The baneful philosophical legacy of Edmund Burke


Shortly after David Cameron entered Downing Street in coalition with the Liberal Democrats nine and a half years ago, The Independent published an article titled: “Edmund Burke: How did a long-dead Irishman become the hottest thinker of 2010?” The author, Amol Rajan (later the paper’s editor), argued that Burke “personifies the spirit and philosophy of the present government," owing to his “embodiment of the common ground between liberals and conservatives, his understanding that the Big Society is really just an agglomeration of small societies, and his rewriting of Rousseau's contract within society as a contract between the generations.”

Times change. The liberal wing of the coalition decisively lost, whereas the Conservative Party has become a destructive force that, in pursuit of an anti-European obsession, has already damaged the nation’s economic prosperity, ruptured all its diplomatic alliances simultaneously and put at risk the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

It’s tempting and deserved to criticise the politicians who caused this, especially Cameron for his catastrophic decision to put EU membership to a plebiscite. But I prefer to additionally unload on the baneful philosophical legacy of Burke himself. I attended the press launch of Cameron’s Big Society programme in 2010, supposedly designed to “empower communities,” in which a succession of Tory politicians paid fawning tribute to Burke. It was all nonsense: an intellectually vacuous party alighting on a famous name whose work they had barely read and certainly not understood.

Burke is a figure of the distant past. His writings are a historical curiosity that should have no purchase on public life in the democratic age. His attraction to modern Conservatives seems to rest on a single passage in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

Modern Tories almost universally interpret this to their own liking, as an allusion to social, religious and municipal organisations as being the first element of civic attachment. They could scarcely be more wrong. Burke is, rather, enjoining people to be content with their allotted station in life. It’s about class. He isn’t pleading the cause of the local community as against the mighty state: he’s telling the masses to defer to the aristocracy.

The same principle applies to Burke’s views on religious liberty. There is no more important document in the history of constitutional government than the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and enacted by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786. It set out the crucial principle that there should be no religious test for public office. What people believe about the origins and purpose of the universe is their own affair: it doesn’t belong in affairs of government. Burke took exactly the opposite line. He defended the Test and Corporation Acts, passed respectively in 1661 and 1673, which restricted civic and military office to communicant members of the Church of England. “Dissent,” he said (referring to Protestant non-conformism), “not satisfied with tolerance, is not conscience, but ambition.”

In short: according to Burke, you’re allowed freedom of worship and assembly, and it’s ungrateful and insubordinate to expect political rights as well. Bear in mind that the Dissenters were Burke’s fellow Christians. He had far harsher words to say about the civic role of adherents of other faiths. In Reflections, he allowed that some revolutions (he was alluding to America specifically) may be pursued by “men of great civil and great military talents.” These farsighted personages were, said Burke, “not like Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.”

There is one further isolated passage for which Burke is known and often cited, and which on the face of it does speak to Britain’s recent political turmoil. It is from his Speech to the Electors of Bristol (1774), where he declares: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

What could be more apt as a summary of the Brexit controversy? An ill-judged exercise in direct democracy, the 2016 referendum, produced an outcome that a majority of MPs believed, with good reason, would damage their constituents’ welfare and the national interest. Parliamentary scrutiny under the hobbled premiership of Theresa May was not a defiance of “the will of the people” but a clash of competing versions of democracy, the deliberative as against the plebiscitary. Nor is this conundrum of modern politics confined to the Brexit imbroglio. In the New Statesman in 2015, six months before the referendum, Chris Bryant, the Labour MP, cited this passage and gushed: “Burke’s point is even more important in an era of social media, when every email, every tweet and every posting comes replete with the demand that an MP should do precisely as his or her constituents wish (which is always precisely as the correspondent wishes).”

Not so fast. There’s a compelling argument for giving greater weight to representative than direct democracy but Burke is lethal to it. Bryant, like other modern politicians who cite Burke, doesn’t appear familiar with the historical context. The pro-Brexit campaigners malign dissenting MPs, as well as an independent judiciary, as an unaccountable elite. This notion is a calumny against conscientious public servants, yet it describes quite well the role of the representative in Burke’s own thinking. In Reflections, Burke maintains that, in electing their representatives, the people confer that task “on those only in whom they may discern that predominant proportion of active virtue and wisdom.”

In An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Burke is clearer still that the people’s representatives should come from a natural aristocracy distinguished by intellect, wisdom and probity. It’s these characteristics that enable the representative to discern the public good, and we should be grateful to them. For, says Burke, “when you separate the common sort of men from their proper chieftains so as to form them into an adverse army, I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds… The mind owes to them no sort of submission.”

Burke defended reaction against progress, and religious privilege against pluralism, and he saw the Jews as an enemy of civilisation. It’s not even tenable to argue that he was a man of his time who (as the great historian and polymath Conor Cruise O’Brien advanced in his biography The Great Melody) prophetically foresaw the bloody consequences of insurrectionary politics. On the contrary, the French Revolution of 1789 was an immense blow for freedom, celebrated by European and American humanitarians. It advanced social reform and secularism in the spirit of the age. The reason for its degeneration was not, as was the case with the Russian Revolution of 1917, a totalitarian ideology at its heart but the support given to the Ancien régime by Austria and Prussia in 1792, which precipitated a second revolution and all that followed: regicide, terror and nationalism. The proper stance of enlightened politics was to support France, as Jefferson (who was American minister in Paris when the revolution broke out) did, not to undermine it. Burke was in the latter camp.

Burke’s followers in the modern day profess their philosophical debt to a man determined to uphold the established order against not only revolution but also reform and mere ambition. There is a cultural and historical cost to such obduracy. A much greater thinker, John Stuart Mill, complained: “England has never had any general break-up of old associations. Hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head.” In an age when modern Conservatives attack the role of experts, stupidity in politics is gaining ground. Burke should be acknowledged as its inspiration.