Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke
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them becomes their right or legitimate claim upon it. But their civil rights are not merely the legal form taken, after the social compact, by their original natural rights. Nor is government derived from every man’s original right to act according to his own will and judgment.
The purposes of government are specified by the natural wants of men, understood not as their desires, but as their real needs. “Government,” according to Burke, “is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.”20 But among these wants is the education of men to virtue through legal as well as moral restraints upon their passions. “In this sense the restraints on men as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” Burke, one sees, is moving toward rational moral ends as the legitimating principle of government, and away from original rights and their corollary, consent. But his immediate concern in this passage is to point out that, “as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.”21
Rather, one must say: “The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.”22 To clarify what Burke is getting at, let us agree by way of example that it is not good for human beings to be starved, beaten, humiliated, deprived of human affections, or intellectually stultified. There are conceivable circumstances in which any of these, in a limited degree and for a limited time, might do someone more good than harm. But they could be justified only as a means to good ends, for these things are not in themselves human goods. Therefore, they cannot constitute the ends of life or the purposes of society. On the other hand, one can name human needs that do specify, in a general way, what civil society is for, and Burke did name some of them.
THE GOALS OF CIVIL SOCIETY
Civil society exists to guarantee to men justice, the fruits of their industry, the acquisitions of their parents, the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, instruction in life, and consolation in death. These are among the advantages that civil society exists to provide for men. But it is impossible to define antecedently, in the abstract and for all possible circumstances, the concrete forms in which these advantages are to be acquired and safeguarded. That must be left to social experience and the gradual development of custom and law.
The end of civil society, then, in global terms, is to promote what is good for human beings. Human goods are “not impossible to be discerned”—Burke was not a radical cultural relativist—and they can serve as the general goals that guide law and public policy. They will therefore set the outer limits of what government may do to people and define what it may not do to them. Burke was not inconsistent when he denounced the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and Warren Hastings in India for violating natural law by their treatment of the populations subject to their power. To deny that natural law is an abstract code of rights is not to say that it forbids nothing.
But when it comes to specifying in the concrete the claims on society that its goals confer on people, it becomes evident that the rights of men “are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition.” They cannot be defined, that is, in the abstract and in advance. Human goods must be limited and trimmed in order to be simultaneously attainable in society. Not only that, but evils, which are negations of good, must be tolerated, sometimes even protected, in order that any good at all may be attained. A society ruthlessly purged of all injustice might turn out to be a vast prison. So, for that matter, might a society single-mindedly devoted to the individual’s liberty.
THE RIGHT TO GOVERN
These considerations are particularly relevant to the right that was fundamentally at issue between Burke and his opponents. They held that every man in the state of nature had a sovereign right to govern himself and for that reason had a right to an equal share in the government of civil society. Burke held that what was important in the civil state was not that every man’s will should be registered in the process of government, but that his real interests (advantages, goods) should be achieved.
By entering civil society, Burke insisted, man “abdicates all right to be his own governor.”23 Hence, “as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society.” On the contrary, “it is a thing to be settled by convention.”24 “The moment you abate any thing from the full rights of men, each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience.” But to organize a government and distribute its powers “requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions.”25 The allocation of power in the state, in other words, ought to be made by a prudent judgment about that structure of government which will best achieve the goals of civil society, not merely in general, but in this historically existing society. But this implies that purpose, rather than original rights and individual consent, is the organizing and legitimizing principle of a constitution.
A further conclusion about the nature of political theory follows: “The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science.”26 Moral and political theory may enlighten us on the ultimate ends of social life, but the means thereunto are the object of a practical science that relies on experience.
Who, then, shall make the practical judgments of politics? The question cannot be answered by appealing to the rights of men. “Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.”27 But as to what is for their benefit, Burke said: “The will of the many, and their interest, must very often differ.”28 The first duty of statesmen, indeed, is to “provide for the multitude; because it is the multitude; and is therefore, as such, the first object . . . in all institutions.”29 But the object is the good of the people, not the performance of their will. The duties of statesmen, in consequence, do not belong by right to those whom the many have chosen, but ought to be performed by those qualified by “virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive,”30 for the task of government.
BURKE’S VIEW OF DEMOCRACY
Burke was undoubtedly what today is called an elitist and, in his own terminology, an aristocrat in principle. He had a very low estimation of the political capacity of the mass of the population, and when he agreed that the people had a role in government, he meant only a fairly well-educated and prosperous segment of the people. But the main object of his attack on the democratic theory of his day was not so much the idea that the populace at large was capable of exercising political power as the principle that it had an inherent right to do its own will.
He certainly rejected the notion “that a pure democracy is the only tolerable form into which human society can be thrown.”31 But it could be an acceptable one, though not often:
I reprobate no form of government merely upon abstract principles. There may be situations in which the purely democratic form will become necessary. There may be some (very few, and very particularly circumstanced) where it would be clearly desirable. This I do not take to be the case of France, or of any other great country.32
Democracy as a mere form of government, then, would be sometimes, if only rarely, acceptable to Burke. What would never be acceptable was that the people “should act as if they were the entire masters.”33 Burke explained his objection to this conception of popular sovereignty in the course of his defense of the principle of a state establishment of religion. Under a “mixed and tempered government”34 such as that of Great Britain, “free citizens . . . in order to secure their freedom, . . . must enjoy some