Sovereignty, opinion and revolution in Edmund Burke.

that ever was in Rome) there was Eloquenti~ satis, sapienti~ paruum; eloquence

su$cient, but little wisdom' [25, II, viii, 13; p. 139].8

It is Hobbes's purpose in The Elements of Law to diagnose the relation between

demagoguery and civil unrest. As part of that purpose, he is anxious to demonstrate

that the suspension of consequential reasoning allows "gurative speech to enjoy the

kind of freedom which can be prejudicial to public safety:

So when eloquence and want of judgement go together, want of judgement, like the

daughters of Pelias, consenteth, through eloquence, which is as the witchcraft of

Medea, to cut the commonwealth in pieces, upon pretence or hope of reformation,

which when things are in combustion, they are not able to e!ect [25, II, viii, 15;

p. 141].9

R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120 107

It is clear that Hobbes's dramatic presentation here is designed to convince us that

rhetoric without reason condemns us to error and that, as a political corollary to this,

eloquence without judgement may enjoin us to treason. Of course the suggestion that

intellectual mismanagement is potentially so dangerous does seem somewhat improbable

unless we come to recognise that, in the larger scheme of things, Hobbes is

attempting speci"cally to describe the nature of political authority and, in that

context, to argue that the failure to accord authority its due right proceeds from the

failure to grasp the character of bodies politic as such:

The error concerning mixed government hath proceeded from want of understanding

of what is meant by this word body politic, and how it signi"eth not the concord,

but the union of many men. And though in the charters of subordinate corporations,

a corporation be declared to be one person in law, yet the same hath not been

taken notice of in the body of a commonwealth or city, nor have any of those

innumerable writers of politics observed any such union [24, II, viii, 7;

p. 137}138].

Hobbes's point here is that a harmonious concord or partnership between powers in

a commonwealth is in reality no more than a temporary respite from hostilities.

Where mixed government is taken to imply a plurality of jurisdictions it leads to the

creation of competing dominions, each encouraged to regard the other with jealousy

and suspicion and liable, in the end, to come to blows.

Philosophical and political opinion in the 18th century, from Hume and Smith to

Blackstone and Paley, clearly rejected this conclusion and variously pointed to 1688

as its most consummate refutation. The decades succeeding the Revolution, while they

bore witness to the precariousness which attended a partition of civil powers, also

demonstrated the possibility of partnership. The supposed &error concerning mixed

government' had in fact proved to be a workable antidote, however fraught and

uncertain in its operation, to the excesses which were sometimes taken to accompany

both republican and monarchical governments in their purer forms. As Samuel Squire

put it in the middle of the century, &a true and consistent Whig is a Balancer,

a Mediator2 Under a Henry VIIIth, a Charles, or a James, he is a Countryman;

under a William, or a George, he is a Courtier' [27]. Hume regarded Old Whig

polemicists as Countrymen while Burke considered George III's Whigs as Courtiers.

In each case they were promoting the virtues of a mixed system of government.

A division of legislative and executive competences implied versatility and balance.

That balance, however, was a human contrivance and it was therefore prone to

corruption. But it was not incompatible, as it is in Hobbes's account, with the political

unity of the state.

Nonetheless the core implication contained in Hobbes's statement regarding the

essential integrity of the body politic caused little di$culty for a whole range of

constitutional commentators. For them as for Hobbes, that unity proceeded from the

"nality of sovereign authority. But against Hobbes it was realised that while the

sovereign's will had to remain single and entire its competences could be distributed

among di!erent hands. Beyond that, even Paley appreciated how

108 R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120

10 But the People is not in being before the constitution of government, as not being any Person, but

a multitude of single Persons'.

An act of parliament, in England, can never be unconstitutional, in the strict and

proper acceptation of the term; in a lower sense it may, viz. where it militates with

the spirit, contradicts the analogy, or defeats the provision of other laws, made to

regulate the form of government. Even the #agitious abuse of their trust, by which

a prominent Henry the Eight conferred upon the king's proclamation the authority

of law, was unconstitutional only in this latter sense [28].

Like Hobbes, Paley is happy to concede that the &body of a commonwealth' is &one

person in law' against which no subordinate corporation or person can plead its own

authority as a matter of right. In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith came to the

same conclusion: &In whatever place there is a sovereign, from the very nature of things

the power must be absolute' [14, vol. V, p. 114]. And Burke, contending against Fox

that a multitude of individuals entering into a social compact may not legitimately

&give away and retain the same thing', that they may not invoke rights already

alienated, is advocating sovereignty on the same absolute and unitary basis. There can

be little doubt that the customary wisdom which has developed in this century, from

Carl Schmitt to Collingwood and beyond, to the e!ect that the doctrine of sovereignty

as it had been rigorously formulated in the 17th century became blunted or simply

&lost' in the 18th, has been the product of a persistent confusion about what was

a perfectly distinct set of observations regarding the separation of civil powers on the

one hand, and the integrity of sovereignty on the other.

As far as sovereignty was concerned, then, Burke had little cause to dissent from

Hobbes's position. Their disagreement concerned the distribution of functions within

the sovereign body. However, both could recognise that empire, in the sense of

imperium, in any form of government is by de"nition absolute and indivisible. As

Hobbes points out in De Cive, &A popular state openly challengeth absolute dominion,

and the Citizens oppose it not. For, in the gathering together of many men, they

acknowledge the face of a City' [26, part II, Chapter VI, 13n]. The act of acknowledging

the face ( facies) of a city amounts to ascribing to a sovereign ultimate authority

over the state. It amounts to recognising the establishment a terminus ultimus, a "nal

will, as the sole means of eliminating contention and war: &the City+, as Hobbes puts it,

&which is one Person, cannot take up Arms against it selfe' [26, part II, Chapter VI, 1].

That city, however, which is a popular state is more prone to commotion and strife

than, for instance, a monarchy since it is in the very nature of democratic assemblies

that business is transacted through the medium of eloquence and that members of

those assemblies, under these conditions, can readily be persuaded against their better

judgement to organise into factions. But of course the formation of a faction involves

a bid for imperium being made by what under these circumstances would constitute

a &multitude'. It involves a collection of individuals, a conspiracy, claiming an implicit

right of judgement over the fate of a &people' understood in this instance as a uni"ed

body invested with supreme command [26, part II, vii, 7].10 A faction, in this sense, is

R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120 109

11 &A faction, therefore, is as it were a City in a City'. As Hobbes himself put it, in the Elementorvm

Philosophioe Sectio Tertia De Cive, printed in the Clarendon Edition, Volume II; Part II, xiii, 13: &Est itaque

factio tanquam ciuitas in ciuitate'.

12 &When private men or subjects demand liberty, under the name of liberty, they ask not for liberty but

dominion, which yet for want of understanding, they little consider'.

13 Where there are more Lawes then can easily be remembered, and whereby such things are forbidden,

as reason of it selfe prohibites not of necessity, they must through ignorance, without the least evill

intention, fall within the compasse of Lawes, as gins [i.e. snares] laid to entrap their harmeless liberty

[libertatem innoxiam], which supreme Commanders are bound to preserve for their subjects by the Lawes of

nature'. See also ibid., Part II, xiii, 16: &It is a great part of that liberty which is harmlesse to civill

government2that there be no penalties dreaded, but what they may both foresee, and look for'.

14On the history of attempts to provide a convincing theoretical framework for the government of the

passions, see [29].

15On Hobbesian scepticism in relation to his moral and political philosophy, see [30].

a &City in a City' [26, part II, xiii, 13]11 But two cities contending for power in one

commonwealth, which is equivalent to two bodies at liberty to compete for ascendancy,

is clearly a recipe for disaster.

It is clear, therefore, that on Hobbes's analysis there can be only one body in

possession of signi"cant liberty in the civil state and that this liberty, or freedom from

obligation, goes by the name of dominion [26, part II, x, 8].12 Nonetheless, the liberty

of the subject, the realm of private right or what Hobbes terms &harmlesse liberty'

(libertas innoxia) [26, part II, xiii, 15]13 survives as the remnant of natural

liberty granted by the civil laws. But of course interaction in the realm of harmless

liberty, however innocuous it might be, is never exactly benevolent: &All Society',

Hobbes commented, &is either for Gain, or for Glory' [26, part I, i, 2]. Coming into the

company of others, we bring with us the desire for pro"t or for honour. It is in this

sense that interest*the desire for pro"t*and passion*the desire for esteem*are

mutually reinforcing. Gain can be maximised by power and the acknowledgement of

power is honour. As Hobbes put it in the Elements of Law, &to honour a man (inwardly

in the mind) is to conceive or acknowledge that that man hath the odds or excess of

power over him that contendeth or compareth himself ' [24, I, viii, 5; p. 26]. And later

in the work, in a similar vein, Hobbes argues that &Glory, or internal gloriation or

triumph of the mind, is that passion which proceedeth from the imagination or

conception of our own power, above the power of him that contendeth with us' [24, I,

ix, 1; p. 28].

The pursuit of glory and the pursuit of gain might therefore be deemed to be

mutually co-ordinated activities since ease of pro"t inevitably stands in some kind of

ratio with degree of power. Unless of course, and this is the crucial point, one fails

properly to estimate the degree in question.14 It is this kind of miscalculation, the

e!ect of which is to scupper the alliance of the passions and the interests, which

repeatedly draws the attention of Hobbes throughout his corpus. And it is upon this

preparedness to abandon prudent reckoning that philosophers have, in the words of

De Cive, &built a morall Philosophy wholly estranged from the morall Law' [26, I, iii,

32].15 What we are looking at, in short, is a failure to found conjecture on the basis of

110 R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120

past experience and this failure, we are coming to recognise, has a%icted not only the

pedagogical competence of moral philosophy. It also stands more generally at the

root of vain-glorious behaviour: &men cannot', Hobbes insists, &put o! this same

irrationall appetite, whereby they greedily prefer the present good (to which by strict

consequence, many unfore-seen evills doe adhere) before the future' [26]. It is

Hobbes's contention that this preference for the present good, the dominance of

immoderate passions over projected ends, testi"es to the absence of any restraint

in the form of fear. After all it is fear which Hobbes, in a footnote to the opening

chapter of De Cive, glosses as &a certain foresight of future evill' [26, I, i, 2]. Fear

promotes attentiveness toward the future as prudence inclines us toward the memory

of the past.

It is in this context that Hobbes, considering self-aggrandisement to be the true

motor of social intercourse, writes:

And these are indeed the true delights of Society, unto which we are carryed by

nature, (i.e.) by those passions which are incident to all Creatures, until either by sad

experience, or good precepts, it so fall out (which in many never happens) that the

Appetite, of present matters, be dul'd with the memory of things past, without

which, the discourse of most quick and nimble men, on this subject, is but cold and

hungry [26, I, i, 2].

It is clear from this why Hobbes takes the study of history to be the parent of

wisdom. As he put it in the Epistle to his readers accompanying his translation of

Thucydides's Peloponnesian War, &the principal and proper work of history' is &to

instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves

prudently in the present and providently towards the future' [31]. In this way

vain-glory, or the improvident will to be esteemed above another, can be educated

through memory and fear; it can be disciplined by the recollection of the past in

anxious anticipation of a future. But, in the "nal analysis, the achievement of security

cannot reliably be entrusted to the vagaries of human experience and insight: the

united will of the commonwealth is required to harmonise the judgements of a disbanded

multitude.

