Edmund Burke, author ofReflections on the Revolution inFrance, is known to a worldwide public as a classic politicalthinker: it is less well understood that his intellectual achievementdepended upon his understanding of philosophy and use of it in thepractical writings and speeches by which he is chiefly known. Thepresent essay explores the character and significance of the use ofphilosophy in his political thought. That thought is of the very firstimportance for intellectual history and for the conduct of politics.This essay is the first attempt to examine its philosophical characterand to connect the latter with Burke’s political activity. Indoing so it shows the importance of the philosophical elements inBurke’s thought and how these contribute important ways to hispolitical thought.

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Life
• 3. Intellectual orientation
• 4. Philosophical and Historical Writings
• 5. Political style: some parliamentary applications
• 6. Burke’s practical reasoning
• 7. Burke and the American Revolution
• 8. Philosophical Character of Political Disposition
• 9. The Revolution in France
• 10. Problems of Interpretation
• 11. Conclusion
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature
  • Secondary Literature
  • Other works cited
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Introduction

The name of Edmund Burke (1730–97)^[1] is not one that often figures in the history of philosophy^.[2] This is a curious fate for a writer of genius who was also the authorof a book entitledA Philosophical Enquiry. Besides theEnquiry, Burke’s writings and some of his speechescontain strongly philosophical elements—philosophical both inour contemporary sense and in the eighteenth century sense, especially‘philosophical’ history. These elements play a fundamentalrole within his work, and help us to understand why Burke is apolitical classic. His writings and speeches therefore merit attentionas examples of attention to both ideas and to history, and of the roleof this attention in practical thought. His work is also, as we seeshall see at the end of this entry, an achievement that challengesassumptions held by many of our contemporaries. One way or another,then, Burke is a vitally important figure. Yet there is very littleacademic writing about Burke and philosophy outside of thatEnquiry. This is a significant omission from the history ofpolitical thought, for at least three reasons. One is that though muchhas been written about Burke, including work placing him in relationto other political writers, yet how he thought has not been madeclear. A second is that the rational content of his thinking has notbeen made evident, precisely because its philosophical component hasnot been identified. Thirdly, because the manner and content of histhought have not been identified in the way the case warrants, we readof Burke’s ‘mystic spirit’ (Spurgeon 1922, p. 100)or the ‘irrationalism’ of his writing (Butler 1984, p.35). This matters not only with respect to historical truth, importantthough that is, but also because Burke continues to be treated as asymbolic or instructive figure for contemporary political action (cf.,e.g., Norman 2013; Stephens (2020)), and in significant ways marks aninstructive contrast with some current ways of thinking. This beingso, it is especially important to understand the historical figure,and, importantly, the general elements in his thought, including thephilosophical ones.

2. Life

Burke was born at Dublin in Ireland, then part of the British Empire,the son of a prosperous attorney, and, after an early education athome, became a boarder at the school run by Abraham Shackleton, aQuaker from Yorkshire, at Ballitore in County Kildare. Burke receivedhis university education at Trinity College, Dublin, a bastion of theAnglican Church of Ireland. Thence he proceeded to the Middle Templeat London, in order to qualify for the Bar, but legal practice wasless attractive to him than the broader perspective which had capturedhis attention at university (or earlier). It was first as a writer,and then as a public figure that he made his career. Burke’sintellectual formation did not suggest that his career would be purelyphilosophical. Indeed, for those without an independent income or aclerical vocation such a way of life was not very feasible in Britainor Ireland. Only the Scottish universities offered many posts that didnot require holy orders, but they were not very receptive tonon-presbyterians. Burke married in 1756, and had a son by 1758, sothat a career of Humean celibacy, in which philosophy was cultivatedon a little oatmeal, was not for him.

Burke, like Hume, found that there was more money in narrative worksand in practical affairs than in philosophy. Burke’s earliestwritings includeA Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of ourIdeas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), andA Vindicationof Natural Society (1756). Thereafter he was co-author ofAnAccount of the European Settlements (1757) and beganAnAbridgement of English History (c.1757–62). From 1758, atleast until 1765, he was the principal ‘conductor’ of thenewAnnual Register. In 1765, Burke became private secretaryto the Marquis of Rockingham (who had just become First Lord of theTreasury, i.e. the chief minister of the Crown in Great Britain andIreland) and was elected to the British House of Commons in the sameyear. He remained there, with a brief intermission in the Autumn of1780, for nearly twenty-nine years, retiring in the Summer of 1794.Burke, who was always a prominent figure there and sometimes aneffective persuader, gave a great many parliamentary speeches. Hepublished versions of some of these, notably onAmericanTaxation (1774),Conciliation with America (1775), andFox’s East India Bill (1783). These printed speeches,though anchored to specific occasions, and certainly intended to havea practical effect in British politics, were also meant to embodyBurke’s thought in a durable form. In that respect, theyparallel hisThoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents(1770), andReflections on the Revolution in France (1790),amongst other non-oratorical writings.

Burke’s activity as a parliamentarian and political writerembraced a great many concerns. Prominent amongst these were theproblems of British rule overseas, in North America, India andIreland. His name, however, has been linked most strongly by posterityto a critique of the French Revolution of 1789. Burke was certainlymore notable as a pundit than an executive politician. He heldnational office only twice, for a few months in 1782 and 1783. Hispolitical life was punctuated in May, 1791 by a break from certain ofhis party colleagues over the significance of the Revolution.Thereafter, assisted not least by the turn the Revolution took in1792–3, he became a largely independent commentator on domesticpolitics and international affairs inAn Appeal from the New tothe Old Whigs (1791),Letters on a Regicide Peace(1795–7), andA Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). Burke inhis last years, especially from 1792, also turned his attention to hisnative Ireland. He failed to found a political dynasty, and he left nolasting school in parliamentary politics: the last politician who canbe regarded plausibly as a disciple, the addressee ofA Letter toWilliam Elliot (1795), died in 1818. As Sidgwick observed in the1870s, ‘though Burke lives, we meet with no Burkites’(Sidgwick 1877 [2000, 195]). Nor did Burke bequeath a straightforwardlegacy to any political party or to any ideological brand of thought,though plenty have tried to appropriate him wholly or partly. Thedifficulties that they might encounter in colonising his thought areapparent from an account of it that emphasizes its philosophicalaspects.

3. Intellectual orientation

Burke’s mind, by the time he left Trinity, had two features ofespecial interest: one was an orientation towards religion,improvement and politics, the other a philosophical method. The latterderived from his university education, the former from reflection onthe Irish situation. Burke was born into an Ireland where reflectiveintellect had its social setting in a small educational elite, much ofit connected with the Church of Ireland. This elite contemplated apolitical class which owned much of the land, and consisted primarilyof a gentry and peerage, headed by the King’s representative,the Lord-Lieutenant; but it saw too a tiny professional class, and ahuge, illiterate, impoverished peasantry. The aim of the educationalelite, which it shared with some of the political class, wasimprovement in the broadest sense, that is to say it connectedself-improvement through the influence of the arts & sciences, andthrough the development of intellectual skills, with moral culture andwith economic development. The ability of the educated, thepoliticians and the rich to take constructive initiatives contrastedstarkly with the inability of the peasantry to help itself: peasantsrelieved their misery principally through spasms of‘savagery’ against their landlords’ representatives,but such violence was repressed sternly and helped nobody. (For Burke,as with some of his contemporaries, ‘savagery’ is a termof art about conduct; in particular, conduct that falls below certainstandards.) The Irish situation suggested a general rationale ofpractice to those who wished to improve themselves and others:improvement, if it was to spread outside the educational elite, mustspring from the guidance and good will of the possessing classes: fromthe landlord who developed his property, from the priest whoinstructed and consoled the poor, and from the lord lieutenant whoused his power benevolently. The only obvious alternative was the useof force—and that was both destructive and fruitless. Burkeretained all his life a sense of the responsibility of the educated,rich and powerful to improve the lot of those whom they directed; asense that existing arrangements were valuable insofar as they werethe necessary preconditions for improvement; and a strong sense of theimportance of educated people as agents for constructive change,change which he often contrasted with the use of force, whether asmethod or as result.

