Burke’s Politics

Frederick Dreyer

Description

Edmund Burke claimed to be a practical politician, rather than a theorist. Nevertheless, says the author, Burke held consistent political principles which form a coherent political theory. By examining concepts such as natural laws, natural society, civil society, and history in Burke’s speeches and writings, the author comes to some conclusions about Burke’s political theory and its relation to commonly accepted eighteenth-century political doctrines. Succinct and balanced, this study will be of particular interest to political theorists and historians.

Sujets

• Political science
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781554586745
• Langue: English

Extrait

Burke s Politics A Study in Whig Orthodoxy
Frederick A. Dreyer
Edmund Burke claimed to be a practical politician, rather than a theorist. Nevertheless, says the author, Burke held consistent political principles which form a coherent political theory. By examining concepts such as natural law, natural society, civil society, and history in Burke s speeches and writings, the author comes to some conclusions about Burke s political theory and its relation to commonly accepted eighteenth-century political doctrines. Succinct and balanced, this study will be of particular interest to political theorists and historians.
Frederick A. Dreyer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario. He holds the Ph.D. degree from St. Andrews University, Scotland. He has contributed articles on Burke and British political history to various learned journals, including the Journal of Modern History and the English Historical Review.
Burke s Politics A Study in Whig Orthodoxy
Frederick A. Dreyer
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Dreyer, Frederick A., 1932- Burke s politics
Bibliography: p. Includes index.
ISBN 0-88920-077-7
1. Burke, Edmund, 1729?-1797 - Political science. 2. Political science. I. Title.
JC176.B83D74 320.5 2 C79-094766-8
Copyright 1979 WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
79 80 81 82 4 3 2 1
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
For My Mother
Contents
Acknowledgments
One. Introduction
Two. Natural Justice
Three. Natural Society
Four. Civil Society
Five. History
Six. Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book has its origins in an old argument with my colleague Roger Emerson over what it was that Burke actually said. I doubt whether I have convinced Roger that he is wrong and I am right, but I am sure that my work has gained much from the benefit of his opposition and criticism. I am indebted also to Ian Steele for his advice on imperial history and other matters and to John McLaughlin for his guidance on the French Revolution. My wife acted as final arbiter in all questions of style.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Chapter Two was first published in Studies in Burke and His Time 15 (Winter 1973-74) under the title, Edmund Burke: The Philosopher in Action. It is reprinted here by permission of Studies in Burke and His Time.
One Introduction
The student who tries to define Edmund Burke s political theory attempts something that Burke refused to do himself. He never wrote a political treatise and often affected to be a practical man who disliked speculation and who thought of politics in practical terms. I do not pretend to be an antiquary, a lawyer, or qualified for the chair of professor in metaphysics, he told his constituents. I never ventured to put your solid interests upon speculative grounds. 1 Defending the Reflections, he again rejected the role of a theorist: I was throwing out reflexions upon a political event, and not reading a lecture upon theorism and principles of Government. How I should treat such a subject is not for me to say, for I never had that intention. 2 Burke s writings, nevertheless, are immensely rich in doctrine. And against his assertion that he was a simple, practical man, we can place the equally strong assertion that he was a man of consistent principle. In the closing paragraph of the Reflections, he claimed that he was a man who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life. The attack on the French Revolution he said came from one who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end. 3 He repeated this affirmation in the Appeal: . . . if he could venture to value himself upon anything, it is on the virtue of consistency that he would value himself the most. Strip him of this, and you leave him naked indeed. 4
