Burke and the Birth of Enlightened Conservatism

edmund burke is an unusual figure in a course on the history of philosophy because he wasn't a professor professional scholar wasn't a professional academic wasn't a man who lived the contemplative life makes him different from most of the figures that we've encountered so far in our series of lectures edmund burke was a practical politician who was very influential in late 18th century england he was a member of the house of commons he was one of the rockingham whigs and he spent a long career as a practical politician actually working out the connection between political theory and political practice burke's primary concern in investigating political life is to find out what works in practice and not just in practice across the world his cons his concern is to find out what works in practice under the circumstances of a roughly democratic legislature or a representative legislature burke is trying to figure out the ways in which legislature legislatures work the way in which the new democratic governments that have been set up during the period of the enlightenment function what sort of political ideals they ought to be connected with and in addition how political theory ought to be connected to political practice now hume is often seen or not human but burke is often seen as one of the most conservative thinkers of the enlightenment as a kind of precursor to romantic reaction there's a certain degree of truth in that but he's also a rather reform-minded wig as well he although he was against the french revolution he supported the ideals of the american revolution he investigated corrupt practices among the east india company he wanted to alleviate some of the oppression that was characteristic of the english treatment of ireland and that should become as no surprise burke himself grew up in ireland he is the product of a mixed marriage between a protestant father and a catholic mother all through his political career he's something of an outsider he's a parvenu someone that shows up in commons and got there by dint of his ability not by his lineage not necessarily by his connections so burke is a practical politician if we think of someone like kant as being a an intellectual scientist or a political scientist in the strict sense of the term hume can be thought of as a political engineer he wants to take the insights of political philosophy and apply them and his standard will be pragmatic does it work in practice if it doesn't work in practice he thinks that a theory is by definition a bad theory so burke is a very pragmatic thinker a very practical man and something of an opportunist as well we ought to forgive him the occasional lapses in his thinking and in his writing the heat of political polemic often get causes people to go out on a limb to over formulate an argument to take it a little bit too far and there's also a sense of i don't know a certain degree of confusion in burke's work he's concerned with different political issues at different times and although there's a rough consistency to his outlook he varies and vacillates the way most politicians do it's about the best we can expect from a man that has to live with the rough and tumble of politics every day now burke's position is that of a whig he's an outsider he supports the country party as opposed to the court party he wants to make sure that corruption doesn't dominate the english government and he wants to make sure that no unforeseen revolutionary emergencies create the kind of desperate political situation in england that is characteristic of france during the time of the french revolution and he also wants to look at the origins of legitimacy the structure of legislation and the way in which governments can be reformed which is part of the project of the enlightenment and at the same time made stable because reform and stability are in some respects antithetical there's a certain degree of tension between the two burke recognizes the need for reform but he also recognizes the need for political stability for political order sometimes he goes for one sometimes for the other but my sense is that his primary emphasis is on the idea of political order he thinks that the hobbesian state of nature the lapse back into lawless terror that was characteristic of the worst excesses of the french revolution could have been predicted that a wise political science would have prevented the necessity for such a state of affairs and that by empirically studying the data of history burke thinks that we can come to a rough empirical understanding of what human nature is as in in the case of individuals and what the nature of human societies and human governments is as a matter of practical fact empirical fact so hume's theory is going to be anti-utopian it's going to move away from the tradition of thought that we got with plato or thomas more of creating an ideal society and judging the world around us on the basis of that he's going to take the other attack he's going to look at the world around us and say at least this works we can be sure that this has some connection to reality it is reality now our proposals for reform will have to be judged within the context of what works someone wants to find politics as the art of the possible and that's very much burke's perspective does it work in practice now as a leader in the house of commons he's a noted orator he is an indefatigable writer of pamphlets and he knows how to manage men he knows how to manage legislatures he knows how to get things done he recognizes the need for reform and pushes for reform when he thinks it's unavoidable reform is dangerous because there's always a certain degree of risk involved in changing the status quo right that's the conservative element but being a rational risk minimizer burke says that occasionally gradual slow-moving well-considered reforms implemented over a period of time are actually risk-reducing mechanisms because they prevent the necessity for revolutionary violence which is the worst possible state of affairs in other words prior to the beginnings of the american revolution burke advocates liberalizing the relationship with the american colonies he says give them