This experiential orientation of Burke’s mind was turned fromattitude into articulate thought through the educational medium of theIrish Enlightenment. For example, some points that may seemdistinctively Burkean belonged first to Berkeley. Berkeley saw noadvantages in improper abstraction or in a mythical golden age.Burke’s unwillingness to judge institutions and practiceswithout first connecting them with other things, his disinclination‘to give praise or blame to any thing which relates to humanactions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object in all thenakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction’ (RRF, W& S 1981–2015, viii.58), is a practical judgement thatimplies a conceptual counterpart like Berkeley’s view that‘when we attempt to abstract extension and motion from all otherqualities, and consider them by themselves, we presently lose sight ofthem, and run into great extravagancies’ (Berkeley,Principles of Human Knowledge [1948–57, vol. ii, 84].)In both cases, philosophical wariness matched a distaste forconsidering aspects of objects in permanent isolation from the otheraspects with which they were actually connected. This suspicion ofabstract ideas accompanied a suspicion of schemes for consideringpeople in abstraction from their present situations, and accompaniedtoo doubts about a golden past: Berkeley rejected ‘the rudeoriginal of society’ (Berkeley,The Querist[1948–57, vol. vi, 141]) and had no time for ‘declaimersagainst prejudice’ who ‘have wrought themselves into asort of esteem for savages, as a virtuous and unprejudicedpeople’ (Berkeley,Discourse addressed to Magistrates[1948–57, vol. vi, 206]), and it need not be emphasized thatBurke shared such views. Both belonged to an elite which consideredimprovement to be necessary, and sought to make it through theagencies in church, state and education that were really available atthe time. Above all, they shared an intellectual temper: they soughtto see things how they are, with an eye to bettering the condition ofsociety. But Burke was not Berkeley, and though their similaritiesindicate a shared philosophical orientation, Burke had his own way ofdeveloping it. To individuate him, we must turn to what he acquiredfrom the Trinity syllabus, and how he used his acquisitions.

This syllabus, by the time Burke became an undergraduate student in1744, not only gave attention to Aristotelian manuals but also to‘the way of ideas’ enshrined in Locke’sEssayconcerning Human Understanding. Such a syllabus, in itsAristotelian aspect, indicated the unity of all departments ofliterature—or learning as we now call it — which wascongenial to one with Burke’s passion for knowledge — hewrote of hisfuror mathematicus,furor logicus,furor historicus, andfuror poeticus.^[3] It also indicated the range of achievements, and the range of needs,that people had generated. The extent and variety of human activityimpressed itself upon Burke. If his practical situation in Irelandsuggested that not reason alone but also Christianity and persuasionwere necessary to improvement, Burke could now understand these needsin terms of a scheme of learning, and indeed had the opportunity todevelop the corresponding skills. At Trinity he founded a debatingsociety, where he developed his oratorical technique on theological,moral and political topics, as well as commenting on the economic andliterary life of Ireland in a periodical run by himself and hisfriends. This acquisition of skills was complemented by an opportunityfor philosophical development. This applied in particular toBurke’s antecedent bent towards the imaginative branches ofliterature, especially romances of chivalry, such as theFaerieQueen by Edmund Spenser (the collateral ancestor from whom hederived his Christian name). Creations of alternative worlds by themind now received a philosophical warrant from another part of theTrinity syllabus. Locke had recognized that the mind devised complexideas. The mind had a power to receive simple ideas from the sensesand from its reflection on its own operations, and to make out of thismaterial further ideas that had no referent in the world of sensation.Burke’s interest in developing such ideas did not extend to thecentaurs that Locke had mentioned, but the ability to make complexideas and to assemble them in new ways was central to Burke’sway of proceeding. His philosophical method involved thinking in termsof complex ideas about a connected range of matters, matters connectedby their place in a programme of human improvement. Reason wasfundamental to this method—but not reason alone, as we see inBurke’s sole work devoted wholly to philosophy, which made useof Locke’s thought on the way to an original destination.

4. Philosophical and Historical Writings

Locke’sEssay concerning Human Understanding of 1690was the first attempt to give a survey of the mind’s workingsthat was both comprehensive and post-aristotelian. It soon fosteredintense interest in epistemology, psychology and ethics. Burke seemsto have worked on the imagination—the faculty of devising andcombining ideas — as an undergraduate, and continued to do sointo the 1750s. The result,A Philosophical Enquiry into theOrigin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)emphasized, unsurprisingly, the activity of mind in making ideas andthe influence of these upon conduct. It was in the first place anexercise in clarifying ideas, with an eye to refining the ways inwhich the arts affect the passions: in other words, a refinement ofcomplex ideas was taken to be the precondition of a refinement ofpractice.

The roots of human activity, Burke thought, were the passions ofcuriosity, pleasure and pain. Curiosity stimulated the activity ofmind on all matters. Ideas of pain and of pleasure correspondedrespectively to self-preservation and society, and society involvedthe passions of sympathy, imitation and ambition. Imitation tended toestablish habit, and ambition to produce change. Sympathy did neither,but it did establish an interest in other people’s welfare thatextended to mental identification with them. The scope of sympathycould embrace anyone, unlike compassion, which applied only to thosein a worse situation than oneself. Such width of concern had anobvious reference to the social order (and may express alsoBurke’s thinking about the theatre). The passions, understood inBurke’s way, suggested at once that society as such answered tonatural instincts, and that it comprised elements of continuity andimprovement alike. Burke then proceeded to show that self-preservationand its cognates suggested the complex idea of the sublime, and notleast the idea of a God who was both active and terrible. Beauty, onthe other hand, comprised a very different set of simple ideas, whichoriginated in pleasure. Sublime and beautiful therefore sprang fromvery different origins.

The diverse views rejected byA Philosophical Enquiry wereunited by the pervasive assumption that human nature in an unschooledcondition, as it came from the hand of nature, and understood withoutdirect reference to God, was in some sense adequate to the humancondition. Rousseau’sDiscourse on Inequality was atodds with Burke’s view of the naturalness of society, and withhis view that solitude, because unnatural, was a source of pain, aswell as with Burke’s position that sympathy, rather than merelycompassion, was a key emotion. Burke’s view that the mind formedideas of beauty from the ideas of pleasure it received contradictedthe view of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson that beauty (like goodness) wasa perception presented by a sixth or moral sense. Burke’sfurther view that our simple ideas of pain went towards a complex ideaof a God who inspired terror, was very distant from the deists’view that He could be understood by our natural faculty of reasonalone and that as such He was known to be benevolent and not muchbesides. These three positions alike presumed that human faculties,unimproved by human effort and considered with little relation to God,were sufficient to inspire right conduct and meet human needs. It isnot surprising that Burke rejected them.

Burke not only thought that nature needed improvement, but alsorecognized nature’s ambiguity. Ambition, for instance, was thesource of enterprise and of improvement: but Burke did not supposethat the enterprise produced by this characteristic was in all itsmanifestations a benefit to its exponent, and indeed once called it‘the cause of the greatest disappointments, miseries andmisfortunes, and sometimes of dangerous immoralities’^[4]. If Burke had a forward-looking mind, and believed that human natureboth required and led to development, he did not think that progresswas necessarily an unqualified gain: for instance, in discussing thecivilizing of American ‘savages,’ he saw a diminution oftheir courage as well as an increase in their moral goodness. (ForBurke, ‘savagery’ contrasts with civilisation, and unlikesome other figures, he did not suppose that savagery was by definitionequivalent to all behaviour of indigenous peoples as such).

A Philosophical Enquiry suggests that Burke was developingthe loyalties of his youth through the medium of philosophicalpsychology. A God who presents Himself through nature in a way that isoften found in the Bible, and who devises and sustains nature in a waythat leads people to society and facilitates the improvement of thatsociety, has set Himself to support Christianity, power andimprovement, and very probably education too. At the same time,however, other aspects of the book suggest that this support wasdelivered to them, not on their own terms, but on the terms of aphilosophy which recognizes the ability of the imagination totransform people’s understandings of themselves and theirsociety.

Anyone who thinks in terms of complex ideas can see that these can beframed easily in different ways, none of which need correspond toanything found in the external world: combine the ideas of a man and ahorse, as Locke had suggested, and you have the idea of a centaur. Noone who reads romances, as the young Burke had done, would finddifficulty in imagining a society differing beyond recognition fromits current arrangements. A classic instance of political imagination,indeed, is Burke’s ownVindication of Natural Society,which presents as an alternative model of society anorganization—if that is the word—devoid of civilgovernment, church and significant private property.

Burke, in other words, had a conception of ideas that enabled him tothink through not only his own grouping of claims but also theiropposites. This reflects, no doubt, other features of his mind apartfrom his understanding of complex ideas, such as the skill in seeingthe strong side and the weak side of any argument, which Burke hadacquired in his undergraduate study of rhetoric; and it reflects, too,a habit of versatility begun in his debating society, for therespeakers were called upon to play roles; and no doubt it isreminiscent, again, of Burke’s undergraduate interest in thetheatre. Yet beyond all of these, it suggests that in the large topicswhich experience had put before Burke—religion, morals, arts andsciences—argument had not produced overwhelmingly decisiveresults to his way of thinking. ForA Vindication also seemsto make a case against everything he had espoused.

If argument did not deliver incontestable conclusions, where was oneto go? Burke’s answer, in his notes, was that where this was so,peopleshould prefer the conclusions that accorded with theirnatural feelings. The complement to this emphasis upon feeling was tolook to the results of affective preference—that is to say, acriterion for conduct in such a case was what tended to make peoplebetter and happier.

This was a judgement in the first place about personal conduct, andthe manner of applying it to matters on the larger scale of civilsociety was less obvious. Here the judgement of benefit, whetherethical or pleasurable, might be harder to discern. In order to makeit plain inA Vindication, Burke applied areductio adabsurdum to principles in theology that he had rejected byshowing their consequences for politics.

