Burke is wary of people, who, under the pretext of zeal towards the Revolution and Constitution, too frequently wander from their true principles; and are ready in every occaisoon to depart from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one, and which presides in the other” (4).
Burke’s objection to the Revolution Society’s involvement with the Nationsl Assembly of France is that the RS presumes to speak for the whole of England and her government, when in reality they speak on “the mere authority of individuals” (7).
Burke’s liberty is “manly, moral, [and] regulated” (7).
“Circumstances […] give in reality to every political principle it’s distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect” (8).
“liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind,” but Burke cannot celebrate a madman escaped from prison. Liberty in specific can be good or bad (8).
“The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risque congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints” (9).
“liberty, when men act in bodies, is power” (9).
“Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience” (9).
“Whenever our neighbour’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own” (9).
“The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties,” i.e., religion as healing, not inflammatory, liberty and government as moderate, not revolutionary. Religion that does not heal is wrongheaded, just as a government that does not act with prudence (12).
“the hortus siccus of dissent” i.e., the dry garden of dissent, which assume to mean not producing fruit, barren (13).
“According to this spiritual doctor of politics [the “fulminating” preacher], if his majesty does not owe his crown to the choice of his people, he is no lawful king” (14).
In discussing the king and laws of succession in Britain (15), Burke highlights an interesting feature of British law. The king, as executor of the law, is also subject to the laws of succession. So really, the king in England does not violate Rousseau’s notion of the general will. The king is the sovereign, but not the Sovereign. He is the person chosen (at one point), to be the ruler, but he is himself responsible to the general will. In France, the people who replaced the French ruler, as proponents of absolute liberty, we’re not themselves held to the law. They were both legislator and executor and so became corrupt.
See: Declaration of Right/Bill of Rights
The Bill of Rights was “drawn up by great lawyers and great statesmen, and not by warm and inexperienced enthusiasts” (16). Sober legislators, as advocated by Rousseau. It’s fundamental principle: “An cat for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the succession of the crown” (17).
“turning a case of necessity into a rule of law” is “totally adverse” to the “wisdom of the nation [….] it is against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case! and regarding an individual person” (17).
King William was made king not by choice but as “an act of necessity” (18). In “preserving ‘a certainty in the SUCCESSION thereof, the unity, peace, and tranquility of this nation doth, under God, wholly depend’” (19). “They knew that a doubtful title of succession would but too much resemble an election, and that an election would be utterly destructive of the ‘unity, peace, and tranquility of this nation’” (19).
“So far is it from being true, that we acquired a right by the Revolution to elect our kings, that if we had possessed it before, the English nation did at the time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves and for all their posterity for ever” (20).
For Burke, sound, rational thinking is to subject “occasional will” to “permanent reason” and “steady maxims of faith, justice, and fixed fundamental policy” (20).
The king is not the monarchy but rather fills the role, thus, he may only “abdicate for his own person” (21). “The engagement and pact of society, which genially goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities” (21).
communi sponsione reipublicae: the consent of the entire commonwealth, the “compact of the state” (21). Roughly equivalent to the general will of Rousseau.
“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” (21). Thus, the compact must be upheld by all in order that deviations of necessity can occur. When England found itself without a king during the Restoration and the Revolution, the people “acted by the ancient organized states in the shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculae of a disbanded people” (22). The people followed the compact, even though they had lost their ruler.
The Revolution Society, however, took “the deviation from the principle for the principle” (23). But “King James was a bad king with a good title, and not an usurper [of the general will, a people’s self-sovereignty]” (23).
Precision if language is of the utmost import: “No government could stand a moment, if it could be blown down with any thing so loose and indefinite as an opinion of ‘misconduct’” (27).
“The question of dethroning, or, if these gentleman like the phrase better, ‘cashiering kings,’ will always be, as it has always been, an extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of the law” (30). Like the period captured in Billy Budd, necessity trumps law, but only in particulars.
“You will observe, that from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity” (33).
