct of congregation. Aristotle and Cicero had each in their time maintained, against contemporary theorists, that in this instinct is to be traced the true germ of social organisation; and their view was revived, at the revival of letters, in the remarkable tract of Buchanan, De Jure Regni. According to this view, the uses and advantages of social life are entirely an aftergrowth upon the results of the unreasoned tendency, operating through the rude channels of the feelings, of individual human animals to [xxxviii] gravitate together. “Ea est quaedam naturae vis, non hominibus modo, sed mansuetioribus etiam aliorum animantium indita . . . congregandorum hominum caussa longe antiquior, et communitatis eorum inter ipsos multo prius et sanctius vinculum.” It is this law of nature (pp. 121, 122) which true political philosophy ever follows: the varied utilities of life grow out of nature, as out of a living stock. The State then, says Buchanan, is no device of the orator or the lawyer, but an immediate emanation of the Divine Power and Goodness: and he proceeds to cite the beautiful sentiment of Cicero, quoted in these pages of Burke, “nihil eorum quae quidem fiant in terris acceptius quam concilia et coetus hominum jure sociati quae civitates appellantur.” The same belief, that society rests on the developement