For that is whatA Vindication provided. This short work waswritten in the persona of the recently deceased Henry St. John,Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751). Bolingbroke had been a Torypillar of the state, and therefore of the church too; but theposthumous publication of his philosophical works revealed that farfrom being an Anglican, he had not been a Christian—but rather adeist.A Vindication suggested the ills that Bolingbroke hadattributed to the artifice of revealed religion could be paralleled bythose generated by civil society. One logic, indeed, was attributableon these terms to both Christianity and civil society: that just asthe latter distributed the means of power unequally, so too didChristianity distribute those of salvation unequally (for not everyonehad heard, and fewer believed, the Gospel). The deism of Bolingbrokeimplied the principle that God treated everyone impartially, and thatthe means to salvation were therefore to be found in a mediumavailable to all, and thus available from the earliest point of humanhistory, namely reason. It was easy to add, as Burke did, that if theprinciple that such an original nature was the mature expression ofGod’s ordinances were to be applied to civil society, thenormative result would be a regression from complex and thereforecivilised forms to a simple society, even to animal-likeprimitiveness—some of the matter ofA Vindicationparaphrases Rousseau’sDiscourse on Inequality (Sewell1938, 97–114). So Bolingbroke the deist and Bolingbroke thepolitician could be made to look very much at odds with each other.This gap offered Burke an opening.A Vindication satirizedBolingbroke’s schizophrenic position, employing a good deal oftransparent exaggeration to make ‘his’ criticisms of civil(‘artificial’) society seem very absurd: and Burke added apreface to the second edition which made the disjunctive alternativesclear so that even he who ran might read.

Yet it is hard not to recognize that Burke himself was telling thereader, in a way that entered the consciousness all the more forciblybecause it accompanied entertainment, that civil society really didinvolvesome evils, just as he identified losses as well asgains from progress in other connexions. Burke’sVindication, speaking in the voice of pseudo-Bolingbroke,lamented the situation of miners: and ‘the innumerable servile,degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome andpestiferous occupations’ of ‘so many wretches’ waslamented by Burke without any such persona, thirty-four years later inReflections on the Revolution in France. Such criticism,taken in itself, is undoubtedly telling. Burke never dissembled theexistence of the real misery that he observed in civil society.Instead, he pointed out that wretched practices could not be detachedfrom the larger pattern of habits and institution in which they wereimplicated, and that this pattern had a beneficial effect overall.Burke recognized misery, did not deny it, and therefore had a livelysense of the imperfection of arrangements, however civilized theymight be. His sense of duality in nature and society resembles AdamSmith’s.

Burke’s position, therefore, was poised. But it was not merely amatter of pointing out what made for good and what for ill in civilsociety: it was a matter of responsibility—of choosing morallyappropriate words. This was so for a philosophical reason, because ofthe very nature of the words involved. Burke’sPhilosophicalEnquiry divided words into three categories. First, there wereaggregate words, which signified groups of simple ideas united bynature, e.g. man, horse, or tree. Second, there were simple abstractwords, each of which stood for one simple idea involved in suchunities, as red, blue, round or square. Thirdly, and most importantlyfor our purpose, came abstract compound words. These united aggregatewords and simple abstract words. As such, they need not have areferent that existed in nature.A Philosophical Enquiryargued that no compound abstract nouns suggested ideas to the mind atall readily, and that in many cases they did not correspond to anyidea at all, but instead produced in the mind only images of pastexperience connected with these words. This category included virtue,vice, justice, honour, and liberty, besides magistrate, docility andpersuasion (Wecter 1940, 167–81). The centrality of such termsto a discussion of civil society requires no emphasis. The obviousinference from Burke’s philosophy of language was that to useabstract compound words was less to discuss ideas than to raise imageswhich touched the affections of the listener or reader. To do thiscould scarcely to be thought part of a speculative activity: theeffect would not be cognitive, but practical: not to develop ideas,but to influence conduct. The question was, with what arrangementswere these words, and therefore pleasurable images, to beconnected.

This understanding of the mind gave speakers and writers an unusuallypowerful role. It was in their hands to connect words which suggestedpro-attitudes with arrangements oftheir choosing: for thesewords had did not imply only one set of conceptual contents, becausethey implied none. If one recollects the propensity to imitation thatBurke found in mankind, this choosing was likely also to be leading.So Burke was exceptionally sensitive to the role of men of letters andpublic speakers in moulding opinion. By the same measure, he had anunusually lively sense of their responsibilities. It wastheywho had the power to guide people to the proper ends, or elsewhere.Guidance need not be directly didactic—indeed, it could not be,because there could be no definitions to expound — but would bea matter of providing a linguistic setting which guided listeners andreaders to goals that were ethically and politically beneficial.

One crucial approach that Burke himself developed washistoriographical. In works of history or in oratory, discussioninvolving a compound abstract noun—such as‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’— could takeplace in connexion with aggregate words like ‘Indians’ or‘the English’, and, therefore, being discussed in relationto these, connected that noun with definite ideas rather than withfurther ideas that had no easily identifiable content—or nocontent at all. Almost all of Burke’s writings and his moreimportant speeches have a strong historical element. That element iscast as a narrative in a way that connects compound abstract wordswith specific persons and specific transactions. Burke also wroteavowedly historical works in the years immediately after publishingA Philosophical Enquiry The content of these historiesdeveloped the preferences of his youth for improvement by embodyingthese in a way that made them integral to the origins and continuingcharacter of modern arrangements in the Americas and in England.

Burke, like Smith again, wrote ‘philosophical’ history,that is to say gave a view of the key agencies that had shaped humandestiny over the long run of human society. Indeed, he casuallyimplied a four-stage theory of socio-economic history at a time whenScottish stadial history, except that in Dalrymple’sFeudalProperty (1757), was either unwritten or unpublished. But hisattention, primarily, lay elsewhere, as appears inAn Account ofthe European Settlements. This work arose from the initiative of‘booksellers’ alive to the reading public’s interestin North America, where Britain was then at war with France, and thework was co-written with Burke’s ‘cousin’ and friendWilliam Burke. Edmund’s pen is evident in the passages whichcontrast ‘savagery’ with civilization. The book emphasizedthat the coming of Europeans to the New World brought with it acivilizing of ‘savages,’ who were far from noble, throughthe agency of institutionalised Christianity. This implicit distancefrom the contemporary cult of ‘the noble savage’, and fromprimitivism in general, provided an identifiable complement to theimplied rejections ofA Philosophical Enquiry and the satireabout ‘natural society’ inA Vindication.

A stage of human history rather later than that of‘savages’ was delineated withinAn Abridgement ofEnglish History, which Burke wrote after 1757, but did notfinish. So far as it goes, this provided a continuous account that ranfrom the Roman landings to Magna Carta. Christianity figured again inthis narrative as a source of civilization, but the significance ofthe tale was more complex. This time the story was primarilypolitical, and showed how one of the values most prized byBurke’s contemporaries, civil liberty, came to belong toEngland. The Norman Conquest of England established a powerfulexecutive government and brought with it a uniform system of law; ifthese two were necessary conditions for the matching grace of civilliberty for all, however, they were not sufficient: the requiredaddition came from an aristocracy, which had been taught the value ofliberty by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and which had come tounderstand that its own power was insufficient to extract therequisite concessions from the crown unless popular support could bewon. Burke’s sense of the double-edged character of civilizationthus developed into a sense that the political regime required by anadvanced society—the combination of strong institutionswith civil liberty—came from sources that were contraryto each other, and not always beneficial in isolation (aristocracy asa form of government was an ‘austere and insolentdomination’ (TCD, W & S, 1981–2015, ii. 268)): and asboth a strong executive and civil liberty were needed, by the sametoken the forces making for each needed to be counterbalanced from theother side on a continuing basis. This balance of forces characteriseda situation in which ‘liberty’ had an identifiablecontent, namely the specific civil liberties secured through politicalstruggle and written into Magna Carta.

Burke’s narratives suggested that agencies antipathetic to eachother, if properly connected to one another, might produce resultsthat were both intelligible and valuable. One effect amongst severalof this conception of cooperative conflict was a rehabilitation of theRoman Catholicism that was the historic heritage of Burke’sfamily.An Account andAn Abridgement alikesuggested that in its historical time and place Roman Catholicism,and, indeed, clericalism, whether embodied in Jesuit missionaries orin an English archbishop, had been a constituent needed to producesocial and political benefits of a fundamental kind. As anhistoriographical exemplar,An Abridgement therefore showedan exceptional appreciation of the Middle Ages, which was to induceraptures in Lord Acton. It anticipated both Richard Hurd’sLetters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), and, still more, agreat work that set the bearings for Anglo-American medievalists formany years, William Stubbs’Constitutional History ofEngland (1875–8). Burke, however, could not think in termsof an academic historiography, still less one that could be theexclusive intellectual preoccupation of its exponents: neither ofthese existed in his time. He could think, however, of quietlydefusing anti-Roman prejudice in Georgian Britain.