“A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views.” For Burke, a nation must be ground on a “sure principle of conservation” that, as such, “leaves acquisition free; but it secured what it acquires” (33). Revolt offers sweeping change without security; conservatism offers incremental change with assurance of prior right. Burke’s conservatism is defined in a phrase: “in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are neve wholly obsolete” (34).
“All your sophisters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of of our right and privileges” (35).
“France has bought poverty by crime! France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest; but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue” (37).
“everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit” (39).
Burke laments the composition of the third estate in France, “men formed to be instruments, not controls” (44).
The National Assembly, unlike the House of Commons in England, was not “obliged to conform to a fixed constitution,” choosing instead “to make a constitution which shall conform to their designs” (45).
Burke is especially critical of the elite in France who were supposed to set a better example: “When men of rank sacrifice all dis of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and base” (47).
“those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost” (49).
Burke defines as a state as an entity composed of two fundamental parts: ability and property. Ability is presumably the actions or agency a state can perform, and property, of course is property, and is for Burke the more important of the two. “The characteristics essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal” (51). This is not a problem for Burke, rather, he sees it as a strength. The natural selfishness of people who hoard up property compels them to protect it with greater fervour. When men are given an equal portion they do not feel the same sense of entitlement. Burke sees greed as an exploitable weakness that can be used in favour of state integrity. The desire for “perpetuating our property in our families [….] makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice.” “Let those large proprietors be what they will, and they have their chance of being amongst the best, they are at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth” (51-52).
“The will of the many, and their interest, must very often differ; and great will be the difference when they make an evil choice” (52). Rousseau believes the general will must always side with the common good. Factional wills may differ but the general will is greater. Burke understands that the general will is weaker than the particular.
After arguing against Price’s three rights of man, Burke defines the true rights of man: “If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only benificence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice […] They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful […] Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he had a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things” (59). And so over the question of property we see possibly the biggest difference between Rousseau and Burke: Rousseau believes man should be equal in rights and things. But Burke sees this is as completely impracticable.
“Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together” (60).
“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 every thing they want every thing. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by his 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 he 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” (60).
“The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balanced between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes, between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle; adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations” (62).
“This sort of people [the revolutionaries] are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature” (64).
“Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle” (78).
“our manners, our civilization […] in the European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles […] the spirit of a gentleman! and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence” (79). Thus, to Burke, the overthrow of the nobility and the clergy, based on enlightenment ideals, actually undermined the enlightenment in France. Light and reason were, in Europe, upheld by the nobility and the clergy, according to Burke.
Citified man link (79).
“We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not e disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Artists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers” (86).
“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would be better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages” (87).
“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” (87).
“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” (90). Unlike Rousseau, who proposes a civil religion to replace the old religions. “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” (90-91).
“To avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion” (96).
“Society is indeed a contract [….] unavailing sorrow” (96-97). Burke’s discussion of the eternal foundations of lawful society.
Without “civil society man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it. They conceive that He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection—He willed therefore the state—He willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection” (98).
“the people of England, far from thinking a religious, national establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one [….] Church and stare are ideas inseparable in their [English] minds! and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other” (99).
“the unsteady and precarious contribution of individuals” (100).
“conduct (the only language that rarely lies)” (101).
“It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by livery, without which virtue cannot exist” (104).
“the selfish enlargement of mind, and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious men, which commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud have ended in open violence and rapine” (105).
“No man can mortgage his injustice as a pawn for his fidelity” (108).
When men such as Henry VIII wanted to rob abbies they had to lie, cheat, and bribe. But the French revolutionaries did so under the guise of “‘Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights of Men’” (116).
“crude and violent schemes of liberty” (124).
“Nothing can reconcile men to their proceedings and projects [i.e. The crude and violent schemes of liberty] buy the supposition that there is no third option between them! and some tyranny as odious as can be furnished by the records of history, or by the invention of poets” (124).
“Have these gentleman ember heard, in the whole circle of the worlds of theory and practice, of any thing between the despotism of the monarch and the despotism of e multitude? Have they never heard of the monarchy directed by laws, controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and hereditary dignity of a nation; and both again controlled by a judicious check from the reason and feeling of the people at large acting by a suitable and permanent organ?” (124).