The misalliance of the passions and the interests results in the inability to harness

means to ends. It results in the continual failure to unite appetite with its object,

a failure to calculate appropriate strategies for the realisation of determinate goals. To

Burke, examining events in France in the 1790s, this misalliance had been engineered

by a cabal of deluded Revolutionaries prepared to sacri"ce both peace and prosperity

to the desperate projects of uninhibited ambition. &The world of contingency and

political combination is much larger', Burke wrote, &than we are apt to imagine'. It

must consequently be engaged by a &constant vigilance and attention to the train of

things as they successively emerge' [17, p. 364]. But vigilance and attention are

themselves values of negligible signi"cance where political intelligence has been

co-opted, as it had been in France, by the exclusive design of naked power: &Everything

depends upon the army in such a government as yours; for you have industriously

destroyed all the opinions, and prejudices, and, as far as in you lay, all the

instincts which support government' [13, p. 268].

R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120 111

16 Burke goes on to a$rm that &our Constitution is a prescriptive constitution, whose sole authority is,

that it has existed time out of mind' (X, p. 96). This is of course a piece of studiously deployed political

rhetoric: Burke had already come, in his Essay Towards an Abridgement of the English History in Works, X,

p. 551, to consider as a &defect' that &persuasion hardly to be eradicated from the minds of our lawyers, that

the English Law has continued in very much the same state from antiquity, to which they will allow hardly

any sort of bounds'. The chief culprit in this was Hale in whose History of the Common Law &the great

changes and remarkable revolutions in the law, together with their courses down to this time, are scarcely

mentioned'. For a discussion of Burke's Essay, see [33].

17 Prescription is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but, which is to secure that property, to

Government. They harmonize with each other, and give mutual aid to one another. It is accompanied with

another ground of authority in the constitution of the human mind, presumption. It is a presumption in

favour of any settled scheme of government against any untried project that a nation has long existed and

#ourished under it'. For discussions of the Burkean doctrine of prescription, see P. Lucas, [9, pp. 555}565]

and [34].

The conquest of opinion in the interest of rational politics was therefore taken to

represent the betrayal of prudent political management. Prudence is the watchword of

governments which recognise their dependence on reliable &opinion', and opinion

comes to be reliably constituted in the process of its historical construction. Without

this dependence, sovereignty can know no practical bounds and is free to conduct

itself without regard for that &harmlesse liberty' upon which civil society thrives. But

where opinion assumes the character of speculative &enthusiasm' and seizes the state as

a vehicle for its expression, the sovereignty of the people will come to connote the

triumphal will of the strongest indulging its energy as a matter of sheer natural right

against any competing initiative. In 1782, in his Speech on the &Reform of Representation

' delivered in the Commons on May 7, Burke had already put his case in the

starkest of terms: &As all government stands upon opinion2 the way utterly to

destroy it is to remove that opinion, to take away all reverence, all con"dence from it;

and then, at the "rst blast of public discontent and popular tumult, it tumbles to the

ground' [32].16 Opinion here is founded upon reverence, upon a regard for settled

practices inherited from the past. It e!ectively binds the constitution in what Paley

was to term its &lower sense'. The constitution, in short, is preserved and animated by

the action of prescription. The prescriptive basis of government is supported, moreover,

by popular presumption in its favour. While prescription guarantees the title to

government, that title is a$rmed by the consolidating interest of presumption.

Together these constitute the grounds of authority in government and succeed in

keeping that authority within customary limits [32, X, pp. 96}97].17

4. Opinion and authority

We have come to recognise that while Burke could accept the Hobbesian stricture

that sovereignty knows no legal obligation, he was also keen to argue that the

executors of the public will in modern states were practically obliged to broker their

decisions with reference to customary opinion. This practical obligation appeared

entirely salutary since, in the real world, power freed from the restraining in#uence of

112 R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120

custom is not usually found to acknowledge any limit to its sphere of political

competence. This sphere of assumed competence contracts, by contrast, in proportion

to the dependence of governments upon the habits and customs of society. Social

habits and customs are themselves derived from the accumulated dispositions of

human intercourse and these in turn come to constitute the world of &opinion'. In

Burke's scheme of things, this world of opinion as it e!ected the established social

protocols of modern European manners had its roots in an historic culture of honour

stretching back into the feudal past and still recognisable in the dynamic interaction

between such passions as self-regard and deference, esteem and emulation.

Throughout the history of European politics prior to 1789 it was the quiet

operation of this culture of honour which had steadily moderated authority in the

interest of justice, security and the common good. Opinion, thus understood, civilises

power. But where the state abandons civilisation, politics, indeed war itself, is barbarised

and degraded:

The new school of murder and barbarism, set up in Paris, having destroyed (so far

as in it lies) all the other manners and principles which have hitherto civilized

Europe, will destroy also the mode of civilized war, which, much more than

anything else, has distinguished the Christian world [35].

It is important to recognise that the culture of honour upon which modern

civilisation had been built is seen by Burke to be materially dependent upon an

unequal division of property amongst the ranks of society. In this way, the interest of

property and the dispositions of honour act in alliance so as to curtail the pretensions

of political power. Government was indeed invented for the protection of property,

but accumulated property is itself a power which stands as a dependable guarantee

against the encroachment of government upon the liberties of society. From this

perspective Burke can argue that the distinction of ranks, rooted in the division of

property and sustained by a culture of honour, constitutes an e!ective security against

tyranny in defence of liberty and property.

By extension, the revolutionary doctrine of natural equality threatened at once the

security of property, moderation in government, and manners in general. Armed with

this perception Burke, in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, could number &an

habitual regard to commutative justice' among the values inevitably cherished by

a &natural aristocracy'. &Natural' here in e!ect means social * &Art is nature', Burke

went on to declare * and society naturally generates distinctions between persons

and groups. Such distinctions may be softened and ameliorated, but they may not be

eliminated: &The state of civil society, which necessarily generates this aristocracy, is

a state of nature' [3, VI, pp. 217}218]. And so it transpires that a regard for

commutative justice is nothing other than a regard for the di!erential parcelling out of

property. Di!erentiation of this kind, however, could only win the support of society

at large to the extent that the impulse to imitate one's betters won out over the

impulse to visit violence upon them: to the extent, in other words, that emulation fell

short of envy.

In Burke's view, such an arrangement could only be secured with the assistance of

the principle of honour acting as a moral force. Honour, however, was a creature

R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120 113

18 &The whole is a body of ways and means for the supply of dominion, without one heterogeneous

particle in it'.

of human sociability and its moral force was derived from the continuous action of

manners and mores on society's members. For this reason the French revolution

against property could be taken to be indistinguishable from its revolution against

manners. Hence Burke's reference in the First Letter on a Regicide Peace to the

&systematick unsociability of this new-invented species of republick'. Human sociability

simply was not possible on the basis of a theory of natural equality imported into

civil society. It depended, in the last instance, on concession, and therefore upon

deference. But deference, whatever else it might mean, implies something other than

complete equality and, in modern Europe, inequality was inextricably linked to the

division of property. But Jacobinism, consisting in &the revolt of the enterprising

talents of a country against its property', [36] had introduced into the world a form of

government which was radically indi!erent to the restraining impulses of all civilised

opinion in its pursuit of total dominion.

It is for this reason that Burke saw "t to defend the war against France in the

mid-1790s as a contest between established property and unadulterated militarism: &It

is a question', he wrote, &between property and force' [36, p. 252]. In the Second Letter

on a Regicide Peace he went on to elaborate upon this theme:

Individuality is left out of their scheme of Government. The state is all in all.

Everything is referred to the production of force; afterwards everything is trusted to

the use of it. It is military in it's principle, in it's maxims, in it's spirit, and in all it's

movements. The state has dominion and conquest for it's sole object; dominion

over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms2We have not considered as we

ought the dreadful energy of a State, in which the property has nothing to do with

the government2 [in France] the property is in complete subjection, and2

nothing rules but the minds of desperate men [15, pp. 288}289, p. 293].18

France was in the process of giving the lie to the habitual assumption of a necessary

connection between property and power. Modern republicanism stood as a hideous

example of political force freed from the in#uence of settled habits and opinions yet

galvanised by a proselytising purpose. The state had been converted into a pure

instrument of domination, and had consequently come to display an inexhaustible

appetite for conquest. Its energy was on that account being mobilised without the

least consideration for that habitual regard for commutative justice upon which the

health of society depended. James Harrington's equation of the balance of property

with the balance of power was not simply being updated in the light of historical

developments. History was in the process of confronting the old Harringtonian

equation with a new reality that would have been unimaginable in the terms of any

political philosophy prepared to set the government of a commonwealth in relation to

the state of its property: &The condition of a commonwealth not governed by its

property was a combination of things, which the learned and ingenious speculator

Harrington, who has tossed about society into all forms, never could imagine to be

114 R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120

19 &No civil or politic constitutions can be perfect or secure, whilst they are composed of men, that are for

the most part passionate, interested, unjust, or unthinking, but generally and naturally restless or unquiet;

discontented with the present, and what they have, raving after the future, or something they want, and

thereby ever disposed and desirous to change'.

possible' [15, p. 289]. But the representation of the state without reference to its

property was, in post-Feudal Europe, the political equivalent of insulating power

from the in#uence of opinion: it entailed collapsing society into civil government.

Under these circumstances, the obligations of public authority would still have to

make themselves felt despite the absence of any kind of loyalty on the part of citizens

to their state. In the end, executive action would have to supply the de"cit left by the

demise of unforced allegiance.

Burke's point here was that the reality of allegiance could not be explained simply

by reference to abstract principles of political right. Revolutionary doctrine had failed

to realise that obedience did not result from a formal obligation to comply. Compliance

was a form of social subordination and not a form of rational assent. In this vein,

Burke accepted with Hume and Smith that Hobbes, in founding the state upon the

elimination of total war by the establishment of a supreme and legally irreproachable

authority, had left unexplained how government could win the positive allegiance of

its subjects: how wisdom amongst individuals eager for pro"t and honour would

e!ectively prevail in such a way as to inculcate an habitual deference to the interest of

their state. But earlier, in 1672, in An Essay Upon the Original and Nature of Government,

it was Sir William Temple who had set about addressing this question as part of

a conjectural inquiry into the a!ective ties of obligation: &Nor do I know', he asserted,

&if men are like sheep, why they need any government; or, if they are like wolves, how

they can su!er it' [37].

Temple was happy to accept that human creatures are de"ned by a &restlessness of

mind and thought' which inclines them toward faction, rebellion and division [38].19

But while discord and dissension are evident facts of life, so too are civil concord and

obedience. While authority can interpose itself between opposing factions, the question

of how it can win the kind of cohesive assent which lays public dissidence to rest

still remains. A civil union requires a &common bottom' which harmonises individual

passions in relation to some common interest under the management of an agreed

authority:

in a state, division of opinion, though upon points of common interest or safety,

yet, if pursued to the height, and with heat or obstinacy enough on both sides,

must end in blows and civil arms2 But nothing, besides the uniting of parties

upon one common bottom, can save a state in a tempestuous season [38, III,

p. 64].

In submitting to the common interest, a people do so in deference to a government

whose authority is founded, not upon some juridical formula or compact, but upon

opinion. All government is a restraint upon liberty and &dominion is equally absolute'

whatever constitutional form it assumes [38, I, p. 5].

R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120 115

20An almost identical formulation appears in [39] &as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the

governors have nothing to support them but opinion'.

However, contention for liberty within a state, where the contest takes the shape of

a bid for supremacy, can only be superseded when the competitors arrive at a harmonious

acknowledgement of the right of public power. This acknowledgement is not

achieved by the contractual transfer of legitimate authority; it is achieved by force of

opinion:

Nor can it be2 that when vast numbers of men submit their lives and fortunes

absolutely to the will of one, it should be want of heart, but must be force of custom,

or opinion, the true ground and foundation of all government, and that which

subjects power to authority. For power, arising from strength, is always in those

that are governed, who are many: but authority, arising from opinion, is in those

that govern, who are few [38, I, p. 6].20

Opinion in favour of authority may spring from respect for the wisdom, valour or

goodness of those who hold it. It may equally arise from the presumption of divine

designation. But it is con"rmed by custom [37, I, p. 8]. At the beginning of political

time, individuals did not "nd themselves conversing and interacting with one another

as interested equals in search of advantage. Instead, they "rst met as purposive beings

accustomed to paternal authority. They came into this world as members of families,

accustomed to respect the virtues of courage or wisdom spontaneously invested in the

paterfamilias. The "rst authoritative assembly of persons was a meeting of heads of

households: political society was originally convened by the bearers of natural

authority who presided over their people through an assumed display of valour,

prudence and piety, or whatever was taken naturally to be annexed to paternal right.

