Edmund's pen is evident in the passages which contrast savagery with civilization. The book emphasized that the coming of Europeans to the New World brought with it a civilizing of savages, who were far from noble, through the agency of institutionalised Christianity. This implicit distance from the cult of the noble savage, and from primitivism in general, provided an identifiable complement to the implied rejections of A Philosophical Enquiry and the satire about 'natural society' in A Vindication.
A stage of human history rather later than that of savages was delineated within An Abridgement of English History , which Burke wrote after , but did not finish. So far as it goes, this provided a continuous account that ran from the Roman landings to Magna Carta. Christianity figured again in this narrative as a source of civilization, but the significance of the tale was more complex.
This time the story was primarily political, and showed how one of the values most prized by Burke's contemporaries, civil liberty, came to belong to England. The Norman Conquest of England established a powerful executive government and brought with it a uniform system of law; if these two were necessary conditions for the matching grace of civil liberty for all, however, they were not sufficient: the required addition came from an aristocracy, which had been taught the value of liberty by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and which had come to understand that its own power was insufficient to extract the requisite concessions from the crown unless popular support could be won.
Burke's narratives suggested that agencies antipathetic to each other, if properly connected to one another, might produce results that were both intelligible and valuable. One effect amongst several of this conception of cooperative conflict was a rehabilitation of the Roman Catholicism that was the historic heritage of Burke's family.
An Account and An Abridgement alike suggested that in its historical time and place Roman Catholicism, and, indeed, clericalism, whether embodied in Jesuit missionaries or in an English archbishop, had been a constituent needed to produce social and political benefits of a fundamental kind.
As an historiographical exemplar, An Abridgement therefore showed an exceptional appreciation of the Middle Ages, which was to cause raptures to Lord Acton.
It anticipated both Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance , and, still more, a great work that set the bearings for Anglo-American medievalists for many years, William Stubbs' Constitutional History of England —8. Burke, however, could not think in terms of an academic historiography, still less one that would be the exclusive intellectual preoccupation of its exponents: neither of these existed in his time. He could think, however, of subtly defusing anti-Roman prejudice in Georgian Britain.
Burke himself was not a Roman Catholic, and viewed enquiry into his personal background with alarm and suspicion. This was sensible enough in a Britain which still subliminally linked civil liberty with Protestantism, and therefore regarded Irishness as a likely pointer to popish subversion of its political values. Burke's argumentative stance always benefited Roman Catholics, but he never found a kind word for the Pope: his was a position which emphasized the priority of civil interests over denominational claims in civil society.
This was a political development of the centrality he gave to the claims of improvement, and of the obvious necessity of its free development for the bettering of the human condition. It also silently defused any papal claim to civil dominance on theological grounds and, more audibly, suggested that the penalisation of Roman Catholic beliefs was wrong if these did not cause Catholics to interfere with others' civil interests.
Burke's presumptions about the priority of civil interests and a sense of the possible irrelevance of denominational opinion to civil society suggest a reading of Locke's Letter concerning Toleration and Two Treatises of Government , the latter of which was common, though not prescribed reading at Trinity.
It also implies that the proper terms in which to conceive civil interests are those of natural jurisprudence, because there people are considered without reference to any specific allegiances, religious or otherwise. Burke referred to natural law and natural rights directly when such reference advanced his own arguments, though he made no theoretical contribution to natural jurisprudence until quite late in life.
His creative energies were mostly applied elsewhere. Burke developed his thoughts about civil interests in a work that his executors entitled Tracts on the Popery Laws , which he drafted when he was employed as private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland in the early seventeen-sixties.
After this, Burke became involved more immediately in political practice, and, by one means or another, contributed to it until his death and through the activities of his executors in publishing or reprinting his writings from beyond the grave.
This was one obvious route for practical development, even besides the amenities of status that it brought to Burke. For his view of the compound abstract words involved in civil discussion did not suggest that purely speculative study had unlimited potential either for the mind or for personal satisfaction, because a strictly speculative discussion was likely to be inconclusive at best: such words became more readily intelligible in connexion with the concrete, and therefore the practical.