“the present ruling authority in France […] affects to be a pure democracy, though I think it in a direct train of becoming shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy” (125).
“in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong division prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of s ingle sceptre” (125-26).
The despotism of the multitude deprives the minority “of all external consolation”—they are “deserted by all mankind; overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species” (126). Despotism of the majority, or “party tyranny” (126).
“Men have been sometimes led by degrees, sometimes hurried into things, of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they never would have permitted the most remote approach” (127).
“Along with much evil, there is some good in monarchy itself; and some corrective to its evil, from religion, from laws, from manners, from opinions” (128).
The government of France was not, “on the whole, so oppressive, or so corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit for all reformation” (132).
“Rather too much countenance was given to the spirit of innovation, which soon was turned against those who fostered it, and ended in their ruin” (132).
“They tell the people, to comfort them in the rags with which they have clothed them, that they are a nation of philosophers” (134).
“A brave people while certainly prefer liberty, accompanied with a virtuous poverty, to a depraved and wealthy servitude. But before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased, and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions; and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train” (135).
“[Henry of Navarre] never sought to be loved without putting himself first in a condition to be feared” (136).
“The strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found to belong to him and to distinguish him, is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to secure property, and to preserve communities in a settled state” (139).
“I rather suspect that vices are feigned or exaggerated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An enemy is a bad witness: a robber is a worse” (140).
“Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the members, but not for their punishment” (141).
“A certain quantum of power must always exist in the community, in some hands, and under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies to vices, not to names; to the causes if evil which are permanent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and the transitory modes in which they appear” (142).
“cannibal appetites” (143).
“I allow all this, because I am a man who have to deal with men […] I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes” (144).
Burke disdains the “Civic Education” that is to replace religion in Rousseau’s philosophy, that teaches an “enlightened self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us will identify with an interest more enlarged and public” (149).
“It is with the greatest difficulty that I am able to separate policy from justice. Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all” (156).
“A man full of warm speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country” (157).
“A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman” (157-58).
“Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an inter mixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest. The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the sovereign of the world; in a confidence in his declarations; and an imitation of his perfections the rest is our own” (159).
“in these gentleman there is nothing of the tender parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant for the sake of an experiment” (167).
“eloquence may exist without a proportions or degree of wisdom” (167).
“The true lawgiver ought to have an heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself. It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance; but his movements towards it ought to be deliberate. Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will atchieve more than our force” (169-170).
“By their violent haste, and their defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchymist and empiric” (170).
“those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults, are unqualified for the work of reformation: because their minds are not only unfurnished with patterns of the fair and good, but by habit they come to take no delight in the contemplation of those things. By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little” (171).
“In old establishments various correctives have been found for their aberrations from theory. Indeed they are the results of various necessities and expediences. They are not often constructed after any theory; theories are rather drawn from them. In them we often see the end best obtained, where the means seem not perfectly reconcileable to what we may fancy was the original scheme. The means taught by experience may be better suited to political ends than those contrived in the original project” (173).
“in a new and merely theoretic system, it is expected that every contrivance shall appear, on the face of it, to answer its end” (173).
“The French builders […] propose to rest the whole local and general legislature on three bases of three different kinds; one geometrical, one arithmetical, and the third financial; the first of which they call the basis of territory; the second, the basis of population; and the third, the basis of contribution” (173).
“on your ideas, it excludes from a vote, the man of all others whose natural equality stands the most in need of protection and defence; I mean the man who has nothing else but his natural equality to guard him. You order him to buy the right, which you before told him nature had given to him gratuitously at his birth, and of which no authority on earth could lawfully deprive him. With regard to the person who cannot come up to your market, a tyrannous aristocracy, as against him, is established at the very outset, by you who pretend to be its sworn foe” (175).
“Of all these qualifying barriers [to vote] we must think alike; that they are impotent to secure independence; strong only to destroy the rights of men” (176).