By the same token, the "rst governor was a species of pater patri~ who sat at the

head of a little kingdom which with time increased in size and extent [37, I, pp. 11}13].

As the administration of the household expanded with the succession of paternal

jurisdictions through generations, servants became necessary for the e$cient running

of the familia, and they fell under the patriarch's common care. In a paternal kingdom,

where the father tyrannically rules over his kin, he will be forced to arm his servants

for the subjection of his blood relatives. Here, the seruus is kept under command and

in pay and thereby transformed into a primitive guard protecting the welfare of a petty

monarch. But where paternal authority is overturned by familial defection, aristocracy

is instituted, while the decline of an aboriginal aristocracy in wealth ushers in the

rule of democracy [37, I, pp. 14}18]. What is clear is that in all these instances of

political descent fancifully supplied by Temple, authority is founded upon a customary

attachment necessarily antecedent to any system of contractual obligation.

Governments which may be said to have been founded upon contract were the

product of conquest, with a conquering prince demanding the allegiance of a subject

people in return for safety and protection. But here again where obedience is o!ered

speci"cally to authority * where power is transacted through the medium of trust

* potestas is con"rmed through the mechanism of opinion [37, I, pp. 18}19]. Even

116 R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120

21 &Liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very

existence'. For a discussion of this Humean precept in operation, in relation to voluntary state bankruptcy

see [41].

where public opinion has regard for the public interest alone, as is the case in free

cities, assembled for defence, or in commonwealths established by the wisdom of some

great legislator, the opinion of public utility is con"rmed by trust in authority: &Yet are

none of these forms to be raised or upheld without the in#uence of authority, acquired

by the force of opinion of those virtues above mentioned' [37, I, pp. 20}22]. Government

is indeed founded on consent, but consent arises from a sense of common welfare

secured by a virtuous leader or from a general acquiescence in the abilities of one or

a few outstanding individuals. In either case opinion, forti"ed by custom, puts its trust

in the right of authority. Without this trust, power * held by the few * is nakedly

pitted against the disa!ection of the governed, &who are many'.

This was an argument which Hume, in his essay on the &First Principles of

Government', was to make his own and one which, after the French Revolution, was

to acquire a new signi"cance for Edmund Burke and John Millar alike. Hume, for his

part, extended Temple's point by maintaining that &Opinion is of two kinds, to wit,

opinion of INTEREST, and opinion of RIGHT', with opinion of right*or authority

*acting as a perpetual and necessary guarantor to opinion of interest*or the sense

of general advantage [39, p. 33, 41].21 However, in Hume's formulation, opinion of

right comprises both the right to property and the right to power, and on this score he

concurs with what he takes to be the common view * &It is su$ciently understood,

that the opinion of right to property is of moment in all matters of government'* and

he proceeds to point out how

A noted author has made property the foundation of all government; and most of

our political writers seem inclined to follow him in that particular. This is carrying

the matter too far; but still it must be owned, that the opinion of right to property

has a great in#uence in this subject [39, pp. 33}34].

The &noted author' is of course James Harrington. And having made it clear that he

carried &the matter too far', Hume proceeds to tell us in what direction the exaggeration

ought to be corrected. &A Government', he writes, &may endure for several ages,

though the balance of power and the balance of property do not coincide' [39, p. 35].

Ample historical evidence could be summoned in support of such a thesis as

the researches of Lord Kames and Adam Smith had demonstrated (see [42,43]).

Burke's claim was that the French Revolution marked the point at which a disequilibrium

between property and power challenged the durability of government as a civil

power altogether, and through the 1790s he set out to show how power comes to be

deprived of all balance when property falls prey to the arbitrary will of a revolutionary

state.

Authority can only be peaceably assumed under the auspices of an accepted title to

rule, whatever the distribution of property, and balancing the right of political

authority in relation to the rights of ownership requires an equilibrium rather than an

R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120 117

22 &The rank of nobility being connected with political distinction, has hitherto maintained the ground,

and continues to be the object of ambition; but when separated from the estate which gave it support, so far

from being of service to the owner, it operates as an exclusion from almost all the paths of industry, and

seems to confer a mock-dignity upon real and hopeless indigence and servility2As the advancement of

commerce and manfactures in Britain, has produced a state of property highly favourable to liberty, so it

has contributed to collect and arrange the inhabitants in a manner which enables them, with great facility to

combine in asserting their privileges'.

equality of interests. It calls for circumstantial adjustment rather than revolutionary

realignment. It is in this context that one needs to understand Burke's remark that

&The property of the nation is the nation' [36, IX, p. 252]. Equally, it is in this context

that Burke's defence of the principles of sovereignty, property and moderate government

are more generally to be understood. They should be seen as part of an

enlightenment defence of European civilisation against what appeared to him to be

a resurgent and highly politicised kind of fanaticism. This fanaticism displayed

a political voraciousness that was at the same time politically uncomprehending in the

extreme. And so the Reyections must at least in the "rst instance be understood as an

assault upon a species of political fundamentalism, and not as a Jeremiad against

liberty, against progress or against human prosperity generally. Its trenchancy derives

from an understanding of political urgency and crisis which Coleridge, for instance

* or Fox, or Wollstonecraft, or Thelwall * rather lacked than transcended in the

early 1790s. Revolutions divide one world of political habit and perception from

another, the French Revolution more perhaps than any other.

From this vantage point, Burke's comparative proximity to John Millar and

distance from William Paley becomes apparent. To Millar it was clear that the

balance of property in Britain had radically shifted away from the nobility, a development

which promised a gradual change in the balance of power [44].22 But in France,

the enthusiasm for correcting political abuses was accompanied by an abandonment

of all habitual regard for authority. With public attention focused on the general

advantage of society, an equalisation of ranks and a di!usion of popular privileges

was rapidly sought. A revolution in the &opinion of interest' swept aside the regular

machinery of government, levelling all inherited institutional bulwarks and extinguishing

all a!ection for established authority: &enthusiasm2overthrew those banks

and landmarks, which while they defended the civil rights of the inhabitants, might

have contributed to direct and regulate the new establishment' [44, IV, p. 308].

A revolution in the perception of public interest had generated a crisis in the assumed

legitimacy of public right. Such a crisis, Burke argued, threatened to set at nought

everything which could be said to have contributed to the improvement of human

welfare over the preceding half millennium.

References

[1] R. Bourke, Liberty, authority and trust in Burke's idea of empire, The Journal of the History of Ideas

(submitted for publication).

118 R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120

[2] E. Burke, MS. At She$eld, BK 6. 126, in: P. Langford (Ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmunsd

Burke, vol. II, Oxford, 1981, p. 47.

[3] E. Burke, An appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) in: The Works of the Right Honourable

Edmund Burke, vol. VI, London, 1803}1827, p. 210.

[4] E. Burke, An appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) in: The Works of the Right Honourable

Edmund Burke, vol. VI, London, 1803}1827, p. 147.

[5] F.H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, Cambridge, 1966; 2nd Edition, 1986.

[6] C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. G. Schwab

Cambridge, MA, 1985, esp. pp. 13}14.

[7] R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, of Man, Society, Civilisation and Barbarism, Oxford, 1942,

p. iv.

[8] D. Hume, History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, London,

1778, 6 vols. VI, pp. 219}220.

[9] P. Lucas, On Edmund Burke's doctrine of prescription; or, an appeal from the new to the old lawyers,

Historical Journal XI (1968) 35}63. See in particular pp. 60}61 n. 46.

[11] E. Burke, Substance of the Speech of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, in the Debate on the

Army Estimates, in the House of Commons, On Tuesday, the 9th Day of February, 1790: Comprehending

a Discussion of the Present Situation of A!airs in France, in: The Works of the Right

Honourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols. V, London, 1803}1827, p. 17.

[12] L.G. Schwoerer, &No Standing Armies': The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England,

Baltimore and London, 1974.

[13] E. Burke, Re#ections on the Revolution in France, in: P. Langford (General Ed.), The Writings and

Speeches of Edmund Burke, in: L.G. Mitchell (Ed.), The French Revolution, 1790}1794, vol. VIII,

Oxford, 1989, p. 230.

[14] A. Smith, in: R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, P.L. Stein (Eds.), Lectures on Jurisprudence, Oxford, 1978, LJ

(A) iv, pp. 88}97.

[15] E. Burke, Second Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796) in: R.B. McDowell (Ed.), Writings and Speeches:

(I) The Revolutionary War, 1794}1797 and (II) Ireland, vol. IX, Oxford, 1991, p. 284.

[16] I. Hont, The permanent crisis of a divided mankind: `contermporary crisis of the nation statea in

historical perspective, in: J. Dunn (Ed.), Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?, Oxford, 1995,

pp. 166}231.

[17] E. Burke, Thoughts on French A!airs (1791) in Writings and Speeches, vol. VIII, p. 341.

[18] E. Burke, Observations on the Conduct of the Minority, published in 1797, in Writings and Speeches,

vol. VIII, p. 438.

[19] T. Hobbes, in: Sir W. Molesworth (Ed.), English Works, London, 1839}1845, 11 vols. IV, p. 414.

[20] J.G.A. Pocock, Edmund Burke and the de"nition of enthusiasm: the context as counterrevolution,

in: F. Furet, M. Ozouf (Eds.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern

Political Culture: The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789}1848, Oxford, 1989, pp. 19}43.

See esp. p. 26.

[21] D. Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation,

Princeton, 1986.

[24] T. Hobbes, in: F. ToK nnies (Ed.), The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, Cambridge, 1928, I, vol. 14;

p. 17.

[25] T. Hobbes, Leviathan, in: R. Tuck (Ed.), Cambridge, 1991, I, vol. 36.

[26] T. Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, in The Clarendon Edition of the Philosophical Works of

Thomas Hobbes, vol. III: Part II, xii, 12.

[27] S. Squire, An Historical Essay Upon the Balance of Civil Power in England, London, 1748, p. xxix.

[28] W. Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, London, 1785, p. 464.

[29] A.O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph,

Princeton, 1977.

[30] R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572}1651, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 308}329 and 346}348.

[31] Thucydides, in: D. Grene (Ed.), The Peloponnesian War: The Complete Hobbes Translation, Chicago,

1989, p. xxi.

R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120 119

[32] E. Burke, On the reform of the representation in the House of Commons, in: The Works of the Right

Honourable Edmund Burke, London, 1803}1827. 16 vols. X, p. 93.

[33] R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688}1863, Cambridge,

1987, Part 3.

[34] J.G.A. Pocock, Burke and the ancient constitution: a problem in the history of ideas, in: Politics,

Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, New York, 1971.

[35] E. Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) in Writings and Speeches, vol. VIII,

p. 320.

[36] E. Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796), in Writings and Speeches, p. 241.

[37] Sir William Temple, An Essay Upon the Original and Nature of Government (1672) in The Works of

Sir William Temple, London, 1894, 4 vols. I, p. 10.

[38] Sir William Temple, Of popular discontents, in: An Essay Upon the Original and Nature of

Government (1672) in The Works of Sir William Temple, London, 1894, 4 vols. III, p. 32. See also III,

p. 34.

[39] D. Hume, Of the "rst principles of government (1741), in: E.F. Miller (Ed.), Essays, Moral, Political,

and Literary, Indianapolis, Revised Edition, 1985, 1987, p. 32.