some representation in parliament you are actually denying them the rights of englishmen which had been established by the glorious revolution burke continuously harks back to the glorious revolution as his idea of a fine revolution not much happens the change is quick easy bloodless he does his best not to talk about the period of english history between 1640 and 1660 because it would give people the unpleasant impression that once in a while revolutions can't be avoided and perhaps even the government he thinks so highly of was based upon an earlier revolution so when he talks about revolutions of the earlier century he's talking about the glorious revolution he doesn't want to think about cromwell there's a little bit of a disingenuous element here he is after all a practical politician supporting whig policies what's more wig than to advocate the principles of the glorious revolution of 89. his reason for supporting the protests of the american colonists was that their demands were within the province of the rights that had been established for englishmen in the glorious revolution of 1689 and he said look if we don't liberalize our connection with them and in addition not just to the americans but he was also willing to liberalize his relations with india and other colonial possessions of england he says if we don't liberalize our connections with them in fact we will lose them we will drive them to the unavoidable expedient of an enormous revolution which will cost us men which will cost us money and which will ultimately cost us america so burke is not a reactionary in the sense that he's entirely against reform what he is is a conservative one who wants to make reforms piecemeal slowly for him as for hume and this is one of the connections between burke and the entire tradition of english political and moral thought prudence is the great virtue if we would distinguish between the empiricists and the idealists or distinguish between the the english-speaking philosophers and the continental rationalists i would say that the great virtue of the english empirical philosophers is prudence they are prudent men they don't get carried away by either emotion or reason they do things more or less within the bounds of common sense the alternative virtue which we find among the rationalistic philosophers primarily among the german-speaking philosophers also i would say among plato all metaphysicians their great alternative virtue is ruthlessness they take an idea as far as it can possibly go and they say prudence be damned we're going to do what makes sense we're going to do what's right regardless of whether this is consistent with anybody's idea of common sense common sense in a way is our problem we want to get beyond common sense to what thorough called something magnificently uncommon well burke doesn't want anything uncommon or magnificent he wants something prudent something you can count on something that would be conservative without being reactionary and so he's willing to make changes in political practice and in political theory so long as they're gradual so long as they balance out the empirical interests that are represented in the society at the moment that a particular reform is suggested and so that we can possibly reverse any given reform so that if it turns out to be deleterious in practice we can say okay we made a mistake we're going to revoke that attempted reform burke is skeptical at all of all utopian thoughts of all utopian rationalistic programs for the ulti for the creation of ultimate human felicity he says we'll do the best we can right here and now within the parameters of what can practically be done so he advocates certain kinds of reform reforms of english foreign policy reform in the treatment of ireland reform in the organization of the government and burke also wants to reform political theory that the idea of politics the way in which people think about politics burke believes the on the basis of his experience as a practical politician that he has something worthwhile to say about that however disdainful professional philosophers might be and there's a certain degree of truth in that burke has been largely neglected by professional politicians because there are great many inconsistencies in his work he's not the deep rigorous thinker that we're going to find in hume or kant or any of the professional scholars burke does advocate and does make a couple of arguments that are not novel and important his most important work is called reflections on the revolution in france it is ostensibly a letter written to a friend a young french nobleman explaining the english conservative interpretation of the french revolution and in particular the interpretation of the terror burke thinks that the terror essentially a breakdown of legal order which amounts to the law of the war of all against all to a horrifying situation which is the worst of political circumstances where no one has any security for property or for life where terror reigns where there's no predictability with regard to governmental policy and you never know who's going to be killed next first dantana robespierre start to persecute those they suspect of having royalist sympathies and then they get their own political enemies within the revolutionary movement and finally their own political enemies get them and chop their heads off because political terror is a dangerous thing no one knows who to trust no one knows where to go burke says this could have been predicted the entire tradition of the french enlightenment the tradition of continental rationalism of abstract theorizing independent of contingent and immediate circumstances it really is what leads to political fallacies like emphasizing the impressible rights of man and other abstractions which have no immediate connection to the historical experience of french government so burke says all this abstract theorizing done by the professors in their studies are not only wrong but positively dangerous when carried into practice the result is not improvement it's chaos by trying to institute what amounts to a secular millennium by trying to end the earlier messy ugly evil portion of human existence and create a new fundamentally