There was, on this understanding, intellectual benefit in political participation, and, equally, political practice might benefit from the speculative mind. This is likely to seem an implausible position nowadays, when political activity is frenetic, and learning is a matter of speciality; but in the eighteenth century, when an agile mind could manage at least the basics of several branches of learning, and the British legislature was often in session for less than six months each year, it was more plausible.
Political participation, on Burke's understanding, besides its intellectual possibilities, had an ethical potential. To the extent that thinking about politics was necessarily uncertain, the proper conduct of affairs depended upon an honest as well as a capacious mind, and on a well-disposed management of words.
It remains to show what Burke learnt from political activity, and what he conferred upon it. The picture is one in which the claims of practice enriched Burke's mind and brought intellectual benefits to practice itself. Burke's life was spent in parliamentary affairs from the mids, and this made a difference to his style of intellectual activity. The difference made by participation lay not least in his reasons for applying his mind, and consequently in how he did so.
The reasons were to influence opinion, both in Parliament and from his position as a member of the legislative, and to determine votes in the House of Commons itself.
The matter common to both of these was Burke's view that words were central to political understanding. An obvious inference from Burke's account of compound abstract words is that to use these is to touch the experience of reader or listener, and that persuasion was unavoidably central to discussing politics: this befitted a practical rather than a speculative subject. Indeed, these terms implied that the point of discussing politics must be to influence action, and nothing much else.
Burke developed great skill in managing words, begun in debating at Trinity and carried forward at other venues, including the House of Commons. As such language was persuasive, its objective was to establish pro-attitudes and con-attitudes in mind of listener or reader. This was not the only philosophical aspect in Burke's political practice. A major conceptual tool in discussing politics was relation.
Relation is one of those terms which was common to both the scholastics 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 which would raise or lower their significance and standing. Connexion was scarcely less valuable, because the place that someone or something occupied could be used to sustain or criticise their role, as well as to demonstrate the value of co-operative contraries.
Best of all, relation in either sense lent itself to a myriad of uses, for as LeClerc had remarked in his Logic which Burke had read at Trinity relations were beyond counting— sunt autem innumerae relationes Le Clerc , pt.
Burke's conception of philosophical history was also fundamental to his political practice. The manners Burke saw around him in England were continuous with those he had seen in the middle ages, or projected backwards thither, in which a powerful executive government was balanced by other agencies with the effect of securing civil liberty. Those agencies most obvious in Burke's time had established the sovereignty of Parliament at the Glorious Revolution —9 , implied it in the Bill of Rights , exercised it in the Act of Settlement , and confirmed it by suppressing the attempts made from to to reassert the sovereignty of kings alone.
Burke understood law in this arrangement as the guarantor of interests of the governed because it was law passed and secured by Parliament. It was secured in Parliament by the mutual dependence of Commons, Lords and King. That sovereignty had this public character made the British state a beneficiary of a very high degree of financial credit, and this increased the power of Parliament. The long, slow movement of British history from a conception of the realm understood as royal property to the state conceived as the expression of public will had in Burke's time reached a stage at which this will was expressed through the decisions of Parliament in a manner heavily influenced by the monarch.
Burke's political activities therefore assumed parliamentary sovereignty. If Burke's view of words and relations gave him practical tools, and if parliamentary sovereignty provided him with a practical postulate, what did he assume was the proper end of sovereignty?
We have seen that the relation between sovereign and the governed had for a primary purpose the protection of the latter's civil interests. But the former might also see that there were complications for the latter.
Here, opponents may be not only enemies but also co-workers, sharing at least some common assumptions about the system within which their lot was cast, although separated from others by the role required of them. In that situation, the question becomes, where do you take your place?
The answer may depend on your own connexions, and on how you conceive them. Let us turn to how Burke's thinking was informed by his philosophical 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 or the other in a difference of opinion.
This method is seen, for instance, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents Its central statement for our purpose is about i relation in the form of connexion: that the British constitution had been constructed in a manner that required the connexion in this case the interdependence of the parts of the sovereign in order to achieve mutual control.
This statement contrasted with ii the historical statement that there was a new system of court politics which involved disconnecting those parts in order to make the monarch independent of the other parts of the political sovereign. Burke's history showed the emergence of this new system, and illustrated its pernicious results in both domestic and foreign affairs.