[41] I. Hont, The rhapsody of public debt: David Hume and voluntary state bankruptcy, in: N. Phillipson,

Q. Skinner (Eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge, 1993.

[42] H. Home, L. Kames, Historical Law-Tracts, Edinburgh, 1758, 2 vols. I, 247, passim.

[43] A. Smith, in: R.L. Meek, D.D. Raphael, P.G. Stein (Eds.), Lectures on Jurisprudence, Oxford, 1978,

passim.

[44] J. Millar, An Historical View of the English Government From the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain

to the Revolution of 1688, With the History of the Government From the Revolution to the Present

Time, London, 1803, 4 vols. IV, p. 132.

Further reading

[10] D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750}1834,

Cambridge, 1996 (Chapter 7).

[22] Q. Skinner, & `Scientia Civilisa in Classical Rhetoric and in the Early Hobbesa in: N. Phillipson,

Q. Skinner (Eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge, 1993.

[23] T. Hobbes, Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality, in: Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.

76, 1991, pp. 1}61.

[40] D. Hume, Of the Origin of Government (1777), in: Essays, p. 41.

120 R. Bourke / History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 99}120

EDMUND BURKE AND ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY:

JUSTICE, HONOUR AND THE PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT

Richard Bourke1 2

Abstract: This article situates the work of Edmund Burke, principally his writings on

the French Revolution, in an enlightenment debate about sociability, monarchy and

mixed government. It shows how his conception of manners in general, and honour in

particular, relates to similar preoccupations in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Smith and

Millar, and how that conception has consequences for his theory of authority and moderation

in politics.

The writings and speeches of Edmund Burke constitute a sustained engagement

with the major political questions of his age. To that extent they have an

obviously circumstantial character. However, it is in the nature of major political

questions that they are capable of provoking fundamental responses.

Burke’s career spanned a period in which Britain was deprived of colonial

empire in North America and in which it acquired a commercial empire in

South Asia. That same period saw, in Burke’s estimation, the collapse of political

civilization in France and the emergence of revolutionary fanaticism in

Europe. Under these conditions of extreme upheaval, the considered defence

of a political position is likely to become a defence of political principles.

Accordingly, throughout his career, Burke was continually obliged to return

to fundamental questions about the responsibilities of empire, the nature of

government and the foundations of human society. Now it is perfectly clear

that in all this Burke did not proceed by systematic philosophical inquiry, but

it is equally clear that sophisticated public debate in the eighteenth century

involved consideration of issues of overriding moral and political significance.

Burkean argument was no exception. At its most expansive it depended

at least implicitly upon an appraisal of the precise achievements of European

civilization; and so at various times from the American War through to the

Hastings Impeachment and the French Revolution, Burke set about elucidating

the content of modern civilization with a view to establishing its political

character.

On Burke’s understanding, the most significant achievement of modern

European civilization was to be found in the institution of moderate government.

Moderate governments could be identified by the liberty which the subjects

of those governments possessed, or felt they possessed. They could be

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXI. No. 4. Winter 2000

1 I would like to thank David Armitage, David Bromwich, James Chandler, John

Dunn, Iain Hampsher-Monk, Istvan Hont, Ed Hundert, J.G.A. Pocock, Chris Reid and

Michael Sonenscher for their comments and advice on this article. Responsibility for the

remaining errors lies with me.

2 University of London, Queen Mary and Westfield College, Mile End Road, London

E1 4NS.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 633

identified, in other words, by the security of life and property enjoyed by the

governed over and against their governments. But such security was dependent

in the final analysis on a separation of powers within the state. More particularly,

it depended on the separation of executive from judicial power. That

separation, as Montesquieu had argued, best took the form of trial by jury in

which the judgments of jurors were nonetheless fixed by the letter of the law.3

In this way, in moderate governments legal judgment could be rendered without

fear of interference from competing organs of power in the state. As Burke

put it in the Reflections: ‘Whatever is supreme power in a state, ought to have,

as much as possible, its judicial authority so constituted as not only not to

depend upon it, but in some sort to balance it.’4 Balance here implied a counterweight.

Judicial authority should secure justice to the citizens of a state

over and against its executive power. In this sense, Burke continued, the judicature

should be ‘something exterior to the state’.5 That is, it should be independent

of the state’s regular institutions of government. Where such

independence was enshrined in the constitution of a state, or made a part of its

customary or fundamental law, there safety and tranquillity would be found to

reign.

But there were conditions under which such constitutional provisions

would remain secure and conditions under which they could be rendered precarious.

In the first instance, the security of fundamental or customary law

depended on its being deposited with an independent judiciary. But there were

also social and political conditions on which the security of fundamental law

depended. From a political point of view, the constitutional security of a state

required that effective restraints be placed on the various branches of public

power. In Britain, according to Burke, that meant protecting the authority of

the legislature against encroachment from the executive. For Montesquieu, by

contrast, it was best achieved by maintaining the subordinate powers of the

state, in particular the patrimonial jurisdictions of the French nobility, as a

brake on the arbitrary designs of the monarchy. But for both Burke and

Montesquieu there were also social conditions without which any restraint

upon power would be deprived of all practical efficacy. Those conditions

comprised at once the distribution of property and the disposition of manners.

This article is an attempt to set out what Burke took the appropriate disposition

of manners in moderate governments to consist in and to that end it tries

to show how the principle of honour came to occupy a central place in his

3 See Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed.

Anne Cohler, Basia Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge, 1989), I, XI, 6: ‘Most

kingdoms in Europe enjoy a moderate government because the prince who is invested

with the first two [legislative and executive] powers leaves the third [judicial] to his

subjects.’

4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in The Writings

and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford, 1981), VIII, p. 253.

5 Ibid.

analysis. Honour is a variant on the Voltairean theme of politeness, and in the

pages that follow I shall attempt to show how it functioned for Burke as the

very solvent which maintained society in a condition of peace and tranquillity.

Burke’s understanding is best approached through his analysis of the point

at which the disposition of manners became incompatible with the survival of

moderate government. That point was reached with the advent of revolution

in France. The significance of the Revolution was to be found in the doctrine

of the Rights of Man, but that doctrine carried within it a threat to the inherited

system of European manners. From this perspective, the Revolution held out

the prospect of the destruction not only of established government but of society

itself. It was this which rendered the Revolution quite the most remarkable

event in European history. But in arriving at this conclusion, Burke drew upon

an understanding not simply of the various habits and aptitudes of particular

societies but also upon an understanding of the foundations of human sociability

itself. That understanding was the product of a thoughtful engagement

with an extended enlightenment debate about the nature of human appetites

and passions. This debate had been concerned to uncover whether human

society was based upon relations of benevolence or utility, whether politeness

was the product of benevolence and whether utility was the product of rational

calculation. Burke was familiar with such theories of manners and moral sentiments

through the works of Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson.

His own argument is therefore best understood in the context of their rival

claims and assumptions. So while this article is principally concerned with

Burke’s understanding of the foundations of human behaviour and motivation,

it is also necessarily concerned with the broader enlightenment debate

about the character of human sociability.

I

Throughout the Reflections Burke points to honour as a principle whose exercise

is crucial to the maintenance of civility in territorial states. By extinguishing

its operation, or debasing its currency, we are liable to dissolve

communities, in the words of Burke’s extravagant phrasing, ‘into an unsocial,

uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles’.6 Prestige is the element

in which honour flourishes, and rank offers security to prestige. Without that

security peaceable human intercourse is liable to come under threat from the

indeterminacy of social norms: ‘Who would insure a tender and delicate sense

of honour to beat with the first pulses of the heart, when no man could know

what would be the test of honour in a nation, continually varying the standard

of its coin?’7 During the course of this article I explore Burke’s strategic

deployment of honour as the founding principle of modern society and government.

It is in this context that I attempt to show how the principle of honour

634 R. BOURKE

6 Ibid., p. 147.

7 Ibid., p. 146.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 635

acts for him as the enabling condition of justice in society, but also as the

means by which political power is moderated in its conduct. It supplies the

mechanism, in other words, by which governments are preserved from a

descent into tyranny.

In the larger scheme of things, I want to suggest that both justice and moderation

depend for Burke, in a way that they did not for Montesquieu, on virtue.

They depend in the final analysis on the possibility of benevolent human

action. This dependence, as I hope to show, can also be found in the political

thought of Adam Ferguson, but it was not an integral part of the project of

Adam Smith. Burke’s argument was ultimately underwritten by a doctrine of

benevolent sociability premised on the distinction of ranks. But we have seen

that evolving a coherent position in the face of Revolutionary politics obliged

him to draw upon the resources supplied by the broad eighteenth-century

inquiry into the foundations of society, the origins of justice and the government

of the passions. To that extent, as I have been arguing, Burke’s engagement

with the situation in France after 1789 was at the same time an

intervention into the world of eighteenth-century philosophical dispute. Setting

out the terms in which that intervention was orchestrated, we will constantly

be obliged in the pages that follow to take stock of the larger debate

from which the characteristically Burkean argument took its bearings. That

process will take us from Voltaire and Montesquieu to Smith, to Millar and to

Ferguson.

In identifying honour as a staple ingredient in the moral ties subsisting in

modern states, Burke is deliberately raising the ghost of Montesquieu, whose

political intelligence he recommends in both the Reflections and the Appeal.

More particularly, he is bringing into view the ‘principle of monarchy’, which

is described in the Spirit of the Laws as providing that particular constitutional

form with the means of coherent action. Here we learn that monarchical government

is supported by a definite organization of human interests, founded

on the pervasive demand for pre-eminence and rank, by which the passions of

individuals can find expression without collapsing society into a state of conflict.

Honour, which comprises the demand for ‘preferences and distinctions’

— the ‘prejudice of each person and each condition’ — restrains the

behaviour of individuals in the absence of human benevolence. Harmony is

secured without each citizen consciously looking to the common welfare.

Under these circumstances, in which each person sets their sights on preferential

advantage, it is possible to act as a good citizen without seeking specifically

to behave as a ‘good man’:

You could say that it is like the system of the universe, where there is a force

repelling all bodies from the centre and a force of gravitation attracting

them to it. Honour makes all parts of the body politic move; its very action

binds them, and each person works for the common good, believing he

works for his individual interests.8

While attending to our own interests, endeavouring to distinguish ourselves

in opposition to others, our passions do not stand in need of censors, governors,

tribunals: ‘The World’, as Montesquieu put it, ‘is the school of honor.’9

In this world, the centre of gravity of which is the court, distinction is secured

by the attentions of the monarch. Individuals competing for honours compete

for praise. With Hobbes, honour was desperately secured at the expense of

others: ‘Glory is like Honour, if all men have it, no man hath it . . . every man

must account himselfe, such as he can make himself, without the help of others.’

10 Self-love entailed an exclusive regard to oneself. But here ambition is

understood to realize itself only in the sights of onlookers: in being driven to

enhance our own distinction, we desire its exhibition before a collection of

admirers.

Voltaire’s tribute to the age of the Sun King, in the form of his Siècle de

Louis XIV, appeared three years after the publication of the Spirit of the Laws.