Burke himself was not a Roman Catholic, and viewed enquiry into hispersonal background with alarm and suspicion. This was sensible enoughin a Britain which still subliminally linked civil liberty withProtestantism, and therefore regarded Irishness as a likely pointer topopish subversion of its political values. Burke’s argumentativestance always benefited Roman Catholics, but he never found a kindword for the Pope: his was a position which emphasized the priority ofcivil interests over denominational claims in civil society. IndeedBurke considered that ‘the truth of our common Christianity, isnot so clear as this proposition: that all men, at least the majorityof men in the society, ought to enjoy the common advantages ofit.’ (TPL, W & S 1981–2015, ix.464). This was apolitical development of the centrality he gave to the claims ofimprovement, and of the obvious necessity of its free development forthe bettering of the human condition. It also silently defused anypapal claim to civil dominance on theological grounds and, moreaudibly, suggested that the penalisation of Roman Catholic beliefs waswrong if these did not cause Catholics to interfere with others‘civil interests. Burke’s presumptions about the priority ofcivil interests and a sense of the possible irrelevance ofdenominational opinion to civil society suggest a reading ofLocke’sLetter concerning Toleration andTwoTreatises of Government, the latter of which was common, thoughnot prescribed reading at Trinity. It also implies that the properterms in which to conceive civil interests are those of naturaljurisprudence, because there people are considered without referenceto any specific allegiances, credal or otherwise. Burke referred tonatural law and natural rights directly when such reference advancedhis own arguments, though he made no theoretical contribution tonatural jurisprudence until quite late in life. His creative energieswere mostly applied elsewhere.

Burke developed his thoughts about civil interests in a work that hisexecutors entitledTracts on the Popery Laws, which hedrafted when he was employed as private secretary to the ChiefSecretary for Ireland in the early seventeen-sixties. After this,Burke became involved more immediately in political practice, and, byone means or another, contributed to it until his death and (throughthe activities of his executors in publishing or reprinting hiswritings) from beyond the grave. This was one obvious route forpractical development, even besides the amenities of status that itbrought to Burke. For his view of the compound abstract words involvedin civil discussion did not suggest that purely speculative study hadunlimited potential either for the mind or for personal satisfaction,because a strictly speculative discussion was likely to beinconclusive at best: such words became more readily intelligible inconnexion with the concrete, and therefore the practical. Hence,perhaps, Burke concluded that ‘man is made for Speculation andaction; and when he pursues his nature he succeeds best inboth.’ (Somerset 1957, 87). There was, on this understanding,intellectual benefit in political participation, and, equally,political practice might benefit from the speculative mind. This islikely to seem an implausible position nowadays, when politicalactivity is frenetic, and learning is a matter of speciality; but inthe eighteenth century, when an agile mind could manage at least thebasics of several branches of learning, and the British legislaturewas often in session for less than six months each year, it was moreplausible. Political participation, on Burke’s understanding,besides its intellectual possibilities, had an ethical potential. Tothe extent that thinking about politics was necessarily uncertain, theproper conduct of affairs depended upon an honest as well as acapacious mind, and on a well-disposed management of words.

It remains to show what Burke learnt from political activity, and whathe conferred upon it. The picture is one in which the claims ofpractice enriched Burke’s mind and brought intellectual benefitsto practice itself.

5. Political style: some parliamentary applications

Burke’s life was spent in parliamentary affairs from themid-1760s, and this made a difference to his style of intellectualactivity. This did not lie primarily in developing the cast of hismind, and if in 1771 Burke stated that ‘I have endeavoured allmy life to train my understanding and my temper in the studies andhabits of Philosophy’, at the same time he concluded that‘my Principles are all settled and arranged’^.[5] This did not preclude intellectual innovation. The difference made byparticipation lay not least in his reasons for applying his mind, andconsequently in how he did so. The reasons were to influence opinion,both in Parliament and from his position as a member of thelegislative, and to determine votes in the House of Commons itself.The matter common to both of these was Burke’s view that wordswere central to political understanding.

An obvious inference from Burke’s account of compound abstractwords is that to use these is to touch the experience of reader orlistener, and that persuasion was unavoidably central to discussingpolitics: this befitted a practical rather than a speculative subject.Indeed, these terms implied that the point of discussing politics mustbe to influence action, and nothing much else. Burke developed greatskill in managing words, begun in debating at Trinity and carriedforward at other venues, including the House of Commons. As suchlanguage was persuasive, its objective was to establish pro-attitudesand con-attitudes in mind of listener or reader.

This was not the only philosophical aspect in Burke’s politicalpractice. A major conceptual tool in discussing politics was relation.Relation is one of those terms which was common to both thescholastics and Locke. It denotes both comparison and connexion.Comparison was an invaluable procedure because it enabled events,institutions and persons to be placed in any number of lights whichwould raise or lower their significance and standing. Connexion wasscarcely less valuable, because the place that someone or somethingoccupied could be used to sustain or criticise their role, as well asto demonstrate the value of co-operative contraries. Best of all,relation in either sense lent itself to a myriad of uses, for asLeClerc had remarked in hisLogic (which Burke had read atTrinity) relations were beyond counting—sunt autem innumeraerelationes (Le Clerc 1692, pt. 1, ch. 4, s. 1, p. 19).

Burke’s conception of philosophical history was also fundamentalto his political practice. ‘Every age has its own manners andits politicks dependent upon them’ (TCD, W & S,1981–2015, ii 258). The manners Burke saw around him in Englandwere continuous with those he had seen in the middle ages, orprojected backwards thither, in which a powerful executive governmentwas balanced by other agencies with the effect of securing civilliberty. Those agencies most obvious in Burke’s time hadestablished the sovereignty of Parliament at the Glorious Revolution(1688–9), implied it in the Bill of Rights (1689), exercised itin the Act of Settlement (1701), and confirmed it by suppressing theattempts made from 1708 to 1746 to reassert claims to the throne thatParliament had rejected. Burke understood law in this arrangement asthe guarantor of interests of the governed because it was law passedand secured by Parliament. It was secured in Parliament by the mutualdependence of Commons, Lords and King. That sovereignty had thispublic character made the British state a beneficiary of a very highdegree of financial credit, and this increased the power ofParliament. The long, slow movement of British history from aconception of the realm understood as royal property to the stateconceived as the expression of public will had in Burke’s timereached a stage at which this will was expressed through the decisionsof Parliament in a manner heavily influenced by the monarch.Burke’s political activities therefore assumed parliamentarysovereignty.

If Burke’s view of words and relations gave him practical tools,and if parliamentary sovereignty provided him with a practicalpostulate, what did he assume was the proper end of sovereignty? Wehave seen that the relation between sovereign and the governed had fora primary purpose the protection of the latter’s civilinterests. This much suggests continuity between Burke thephilosopher/historian and Burke the political participant. But theformer might also see that there were complications for the latter.One who sees the multiplicity of civil interests, and the variety ofrelations in which they can be considered, and the variety ofcontraries at work, will see that to put society at ease with itselfmay well imply conflict and see that such conflict is hard to avoid;he or she will see, too, that Parliament forms an arena for conductingit in a stylised and moderated way through the representation ofinterests, appropriate to a civilized state of society; and, evenwhile participating in such a conflict, s/he might recognizes thenecessity of both sides to the result. Here, opponents may be not onlyadversaries but also co-workers, sharing at least some commonassumptions about the system within which their lot was cast, althoughseparated from others by the role required of them. In that situation,the question becomes, where do you take your place? The answer maydepend onyour own connexions, and on how you conceivethem.

6. Burke’s practical reasoning

Let us turn to how Burke’s thinking was informed by hisphilosophical thinking, especially to his use of relation.Burke’s method for written composition often combined (i)identification of relations, with (ii) relevant history, and (iii)treatment in language that would attach pro-attitudes to one side orthe other in a difference of opinion. This method is seen, forinstance, in hisThoughts on the Cause of thePresentDiscontents (1770). Its central statement for our purpose isabout (i) relation in the form of connexion: that the Britishconstitution had been constructed in a manner that required theconnexion (in this case the interdependence) of the parts of thesovereign in order to achieve mutual control. This statementcontrasted with (ii) the historical statement that there was a newsystem of court politics which involved disconnecting those parts inorder to make the monarch independent of the other parts of thepolitical sovereign. Burke’s history showed the emergence ofthis new system, and illustrated its pernicious results in bothdomestic and foreign affairs. The contrast (iii) between the oldersystem — which was represented as having benignresults—was clear, and the disposition of pro-language obviousenough. Burke’s appeal lay to the standards which hiscontemporaries would take for granted, namely those implied in theirbeliefs about parliamentary sovereignty. As if it were not enough, thepicture of the older order was reinforced by a sense of connexion inthe Aristotelian sense that Burke’s society recognized andapproved—that man was sociable, rather than being a solitarybeast, and above all by the annexation of the key term ofconnexion to the side of the dispute that Burke favoured. Allof these considerations suggested the appropriateness of ‘thegood’ combining to counterbalance the efforts of courtpoliticians, and so to sustain parliamentary sovereignty and itsbenefits.

