Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke
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persuade a reading public that the French Revolution is a menace to the civilization of Europe, and of Britain in particular. Yet, since the Revolution was built upon a political theory, Burke found himself obliged for the first time to organize his own previous beliefs about God, man, and society into a coherent political countertheory.
BURKE’S CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY
The Reflections begins with an attack on Dr. Price and his speech.7 According to Dr. Price, as quoted by Burke, George III was “almost the only lawful king in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people.”8 Popular choice, then, was the criterion of legitimacy. This followed from what Dr. Price said was a basic principle established by the Revolution of 1688, namely, the right of the people of England “1. ‘To choose our own governors.’ 2. ‘To cashier them for misconduct.’ 3. ‘To frame a government for ourselves.’”9 Burke read this declaration of the right of the people as an assertion of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and he denounced it as unknown to and incompatible with the British constitution.
Certainly, he said, it was unknown to the leaders of the Revolution in 1688. He admitted that it would be “difficult, perhaps impossible, to give limits to the mere abstract competence of the supreme power, such as was exercised by parliament at that time.” But there was no doubt in the minds of the revolutionary leaders or in Burke’s about the limits of what they were morally competent to do:
The house of lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the house of commons; no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom. Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the house of commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities.10
THE PRINCIPLE
OF INHERITANCE
For this reason, Burke continued, “the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law.” Originally, succession was defined by common law; after the Revolution, by statute. “Both these descriptions of law are of the same force,” however, “and are derived from an equal authority, emanating from the common agreement and original compact of the state, communi sponsione reipublicae, and as such are equally binding on king, and people too, as long as the terms are observed, and they continue the same body politic.”11
The operative moral principle, it will be noticed, is that the terms of the constitution, once set, must be observed. But the reason for accepting hereditary government as a constitutional principle is a practical one: “No experience has taught us, that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown, our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right.”12 It was this consideration that made Burke a monarchist, not devotion to any abstract principles of royal right parallel to abstract principles of popular right. Burke explicitly rejected the notions that “hereditary royalty was the only lawful government in the world,” that “monarchy had more of a divine sanction than any other mode of government,” or that “a right to govern by inheritance [was] in strictness indefeasible in every person, who should be found in the succession to a throne, and under every circumstance.”13 But he considered hereditary monarchy justified as an integral part of a constitution that was wholly based on the principle of inheritance and historically had served the people well.
“We have,” he said, “an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and a house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.” Indeed, “it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.”14
This passage may seem to imply that there is no standard of natural right anterior and superior to the constitution. But it will be noticed that Burke is speaking here, not of the objective moral order, but of “the uniform policy of our constitution,” and that he praises this policy, not as a statement of ultimate moral principles, but as a manifestation of practical wisdom “working after the pattern of nature.”15
It will be further noticed that throughout this passage Burke contrasts inherited rights, not with natural rights (to which he could and did appeal on other occasions), but with “the rights of men,” which are the original rights of men in the state of nature. Dr. Price and others presume that it is possible to appeal to those rights in order to determine what rights men ought to have now, in an old and long-established civil society. It is this appeal that Burke says English statesmen of the past rejected in favor of the historic rights of Englishmen.
These statesmen wisely “preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen, to that vague speculative right, which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild litigious spirit.”16 It is advisable, therefore, to have some viable definition of what men’s rights are. Positive and recorded rights are better than original rights, in Burke’s view, because they have been defined, nuanced, and given sure modes of protection through long historical experience. Original rights, which are objects of speculation rather than of experience, can give rise to conflicting absolute claims that can tear a society apart.
THE TRUE RIGHTS OF MAN
Furthermore, it is to misunderstand the social condition to think that men’s claims on society and one another can be reduced to rights which they enjoyed in abstract and unqualified forms before civil society came into being. Burke never denied that there had been a state of nature, that men had original rights in it, or that civil society had been formed by a compact. Either he accepted these beliefs as one tends to accept the commonplaces of his age or he knew that others accepted them so generally that to deny them would be to lose the argument at the outset. For whatever reason, he restricted himself to arguing that the original rights of men were not unreal, but irrelevant to civil society. The change they underwent in the civil state was so profound that they no longer furnished a standard for judging the rights of “civil social man.”17 In Burke’s own words:
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs.18
We must think, then, of men’s rights in society in another way:
If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to do justice; as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour.19
Civil society is “an institution