Here we discover a culture of preferment and ambition contributing to the

advancement of politeness — ‘l’europe a dû sa politesse à la cour de Louis

XIV’—at the expense of ‘faction, de fureur & de rébellion’.11 The animosity

which had taken hold of citizens in opposition to their kings since the time of

Francis II gave way to ‘une emulation de servir le prince’ and provided for a

correspondence between the throne and the nation, ‘malgré le pouvoir

absolu’.12 In this scheme of things, all attention was directed towards the

court, attracting the nobility in search of favours, and establishing in the process

a concourse between the bourg and the palais:

Les maisons, que tous les seigneurs bâtirent ou achetérens dans paris, &

leurs femmes qui y vécurrent avec dignité, formérent des écoles de politesse

. . . Les spectacles, les prommenades publiques, où l’on commencait à

rassembler pour goûter une vie plus douce, rendirent peu-à-peu l’extérieur

de tous les citoiens presque semblable. On s’apperçoit aujourd’hui jusques

dans le fond d’une boutique, que la politesse a gagné toutes les conditions;

les provinces se sont ressenties avec le tems de tous ces changemens.13

But while Voltaire argues that the splendour of the court acted as a bait to

‘les seigneurs’, enticing them from their estates into the city in search of ‘une

vie plus douce’, and permitting the diffusion of politeness together with order

in a society previously riven by faction and rebellion, the promise of favours

636 R. BOURKE

8 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, I, iii, 7.

9 Ibid., I, iv, 2.

10 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, in The Clarendon Editions of the Philosophical Works

of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford, 1983), II, pp. 91–2.

11 Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (2 vols., Berlin, 1951), I, p. 5, and II, p. 138.

12 Ibid., II, p. 138, and II, p. 110.

13 Ibid., II, pp. 139–41.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 637

in exchange for services is seen by him as capable of promoting both refinement

and justice without attaching to privilege any solid institutional power.

But it is precisely the concrete embodiment of prerogatives in the form of

subordinate jurisdictions which Montesquieu presented as indispensable to

the establishment of moderation in territorial states:

In a way, the nobility is the essence of monarchy . . . In a few European

states, some people had imagined abolishing all the justices of the lords.

They did not see that they wanted to do what the Parliament of England did.

If you abolish the prerogatives of the lords, the clergy, nobility and towns in

a monarchy, you will soon have a popular state or a despotic state.14

Montesquieu’s suggestion here is that government, established for the security

of justice, is likely to degenerate into despotism where the power of the

state is able to act directly upon its population without the interposition of

intermediate and subordinate privileges. In a monarchy, in which a single

individual governs in accordance with fundamental laws, power is obliged to

communicate itself through intermediate channels. The ‘most natural’ subordinate

power in a monarchy is held to be the nobility.15 But the monarchy and

nobility must either hold each other in check or make an attempt on each

other’s authority. Rivalry, inevitably, degenerates into war, but a mutual check

is supplied by honour. Power in a monarchy, Montesquieu is suggesting, is

limited by the ‘spring’ of its government. But that spring — honour — can

protect justice from the decrees of arbitrary authority only when the prerogatives

des corps retain their independence. The English, Montesquieu contended,

had removed intermediate powers in the interest of liberty. ‘They are

right to preserve that liberty’, he continued, ‘if they were to lose it, they would

be one of the most enslaved peoples on earth.’16

But as he wrote this, it was still his belief that in England the spirit of liberty

had been rigorously maintained. Popular sentiment favoured wit over taste,

national literature tended more to Juvenalian satire than Horatian ceremony,

manners appeared in a less tender, less frivolous guise. But moral seriousness

remained intact. Honour sustained the French feudal nobility, but usefulness

was the principle of a free government in which the aristocracy had been

deprived of its ‘gothic’ autonomy: ‘those who govern . . . would have more

regard for those who are useful to them than for those who divert them’.17 In

England the ‘form of an absolute government’ presided over its essential freedom,

and the spirit of emulation privileged utility over politeness.18 But since

the patrimonial jurisdictions of the French monarchy were inoperative within

the state, representatives of the people and ministers of the crown required ‘a

14 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, I, ii, 4.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., III, xix, 27.

18 Ibid.

power whose regulations temper them’.19 This power was supplied by a hereditary

nobility which ‘must have a great interest in preserving its prerogatives,

odious in themselves, and which, in a free state, must always be endangered’.

20 The ‘Important men’, covetous of distinctions which serve to differentiate

their interests from those of the popular assembly, can sit in judgment

on abuses allegedly perpetrated in the course of public business. Legislative

power, acting as judge where it represents the interested party, is incompatible

with justice. The provision in the English constitution correcting this potential

abuse, we are reminded, is what distinguishes it from the constitutions of certain

ancient republics where the people sat as judge and accuser at the same

time. The House of Lords, without constituting a feudal jurisdiction, performs

its duty as a check on the possible growth of despotic power. At the same time

Parliament as a whole is confined by the executive while the two branches of

the legislature bind each other: ‘As its legislative body is composed of two

parts, the one will be chained to the other by their reciprocal faculty of vetoing.

The two will be bound by the executive, which will itself be bound by the

legislative power.’21 Such mechanisms of restraint acted as an institutional

safeguard or supplement to the spirit of liberty in regulating authority.

However, constitutional checks on the growth of political abuses are only

as sound as the moral character of those who support it. In Britain the constitutional

edifice of the state depended on the durability of the nation’s mores.

British liberty had to stand on the nation’s fund of political virtue. Such an

arrangement, in Montesquieu’s view, was altogether more precarious than the

French monarchy’s dependence on a system of honour: ‘As all human things

have an end, the state we are speaking of will lose its liberty.’22 But the system

of honour in a constitutional monarchy like France, Montesquieu reveals, is in

reality a species of ‘false honour’ which requires no self-sacrifice on the part

of the individuals who maintain it. ‘Philosophically speaking’, he remarked,

‘it is true that the honour that guides all parts of the state is a false honour, but

this false honour is as useful to the public as the true one would be to the individuals

who could have it.’23 However, by 1790, it was Burke’s judgment that

the British system of mixed government was always going to prove more

durable than the absolute monarchy of France. The court, now in the guise of

parliamentary managers, wedded, through the power of patronage, monarchy

to aristocracy and lords to commoners in a secure and enduring bond arising

more from substantive connections than from formal legal ties. That bond,

however, was always threatened by the steady growth of executive power.

Since in the final analysis it was to parliament that one had to look for

638 R. BOURKE

19 Ibid., II, xi, 6.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., I, iii, 7.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 639

protection against an aspiring monarch, British liberty was forced to rely upon

the political restraints which the representation of the state imposed upon

itself. Restraint, as we shall see, was supplied by moral discipline, a discipline

which French revolutionary politics would prove incapable of evolving but

which in England was supplied by a form of virtuous honour more dependable,

in Burke’s view, than that ‘false honour’ which had failed to preserve

constitutional monarchy in France.

Montesquieu’s apprehensiveness about England becomes Burke’s verdict

on post-Revolutionary France, the government of which is deemed to have

become ‘the most completely arbitrary power that has ever appeared on

earth’.24 In attempting to account for this outcome, in seeking to identify the

poison which came to infect the vitals of ancien régime France, Burke assimilates

Voltaire’s eulogy for the purpose of his own indictment: ‘In the cities the

nobility had no power; in the country very little.’25 Disdaining to take part in

civil government or police, standing aloof from administrative business, the

nobility turned their backs on the third estate of the realm, affecting a drastic

exclusiveness in relation to new wealth and talent. ‘Nobility’, Burke wrote, ‘is

a graceful ornament to civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished

society’:

Omnes boni nobilitati favemus, was the saying of a wise and good man. It is

indeed one sign of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline to it with some

sort of partial propensity. He feels no ennobling principle in his own heart

who wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been adopted

for giving body to opinion, and permanence to fugitive esteem.26

But good men, men of wealth and talent, had been estranged from the nobility

in France, and the nobility, ordinarily a consolidating ‘artificial institution’,

cultivated their vanity to the detriment of their involvement in the managerial

organs of state. Under these circumstances, opinion loses its tangible embodiment

and social esteem is free to revolutionize itself.

Montesquieu, having told his readers that ‘laws represent mores’ and that

‘mores represent manners’,27 proceeded, as we have seen, to argue that manners

in a monarchy were formed out of the relations between the prince and

the nobility. The prince sought confirmation from the nobility and the nobility

sought preferment from the prince. Such mutual regard goes by the name of

honour, but honour requires the support of authority and the authority of a feudal

nobility derived from its territorial power. Burke’s purpose, in charting

this territory once more in the wake of the Revolution in France, is to contend

for an alternative account of the relation between liberty and authority in

24 Burke, Reflections, p. 233.

25 Ibid., p. 186.

26 Ibid., p. 188. The Latin citation — ‘all good men always take the part of the

high-born’ — is from Cicero, Pro Sestio, ix, 21.

27 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, III, xix, 16.

modern states. That required an alternative account of how the passions of

men are restrained in modern societies. In his Letter to a Member of the

National Assembly of 1791, Burke explicitly addresses this issue, proclaiming

that human appetites must be externally manipulated to the extent that they do

not impose order on themselves:

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to

put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice

is above their rapacity . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling

power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is

within, the more there must be without.28

Society requires justice if it is to escape from rapacity and our liberty consists

in the quality of that justice. While the qualification for liberty depends

on our disposition to refrain from invading the liberty of others, Burke advises

his readers that it also depends on our ability ‘to listen to the councels of the

wise and the good, in preference to the flattery of knaves’.29 This amounts to a

presumption in favour of authority, but it also assumes that the appetites of

those who wield authority may themselves be subjected to a moral discipline.

The good and the wise are required to adjudicate competing claims to justice.

Without this process of adjudication, peaceable interaction among the members

of civil society could not survive. But Burke is also aware of the fact that

any process of political arbitration requires that the arbiters themselves moderate

their conduct, that their ‘love to justice’ wins out over their rapacity. In

that sense, his argument turns on how goodness and wisdom are secured to

rulers entrusted with authority over the liberty of the ruled.

Public virtue depends for Burke on the political efficacy of a natural aristocracy

in the midst of the artificial institutions of civil society. That is, it

depends on the extent to which the established division of political labour in a

state can be brought into conformity with political merit. In the Appeal from

the New to the Old Whigs, Burke sets out to explain how the merits of the few

are justified by the protection which they offer to the many:

To enable men to act with the weight and character of a people, and to

answer to the ends for which they are incorporated into that capacity, we

must suppose them (by means immediate or consequential) to be in that

state of habitual social discipline, in which the wiser, the more expert, and

the more opulent, conduct, and by conducting enlighten and protect the

weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with the goods of fortune.30

Social discipline makes an appearance where the conduct of affairs is committed

to those who merit political responsibility. The security of justice is

640 R. BOURKE

28 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), in Writings and Speeches, ed.

Langford, VIII, p. 332.

29 Ibid.

30 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), in The Works of the Right

Honourable Edmund Burke (16 vols., London, 1803–27), VI, p. 216.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 641

therefore underwritten by deference to moral seniority. Justice and the common

good are guaranteed to the vulnerable by the virtues of ‘the wiser, the

more expert, and the more opulent’. But in that case justice is secured in the

last instance by the benevolence of the few and not by what Adam Smith had

called ‘a sense of its utility’.31

In what follows, I want to argue that Burke’s engagement with the affairs of

France brought him to rather different conclusions from those drawn in the

Theory of Moral Sentiments about the foundations of justice and of human

society in general. Burke had described Smith’s book in 1759 as being a work

of great practical significance which he valued for its ‘solidity and Truth’.32

But whatever the truth of Smith’s argument, his conclusions were not ones to

which Burke himself subscribed. Smith allows for the establishment of society

in the absence of virtue. Society arises from a kind of utilitarian reciprocity

and not from the prevalence of goodwill. But for Burke, on the other hand,

society cannot exist ‘unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be

placed somewhere’. If that control is not to be supplied exclusively by external

coercion, it must be provided from ‘within’. In Burke’s account, the mechanisms

of control ultimately derive from the moral resources of human

benevolence. Benevolence, however, is not the most dependable of human

affects. Its security depends upon the circumstances in which it most readily

prospers. Those circumstances are largely met by opulence and ease, by freedom

from necessity, and it is for this reason that the welfare of the many is best

entrusted to the generosity of the few.