This illustrates Burke’s remarkable ability to combinephilosophical method and philosophical history, as well as thepractical purpose to which he put them—forming an understandingof politics which was practical in the very particular sense ofcalling for activity in one direction to counterbalance forces comingfrom another. It was also practical in relation to advancing veryspecific interests. These considerations were used to situate quiteanother sense of connexion, namely political party, and especially theparty of Lord Rockingham to which and to whom Burke had attachedhimself. IndeedPresent Discontents was read in draft by hisparty’s leading lights before publication. On publication, thepamphlet was widely understood as a manifesto for this party. AfterpublicationPresent Discontents became a manual from whichfledging politicians learnt the rationale of their party, and, indeed,a source book for cat calls from the party colleagues from whom Burkeseparated in 1791. The philosophical and historical element inBurke’s positions is evident only to those who retrace all ofhis steps; an activity which his contemporaries lacked the will, and(as not all of his major works had been published) some of the meansto do.

The educative effect of Burke’s writing is not to beunderestimated in a civil society which boasted many highly literatemembers but had very few with any formal education in politicalscience (except, sometimes, at Scottish universities). Indeed, it islikely that Burke wrote in order to educate. Yet at the same time thatthe strength of his ideas and historical arguments, and the skill withwhich he developed these, excites the reader’s admiration, theycreate unease. This is not merely because inPresentDiscontents the philosophical sense of connexion is used toadumbrate the claims of a party connexion: it is a more generalizeddisquiet. A politician inspires confidence, in part, because s/he istaken to be honest: and a good way to be thought honest is to conveythe impression that you are not clever enough to deceive. As aphilosopher commands interest when s/he is intellectually powerful,this impression is one that is hard to achieve: but it can be done.C.D. Broad suggested that ‘Locke, we feel, is not so muchcleverer than ourselves as to be capable of playing tricks with useven if he wanted to do so. He is the Mr Baldwin^[6] of philosophy, and he derives from his literary style some of theadvantages which that statesman owed to his pipe and his pigs.’(Broad 1952, 39). This judgement does not apply to Burke, though hedid keep pigs. The reader carries away from Burke a sense of greatcreative power, dialectical skill, and verbal ingenuity: in short, asense of being overborne by intellectual force. The listener probablyreceived other and unwelcome sensations when these were seconded bypersonal raucousness. Such feelings generate unease, and unease isincreased by Burke’s manner of writing.

His literary style is to argue clearly and concisely, but in doing soto include a manifest carefulness of qualification that will permitsubsequent shifts of position—for instance his self-descriptionas a ‘true but severe friend to monarchy’ is consistentwith his occupying any point within the generous spectrum ofparliamentary sovereignty—and, indeed, the sense of historicalchange which pervadesPresent Discontents suggests thatpolitical movement is a common experience. Unease, perhaps, isincreased even further: for against one equipped with thisintellectual repertoire, the accusation of inconsistency isirresistibly tempting and utterly useless. Again, Burke’s is avery sensible way for a statesman to think, but it is not how thepublic wishes politicians to appear on most occasions. Still less isit reassuring about Burke’s intellectualbona fides:for this is not how people innocent of political experience, who arealways the majority, conceive the role of political principles.Coleridge put his finger on an important point when he suggested thatfrom ‘principles exactly the same’ Burke coulddraw ‘practical inferences almost opposite’ in differentsituations (Coleridge, 1983, vol. i, 191). Burke’s philosophicaland historical positions are clear, but they do not translate, andwere not meant to translate, into a set of specific practicalconclusions of permanent validity.

There was the contrast, too, between the breadth of view and oflearning in the matured statements that Burke published, on the onehand, and, on the other, the ways of the parliamentary pugilist whowas audible to fellow M.P.s and legible to others in the speechesreported by the daily newspapers. Burke’s manner was anythingbut ‘philosophical’ as the public understands the word.Partly this was, doubtless, because Burke was like that as a person,and not least because he had a weak voice that had to be raised if itwas to be heard in the bear garden that was the House of Commons, butpartly, too, because hisPhilosophical Enquiry had suggestedthat the best way to impart a mood to an audience was to display itoneself. So, for instance, if Burke needed to plead for moderation, hedid so immoderately. Above all, perhaps, it was because thisphilosopher- turned-participant was not exempt from the need to win tohis side enough minds to ensure that his side was not beaten (or, atany rate, demonstrated enough strength to remain in contention), andhad at hand an exceptionally powerful range of persuasive tools. It isan evident fact, too, that the resources of Western civilization weresometimes invoked by Burke in order to produce votes in the House ofCommons—votes, which, whatever else they were, were in theinterests of his party. But, manifestly, these resources do not supplya rationale for only one policy, still less for only one party or forvoting only one way on a given occasion. The roles of thinker andparty spokesman consort ill: and there were bound to be doubts aboutone

Who born for the Universe, narrow’d his mind,
And to party gave up, what was meant for mankind.
Tho’ fraught with all learning, kept straining his throat,
To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.
(Goldsmith, lines 31–34).

An apparent junction of this sort was always likely to suggest thatBurke had profoundly personal motives for narrowing his mind, and whenhe was not being caricatured as an Irish Jesuit he was being satirizedas a corrupt hack.^[7]Yet some sort of procedure of the type pursued by Burke wasimplied in his sense of practical reasoning. The ‘philosopher inaction’ had the function of finding ‘proper means’to ‘the proper ends of Government’ marked out by‘the speculative philosopher’ (TCD, W & S,1981–2015, ii. 45–51). Parliamentary votes, in thesituation that Burke found himself, were amongst the proper means.

7. Burke and the American Revolution

Political participation generated scepticism about Burke as a person,some of which was unjust, though all of it was to be expected. Whatwas perhaps less predictable, and is certainly more interestingphilosophically, is that this participation was a precondition of thepractical thought which made Burke famous in his own time and hasgiven him a leading place in the canon of Western political thought.One very important example of this is his treatment of the AmericanRevolution. This was informed, no doubt, by where Burke happened tofind himself on the spectrum of practical politics in the years thatfollowed 1766. But his conclusions for practice were informed also byhis understanding of ideas – meaning ideas in a philosophical,precisely in a Lockean sense – and how these could be combined.In other words, the content of his political thought was informedimportantly not only by where he was practically but also who he wasphilosophically.

Burke’s practical thinking about the dispute between the Britishparliament and its North American colonies began with a situation notof his making, that is to say the rejection of the Stamp Act by thecolonists, and its withdrawal by the ministry headed by LordRockingham in 1765–6. The Rockingham ministry followed up thisconcession by way of letting the colonists alone with the explicitassertion of Parliament’s right to legislate for the colonies inthe Declaratory Act of 1766. Burke’s task was to demonstrate tothe House of Commons the plausibility of this package. He did so bycombining two complex ideas—or at least two abstract compoundnouns—in a new way. One idea was empire, which involved command.The other was liberty. These, Burke thought, were ideas difficult tocombine—a sound reflection as they are diametricallyopposed—but that they were combinable in the further idea of aBritish empire—one which combined legislative commandwith civil liberty. This idea implied letting alone certain matters ofconcern to the colonists, and so allowing them in some respects civilliberty on ade facto basis (SDR, W & S 1981–2015,ii. 317–18). This idea is considerably more ingenious than theaverage British opinion that ‘all the dominions of Great Britainare bound by Acts of Parliament’^.[8] Burke’s view was explanatory, because it conceived thesituation before Parliament in a way that made intelligible the pointsinvolved and established a connexion amongst them. It was alsoaccommodating, because it made the British executive’s policyintellectually and therefore practically respectable at the same timethat it made room for colonial preferences. In short, it was a smallmasterpiece of thinking about policy.

The repeal of the Stamp Act was followed by the passing of theDeclaratory Act. Burke was practically successful in 1766 with theHouse of Commons because he was speaking for the executive, and amajority amongst Members of Parliament,ceteris paribus,tended to vote for the king’s ministers. In 1774 and 1775 he waspractically unsuccessful, because he was now in opposition, but hisconceptual achievement in dealing with the American question becamemuch greater. By 1774, the issues dividing some American colonistsfrom Parliament had changed. The former now resented the attempts ofthe latter to levy taxation on them directly, rather than by theauthority of their own colonial legislatures, and they resented stillmore the project of backing the attempt, if need be, with coercion.Burke’s speech of 1774 onAmerican Taxation did notdelete the idea of imperial command, but rather elaborated his complexidea of the British empire in a new way in order to deal with the newsituation.

