Edmund Burke is often sold as the father of conservatism and lauded as one of its intellectual titans — a levee holding back the river of liberalism springing from the French Revolution. However, the last two-hundred years have shown that Burke and his acolyte’s strategies have failed to meaningfully confront liberalism. At best, they have only served to slow and moderate its progression.
Burke did not only fail. In fact, he accomplished his clearly articulated goals of “slow and incremental reform” that were misunderstood by illiberal conservatives and reactionaries as supposed opposition to liberalism. Burke was not opposed to liberalism at all. He was molded in a country that over one-hundred years prior had already adopted a liberal tradition and disposition, though of a less revolutionary flavor. He is a conservative in name only, in view of a liberal overton window.
In any other context, Burke is more accurately described as a conservative liberal or a “classical liberal.” It is hard, once you have set aside Burke’s flowery rhetoric and examined the cold, hard ideas presented, to find a true disagreement with or objection to liberalism.
In his seminal work Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke’s only answer to the revolution is prudence to stem violent excess and to create sensible moderate reform. In Burke’s view, now that the dam has been broken, only the flow and direction revolution takes can be controlled. Will reform be revolutionary and swift, or moderate and prudent? Burke’s chief concern when conducting reform is a prudential adherence to moderation and prejudice for a country’s established constitution and customs:
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.1
Burke criticizes the revolutionary French government as being overly hostile toward institutions and establishments that are old and grounded in tradition. He charges revolutionaries with having no respect for or confidence in the wisdom of what they have inherited, saying, “They think that government may vary like modes of dress, and with as little ill effect. That there needs no principle of attachment, except a sense of present convenience, to any constitution of the state.”2
Burke argues the trick comes in when trying to craft a free government that provides for the common good by balancing liberty and restraint. That is where prudence, skill, collaboration, deep thought, and patience are necessary. On that count, he is correct. Burke states that he finds none of this in the National Assembly of France, arguing that revolutionary fervor has replaced responsible governance as the order of the day.3
If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty, soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity to his cause.
Moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors; until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable him to temper and moderate on some occasions, the popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines, and establishing powers, that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.4
Burke sees no hope of the revolution producing a free government or instituting lasting reforms in France because the prudence necessary simply does not have the support of the majority. He not only expresses worry that nothing will be built, but that nothing will survive, saying that, “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”5
Burke is not dismissing the strife of the people or their just want of reform, but he is urging them in their rage not to abolish institutions and establishments that have and may continue to serve them well in favor of erecting new and untested ones; a task he deems to be not without difficulties.6 Burke argues that if any positive political reform is to come in France it will be found by prudently and rigorously pursuing a middle road between the excesses of the revolution and the status quo.7
Burke stresses that if positive change is possible and is to be lasting, it must occur by reform within and in cooperation with these contexts. Wiping the slate clean in revolution without respect for what has been not only jeopardizes the initial mission of reform but also risks a total political collapse; for Burke, any order is necessarily better than anarchy. Thus, Burke argues it is not only more prudent but more effective to seek reform and not revolution.
The fatal flaw in Burke’s argument is that he has conceded everything right up to the pace and scope of liberalization. He does this in reliance upon what he believes to be commonly held and valued virtues and principles to guide liberalism, but liberalism is all about the individual freedom, a clear contradiction. Today, conservatives cannot moderate in the way Burke advocated. Yes, there are many worthwhile things he has to say about the nature of conservatism and tradition that we must heed. However, there can be no compromise or “reform” from within the liberal revolution. We must be bold.
Under liberalism there can be no consensus and no prejudice for anything, and thus a single individual trying to conserve their particular flavor of liberalism will inevitably be rolled by the multitude of other individuals. If one seeks to be a true and an effective conservative, he must reject the entire premise of liberalism rather than play at a disadvantage within its paradigm.
If one truly believes the need for reform to exist, it would seem to be cowardly and an injustice in itself to not put, as Thomas Paine says, “the whole heart and soul” into the measure of reform.
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Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France: And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event, London: Penguin Books, 2004, 184.
Ibid.
Burke, 373-374.
Burke, 374.
Burke, 279-280.
Burke, 280-282.
Burke, 266-267.
What is the entire premise of liberalism?
Is there a reason my comments keep being deleted?