changed social structure which which creates perfect equality and perfect liberty and perfect justice what you get is perfectly the opposite all utopian schemes for the immediate creation of perfection are chamerical and wrong they're an illusion burke says practice over theory what works comes over what we would like so what burke says is that the terror is implicit in the french revolution itself and that these demands for complete change now are not only unrealistic but dangerous and they're the product of this abstract rationalizing that we get in the continental tradition he thinks that people like russo with their radical democratic tendencies their insistence remember the beginning of rousseau's social contract man is born free but everywhere is in chains it's a beautiful poetic line does anyone clearly understand what it means it means that the world's bad and that lots of political stuff is evil and burke says well that may be true but that's a very dangerous idea to introduce we cannot make complete human liberation tomorrow or prac or in fact we cannot create complete human liberation within the foreseeable future so in practice that's impossible he thinks that the abstract tradition of rational inquiry that starts in french culture i guess with descartes and moves on through the tradition of the french enlightenment is dangerous because it neglects practicality in favor of abstract theories that have no immediate connection to historical experience in some respects the guillotine is the logical outcome of rationalism it's the logical outcome of insisting that both political and moral duty comes from pure reason rather than the collected connection of our traditions our feelings our sentiments our reasonings about our traditions and feelings and sentiments in other words the idea that we can institute a whole new world today i think someone once said that uh the guillotine is a very cartesian sort of an instrument because it separates the mind and the body so completely well i think burke would sympathize with that kind of a view he says look the french have a legitimate set of objections to the kind of government they have an absolute monarchy is an evil thing divine right despotism divine right monarchies are a mistake they're a relic of the feudal past these ought to be gotten rid of the domination of the church in french political affairs is burke thinks and evil the hereditary nobility and the particular legal and institutional advantages that they have at least some of those for burke are evil but he says look all of these grievances could be redressed but they can be redressed only one at a time and only gradually the idea of killing the king and then killing all the nobles and then killing all the people who dispute within the radical democratic party and then starting to kill each other is what you would expect from people that have no connection to their earlier traditions because it's tradition sentiment a kind of intellectual inertia that keeps society together society is not held together by rationality people normally do not sit down do some mathematical problems and conclude that they love their family that they love their country that they like their hometown people are essentially creatures of sentiment this connects it back up to the human tradition of moral theory this connects it to the skeptical tradition of epistemology that comes out of lock and empiricism and things like that so hume while he's not or burke while he's not a professional philosopher is well within the central trend the skeptical empirical gradual sentimental trend of english thought now he thinks that the advantage that the advantages of the english constitution is that it's a gradual accumulation of practices and traditions which minimized the need for revolution and which could be gradually reformed from within and one of the great advantages of the english revel of the english constitution is that it's not written down it's a general kind of nebulous collection of traditions and practices and sentiments and the advantage of the fact of that is that it can change gradually and imperceptibly it gives you the sense of continuity over time burke thinks that very important he thinks that the english constitution is an entailed inheritance as he puts it we inherit a system of government and a society from our ancestors and it is an entailed inheritance you can't just throw it all out you can't get rid of it all at once so burke says the real problem with the french revolution is that it wasn't a gradual series of reforms it wasn't based empirically on the traditions of the french ways of life and french government the problem with it is that it comes from abstract theorizing which is downright dangerous now burke supported the american revolution because he felt that the american colonists had been forced in defense of their whig liberties to have grudgingly a revolution and he said i told you so in a way the english government had it coming he thinks that the french government has it coming too because they're also unwilling to make reforms but he says the revolutionaries are actually worse than the government they already had while we may have had oppression under an absolute monarch we have terror under ever under a revolution and what we can reasonably expect to come out of this revolution is something like a caesar some sort of despotic figure that will dominate this age of chaos and create order at the price of all the liberties that everyone had prior to the revolution in other words he anticipates something like napoleon not a bad anticipation again the practical politician can see what the likely outcome of chaos in real life is going to be so his criticism of the french revolution is what he's mostly remembered for and that's where he gets the name of being a great reactionary it's not fair to call him a reactionary the true label the appropriate label would be conservative he doesn't oppose all reforms he doesn't want to go back to feudalism but he wants to make sure these reforms are slow and gradual in some respects that makes him out of step with the enlightenment it certainly makes him out of step with the enlightenment as it's existing on the continent