“the contest between the rich and the poor is not a struggle between corporation and corporation, but a contest between men and men; a competition not between districts but between descriptions” (178).
In this whole section Burke is perturbed that the French system takes wealth and power away from the wealthy and powerful… Might play into Vere as the aristocratic officer who never had to fight his way up, but rather was awarded his Captaincy based on his stature in society.
“the basis of population, does not begin to operate from the same point with the two other principles called the bases of territory and of contribution, which are both of an aristocratic nature” (181).
“for an equal share in the contribution of the whole commune, there will be a difference of sixteen voices to ten in voting for deputies to be chosen on the principle of representing the general contribution of the whole commune” (182).
“Such is the fantastical and unjust inequality between mass and mass, in this curious repartition of the rights of representation arising out of territory and contribution. The qualifications which these confer are in truth negative qualifications, that give a right in an inverse proportion to the possession of them” (182).
“the present French power is the very first body of citizens, who, having obtained full authority to do with their country what they pleased, have chosen to dissever it in this barbarous manner” (183).
“these pretended citizens [the revolutionary government] treat France exactly like a country of conquest […] They have made France free in the manner in which those sincere friends to the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece, Macedon, and other nations” (183, 184).
“when all the good arts had fallen into ruin, they proceeded, as your assembly does, upon the equality of men, and with as little judgement, and as little care for those things which make a republic tolerable or durable” (184-85).
“As the first sort of legislators attended to the different kinds of citizens, and combined them into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphysical and alchemistical legislators, have taken the direct contrary course. They have attempted to confound all sorts of citizens, as well as they could, into one homogenous mass; and then they divided is their amalgamation into a number of incoherent republics. They reduce men to loose country’s merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to figures whose power is to arise from their place in the table” (186).
The French metaphysicians reduced man to “substance and quantity” though “complex deliberation” requires eight more categories of logic: “Quality, Relation, Action, Passivity, Place, Date, Situation, Disposition” (186, 311).
i.e. Materialism
“With you the elective assembly is the sovereign, and the sole soveign: all the members are therefore integral parts of the sole sovereignty. But with us it is totally different. With us the representative, separated from the other parts, can have no action and no existence. The government is the point of reference of the several members and districts of our representation. This is the centre of our unity. This government of reference is s trustee for the whole, and not for the parts” (188).
“Your constitution has too much of jealousy to have much sense in it” (190).
“Your legislators, in every thing new, are the very first who have founded a commonwealth upon gaming […] The great object in these politics is to metamorphose France, from a great kingdom into one great play-table” (193, 194).
“The truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically making a nation of gamesters is this; that tho’ all are forced to play, few can understand the game; and fewer still are in a condition to avail themselves of the knowledge. The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the machine of these speculations” (195).
“It is boasted, that the geometrical policy has been adopted, that all local ideas should be sunk, and that the people should no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Norman’s, but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart, and one assembly. But instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is, that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country. No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of square measurement” (198).
“Whatever is supreme in a state, ought to have, as much as possible, its judicial authority so constituted as not only not to depend upon it, but in some sort to balance it. It ought to give a security to its justice against its power. It ought to make its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state” (207).
“To preserve concord where authority is extinguished, at the hazard of all consequences, the assembly attempts to cure the distempers by the distempers themselves” (218).
“There must be blood” (218).
“Every thing depends upon the army in such a government as yours; for you have industriously destroyed all the opinions, and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the instincts which support government. Therefore the moment any difference arises between your national assembly and any part of the nation, you must have recourse to force” (222).
“You must rule by an army; and you have infused into that army by which you rule, as well as into the whole body of the nation, principles which after a time must disable you in the use you resolve to make of it” (223).
“Massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men!”
“Is it among the rights of man to pay tribute to his equals?”
“you send troops to sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to fear and force, which you did not suffer us to yield to the mild authority of opinion” (226).
“The last reason of kings [force], is always the first with your assembly” (227).
“Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government” (231).
“They rob only to enable them to cheat” (238).
“despotism itself must submit to the vices of popularity” (245).
“They who destroy every thing certainly will remove some grievance” (248).
“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” (249).