This claim to a reputation for consistency does not prove that Burke deserved it. Some scepticism is no doubt justified. He spent most of his mature life as an active party politician. His great assertions of principle were made in the heat of party warfare. Even after he broke with his party over the French Revolution, he continued to write and speak like a politician. His controversial purpose always dominated his exposition of theory. Moreover, the assertions of principle that are scattered throughout his works are extremely difficult to fit together into a consistent and coherent theory of politics. On the interpretation put forward by Robert M. Hutchins, Burke often lapsed into profound contradictions: whether he acknowledged or denied the authority of natural right, social compact, or popular sovereignty depended upon the necessities of his case. 5 Hutchins Burke is a splendid rhetorician and advocate but not a seeker after truth nor a philosopher. 6 This assessment has been repeated by Frank O Gorman. On O Gorman s account, Burke did not develop a systematic philosophy; it is vain to search for one in his writings; it is even useless to look for fundamental conceptions or key notions. If Burke is to be explained at all, it is not in terms of the ideas he held but in terms of the circumstances which elicited their statement. 7 The basic objection to this assessment is that it rests on dogmatic assumptions. Any proof of Burke s inconsistency is only as good as our interpretation of his statements. On a given reading of his statements a contradiction may be demonstrated. But what we may have proven is not Burke s lack of consistency but the falsity of our reading. To suppose, as O Gorman does, that no reading of Burke will reveal a consistent pattern of thought may have a certain commonsense merit; it is not, however, a supposition that has been proven or can be proven. Admittedly, efforts to justify Burke as a theorist often explain his thought in terms of intellectual affiliations that are not compatible. John Morley s Burke had links with Montesquieu, Bentham, Coleridge, and Darwin. 8 Alfred Cobban s Burke is affiliated to Locke, to the Lake Poets, and to nineteenth-century nationalists. 9 Leo Strauss s Burke is part Thomist and part Hegelian. 10 For J. G. A. Pocock, Burke owed an intellectual debt to Matthew Hale and the seventeenth-century theorists of the common law. Yet Pocock also admits that there is a possible affiliation with natural law, romantic sensibility, and the theories of Hume and Montesquieu. 11 In Peter Stanlis interpretation, Burke appears as a thinker who is both essentially Thomist and essentially eclectic. 12 It is possible that any one of these interpretations is true; yet each of them in different ways denies Burke s capacity for systematic and coherent thought. The issue that separates these authors from Hutchins is not whether Burke held a coherent theory but whether he held any theory with conviction.
If the question to be answered is what theory did Burke sincerely believe, we immediately run into immense problems of proof and interpretation. Whatever theory he formulated, it has to be deduced from party speeches and controversial pamphlets. There is no reason to think that Burke was consistently candid in his statements or that he adopted arguments simply because of their doctrinal authority. In the Regency crisis, he was presumably influenced by considerations that he did not introduce in debate. Burke asserted the rights of the Prince of Wales in terms of theory and constitutional law. 13 But upon the rights of the Prince depended the political fortunes of Burke and his party. If the Prince of Wales became regent with unfettered authority, Burke and his party would come into office. In the American Revolution, his defence of the colonists may have been dictated by private conviction; it may also have been dictated by party commitments. When we read Burke it is difficult to tell whether what we see is the statement of the party man or the confession of the formal philosopher. Like most public men he sometimes wrote in a representative capacity. Presumably, he was not free to write whatever he pleased when he compiled the reports for the committee on Indian affairs. 14 He wrote something that had to be adopted by the committee and issued under its authority. When he wrote The Present Discontents what he intended was a statement of the collective opinion of his party. Before publication the manuscript was sent to his friends for correction and endorsement; after publication, Burke spoke of the pamphlet as a statement of his party s creed. 15 In this instance it is impossible to tell whether Burke wrote what he privately believed or what he thought his friends were likely to accept. Scholars often assume that Burke spoke with a double voice. In one voice we hear the real philosopher who stated convictions and principles; in the other we hear merely the politician who said things for the convenience of debate. On the assumption of a double voice a great many things that Burke wrote may be dismissed from the interpretation of his theory. Morley ignored all of Burke s references to natural law; Strauss has discounted all of Burke s references to natural rights, the state of nature, and social contract. 16 Both authors supposed that Burke as a philosopher had rejected the Lockean theory of politics; both assumed presumably that Burke s Lockean statements did not count as evidence of his private theory. Any account of Burke s ideas that suppo