Burke Edmund (1729–97), British statesman and one of the eighteenth century’s greatest political writers. Born in Dublin, he moved to London to study law, then undertook a literary and political career. He sat in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1794. In speeches and pamphlets during these years he offered an ideological perspective on politics that endures to this day as the fountain of conservative wisdom. The philosophical stance that pervades Burke’s parliamentary career and writings is skepticism, a profound distrust of political rationalism, i.e., the achievement in the political realm of abstract and rational structures, ideals, and objectives. Burkean skeptics are profoundly anti-ideological, detesting what they consider the complex, mysterious, and existential givens of political life distorted, criticized, or planned from a perspective of abstract, generalized, and rational categories. The seminal expression of Burke’s skeptical conservatism is found in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The conservatism of the Reflections was earlier displayed, however, in Burke’s response to radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parliament in the early 1780s. The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments, when all wise men knew that ‘a prescriptive government never was made upon any foregone theory.’ How ridiculous, then, to put governments on Procrustean beds and make them fit ‘the theories which learned and speculative men have made.’ Such prideful presumption required much more rational capacity than could be found among ordinary mortals. One victim of Burke’s skepticism is the vaunted liberal idea of the social contract. Commonwealths were neither constructed nor ought they to be renovated according to a priori principles. The concept of an original act of contract is just such a principle. The only contract in politics is the agreement that binds generations past, present, and future, one that ‘is but a clause in the great primeval contract of an eternal society.’ Burke rejects the voluntaristic quality of rationalist liberal contractualism. Individuals are not free to create their own political institutions. Political society and law are not ‘subject to the will of those who, by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law.’ Men and groups ‘are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement’ to rip apart their communities and dissolve them into an ‘unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos.’ Burke saw our stock of reason as small; despite this people still fled their basic limitations in flights of ideological fancy. They recognized no barrier to their powers and sought in politics to make reality match their speculative visions. Burke devoutly wished that people would appreciate their weakness, their ‘subordinate rank in the creation.’ God has ‘subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us.’ And that place is to know the limits of one’s rational and speculative faculties. Instead of relying on their own meager supply of reason, politicians should avail themselves ‘of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.’ Because people forget this they weave rational schemes of reform far beyond their power to implement.
Burke stands as the champion of political skepticism in revolt against Enlightenment rationalism and its ‘smugness of adulterated metaphysics,’ which produced the ‘revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma.’ The sins of the French were produced by the ‘clumsy subtlety of their political metaphysics.’ The ‘faith in the dogmatism of philosophers’ led them to rely on reason and abstract ideas, on speculation and a priori principles of natural right, freedom, and equality as the basis for reforming governments. Englishmen, like Burke, had no such illusions; they understood the complexity and fragility of human nature and human institutions, they were not ‘the converts of Roussea. . . the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius [had] made no progress amongst [them].’
See also POLITICAL PHILOSOPH. I.K.