The contrast iii between the older system — which was represented as having benign results—was clear, and the disposition of pro-language obvious enough. Burke's appeal lay to the standards which his contemporaries would take for granted, namely those implied in their beliefs about parliamentary sovereignty. As if it were not enough, the picture of the older order was reinforced by a sense of connexion in the Aristotelian sense that Burke's society recognized and approved—that man was sociable, rather than being a solitary beast, and above all by the annexation of the key term of connexion to the side of the dispute that Burke favoured.
This illustrates Burke's remarkable ability to combine philosophical method and philosophical history, as well as the practical purpose to which he put them—forming an understanding of politics which was practical in the very particular sense of calling for activity in one direction to counterbalance forces coming from another.
It was also practical in relation to advancing very specific interests. These considerations were used to situate quite another sense of connexion, namely political party, and especially the party of Lord Rockingham to which and to whom Burke had attached himself. Indeed Present Discontents was read in draft by his party's leading lights before publication. On publication, the pamphlet was widely understood as a manifesto for this party. After publication Present Discontents became a manual from which fledging politicians learnt the rationale of their party, and, indeed, a source book for cat calls from the party colleagues from whom Burke separated in The philosophical and historical element in Burke's positions is evident only to those who retrace all of his steps; an activity which his contemporaries lacked the will, and as not all of his major works had been published some of the means to do.
The educative effect of Burke's writing is not to be underestimated in a civil society, which boasted many highly literate members but had very few with any formal education in political science except, sometimes, at Scottish universities.
Indeed, it is likely that Burke wrote in order to educate. Yet at the same time that the strength of his conceptual and historical arguments, and the skill with which he developed these, excites the reader's admiration, they create unease.
This is not merely because in Present Discontents the philosophical sense of connexion is used to adumbrate the claims of a party connexion: it is a more generalized disquiet.
He is the Mr Baldwin [ 6 ] of philosophy, and he derives from his literary style some of the advantages which that statesman owed to his pipe and his pigs. This judgement does not apply to Burke, even though he did keep pigs. The reader carries away from Burke a sense of great creative power, dialectical skill, and verbal ingenuity: in short, a sense of being overborne by intellectual force. The listener probably received other and unwelcome sensations when these were seconded by personal raucousness.
Such feelings generate unease, and unease is increased by Burke's prose. Unease, perhaps, is increased even further: for against one equipped with this intellectual repertoire, the accusation of inconsistency is irresistibly tempting and utterly useless. Again, Burke's is a very sensible way for a statesman to think, but it is not how the public wishes politicians to appear on most occasions. Still less is it reassuring about Burke's intellectual bona fides : for this is not how people innocent of political experience, who are the majority, conceive the role of political principles.
Burke's philosophical and historical positions are clear, but they do not translate, and were not meant to translate, into a set of specific practical conclusions of permanent validity. There was the contrast, too, between the breadth of view and of learning in the matured statements that Burke published, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ways of the parliamentary pugilist who was audible to fellow M.
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 it was to be heard in the bear garden that was the House of Commons, but partly, too, because his Philosophical Enquiry had suggested that the best way to impart a mood to an audience was to display it oneself.
So, for instance, if Burke needed to plead for moderation, he did so immoderately. Above all, perhaps, it was because this philosopher- turned-participant was not exempt from the need to win to his side enough minds to ensure that his side was not beaten or, at any rate, demonstrated enough strength to remain in contention , and had at hand an exceptionally powerful range of persuasive tools.
It is an evident fact, too, that the resources of Western civilization were sometimes invoked by Burke in order to produce votes in the House of Commons—votes, which, whatever else they were, were in the interests of his party. But, manifestly, these resources do not supply a rationale for only one policy, still less for only one party. The roles of thinker and party spokesman consort ill: and there were bound to be doubts about one.
An apparent disruption of this sort was always likely to suggest that Burke had profoundly personal motives for narrowing his mind, and when he was not being caricatured as an Irish Jesuit he was being satirized as a corrupt hack [ 7 ]. Yet some sort of procedure of the type pursued by Burke was implied in his sense of practical reasoning.