II

According to Smith, in the pursuit of wealth we are driven by the desire for

distinction rather than the literal anticipation of gain.We delight in the bounty

of others by participating in the pleasure which we sympathetically attach in

our imagination to their predicament. But our delight does not consist so much

in the actual prosperity they enjoy, still less in the expectation of benefiting

from their kindness; instead, it arises out of our sympathy for the honours and

distinctions which fortune has brought to them in the form of splendour and

riches:

From whence arises that emulation which runs through all the different

ranks of men, and what are the advantages we propose by that great purpose

of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be

taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the

advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the

31 The phrase appears in Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments,

ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976), II, ii, 3, 2.

32 The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E.C. Mossner and J.S. Ross (Oxford,

1977), ‘Letter from Edmund Burke’, pp. 46–7.

ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon

the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation.33

The effortless empire which the rich establish over the affections of the

needy proceeds from the ready sympathy which the affluent elicit from the

multitude, astonished and uplifted by their exalted stature. The admiring multitude

are pleased by the beauty, the illustriousness, the tasteful finery, of commodious

living. But more than this, they delight in the awe and respect which

the possessors of these frivolous objects seem to inspire. Emulation is

prompted by the general desire to secure this respect for themselves — to

muster astonishment and applause, to excite wonder and exaltation. Our decisive

involvement in the hurry and business of life, our unthinking devotion to

the ‘two-penny stake’ of existence, has its origin in the comprehensive ambition

to earn—and to be seen to earn—the adulation of admiring spectators.

But it is precisely this vanity, this overwhelming desire for attention and

prestige, which operates as a check upon the otherwise unruly impulse to

maximize our advantage without restraint. In one of his political fragments—

‘Que L’État de Guerre Nait de L’État Social’—Rousseau challenged the view

which he took to have been expounded in the Leviathan that the state of nature

amounted to a state of war in which each combatant aimed at a final and comprehensive

conquest. Imagining this conquest to have arrived at a final stage

of completion, can we suppose the sole survivor to exercise dominion over a

vast, uninhabited waste and delight in his achievement? — ‘à quels yeux’,

Rousseau asks, ‘étalera-t-il son pouvoir?’.34 Smith would have understood the

point well: for the value of self-aggrandizement to be sustainable, it must be

open to view; it must meet with sympathy and approval. In the race for honours

and preferment, the premium which we place upon our own triumph is in

the final instance answerable to the pleasure or displeasure which our conduct

provokes in the minds of others. Esteem is the measure of success; it enables

that ‘agreed valuation’ without which competition would become a lethal

exploit. The need to exhibit our accomplishments, and by this exhibition to

win for ourselves praise and encouragement, effectively humbles the ‘arrogance’

of self-love.35 Through the very demand for reciprocity, individuals are

rendered more tractable, their ferocity and selfishness are subdued. Putting

ourselves continually on display in the hope of winning admiration amounts

to an expression of the desire to arouse the sympathetic imagination of attentive

spectators. Sympathy, in this sense, offers its own reward: we seek it out

for the pleasure it bestows, we indulge our fellow- feeling, not from love or

affection, but from the earnest wish to be acknowledged, to have our sentiments

beat time with the sentiments we encounter in society at large.

642 R. BOURKE

33 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I, iii, 2, 1.

34 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel

Raymond (4 vols., Paris, 1959–69), III, p. 601.

35 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, II, ii, 2, 1.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 643

Moral norms are generated in Smith out of the dynamics of ‘propriety’, or

an agreed aptness of behaviour. But while propriety is the foundation of virtue,

sympathy is the key to the workings of propriety. In our sympathy with

joy we imaginatively participate in the supposed situation of another—their

joy becomes, after a fashion, our own. But we also, Smith wants to argue,

enter into the grief of others. In what sense, we might therefore ask, is pleasure

to be derived from our conception of both the sufferings and the delights of

others? This, of course, was the question which Hume posed to Smith in a letter

dispatched in July 1759. In a footnote to the second edition of the Theory of

Moral Sentiments, Smith set out his response:

It has been objected to me that as I found the sentiment of approbation,

which is always agreeable, upon sympathy, it is inconsistent with my system

to admit any disagreeable sympathy. I answer that in the sentiment of

approbation there are two things to be taken notice of; first, the sympathetic

passion of the spectator; and, secondly, the emotion which arises from his

observing the perfect coincidence between this sympathetic passion in himself,

and the original passion in the person principally concerned. This last

emotion, in which the sentiment of approbation properly consists, is always

agreeable and delightful.36

In entering into what we fancy to be the passions attendant upon the situation

of another, our approval is supplied by the pleasure of an assumed coincidence

between their sentiments and our own. Sympathy is in reality indistinguishable

from approval, and in expressing our approbation we keenly experience

the distinct pleasure of this peculiar form of concordance.

By implication, disapprobation indicates a failure to attain this fellowfeeling,

an inability to establish agreement between the sentiments of the

spectator and those of the principal agent. But of course, in depending upon a

society of judges and critics for confirmation of our own success, and in craving

the positive estimation of our actions which it is in their power to give, we

are inclined to avoid unnecessarily bringing upon ourselves the disapproving

gaze of the world: the delight we experience in observing a perfect concurrence

between our feelings and those of another, or in our being the object of

resounding approbation, is matched by the dread of exclusion from the society

of agreeable passions. By means of this fortuitous arrangement, the commerce

of manners, sentiments and opinions is able to flourish without individuals

looking further than their own desire to impress: propriety, in other words, is

enabled by our own vanity; the anxiety to be pleased by pleasing others provides

for that correspondence of sentiments and opinions without which

social harmony could never be established.

The machinations of propriety, maintained in society by the continuous circulation

of opinion and estimation, enable that minimal tranquillity necessary

for even the most rudimentary social existence. In referring this basic

36 Ibid., I, iii, 1, 9n.

harmony to the mercenary exchange of sympathetic affections, Smith is conspicuously

refusing to refer it to either the ‘artifice of politicians’, after the

fashion of Mandeville, or to an interested reflection upon the demands of

social utility, after the fashion of Hume. But he is also refusing to ascribe the

foundations of society to human generosity or benevolence. No such refusal,

however, is to be met with in Burke. We get some sense of Burke’s position

when we turn to the Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace, where he cautions

against the infectious designs of those enthusiastic Revolutionaries ‘who seek

their happiness by other roads than those of humanity, morals, and religion,

and whose liberty consists, and consists alone, in being free from those

restraints, which are imposed by the virtues upon the passions’.37 Virtue, however,

is in the first instance a property of the Good Man. It is the gentility and

liberality of good men which we admire and endeavour to imitate. Moreover,

in admiring them, we are bringing our sentiments into conformity with the

dictates of religion, without which morality could never overcome self-love,

while emulation would forever degenerate into envy: ‘We know, and what is

better we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source

of all comfort.’38 But in all this it is clear that self-esteem does not itself constitute

the road to virtue through the self-imposed restrictions of propriety;

rather, virtue latterly corrects the fierce and unruly propensities displayed by

the indulgence of naked passion. Manners, in a sense, are already virtuous in

Burke: they contain within them the positive values of humanity and

self-command.

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith had made it clear that there is a

‘considerable difference between virtue and mere propriety; between those

qualities and actions which deserve to be admired and celebrated, and those

which simply deserve to be approved of’.39 The observance of propriety,

founded upon the desire to be honoured and respected, effectively obliges us

to evolve a sense of justice, however imperfect and frail our commitment to it

might in practice be. But in conforming our behaviour to a sense of justice we

do not transcend self-interest out of regard for virtue. Harmony is not in the

gift of good men, and neither does it follow the achievement of virtue: instead,

harmony for Smith is the occasion for the expression of virtue, an occasion

whose promise, under conditions of prosperity and extensive commerce, is

considerably amplified. Social tranquillity, produced by a mercenary commerce

of passion and opinion, and conducted over time through the media of

industry and accumulation, lays the foundation of order and rank which regulates

the system of emulation. But this, of course, is to concede that

644 R. BOURKE

37 Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace, in Writings and Speeches, ed. Langford, IX,

p. 110.

38 Burke, Reflections, p. 141. On the centrality of religion to Burke’s political

thinking, see Iain Hampsher-Monk, A History of Political Thought (Oxford, 1992),

pp. 278–82.

39 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I, i, 5, 7.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 645

self-regard lies at the root of estimation. A concession of this kind, however,

Burke was not prepared to make. He believed that, for commerce to succeed,

it must be founded on the distinction of ranks. It needs the security of ‘protecting

principles’ if it is to be harmoniously pursued. It is from this perspective

that Burke could contend in the Reflections that

Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of

nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies

their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment

to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental

principles, what sort of thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious,

and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honour,

or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing

hereafter?40

Nobility maintains the currency of esteem, and religion encourages us to humble

our pride in affectionately marvelling at the great. Through the value of

gentility and the office of humility, Burke is substituting selflessness in the

place of self-interest, and deference in the place of Smith’s elaborate system

of social accommodation.

Accommodation, in a world divided into rich and poor, may be unequal; but

this is somewhat different from making inequality the precondition of accommodation.

In the final analysis, Burke is committed to an inequality of virtue

as the principle of social and political organization. It is for this reason that he

could present a ‘perfect democracy’ as ‘the most shameless thing in the

world’. Under conditions of radical equality, a people are ‘less under responsibility

to one of the greatest controlling powers on earth, the sense of fame

and estimation’.41 It is clear that estimation on this account can operate as a

controlling power upon the affections only where individuals are accustomed

to congenial deference before the wise and the opulent: the dignity customarily

attached to the bearers of wisdom and wealth frees them to display their

virtue in the form of goodwill and self-control. Virtue disciplines passion, and

passion, subject to this discipline, engenders propriety and politeness. But

there is no hint in all this that propriety enables virtue. So much is made evident

in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs:

When the multitude are not under this discipline, they can scarcely be said

to be in civil society. Give once a certain constitution of things, which produces

a variety of conditions and circumstances, and there is in nature and

reason a principle which, for their own benefit, postpones, not the interest

but the judgement, of those who are numero plures, to those who are vertute

et honore majores.42

40 Burke, Reflections, pp. 130–1.

41 Ibid., p. 144.

42 Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, p. 216.

Landed property, the material support of those who are vertute et honore

majores, by its very nature confers the virtues of independence and liberality

upon its possessors and, by the certainty of its transmission, bestows a durability

upon national mores. It is, in a sense, the national stock of virtue and

esteem. ‘It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue’, Burke argued, ‘it

grafts benevolence even upon avarice.’43

The force and depth of Burke’s commitment to the relationship between

honour and virtue, virtue and property, and property and nobility is best captured

by the contrast which his work affords with the inquiries launched into

precisely these themes by John Millar in the later decades of the eighteenth

century. The growth of new government powers, in the aftermath of the

‘Glorious Revolution’, in the form of a standing army maintained by extensive

public borrowing, appeared to Millar in 1771 to have been effectively

counterbalanced by the concomitant growth of commerce with its attendant

freedoms. The fluctuation of property, which it is impossible with justice to

control, inevitably compromises the customary bases of authority. In his

Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society, Millar

explained that

As no one order of men continues in the exclusive possession of opulence,

as every man who is industrious may entertain the hope of gaining a fortune,

it is to be expected that the prerogatives of the monarch and of the ancient

nobility will be gradually undermined, that the privileges of the people will

be extended in the same proportion, and that power, the usual attendant of

wealth, will be in some measure diffused over all the members of the community.

44

It is well known that after the dubious ministerial tactics employed by Pitt in

1784, and more decisively after the events in France of 1789, Millar’s attention

came to be focused more sharply upon the relations between liberty and

authority. How, he began to ask with a new seriousness, could power be safely

diffused ‘over all the members of the community’?45

In addressing this question, Millar began by examining the possibility of

the mercantile interest combining against government in pursuit of its aims.