Burke elaborated the complex idea in a way to which complex ideas lendthemselves, that is to say, by adding a qualification of content. Thesovereignty of the British parliament was an idea that certainlyincluded a right to tax: but a right to tax could be understood to beconsistent on principle with inaction as well as action. The right, inplainer language, need not be applied. Burke could accommodate,therefore, both the claims of Westminster and those of the colonists.To this point, of course, one might reply that Burke wasmerely making concessions. But observe: this situationprovided a cue for innovation in an idea —Burke inserted adistinction into the idea of sovereignty. He distinguished ‘myidea of the constitution of the British Empire’ from ‘theconstitution of Britain’ unconnected with overseas rule. Itcould be inferred that

The Parliament of Great Britain sits at the head of her extensiveempire in two capacities: one of the local legislature of this island,providing for all things at home…The other…is what Icall herimperial character, in which…she superintendsall the several inferior legislatures, and guides, and controls themall without annihilating any. As all these provincial legislatures areonly co-ordinate to each other, they ought all to be subordinate toher….It is necessary to coerce the negligent, to restrain theviolent, and to aid the weak and deficient, by the over-rulingplenitude of her power. She is never to intrude into the place of theothers, whilst they are equal to the common ends of their institution.But in order to enable parliament to answer all these ends ofprovident and beneficent superintendence, her powers must be boundless

so that Burke’s elaboration of the complex idea of the Britishempire suggests complementary roles for the British parliament and thecolonial legislatures, an elaboration which would make the question oftaxation irrelevant at a stroke, whilst simultaneously emphasizing theauthority of Westminster.

Conceptual refinement provided a practical avenue that other, lessgifted politicians had not devised. Burke’s position wasaltogether subtler than the implied tautology of a minister’sclaim that ‘to say we have a right to tax America and are neverto exercise that right is ridiculous’ (Sir Edward Thurlow,quoted in Gore-Brown 1953, 85), and of another politician’sdespairing sense that ‘we must either insist upon theirsubmission to the authority of the Legislature or give them upentirely to their own discretion.’^.[9] These pundits, by failing to conceive a sufficiently complex idea ofsovereignty and the sovereign’s right to tax, failed also to seethat sovereignty did not imply an unpleasant choice between abrogatingthis right by disuse or applying it by force.

Events soon required a further elaboration of Burke’s idea ofthe British empire. The continued use of coercion made the colonistsmore, not less recalcitrant. The practical need seemed to be for termson which they would stay, in some sense or senses, under British rule.Their crucial claim was now that their right to tax themselves bytheir own legislatures rested on charters from the Crown, and thatthey were subordinate to the Crown alone, and not to Parliament. Burkegave still closer attention to the idea of sovereignty. It would betactless to emphasize the sovereignty of Parliament, but it would beself-defeating to withdraw it explicitly and concede a sovereign rightover taxation to the colonial legislatures. So now, in Burke’sspeech onConciliation with America (1775), he focussed upononly one aspect of the complex idea of a parliamentary sovereign. Thelatter comprised in the British instance not only Lords and Commons,but also the king. Hence, by judicious emphasis, the item acquiescedin by the colonists could do some conceptual work: ‘my idea ofan Empire…is…that an Empire is the aggregate of manyStates, under one common head; whether this head be a monarch or apresiding republick’; and it was emphasized that the rights ofthe colonists depended on this superior, for ‘the claim of aprivilege seems rather,ex vi termini, to imply a superiorpower.’ As to a right to tax, Burke added on a later occasion,that though it ‘was inherent in thesupreme power ofsociety, taken as anaggregate, it did not follow that itmust reside in anyparticular power in that society’,and therefore Parliament could delegate it to local legislatures. Inshort, ‘sovereignty was not in its nature an idea of abstractunity; but was capable of great complexity and infinitemodifications.’ (SSC, W & S 1981–2015, iii. 193).

Whether Burke’s ‘infinite modifications’ would haveassisted in keeping the thirteen colonies within the fold of theBritish empire is unknowable. For nothing like his proposals was trieduntil 1778, which was too late. It is clear, however, thatBurke’s ability to make changes in ideas depended on hisphilosophical thinking. To think in terms of complex ideas is torecognize that they can be elaborated by adding further ideas; todistinguish between the roles of Parliament is to make that addition;and to analyse the powers of a parliamentary sovereign as a preface torelocating one of them is to use philosophy as a tool in practicalreasoning. It is noteworthy, also, that these philosophical exerciseswere the means of coping, as Burke hoped, with practical changes.Neither was his work here primarily ideological, for though Burke hada practical goal in view, and at that one consistent with theRockingham achievements of 1766, he worked philosophically to modifythe conceptions in terms of which his contemporaries viewed theirsituation, rather than using his philosophical tools as ways ofdefending those conceptions without modifying them. Thus he addedideas to the stock of his day. It is fitting, though Burke’sproposals were not implemented in time, and though his goal was notattained, that his American speeches figured prominently in theschools and universities of both the U.K. and the U.S.A. well into thetwentieth century. Burke, after all, was suspicious of poor ideas: heconcluded that ‘one of the main causes of our presenttroubles’ was ‘general discourses, and vaguesentiments’, and urged instead study of ‘an exact detailof particulars’ (SSC, W & S 1981–2015, iii. 185).

8. Philosophical Character of Political Disposition

Burke’s thinking about America also suggests a politicaldisposition that owed something to his philosophical conceptions.Burke’s complaint inAmerican Taxation againstministers was that ‘they have taken things…without anyregard to their relations or dependencies’, and had ‘noone connected view.’ This was in part a straightforwardlycognitive position on which Burke laid an emphasis with prudentialpoint: the world with which politicians dealt was complex, and to useideas which were insufficiently complex to capture its contents andtheir relations was a short way to meet the rough side ofreality. It was also, implicitly an ethical position: governmentsought not to apply force to existing relations, at least those thatwere legitimate. This is, in one way, an obvious point from naturaljurisprudence, and one that Burke had made transparently with respectto inroads by the government of Ireland against Catholic property. Inanother, and more interesting way, it reflected his view that abstractcompound nouns and complex ideas evoke specific past experiences. Tointerfere forcibly with someone’s experientially-basedexpectations would be to break their mental association betweenexperience and idea or word: and so the idea or the word would becomemeaningless and cease to influence action. If, therefore, ‘myhold of the Colonies, is in the close affection which grows fromcommon names’, amongst other sources that were ‘thoughlight as air…as strong as links of iron’, then ‘letthe Colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associatedwith your Government;—they will cling and grapple toyou…But let it be once understood, that your Government may beone thing, and their Privileges another; that these two things mayexist without any mutual relation; the cement is gone; the cohesion isloosened; and every thing hastens to decay and dissolution.’(CWA, W & S 1981–2015, iii. 164). To break such mentalassociations was to break communities.

This point suggested that a genuinely prudent conduct of affairs wouldproceed without assaulting the mental associations of the governed,and, as change was omnipresent, would conduct its share under acceptednames—in other words, by gradual and by moderate reform ofinstitutions and practices rather than by immediate and totalreplacement, which Burke stigmatised as ‘innovation’.This, indeed, was what Burke claimed to be doing in his contributionsof 1780–82 to the recasting of the royal household. Theintellectual counterpart of this prudent conduct, namely therefinement of our existing ideas, rather than replacing them, is whathe had done in his revisions of the idea of sovereignty.

This style of thinking gave Burke a very lively sense of the corrosivepower of new ideas. Even newquestions could have unpleasantresults. When the innovations made by the British government unsettledthe colonists, ‘then…they questioned all the parts ofyour legislative power; and by the battery of such questions haveshaken the solid structure of this Empire to its deepestfoundations.’ The proper way to avoid such shakes to civilsociety was to ‘consult and follow your experience’ (ATX,W & S 1981–2015, ii.411, 457), for ‘experience’according to Burke’s philosophy of language was a condition ofcontinuity of mind, and, on the basis of mind, of a sustainablepractice. His was therefore a philosophically conditioned attitude topractice, and one that was very sensitive to the hiatus thatspeculation could cause in the latter. Burke’s sensitivity canproduce apodictic language in order to persuade people to make use ofthe ideas they have inherited, by urging ‘a total renunciationof every speculation of my own; and… [by recommending] aprofound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors’ (CWA, W& S 1981–2015, iii.139). Indeed, Burke can be found,sometimes, deprecating on such rational grounds all explicit appeal tospeculation of any complexion or hue, if it had a disturbing effect:‘reason not at all—oppose the ancient policy and practiceof the empire, as a rampart against the speculations of innovators onboth sides of the question’ (italics added: ATX, W& S 1981–2015, ii.166). His deprecation of speculation waslogically anterior to taking sides in politics.

It was also, in effect, an appeal for ideas adequate to governing.This is evident in Burke’s criticism of ‘vulgar andmechanical politicians’,

a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross andmaterial; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be directorsof the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in themachine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught,…rulingand master principles, which, in the opinion of such men as I havementioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth every thing,and all in all,

so that ‘little minds’ could not govern ‘a greatempire’ (CWA, W & S 1981–2015, iii.139), or,evidently, any empire at all, whereas better results might be expectedfrom ‘men truly initiated and rightly taught.’