Parliamentary votes, in the situation that Burke found himself, were amongst the proper means. Political participation generated scepticism about Burke as a person, some of which was unjust, though all of it was to be expected. What was perhaps less predictable, and is certainly more interesting philosophically, is that this participation was a precondition of the practical thought which made Burke famous in his own time and has given him a leading place in the canon of Western political thought.
One very important example of this is his treatment of the American Revolution. This was informed, no doubt, by where Burke happened to find himself on the spectrum of practical politics in the years that followed But his conclusions for practice were informed also by his 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 informed importantly not only by where he was practically but also who he was philosophically. Burke's practical thinking about the dispute between the British parliament and its North American colonies began with a situation not of his making, that is to say the rejection of the Stamp Act by the colonists, and its withdrawal by the ministry headed by Lord Rockingham in —6.
The Rockingham ministry followed up this concession by way of letting the colonists alone with the explicit assertion of Parliament's right to legislate for the colonies in the Declaratory Act of Burke's task was to demonstrate to the House of Commons the plausibility of this package. He did so by combining two complex ideas—or at least two abstract compound nouns—in a new way. One idea was empire, which involved command. The other was liberty. These, Burke thought, were ideas difficult to combine—a sound reflection as they are diametrically opposed—but that they were combinable in the further idea of a British empire—one which combined legislative command with civil liberty.
It was also accommodating, because it made the British executive's policy intellectually and therefore practically respectable at the same time that it made room for colonial preferences. In short, it was a small masterpiece of thinking about policy. The repeal of the Stamp Act was followed by the passing of the Declaratory Act. Burke was practically successful in with the House of Commons because he was speaking for the executive, and a majority amongst Members of Parliament, ceteris paribus , tended to vote for the king's ministers.
In and he was practically unsuccessful, because he was now in opposition, but his conceptual achievement in dealing with the American question became much greater.
By , the issues dividing some American colonists from Parliament had changed. The former now resented the attempts of the latter to levy taxation on them directly, rather than by the authority of their own colonial legislatures, and they resented still more the project of backing the attempt, if need be, with coercion.
Burke's speech of on American Taxation did not delete the idea of imperial command, but rather elaborated his complex idea of the British empire in a new way in order to deal with the new situation.
Burke elaborated the complex idea in a way to which complex ideas lend themselves, that is to say, by adding a qualification. The sovereignty of the British parliament was an idea that certainly included a right to tax: but a right to tax could be understood to be consistent on principle with inaction as well as action.
The right, in plainer 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 was merely making concessions. But observe: this situation provided a cue for conceptual innovation—Burke inserted a distinction into the idea of sovereignty.
It could be inferred that. Conceptual refinement provided a practical avenue that other, less gifted politicians had not devised. Events soon required a further elaboration of Burke's idea of the British empire. The continued use of coercion made the colonists more, not less recalcitrant. The practical need seemed to be for terms on which they would stay, in some sense or senses, under British rule.
Their crucial claim was now that their right to tax themselves by their own legislatures rested on charters from the Crown, and that they were subordinate to the Crown alone, and not to Parliament.
Burke gave still closer attention to the idea of sovereignty. It would be tactless to emphasize the sovereignty of Parliament, but it would be self-defeating to withdraw it explicitly and concede a sovereign right over taxation to the colonial legislatures. So now, in Burke's speech on Conciliation with America , he focussed upon only one aspect of the complex idea of a parliamentary sovereign.
The latter comprised in the British instance not only Lords and Commons, but also the king. It is clear, however, that Burke's ability to make conceptual changes depended on his philosophical thinking. To think in terms of complex ideas is to recognize that they can be elaborated by adding further ideas; to distinguish between the roles of Parliament is to make that addition; and to analyse the powers of a parliamentary sovereign as a preface to relocating one of them is to use philosophy as a tool in practical reasoning.
It is noteworthy, also, that these philosophical exercises were the means of coping, as Burke hoped, with practical changes. Neither was his work here primarily ideological, for though Burke had a practical goal in view, and at that one consistent with the Rockingham achievements of , he worked philosophically to modify the conceptions in terms of which his contemporaries viewed their situation, rather than using his conceptual tools as ways of defending those conceptions without modifying them.