The merchant, unlike either the farmer or the landed gentleman, is prone to

connecting his long-term interest with the fate of his ‘brethren’, and is accordingly

prepared to ‘join with those of the same profession . . . in promoting

measures for the benefit of their trade’. Millar further observes that

646 R. BOURKE

43 Burke, Reflections, p. 102.

44 John Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society

(London, 1771), p. 187.

45 For Millar’s reaction to these events, see John Craig, ‘Account of the Life and

Writings of John Millar, Esq.’, in John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks

(Edinburgh, 4th edn., 1806), pp. cii–ciii.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 647

the prevalence of this great mercantile association in Britain, has, in the

course of the present century, become gradually more and more conspicuous.

The clamour and tumultuary proceedings of the populace in the great

towns are capable of penetrating the inmost recesses of administration, of

intimidating the boldest minister, and of displacing the most presumptuous

favourite of the back-stairs. The voice of the mercantile interest, never fails

to command the attention of government, and when firm and unanimous, is

even able to control and direct the deliberations of the national councils.46

But the growth of this mercantile association capable of directing national

policy in defence of its own interests was matched by a general and protracted

shift in the principles of association which bind the members of modern commercial

polities: an adjustment, we might say, of the ‘spring’ of government to

new circumstances. These new circumstances helped to introduce contract in

the place of status as the principle upon which society was founded and,

together with this, wealth as such grew capable of inspiring that complacent

subordination and emulation which birth alone had been accustomed to

expect. While order might still depend on rank, it did not depend on titles. The

‘force of habit’, Millar argued, ‘is much more effectual in confirming the

authority derived from wealth than that which is founded on personal qualities’.

47 As wealth changed hands, the rich could command the respect formerly

paid exclusively to the great. But, more generally, as the habitual

deference which had regulated the composition of society began to be qualified,

the Whig principle of ‘utility’ began to supplant the Tory principle of

‘authority’ as the effective spring of government: allegiance, in other words,

was steadily being founded upon considerations of general interest rather than

on the bare respect due to superiority.48

But of course for Burke ‘utility’, or the common welfare, could be reckoned

a Whig principle only on condition that public interest was seen to comprise

the alliance between talents, gentlemen and magnates. This effectively meant

that government in a modern territorial state could discharge its duty only by

retaining a landed aristocracy; that subordinate contracts were possible only

on account of the sobering and stabilizing impact of hereditary privilege; and

that subordination was inconceivable without a prominent nobility. It was

Millar’s belief that the expansion of commerce, especially where it is accompanied

by a general diffusion of learning, makes public discussion of the aims

and uses of government inevitable. Under these conditions, opinion is bound

to favour those political arrangements which tend towards the equalization of

ranks and a more general enjoyment of privileges. ‘Hence’, Millar declared,

46 John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of

the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688, To Which are Subjoined, Some

Dissertations Connected with the History of the Government from the Revolution to the

Present Time (4 vols.; London, 1803), IV, pp. 136–37.

47 Ibid., p. 292.

48 Ibid., pp. 286–7.

‘the distinction between the old and the new Whigs, by which a famous political

character endeavoured lately to cover the desertion of his former tenets;

and hence too a pretty general suspicion, that many nominal adherents of that

party have become secret admirers of democracy.’49 The division between

‘old’ and ‘new’ had come with the French Revolution, which was in due

course seen as promoting the ‘principle of utility’ at the expense of all habitual

reverence for authority. ‘Philosophy’, Millar commented, ‘triumphed at

length over ancient customs.’50 But while the progress of knowledge through

the ranks of society tended towards the promotion of the common interest, it

was still in Millar’s view liable to grow dangerous where it encouraged the

suspension of all customary ties of obedience.51 But there is a real difference

between conceding the necessity of authority for the consolidation of utility,

and the defence of privilege as the very essence of public utility. It was possible,

in other words, after 1791, to commit oneself to the belief in a genuine

distinction between the old and the new Whigs. It was Burke himself who

advertised his commitment to the older creed.

III

From early in his career, Burke consistently traced the principles of old

Whiggism to the Whigs under Anne, who had apparently understood the maxims

of party loyalty, who had taken private honour to be the foundation of

public trust, and who had appreciated the relation between aristocratic freedom

and social virtue. ‘In one of the most fortunate periods in our history’,

Burke wrote in his Thoughts on the Present Discontents, ‘this country was

governed by a connexion; I mean, the great connexion of Whigs in the reign of

Queen Anne.’52 Political connection, we learn, is built upon fidelity and

friendship freed from the corrupting influence of faction precisely because

they are embodied in men who bring the generosity and the liberality of a

gentlemanly life onto the public stage. It was in this vein that Burke, thirty

years later, argued for the embodiment of political institutions in people who

inspire veneration and affection: ‘To make us love our country, our country

must be lovely.’53 Loveliness is connected with the dignity and authority of

the great, to whom we are in turn connected by the ties of local affection and

with whom we associate that composure which facilitates the exercise of virtue:

‘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.’54

648 R. BOURKE

49 Ibid., p. 307n.

50 Ibid., p. 308.

51 See ibid., p. 310.

52 Thoughts on the Present Discontents, in Writings and Speeches, ed. Langford, II,

p. 316.

53 Burke, Reflections, p. 129.

54 Ibid., p. 97.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 649

As the multitude are thereby imbued with a sense of national dignity, so

they are taught to respect the virtues artfully displayed by men of quality. The

state is most appropriately represented by interests connected with the values

animated by the ‘little platoon’ — gentility, conviviality, liberality — while

the stability and perdurance of those values in society maintain the existence

of a virtuous moral discipline. But the stability and durability of virtue is itself

secured by its foundation in the permanency of landed wealth. Extensive

property in land liberates its possessor from envy and dependence. It is, in

effect, the material basis of self-government and a necessary qualification for

the government of others. As indigence is never the master of circumstance—

Junto publicists like Addison and Steele had said as much on innumerable

occasions — it is never a secure basis for virtue.55

The diffusion of property into many hands, it seemed reasonable to conclude,

tends towards a dissipation of virtue. It tempts desire without securing

justice; it severs passion from the public interest. The sense of justice comes

to be keenly appreciated in society, not so much because propriety has

achieved a degree of delicate refinement, but because property retards the

transformation of ambition into rapacity.With the advent of the French Revolution,

Burke could believe himself to have encountered a very real confirmation

of the fact that social energy, in the form of talent and ability, would be

dangerously unleashed when it escaped the conservative and moderating

influence of accumulated masses of landed wealth:

Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not represent

its ability, as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active

principle, and as property is sluggish, inert and timid, it never can be safe

from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant

in the representation. It must be represented too in great masses of accumulation,

or it is not rightly protected. The characteristic essence of property,

formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is

to be unequal. The great masses therefore which excite envy, and tempt

rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger. Then they form a natural

rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations. The same

quantity of property, which is by the natural course of things divided among

many, has not the same operation. Its defensive power is weakened as it is

diffused. In this diffusion each man’s portion is less than what, in the eagerness

of his desires, he may flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the accumulations

of others. The Plunder of the few would indeed give but a share

inconceivably small in the distribution to the many.56

55 See Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond

(5 vols., Oxford, 1965), II, p. 463; no. 248.

56 Burke, Reflections, p. 102. It is noticeable that the dynamic relationship between

the ‘passions’ and the ‘interests’, discussed at length by Albert Hirschman in his The

Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph

(Princeton, 1977), takes the form in this passage of a contest between ability and

property.

For passion to be tamed and harmonized with public interest, the desires of

the many must be tempered and moderated by the property of the few. It was

with the Whigs under Anne that gentlemen learned how best to give these

social arrangements an enduring political expression—how political combination

could be promoted for the defence of liberty and how ability could be

harnessed to property through friendship. They learned how, in the words of

Addison’s ‘The Campaign’, cited in Burke’s Thoughts, virtue and liberty

could unite ‘From long faith, and friendship’s holy ties’.57

However, while the union of virtue, liberty and property secured the constitution

in Britain, their disunion brought about Revolution in France. It was

Burke’s view that by 1790 French democracy had practically completed the

process of converting itself into a federation of oligarchic republics precariously

united by the tyranny of Paris. The democratic principle, under the general

heading of natural rights, had originally been established while the

objects of ambition—wealth and office—were still being held out to attract

the newly enfranchised masses. The spectacle of gain naturally whetted the

appetites of an expectant population, eager to realize their nominal rights in

the form of actual power, but requiring management and regulation if the state

was to survive as a single body. ‘Their confederations, their spectacles, their

civic feasts, and their enthusiasm, I take no notice of’, Burke proclaimed;

‘They are nothing but mere tricks’.58 Nothing, that is, but fictions of political

integrity erected in the face of an altogether more palpable disintegration. The

only instruments available to bolster political unity were the army and the revenue.

In other words, France could be maintained as a national sovereignty

only by the dual expedients of an enforced paper currency and the force of

arms.59

But if the paper tokens of confiscated Church property were to be imported

as one crucial ingredient of national solvency — in both senses of that

word — power would unavoidably come into the hands of the managers and

conductors of circulation together with the agents entrusted with mortgaging

Church plunder. ‘The property of France’, Burke had declared, ‘does not govern

it.’60 More than that, property had itself become entirely ‘volatalized’ by

tacking the value of land to the vagaries of a speculative market in paper

650 R. BOURKE

57 Joseph Addison, ‘The Campaign’ l.40, cited in Thoughts on the Present

Discontents, p. 317. For a more general discussion of friendship, see Addison’s treatment

of Cicero’s De Amicitia, in the Spectator, I, 289; no. 68: ‘Tully was the first who

observed, That Friendship imposes Happiness and abates Misery, by the doubling of our

Joy and dividing of our Grief.’

58 Burke, Reflections, p. 237.

59 The classic treatment of Burke’s reaction to the system of assignats is J.G.A.

Pocock’s ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in

Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1983). See also Pocock’s Introduction to

his edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis, 1987).

60 Burke, Reflections, p. 103.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 651

currency: ‘The great object of these politics is to metamorphose France, from

a great kingdom into one great play-table.’61 In Britain, between about 1694

and 1720, there had steadily evolved an alliance between the monied men and

aristocratic court managers which contributed to stability at home and security

abroad, and which left power squarely in the hands of sober and moderate

politicians while still connecting all energy and ability to the state. But in

France after 1789, with the exclusive empowerment of the directors of currency,

power came to be settled in the towns amongst those acclimatized to

the wizardry of financial markets and able to confer rapidly in pursuit of speculative

profits. Sociability in general was reduced to the mean and shabby proportions

of contractual exchange.

In accordance with this, Burke believed that French society and manners

were being conquered through the medium of market business, which had

been perfected by the combined efforts of ‘burghers’ and financiers left with

no one to emulate but themselves:

In towns combination is natural. The habits of burghers, their occupations,

their diversion, their business, their idleness, continually bring them into

mutual contact. Their virtues and their vices are sociable; they are always in

garrison; and they come embodied and half disciplined into the hands of

those who mean to form them for civil, or for military action.62

At one point in the Reflections Burke announced that ‘among the Revolutions

in France, must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of

politeness’.63 In fact, all politeness had effectively been annihilated—esteem

had been debased, emulation corrupted and gentility extinguished. Social discipline

had been suspended, and the doctrine of the Rights of Man had proved

itself inimical to the noble virtues cultivated by the free correspondence of

independent gentlemen. The jealousies of men ‘in garrison’ predominated

over the generosity and friendship of men in clubs; an ignoble oligarchy of

desperadoes crowded out the dignity and ease of aristocratic liberty.