Burke himself, however much he might try to set the logic of histhought and his intellectual inventiveness within a rich foliage ofwords generated by his skill with the English language—he isperhaps the only classic of political thought in the English languagewho is also a literary classic—was a philosophical thinker. Assuch, his practical conclusions could change, and did, as we haveseen. Practical conclusions changed because they were meant to beserviceable in a world that itself was changing. Burke’sphilosophical equipment, however, served him in the face of allexternal changes. The most dramatic of such changes came during thelast eight years of his life with the advent of the French Revolutionof 1789 and its continuation, in varying forms, down to 1797.

9. The Revolution in France

Burke’s name is indissolubly connected to hisReflections onthe Revolution in France. IfReflections was not thefirst criticism of the Revolution of 1789, it is the one that hasestablished itself permanently in the public mind as the most incisiveone, and it is unlikely to be displaced. This is a curious fact, in away. If we turn to Burke’s other writings of the 1790s, a moreperceptive account of the causes of the Revolution of 1789 is to befound inA Letter to William Elliot (1795). Again,Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–7) investigate thecharacter and consequences of the Revolution from 1791 in a morethoroughgoing way thanReflections had provided for the years1789 and 1790. Yet, in an important sense, the judgement of posterityis right for our purposes.Reflections illustrates veryclearly the central importance of philosophy and‘philosophical’ history for Burke’s writing aboutone of the greatest changes of his day very soon after it had begun totake effect.

This is true, in the first place, in terms of insight.Reflections was published on 1 November 1790, less thaneighteen months after the storming of the Bastille. The interveningperiod had been characterised by a mixture of popular violence andpeaceable, if feverish political activity in France, as its absolutemonarchy gave way to a constitutional monarchy. A detached observerwould be unsure of the future. Whether destruction and violence wouldpredominate or whether an enduring constitutional order would emergewas a question which events had not answered. In the event, of course,the Revolution would be characterised by violence and constitutionaldevelopment alike at different times, but this was as unknowable in1790 as it is obvious in the twenty-first century. Burke, despite thedarkness in which contemporary assessment are made, was able to judgeand to judge very decisively.

Burke’sReflections may be divided (for the author didnot provide any formal divisions) into two portions of unequal length.Both of these are concerned with relations. The first portion, abouttwo-thirds of the text, suggests that the French, in their enthusiasmfor the idea of liberty, had failed to understand that liberty wasonly one amongst a range of benefits,all of which wererequired in mutual connexion for a life under civil government thatwas civilized in the proper sense. The results which flowed from thisdeficiency of understanding included constitutional arrangementswhich, because they did not reflect an understanding of liberty thatwas subtle enough to grasp that the liberty of the many was power, didnot qualify popular sovereignty in a way that would restrain thedemos effectively. As if an unrestrained populace was not badenough, an understanding of life only in terms of liberty swept awaypreceding elaborations of our ideas. This mattered, because therefinement of ideas had been a precondition of refinement of conductand therefore of the progress of society in many respects. One keyinstance of these was the respectful treatment of women encouragedsince the middle ages by Christian learning and by chivalry. But therewas a newer philosophy: ‘on this scheme of things, a king is buta man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animalnot of the highest order’. The retrogression of humanity itselfto animality was not far ahead in the future with ‘a swinishmultitude’. The result, as people would no longer be moved byopinion which had embodied refined ideas, would be that they wouldneed to be governed by force. Force, too, was the ultimate destinationof the second portion ofReflections. This suggested that theidea of equality had been connected only too pervasively with theinstitutional arrangements of the judiciary, the legislative and theexecutive power—and therefore had produced no authority capableof eliciting obedience, but only institutionalised feebleness anddisorder. At the same time, the perverse results of equality in fiscalarrangements had caused popular discontent and financial instability.The result was a situation which could be controlled only by the forceof the military—if, indeed, military order could subsist whensoldiers had applied the idea of equality to their calling. France, itseemed, tended towards either disintegration or the rule of force.

Burke’s philosophical repertoire and historical understandingthus provided the structure ofReflections, and, perhaps moreimportantly, suggested insights into the character of the Revolution.The inattention of the revolutionaries to the relations that needed tobe comprised in a modern government, especially in connexion withliberty, was matched by the inappropriateness to a sovereign regime ofstructuring its institutions around equality rather than aroundeffective command. These insights suggested that a mis-structuring ofthe new constitution proceeded from an inadequate philosophical grasp.Such misunderstanding was matched by a failure to understand thehistorical development which had produced the elaboration of ideasabout conduct that had underwritten government by opinion, and thisfailure suggested that the Revolution would cause retrogression fromthis civilized condition towards a less gentle way of proceeding, aswell as a less effective one. In other words, Burke’sunderstanding of philosophy, and of the history of Europe, conceived‘philosophically’, provided grounds for making fundamentalclaims about the Revolution.

Whether Burke was right in these claims about the Revolution, ofcourse, is another question, and one that can never be answered:French readers ofReflections could take its lessons toheart, and, anyhow, events have a way of modifying tendenciesindependently of intention and interpretation. Indeed, none of this isto say thatReflections was intended as an academic work, oreven an accurate factual statement, about the Revolution. It wascalculated to produce a practical result, which was to dissuade theBritish from admiring the Revolution and so to dampen any propensitythey might feel to imitate it: and thus to protect civilization inBritain. In the course of pursuing this goal, Burke was willing tosatirize the Revolution and its British sympathizers unmercifully inorder to make them as unattractive as possible to any sane reader, andhe matched the satire with a panegyric on British social and politicalarrangements. There is, indeed, much inReflections besidesthe elements that have been emphasized here (and indeed much inBurke’s later views on the Revolution which is not inReflections): but without those elements neither the book norBurke’s understanding of the Revolution would have beenpossible.

10. Problems of Interpretation

It is clear by now that neither ‘mystic spirit’ nor‘irrationalism’ characterise Burke helpfully. Theseexamples of academic appraisal might be taken as extreme. At the sametime they witness interpretative difficulties. Whilst Burke’sthought has never lacked interpreters from his own day to ours, on thewhole they have not brought to bear the combined persistence ofhistorical insight and strength of conceptual grasp required to dojustice to him. Hence he has suffered an ironic fate for one who urgedbreadth and precision of thought. That is to say, he has figured asthe spokesman for a very limited number of points or as onepreoccupied with a limited number of themes. This type of treatmentbegan in the nineteenth century, when Burke was invoked as an antidoteto the confidence of the French Revolution by liberal thinkers whoprized its principles, saw their narrowness, and required a sense ofhistorical development to situate them properly in a viable civilsociety. It was continued when Matthew Arnold tried to treat Burke asa (pre-Home Rule) Gladstonian spokesman about Ireland. It went furtherstill in the twentieth century, when Burke was pressed into service asa counter-revolutionary agent in the anti-Communist cause, and whenthe twenty-first dawned some were treating Burke as a proponent ofpostmodernism. He himself could hardly have complained that his workhas been put topractical use, but it remains true thatacademic justice has yet to be done to him. Chapters and essays onindividual themes in his writings have been more plausible on thewhole than attempts at general interpretation, which usuallyconcentrate on a theme or themes of choice, or subordinateBurke’s thought to it or them, and so give the impression(deliberately or otherwise) that this is the whole of Burke, or at anyrate that this is what matters about him. One response to thissituation is to concentrate primarily on telling the story, and it isinteresting that a number of recent works have taken this path.

In attacking the Revolution in France, Burke constructed arogues’ gallery for French politicians, and stocked it also withquite a number of French thinkers. The figures who appeared to berogues, however, were most of them only straw men, stuffed accordingto the prejudices of a British audience. More significantly for ourpurposes, Burke’s censure of thephilosophes attributedto them complicity with the style of thought that had set up a limitedrange of simple principles as the norm for politics, and which waswholly inadequate to understand and satisfy the connected and variousneeds of human nature under modern conditions. Burke preferred toemphasize that numerous principles, and practical thinking to combinethem, were necessary to meet these needs, and so to sustainimprovement; and to emphasize, too, that such accommodation involvedmuch more practical activity than speculative design. Correspondingly,his own writings develop, not a political philosophy but rather apolitical style that had at its core philosophical elements. This wasa style which implicitly suggested thatpolitical philosophywas insufficient to thinking constructively about politics if it wasonly a speculative sort of knowledge; or, in other words, that it wasnot a way of thinking sufficient to the task of ‘the philosopherin action’. The philosopher in action, at least as embodied byBurke himself, assumed that political philosophy should be highlypractical. It had for its goal regulating opinion in order to producegood political results and to prevent bad ones. “It has everbeen the great primary object of speculative and doctrinal philosophyto regulate opinion”, he wrote. “It is the great object ofpolitical philosophy to promote that which is sound, and to extirpatewhat is mischievous, and which directly tends to render men badcitizens in the community, and mischievous neighbours out of it”(RP2, W & S ix.295).

