Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

by Harold J. Laski

Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that danger. His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must always govern the immediate decision. "When the reason of old establishments is gone," he said in his Speech on Economical Reform, "it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them." "A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve," he wrote in the Reflections on the French Revolution, "taken together would be my standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve" conceals two principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold. "All the reformations we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity"; and the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, which is the most elaborate exposition of his general attitude, proceeds upon the general basis that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future. Nor is this all. "If I cannot reform with equity," said Burke, "I will not reform at all"; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the present and its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.

Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root of his philosophy. He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the necessity of some degree of popular representation. But he was entirely satisfied with current Whig principles, could they but be purged of their grosser deformities. He knew too well how little reason is wont to enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of innovation to its power. He saw so much of virtue in the old order, that he insisted upon the equation of virtue with quintessence. Men of great property and position using their influence as a public trust, delicate in their sense of honor, and acting only from motives of right—these seemed to him the men who should with justice exercise political power. He did not doubt that "there is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven"; but he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found in those who practice the mechanical arts. He did not mean that his aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand. He had no objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of government. There was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an honorable sense of the public good. This, so he urged, was the system which underlay the temporary evils of the British Constitution. An aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of men was the best form of government his imagination could conceive. It meant that property must be dominant in the system of government, that, while office should be open to all, it should be out of the reach of most. "The characteristic essence of property," he wrote in the Reflections, "... is to be unequal"; and he thought the perpetuation of that inequality by inheritance "that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself." The system was difficult to maintain, and it must be put out of the reach of popular temptation. "Our constitution," he said in the Present Discontents, "stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp precipices and deep waters on all sides of it. In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards oversething it on the other." In straining, that is to say, after too large a purification, we may end with destruction. And Burke, of course, was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed. It was always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle with ability; and there are many passages in which he urges the consequent special representation which the adequate defence of property requires.

The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the sanctity of past experience. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, Taine and Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England, have all urged what is in effect a similar plea. We must not break what Bagehot called the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new food breeds trouble. Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform. The true idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be drawn. We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness; and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance, we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless ages. The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present is thus the true guide to our policy. "We ought," he said in a famous sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend."

It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the destiny which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious edifice. He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves. In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.

Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported the Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the other. And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough that his criticism, de Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing. The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom. "The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the Reflections, "the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs." The note recurs in substance throughout his criticism. Much of its application, indeed, will not stand for one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for instance, he correlates the monarchical government of France with the English constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688. The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles, but the roots were absent from their national experience.

A year after the publication of the Reflections he himself perceived the narrowness of that judgment. In the Thoughts on French Affairs (1791) he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the world except the Reformation; which last event it especially resembles in its genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already envisaged the importance of that "patrie intellectuelle" which Tocqueville emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led Burke once again to insist upon the peculiar genius of each separate state, the difficulties of a change, the danger of grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He saw the certainty that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme the French were in truth omitting human nature from their political equation; for general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms only after they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of circumstance. The French created an universal man not less destructive of their practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists. They omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must demand; with the result that, despite themselves, they came rather to destroy than to fulfil. Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the harvest of their failure.

Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness. "We are afraid," he wrote in the Reflections, "to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages." Of Siéyès' building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small. For Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie buried in the remote experience of the state. So that men like Robespierre were asking from their subjects an impossible task. That which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the motives which underlie all human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard. That upon which they feed submits to change; but the effort is slow and the disappointments many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst for power. But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human effort without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers limitation to right ends.

The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not belong to political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he for the temper which drew England into war. He came to write rather with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted with new ideas. Yet even the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) have flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So that it is permissible to think he did not lightly pen those sentences on peace which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of extravagant rhetoric. "War never leaves where it found a nation," he wrote, "it is never to be entered upon without mature deliberation." That was a lesson his generation had still to learn; nor did it take to heart the even nobler passage that follows. "The blood of man," he said, "should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.

V

Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two angles. It is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote from the facts even when he wrote. Every change that he opposed was essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed. Such criticism would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the heart of Burke's position. What is mainly needed is analysis at once of his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so clearly apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian changes of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate. No man was more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious inference that once the means of government were made known those who possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application. He did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a sense to have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the facts at issue. No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized that Wilkes was but the symptom.