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Burke, Edmund
Michael S. Kochin

Edmund Burke (173097), Irish-born and educated British politician, publicist, and
man of letters, was a Whig reformer, the great ideological opponent of the French
Revolution, and the spiritual father of Anglo-American conservatism. Four aspects
of Burkes career are crucial for the study of ethics: his defense of party and party
loyalty, his defense of the elected representative as a trustee of his constituents inter-
ests rather than a delegate instructed by their opinions, his war on every incarnation
of arbitrary power (even in the guise of the enlightened despotism of a monarch or
newly enfranchised People), and finally the pan-European crusade he preached
against the French Revolution and the desire to rationalize politics.
From his youth Burke called himself a Reformer (WS 1: 16). Burke supported
the grievances of the Americans in Britains American war (177583), and pushed
tirelessly for equitable treatment for Irelands Catholic majority and for the native
subjects of British East India Company domination (see colonialism and
postcolonialism; rights of indigenous peoples). Burke was an Irish Protestant
enemy of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, and Nemesis of the arch-Nabob, East
India Company Governor Warren Hastings, for exploiting the Indians for the greater
glory and profit of Britain and her chartered Company. Burke put Hastings on trial
for his life in the name of universal moral principles: We think it necessary, in
justification of ourselves, to declare that the laws of morality are the same everywhere,
and that there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of
bribery, and of oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation,
of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over (Speech
on Opening of Impeachment, February 16, 1788, WS 6: 346).
On party, Burke departs from the tradition of political thought from Plato and
Aristotle to Hume and Bolingbroke and contends that political parties are not
merely ineliminable from free government, but are potentially constructive. Of
course, when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by
one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle (Burke 1981; WS 2: 315).
Where Burke is original and influential is his defense of party in ordinary situations.
Burke defines party as a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavors
the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed
(1981; WS 2: 317).
For a party to be respectable, its members must agree on their particular principles
(Burke 1981; WS 2: 280), yet people can share principles without being united
effectively for political action. Against the slogan asking the voters to judge their
would-be leaders based solely on their programs, not men but measures, Burke
teaches them to value party loyalty: When people desert their connections, the

The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Edited by Hugh LaFollette, print pages 647652.
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/ 9781444367072.wbiee501
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desertion is a manifest fact, upon which a direct simple issue lies, triable by plain
men (1981; WS 2: 31819; see political ethics). From such little loyalties a great
commonwealth is built (see WS 1: 378).
In representative government, parties bind together representatives and constitu-
ents, yet Burke rejects the simplest notion of such a tie, that representatives are mere
delegates of constituent will, obliged to push the policy preferences of those who
elected him. In explaining himself to his Bristol constituents, Burke presents the
classic account of the trustee view of a representatives duties:

Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he
betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. If government
were a matter of Will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior.
But government and Legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of
inclination. (Speech at the Conclusion of the Poll, November 3, 1774, WS 3: 69)

Burkes denial of the right of constituents to instruct their representatives is best