Such a style of thought emphasises the importance of combining a widerange of principles, and of remembering that principles, howevernumerous or important, are only one element in a satisfactory conductof practice. There can be no doubt that analysis was involved inBurke’s proceedings: “let this position beanalysed,” he instructed the British House of Commons criticallyin 1794, “for analysis is the deadly enemy of alldeclamation.”^[10] Though Burke could certainly conduct effective analyses of ideas andwords even after more than twenty years at Westminster, as hisLetter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792) witnesses, his accentlay more decidedly upon the necessity of connecting ideas with eachother, and the inclusion of elements other than one’s own ideasin any treatment of politics that aspired to intellectual andpractical validity. There is nothing in a style of doing philosophythat centres upon analysis that is logically inconsistent with theseprocedures. One temper of mind, however, which sometimes accompaniesthis manner of philosophising is antipathetic to Burke, whilst thereis much in contemporary opinions about politics, including those heldby at least some analytical philosophers, that he would have founddangerously naive. Amongst these a belief in a continuing popularsovereignty (the modern term of art for this is‘democracy’) rather than parliamentary sovereignty is onlythe most obvious example. If Burke is unlikely at present to be thedarling of some philosophers and of some pundits; still less will hebe of those who suppose that in discussing a small number ofprinciples they provide a prescriptive and sufficient guidance for theconduct of policy; and even less of anyone who supposes it logicallyadequate to claim that ‘one very simple principle’ is‘entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with theindividual in the way of compulsion and control’ or to discussany other matter (Mill 1859, ‘Introductory’). The complexcharacter of ideas, their connexions with each other, the need tounderstand practice in terms of such relations, the importance ofcontinuity in thought and practice, and to conduct practice withattention to habitual linkages amongst people’s ideas andactivities, suggest a different sort of thinking. So it is notsurprising that Burke has been quietly ignored by many recentthinkers, or summarily dismissed from consideration by being labelledas a ‘conservative’—but it is of great interest thathe has found and finds many admirers amongst those who succeed in theconduct of practical politics. Whilst Burke would have been the firstto point out that his specific conclusions belong to a time and aplace, his intellectual style is one with which any serious thinkingabout politics, whether reflective or practical, needs to engage.

11. Conclusion

Burke’s thought is philosophical in at least two senses. One isthat it is constituted in part by thinking in terms of philosophicalconceptions, especially complex ideas, particularly those of relation,as well as involving significant positions in philosophical psychologyand philosophy of language. The other sense is that it develops anaccount of the American, British and European past which isphilosophical history, as the eighteenth-century understood the term.These senses, once put together, inform a style of practical thinkingabout politics which emphasizes the importance of synthetic as well asanalytical thinking for practice, and suggests that a progressivepractice requires not only the yields of past effort but also theintelligent application of mind to their further development iffurther progress, rather than regress, is to result. Burke is perhapsthe least studied of political classics, but he is certainly amongstthe small number with whom anyone who aspires to have an adequatepolitical education must read and mark very carefully.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Burke’s Writings

There is no complete edition of Burke’s works: their quantity,the character of some of his manuscript materials and the manner inwhich many of his parliamentary speeches are preserved all make itvery likely that this situation will continue. Neither have theeditorial problems implied in his writings and speeches been overcomein the selections that have been published. For the present, there is,in nine, large substantive volumes,:Writings and Speeches ofEdmund Burke, P. Langford (general editor), Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1981–2015. This, though not without further problemspeculiar to itself, does at least provide a standard system referencefor most of the items quoted here, and is cited above asW& S, and individual works are cited as follows:

[ATX]	American Taxation.
[CWA]	Conciliation with America.
[RRF]	Reflections on the Revolution in France.
[RP]	Letters on a Regicide Peace.
[SSC]	Second Speech on Conciliation.
[SDR]	Speech on Declaratory Resolutions.
[TCD]	Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.
[TPL]	Tracts relating to Popery Laws

Note also:

• [Burke, William, and Edmund Burke], 1757,An Account of theEuropean Settlements, London (and later editions).
• Somerset, H.V.F, ed., 1957,A Notebook of Edmund Burke,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Burke’s Correspondence

• Copeland, T.W., 1958–78, (general ed.),TheCorrespondence of Edmund Burke, Cambridge and Chicago, CambridgeUniversity Press and University of Chicago Press, (ten volumes). Citedas Corr.
• Kelly, J., 2014, ‘A missing letter by Edmund Burke’,Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 29: 142–8.
• Lock, F.P., 1997, 1999, 2003 ‘Unpublished BurkeLetters’,English Historical Review, 112:119–141; 114: 636–657; 118: 940–982.
• Lonsdale, R., 1982, ‘An Uncollected Letter of EdmundBurke’,Notes and Queries, 29(3): 202.
• Walsh, P., 2009 ‘A new Burke letter from 1778’,Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 24: 159–63.

There is further unprinted correspondence in various repositories. Theprimary collections of Burke manuscripts are at Sheffield CityArchives and Northamptonshire Archives, both in the United Kingdom,but there is further material by Burke in a wider range of places; thematerial in manuscript bearing on him is extremely bulky, diverse andscattered.

Secondary Literature

There is relatively little recent literature primarily onBurke’s philosophical writings, however‘philosophical’ is defined, though there is much thatmakes reference to or use of them: thus a bibliography of writingsabout his views on beauty, gender, and political organization, as wellas his literary temper and practical activities would bedisproportionately long. The reader is therefore invited to rangefreely. The secondary literature as a whole is listed up to about 1980in Clara I. Gandy and Peter J. Stanlis, 1983,Edmund Burke: ABibliography of Secondary Studies to 1982, New York, Garland.There are annual listings in theModern Humanities ResearchAssociation’s volumes. The Royal Historical Society’sBibliography of British and Irish History has recently becomemore useful for Burke than it was formerly.

For matters discussed here, the reader is referred to:

• Burke, Edmund, 1958,Philosophical Enquiry, ed. J.T.Boulton, London, Routledge (later edition, Oxford, Blackwell,1987)
• Canavan, F., 1957, ‘Edmund Burke’s College Study ofPhilosophy’,Notes and Queries (New Series), 4:538–543.
• Sewell Jr, R.B., 1938, ‘Rousseau’s Second Discourse inEngland from 1755 to 1762’,Philological Quarterly, 17:97–114.
• Wecter, D., 1940, ‘Burke’s Theory of Words, Images andEmotions’,Publications of the Modern LanguageAssociation, 55: 167–181.

More recently, other aspects of Burke’s thought that bear on hisphilosophy outsidePhilosophical Enquiryhave attractedattention. See:

• Fives, Allyn, 2022, ‘Edmund Burke’s ValuePluralism’,The European Legacy, 27(6):583–600.
• Harrison, Samuel, 2024, ‘The Concept of Dignity in EdmundBurke’s writings on the French Revolution’,BritishJournal for the History of Philosophy, 32(3): 526–546.

Other works cited

• Berkeley, G.,Principles of Human Knowledge,TheQuerist, andDiscourse Addressed to Magistrates, inThe Works of George Berkeley, A.A. Luce and T.E Jessop(eds.), 9 volumes, London: Nelson, 1948–57.
• Broad, C.D., 1952,Ethics and the History of Philosophy,London: Routledge.
• Butler, M., 1984,Burke, Paine, Godwin and the RevolutionControversy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Coleridge, S.T.,Biographica Literaria, James Engell andW. Jackson Bate (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press,1983.
• Freeman, M., 1992, ‘Edmund Burke’, Laurence C. Beckerand Charlotte B. Becker (eds.),Encyclopaedia of Ethics, 2volumes, Garland: New York (Volume 1), pp. 109–11.
• Gore-Brown, R., 1953,Chancellor Thurlow, London:Routledge.
• Goldsmith, Oliver, 1774,Retaliation: a poem, London: G.Kearsly.[Goldsmith 1774 available online].
• Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1905,Report on theManuscripts of the Marquess of Lothian, London: StationeryOffice.
• Hull, C.H., and H.W.V. Temperley (eds.), 1911–12,‘Debates on the Declaratory Act and the Repeal of the StampAct’,American Historical Review, 17:563–586.
• Le Clerc, J., 1692,Logica: sive ars ratiocinandi,London: Awnsham & John Churchill.
• Mill, J.S., 1859,On Liberty, London: Longman.
• Norman, J., 2013,Edmund Burke. The First Conservative ,New York: Basic Books.
• Robinson, Nicholas K., 1996,Edmund Burke: a life incaricature, New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Sidgwick, H., 1877, ‘Bentham and Benthamism in Politics andEthics’, in hisEssays on Ethics and Method, (ed.)Marcus G. Singer Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
• Spurgeon, C.F.E., 1922,Mysticism in English Literature(edn.2) , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Stephens, Bret, 2020, ‘Why Edmund Burke StillMatters’,New York Times, 5 August 2020.
• Williamson, P., 1999,Stanley Baldwin, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

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