Thus he added ideas to the stock of his day. It is fitting, though Burke's proposals were not implemented in time, and though his goal was not attained, that his American speeches figured prominently in the schools and universities of both the U.
Burke's thinking about America also suggests a political disposition that owed something to his philosophical conceptions. It was also, implicitly an ethical position: governments ought not to apply force to existing relations, at least those that were legitimate. This is, in one way, an obvious point from natural jurisprudence, and one that Burke had made transparently with respect to inroads by the government of Ireland against Catholic property.
In another, and more interesting way, it reflected his view that abstract compound nouns and complex ideas evoke specific past experiences. Instead of repairing the castle, he said, a "swinish multitude" had torn it apart to build an entirely new one while despising everything about the old. He condemned the newly elected French National Assembly for abolishing ancient laws, confiscating the property of nobles and the Catholic Church, and driving aristocrats into exile.
Burke also wrote in his Reflections about the superiority of the British Constitution. In this part of his book, Burke summarized the essence of his political conservatism. A nation, he wrote, is a partnership among "those who are living, those who are dead, and those who will be born.
He cited the English Glorious Revolution of Burke celebrated the British Constitution, which contained the inherited "rights of Englishmen," not some theoretical notion about the "rights of man. He also described the English aristocracy, the landowning nobles, as "the great Oaks that shade a Country and perpetuate your benefits from Generation to Generation.
Burke was not enthusiastic about democracy. He defended the English monarchy based on inherited succession. He consistently opposed expanding the right to vote beyond property owners, who made up only a minority of the English population. Moreover, Burke warned, "democracy has many striking points of resemblance to tyranny," including the "cruel oppression" of the minority. Burke summarized the British Constitution by saying, "We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage [House of Lords], and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises [voting rights], and liberties from a long line of ancestors.
King George loved it. Others, like the American patriot, Thomas Paine, condemned it. Burke himself warned of the "French disease" of revolution, spreading throughout Europe and even to Britain.
Burke split with the leadership of the Whig Party when he spoke in favor of war against revolutionary France. Britain declared war in when it joined other European monarchies already fighting the French army.
But no longer supported by the Whig Party, Burke decided to retire from Parliament the following year. He continued writing about the French threat. He also wrote in favor of the free market setting wages and opposed government support for the poor.
This was the job of private charity not government, he said. He argued that burdensome taxes would lead only to the poverty of all. Edmund Burke died of cancer at his estate in Despite his superb debating skills, Burke was on the losing side of most major issues during his long career in Parliament. This was mostly because his Whig Party was usually in the minority. Edmund Burke believed that he should use his independent judgment and vote for the national interest even if this went against the views of those who elected him.
Do you agree or disagree with him? Burke defended the revolution in America but condemned the one in France. Was he consistent or inconsistent in applying his conservative principles? Ayling, Stanley. Edmund Burke, His Life and Opinions.
New York: St. Kramnick, Isaac, ed. The Portable Edmund Burke [speeches and writings]. New York: Penguin Books, Based on his conservative principles, would Edmund Burke be likely to favor or oppose the following developments in the United States? Use evidence from the article to back up your answer on each development. The increase in the number of people allowed to vote, which has taken place over the past years minorities, women, young people over The First Amendment to the U. Constitution, which reads in part: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.
Form small groups for students to compare and discuss whether they think Burke would favor or oppose each development. Alumni Volunteers The Boardroom Alumni. Curriculum Materials. Add Event. Main Menu Home. Westminster Edmund Burke: The Father of Conservatism Burke was a statesman and political thinker who dominated debates in the British Parliament during the late s. Ireland, India, and the French Revolution Following the American Revolution, Burke took unpopular positions on other controversial issues.
Retirement, Death, and Legacy Burke split with the leadership of the Whig Party when he spoke in favor of war against revolutionary France.
His last years were clouded by the death of his only son, but he continued to write and defend himself from his critics. His arguments for long-lived constitutional conventions, political parties, and the independence of an MP once elected still carry weight.
He is justly regarded as one of the founders of the British Conservative tradition. He died on 9 July Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled.
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