understood as an aspect of his opposition to all notions of government as purely a
matter of will, whether democratic, monarchical, aristocratic, or theocratic: Arbi-
trary power is a subversion of natural justice, a violation of the inherent rights of
mankind (Resolutions Regarding the Poor Laws, Burke 1844, 4: 463, quoted in
Stanlis 1958: 55; see power).
Burke defends aristocracy as a balance against royal, popular, or royalpopulist
despotism because it is the nature of despotism to abhor power held by any means
but its own momentary pleasure; and to annihilate all intermediate situations
between boundless strength on its own part, and total debility on the part of the
people (1981; WS 2: 25960). Burke contends that the greatest fault of the Irish
penal laws is that by abolishing primogeniture for Catholics these laws undermined
the Catholic aristocracy that could have balanced the despotism of the Protestant
Ascendancy (Tracts Relating to Popery Laws, WS 9: 437).
Burke is of greatest consequence as the enemy of the despotism of reason and
virtue thrown up by the French Revolution. Burke calls down the vengeance of man
and God against the revolutionary desire to rationalize politics: What is Jacobinism?
It is an attempt (hitherto but too successful) to eradicate prejudice out of the minds
of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into the hands of the
persons capable of occasionally enlightening the minds of the people (Letter to
William Smith, January 29, 1795, Corresp. 9: 12930).
In his most influential work, the 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke
presents a panorama of the French Revolution that comprehends the revolutionaries
crimes and follies and reveals their basest motives (1968: 171). By loosing the reins of
affection, the governing power in France has forfeited, as we would say, its legitimacy:
its orders are enforced only by the immediate prospect of death (1968: 275, 172).
Burke contends that the central question for politics is how people, great and
small, are to be attached to government by their sentiments, and not just by their
interests, especially if their interests are narrowly conceived after the degrading and
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sordid mechanistic view of man promulgated by the paltriest of masters, that little
miserable prating thing[,] the French Philosophy (Speech on Divorce Bill, April 29,
1771, WS 2: 357; Corresp. 1: 173; see also Speech on Conciliation with America,
March 22, 1775, WS 3: 165; Burke 1968: 1712, 349, 369). For Burke, the most
powerful of these political affections falls under the heading of prescription men
ordinarily obey that authority which they recognize as their own, and has always
been their own. For this reason the English people correctly wish to derive all
liberties that they possess as an inheritance (Burke 1968: 117, 120).
All successful reformations, Burke says, proceed upon the principle of reference
to antiquity. Whether or not Englishmen truly have a liberal birthright, says Burke,
they imagine that their liberties are their birthright. The French failed to imagine in
the ancient constitution of France a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the
vulgar practice of the hour; they have relied on the appeal of novelty, and not antiq-
uity, to secure authority for the most radical reforms (Burke 1968: 122). The edifices,
the institutions of civil society, answer to its common purposes with the wisdom of
accumulated experience; they are the tools of proper policy, they are the source of
power for any successful reformation (see Burke 1968: 2678). Once destroyed, they
cannot quickly be replaced so all true statesmanship is a matter of renewal and
reapplication of these institutions.
The French Revolutionaries are not content to be reformers, but rather wish to build
from nothing all institutions of society in accord with their understandings offunda-
mental rights. Arguments from abstract principles, Burke claims, lead us astray by
ignoring all-important circumstances (1968: 90; 1992: 163; see casuistry). Basing their
politics on the most abstract of principles, the French Revolutionaries have abstracted
away from politics: Burke comments on their first revolutionary constitution, Not one
reference is to be found to any thing moral or any thing politic (1968: 297).
Whereas the principled prudence of ordinary politics is limited by the nature of
man, by the second nature of civil society, and by the ancient rights of hallowed
corporations within civil society, revolutionary theory is limited only by despotic
practice (Burke 1968: 345; Letter to a Member of the National Assembly 1791, WS 8:
319). The rawest violence, unclothed by any pretty sentiments and unprotected by
juridical sophistication, becomes the only basis for the revolutionary regime. That
regime would fall, Burke foresaw, as soon as the revolutionary generals mastered
this secret and seized power from the orators and the clerks.
Burke is important for ethical theory not because of his own theoretical
innovations: Burke called for effacing every vestige of that philosophy, which
pretends to have made discoveries in the terra australis of morality (Letter to a
Member of the National Assembly, WS 8: 305). Burke teaches the limits of ethical
theory, either as an account of how people act or as a guide to how they should act
(Speech on Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775, WS 3: 157). Burke critiques
Enlightenment theory by appeal to practice: The best way of showing the evil of
any system is to show the mischiefs that it produces; because a thing may look
specious [plausible] in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice (Speech on Opening
of Impeachment, Fourth Day, February 19, 1788, WS 9: 434).
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In his friendship and mutual influence upon Adam Smith, Burke set the tone of
Anglo-American conservative thought and action by valorizing economic liberty at
the price of the subversion of traditional privilege and received order, and in seeing
a strong but balanced government as a vital tool in the struggle for economic liberty
against entrenched privilege. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers of Burke
such as John Morley, Carl Schmitt, Robert Hutchins, Leo Strauss, Peter Stanlis, and
C. B. Macpherson attempted to locate Burkes thought in relation to the controversy
over the status of natural right and natural law (see natural law). Burke could
appeal to natural rights and natural law when necessary, for example in protesting
the oppression of the Irish Catholics by the penal laws. In his understanding of natu-
ral rights Burke does not depart decisively from the Whig consensus (see locke,
john): Liberty, Burke writes, is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species
(Letter to Charles Depont, November 1789, Corresp. 6: 41). Burke asserts, however,
that the appeal to natural rights is unnecessary and even destructive when a decent
civil order exists and can be preserved. Burke defends the prudence embodied in
existing institutions and the wisdom of prejudice, for through just prejudice, [mans]
duty becomes a part of his nature (1968: 1834).
Burkes enduring lesson is the need to ground all reforms in an appeal to the
wisdom of the past, whether the past was actually wiser than we or not. Burke speaks
of the powerful prepossession toward antiquity with which the minds of all our
lawyers and legislators, and of all the people whom they wish to influence, have been
always filled and the stationary policy of this kingdom in considering their most
sacred rights and franchises as an inheritance (1968: 118). Against the revolutionaries
of every age, Burke contends that people will not look forward to posterity, who
never look backward to their ancestors. The French Revolutionaries, Burke
predicted correctly in 1790, have taught their successors as little to respect their
contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers.
Existing institutions are the material of every successful reform, and wisdom
cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance; her pride is in their
use (1968: 119, 123, 192, 267).
The work of a statesman is reform, and reform requires that institutions be
preserved, where possible, in order to be reformed. No free government or decent
civil order, Burke prophesied, could be founded on the cult of the guillotine.

See also: casuistry; colonialism and postcolonialism; locke, john;

natural law; political ethics; power; rights of indigenous peoples

REFERENCES
Burke, Edmund 1844. Resolutions Regarding the Poor Laws, in Charles William, Earl
Fitzwilliam, and Richard Bourke (eds.), Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund
Burke, Between The Year 1744, and the Period of his Decease, in 1797, 4 vols. London:
Francis and John Rivington, vol. 4, pp. 4624. At http://tinyurl.com/6yehpva.
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Burke, Edmund 195878. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland,
10 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Chicago: University of Chicago
Press (cited as Corresp.).
Burke, Edmund 1968 [1790]. Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise
OBrien. London: Penguin.
Burke, Edmund 1981 [1770]. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. In Paul
Langford (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 2, Party, Parliament,
and the American Crisis, 17661774. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 241322.
Burke, Edmund 1981. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford,
9 vols. (Vol. 4 has yet to appear.) Oxford: Oxford University Press (cited as WS).
Burke, Edmund 1992 [1791]. An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. In Daniel E. Ritchie (ed.),
Further Reflections on the Revolution in France. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, pp. 73201.
Stanlis, Peter J. 1958. Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.

FURTHER READINGS
Dreyer, Frederick A. 1979. Burkes Politics: A Study in Whig Orthodoxy. Waterloo, Ontario:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Lerner, Ralph 1994. Burkes Muffled Oars, in Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics
of Enlightenment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 6787.
Mansfield, Harvey C., Jr. 1965. Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and
Bolingbroke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mehta, Uday Singh 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal
Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
OBrien, Conor Cruise 1992. The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Strauss, Leo 1953. Burke, in Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 294323.