The ‘combination’ arising from business transacted in French towns is

manifestly different from the ‘connexion’ which links the disparate interests

composing British society—landed, mercantile and monied—into a harmonious

whole. While liberality animates the latter, need confines the former:

individuality and autonomy are necessarily compromised where social intercourse

is conducted in terms of mutual want. It is in this context that we ought

to consider Burke’s remark that ‘combination and arrangement’ are impossible

amongst ‘country-people’.64 They do not, in the first instance, have the benefit

of that geographical proximity to the market which participation in the game

61 Ibid., pp. 238, 240.

62 Ibid., p. 242.

63 Ibid., p. 120.

64 Ibid., p. 242.

of speculative trading requires. They are not constantly available for negotiation

according to the electric fluctuation in rates of return:

Anything in the nature of incorporation is impracticable amongst them.

Hope, fear, alarm, jealousy, the ephemerous tale that does its business and

dies in a day, all these things, which are the reins and spurs by which leaders

check or urge the minds of followers, are not easily employed, or hardly at

all, amongst scattered people.65

A shift in the balance of property had been accompanied by a shift in the

balance of power. The nobility of the country might—as the greater gentry in

Britain had done—employ their property to direct the affairs of the town. But

their credit is now in the hands of financiers and burghers; their power of purchasing

has been radically curtailed by the financial trade of the towns: ‘If the

country gentlemen attempt an influence through the mere income of their

property, what is it to that of those who have ten times their income to sell, and

who can ruin their property by bringing their plunder to meet it at market?’66

But combination amongst the gentlemen of the country, we must remember, is

only ‘in a manner’ impossible. They may happily pursue their interest in business

and affairs, and combine for political advantage. But it is in the nature of

their station, and in the disposition arising from that station, not to sacrifice

their substance to the pursuit: ‘Combine them by all the art you can, and all the

industry, they are always dissolving into individuality.’67 Their conferences

are never conducted at the expense of the values of autonomy and friendship:

their standing frees them from the degrading circumstances of necessity and

fear, jealousy and alarm. Their freedom, it seems clear, is their virtue.

The connection between freedom and virtue in modern states had been

given fairly extensive treatment by Ferguson in his Essay on the History of

Civil Society. In reviewing the book for the Annual Register, Burke objected to

its celebration of the Spartan system of manners and government, but still

hailed the volume as a significant contribution to the science of politics.68

What Burke took that significance to consist in is not impossible to determine.

Ferguson’s attention in the Essay was directed towards, amongst other things,

the means by which the principles of government—particularly the principle

of monarchy—were corrupted. In territorial monarchies, the sovereign owes

his authority ‘to the founding titles and dazzling equipage which he exhibits in

public’.69 But while the principle of honour served to incorporate the members

of large states into a single community without appealing to their public spirit,

652 R. BOURKE

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid.

68 Annual Register (1767), pp. 307–16.

69 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767),

p. 104.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 653

it was still peculiarly prone to degeneration if the values supporting the system

of honour were to be seriously undermined:

If those principles of honour which save the individual from servility in his

own person, or from becoming the engine of oppression in the hands of

another, should fail; if they should give way to the maxims of commerce, to

the refinements of a supposed philosophy, or to the misplaced ardours of a

republican spirit; if they are betrayed by the cowardice of subjects, or subdued

by the ambition of princes; what must become of the nations of

Europe?70

As far as Burke was concerned, the French Revolution brought about the

realization of this imagined failure in demonic form: politics did, in fact, give

way to a form of ‘commerce’ unredeemed by honour; prudence was indeed

replaced by the ‘refinements of a supposed philosophy’; and society did

become infused with the ‘misplaced ardours of a republican spirit’.

For all his sympathy with the civic virtues founded on the politics of classical

city-states, Ferguson was keenly aware of the dangers involved in introducing

anachronistic versions of republican equality into the extended

territorial units over which modern governments in their various forms presided.

For the maintenance of civility in large and comparatively dispersed

communities, honour had to take the place of ancient virtue as the spring of

modern politics. The problem, however, was that in this setting it was possible

to imagine ambition being cut loose from the restraints imposed upon it by the

quiet workings of gentlemanly elevation: once the means of social advancement

lost the corrective restraints imposed upon it by a regular system of

social esteem, manners would be corrupted, politeness would disappear, and

the ‘maxims of commerce’ would predominate over the principles of virtuous

liberality. Europe would be peopled by a collection of what Steele had termed

‘Mechanick’ beings: usurious, dependent, desperate and sordid. Only by elevating

a certain order of citizens would society itself be delivered from a condition

of indigent necessity to one of magnanimous liberty: ‘We look for

elevation of sentiment’, Ferguson pointed out, ‘and liberality of mind, among

those orders of citizens, who, by their condition, and their fortune, are relieved

from sordid cares and attentions.’71 Just as only those whose fortune had

released them from the drudgery of common ‘cares’ were capable of

self-government, so only those who clearly exhibited the characteristics of

self-government could be trusted with the government of others: ‘How can he

who has confined his views to his own subsistence or preservation, be

intrusted with the conduct of nations? Such men, when admitted to deliberate

on matters of state, bring to its councils confusion and tumult, or servility and

corruption.’72

70 Ibid., p. 107.

71 Ibid., pp. 284–5.

72 Ibid., p. 286.

Of course, for Burke it was not only people shackled to the brute materiality

of existence who were poorly qualified for the comprehensive business of

public action and deliberation. That very comprehensiveness presupposed leisure

to acquire learning; it required a certain aloofness from the narrow confines

of professional occupations and interests: hence Burke’s contempt for

the menial lawyers—‘mechanical, merely instrumental members of that profession’

73—who had left their seats as clerks in provincial offices for seats in

the national assembly. They could do no better than deliberate in the style of

country attorneys accustomed to the proceedings of petty local jurisdictions.

They were, in essence, incapable of raising their sights above litigious squabbles

to the broad horizon of national politics. As he wrote in the Reflections:

It cannot escape observation, that when men are too much confined to professional

and faculty habits, and, as it were, inveterate in the recurrent

employment of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled than qualified for

whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed

affairs, on a comprehensive connected view of the various complicated

external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious

thing called a state.74

Now that sociability had been confounded with the commerce between the

degenerate oligarchs of the bourg, and now that the state was at the disposal of

professional bureaucratic functionaries dwarfed by the sublime business of

public administration, France could be sutured together only by the emergency

precautions of degenerate men.

Dignity, elevation and generosity had disappeared from politics. Power

could no longer be considered ‘gentle’ nor obedience ‘liberal’: ‘All the pleasing

illusions . . . which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a

bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify

and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire

of light and reason’.75 In the absence of these enabling ‘illusions’, law is left

with no support but terror, and obedience becomes a matter of sheer expedience

to be discontinued when the convenience ceases. Society becomes peopled

with individuals who engage one another from motives of fear or pride,

but never from affection. France is brought under the jurisdiction of naked

power, unadorned and uncompromising, ‘not standing on its own honour, and

the honour of those who obey it’.76 The common sense of justice perishes with

the sense of honour. But in allowing the principle of honour to be exploded,

the Revolutionaries of France were also consigning the historical capital

which had been its original foundation to oblivion: it was, after all, the principle

of honour—‘This mixed system of opinion and sentiment’—which had

654 R. BOURKE

73 Burke, Reflections, p. 93.

74 Ibid., p. 95.

75 Ibid., p. 128.

76 Ibid., p. 129.

EDMUND BURKE & ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY 655

its origin in ‘ancient chivalry’.77 As Ferguson had argued — with Robertson

and Millar78—European manners, uniting courage with compassion, may be

traced to the chivalric figure of the Christian knight, the sanctified hero contending

for renown above spoil and moved as much to acts of charity as to

feats of valour: ‘The point of honour, the prevalence of gallantry in our conversations,

and our theatres . . . are undoubtedly remains of this antiquated

system’.79

But unlike those whom Burke had branded ‘our oeconomical politicians’,80

Ferguson’s emphasis fell less on the tendency of commerce to soften distinctions,

and more on the mechanisms by which distinctions themselves became

agents of the civilizing process. By removing those agents from the field, the

process itself would be corrupted.81 It was, in Burke’s phrase, that ‘generous

loyalty’, that ‘proud submission’, which abated ferocity, which humbled and

subdued the fierceness of pride, and which co-opted human sentiment and

opinion into the polite world of social esteem.82 From this perspective,

Sieyès’s injunction in the Essai sur les privilèges — ‘laissez le Public dispenser

librement les témoignages de son estime’83—had the appearance of a

declaration of war:

Au moment où le Prince imprime à citoyen le caractere de privilégié, il

ouvre l’ame de ce citoyen à un intérêt particulier, & la ferme plus ou moins

aux inspirations de l’intérêt commun. L’ideé de Patrie se resserre pour lui;

elle se renferme dans la caste où il est adopté . . . Alors naît dans son ame . . .

un désir insatiable de domination. Ce désir, malheureusement trop analogue

à la constitution humaine, est une vraie maladie anti-sociale.84

It is from this position that Sieyès could conclude that the nobility, whose

‘droits civils’ made them a people apart in the nation, were ‘imperium in

77 Ibid., p. 127.

78 See William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, With a

View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to

the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (2 vols., Dublin, 1762), I, pp. 62–3; and John

Millar, Distinction of Ranks, pp. 57–62.

79 Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, p. 311.

80 Burke, Reflections, p. 130. For a discussion of Burke’s debt to, and dissent from,

‘Hume, Robertson, Smith and Millar’, on the priority of manners over production and

exchange as an instrument of civilization, see once again J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Political

Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Virtue, Commerce, History,

pp. 197–9.

81 For a contrary view, see Robertson’s History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles

V, I, p. 71: ‘Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinction and

animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them by

one of the strongest of all ties, the desire of supplying their mutual wants.’

82 Burke, Reflections, p. 127.

83 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Essai sur les privilèges (Paris, 1788), p. 10.

84 Ibid., pp. 13–14.

imperio’.85 The battle lines had been drawn; and—in Burke’s analysis—the

conflict, deprived of the meliorating codes of humanity and gallantry which

had dampened the ferocity of European warfare, would surpass the brutalities

of the Reformation wars.

It was Burke’s view that one could not impose limits upon the ‘abstract

competence of supreme power’. Limits, however, were imposed upon the

‘moral competence’ of governments to the extent that they were brought into

society with the people whom they governed.86 For that process of restraint to

function, the manners of society had to be compatible with moral generosity.

This article has attempted to capture Burke’s sense of the conditions under

which moral generosity could flourish in society and the conditions under

which it would be destroyed. The Revolution in France stood for Burke as an

object lesson in how to extinguish social benevolence and erect a political

despotism in the wake of its demise. In the First Letter on a Regicide Peace

Burke argued that manners ‘are more important than laws’. Indeed upon manners,

laws substantially depend. But while manners might assist in the composition

of society, they were also capable of being debased and barbarized:

‘Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize

or refine us.’87 When society is reduced to a process of utilitarian exchange, it

is no society at all. When the public is permitted freely to allocate the marks of

its esteem, honour becomes subject to a free and equal competition. Under

these circumstances, honour will be forced continually to vary the ‘standard

of its coin’. It is then that the very constitution of human beings becomes

infected by ‘une vraie maladie anti-sociale’, and not, as Sieyès had it, when

princes control the bestowal of privileges. Those who seek to level, Burke had

claimed, extinguish in themselves all nobility of spirit. When an attempt is

made to diffuse power over all the members of a community, those who are

vertute et honore majores are sacrificed to the greater number and, in the process,

virtue and honour themselves are left to perish.

Richard Bourke QUEENMARY AND WESTFIELD COLLEGE,

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

656 R. BOURKE

85 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État? (Paris, 3rd edn., 1789),

p. 13.

86 Burke, Reflections, p. 71.

87 Writings and Speeches, ed. Langford, IX, p. 242.