the french and german traditions are very rigorous and absolute and abstract he's more or less consistent with the enlightenment as it happens in england hume would understand burke both of them are rational risk minimizers think about what the implications are of empiricism for political theory let's take hume's empiricism but we could take any of them what is an empiricist sure of well nothing empiricism basically a skeptical philosophy they're not really sure of anything what do they kind of bank on if they're not absolutely certain because certainty is something we associate with guys like descartes humans don't get certain they just get comfortable well what sort of things can you be comfortable with can you have a reasonable belief in well you can believe in what you see and what you have experience with and what do we have experience with the brute facts of human history in other words the empiricist is always going to say well we can at least be reasonably certain that if we continue on the way we're going that the future will be roughly speaking like the past because we notice certain regularities in the world around us so if monarchy has been in england for the past 200 or 300 or 400 or 500 years as long as we don't rock the boat too much the empiricist says we can reasonably expect that we'll have a continuity between the earlier forms and later forms in other words we can expect more of the same it's not perfect but at least we can be sure of that who knows what happened what will happen if we make fundamental changes immediately you can't be certain of that so what it means is i think that empiricism is intrinsically skeptical and in addition intrinsically conservative skepticism is intrinsically conservative because the skeptic is going to say to every would-be reformer what grounds do i have to believe that your reform is going to work and what will we be able to tell him if it's existed in the past well then we'll have some good grounds but many of the political reforms and the most praiseworthy and important political reforms of the enlightenment were things that had never happened in the past and here's the problem an empiricist which is a skeptical kind of philosopher is always going to have some misgivings about even the most attractive reforms because we lack good grounds to expect that they're going to work because we have no practice we have no experience with them and since innovation entails risk and risk is dangerous and undermines at least potentially human felicity the rational thing to do is to oppose or at least to regulate and make gradual in political reforms because that regulates and moderates the risk and the rational minimization of risk is in a way what empiricism is all about you don't know what's going to happen if you haven't tried it yet so if you're going to propose a reform well then the bigger the reform is the more risk involved the more danger it is the more salutary skepticism might be the people who advocate radical complete ultimate reform in the political theory of the enlightenment are all rationalists none of them are empiricists and that's not an accident dogmatism is connected to rationalism remember when i talked about kant last time rationality the willingness to ruthlessly pursue the implications of one idea as kierkegaard said purity of the heart is the will to one thing the willingness to take one idea ruthlessly to its logical consequences that's characteristic of continental rationalism and the consequences of that in terms of political science is saying all oppression is evil it's in the enlightenment that we start to see people begin to object to things like slavery they begin to object to things like the oppression of women they begin to object to the thing to the to ideas like the extermination and genocidal treatment of the indians or non-western peoples these ideas are new we have plenty of experience with the oppression of women we have lots of experience with slavery it's existed all throughout the world throughout most of human history innovation in a manner so great and profound as the status of women or as as in the case of the abolition of slavery is going to strike an empiricist as being a very dangerous set of changes why well what experience do we have with equality between men and women none well who knows what's going to happen then and the problem is that that's true it gives us something to think about i don't know that it's a good reason not to do it as a matter of fact the most important breakthroughs in the political theory of the enlightenment are like it are not dogmatic one way or another a skeptic would have good reasons for objecting to them or at least having some misgivings about them so burke's position is that of a skeptical empiricist and he says show me do we have good reason to believe this is going to work and if we don't well then let's not do it or if we're going to do it if if the political force that advocates change is so powerful that you can't avoid it let's do it gradually let's do it piecemeal let's do it in one place one county or one city to start out let's have essentially a pilot program here in washington when we establish a pilot program we test something out we're essentially adopting a position of berkey and conservatism and this is not an irrational thing to do consider the example of something like prohibition it's with reforms that turn out not to work that turn out not to be very practical where berkey and conservatism comes into its own imagine somebody coming up with an idea that if we made it illegal to drink alcohol in the united states we could reduce drunk driving we could reduce fetal alcohol syndrome we could produce all kinds of evil things and i think that any sensible person looking at the bad consequences of alcoholism would say that it would be fine to get rid of those things but burke will say wait a minute although your theory tells us that it would be good to get rid of these things and in fact i'm inclined to agree with you being a sentimental guy i think that drunk driving is a bad thing but in practice can we do this and that's for burke and for berkey and conservatives the key question will it work in practice how are you going to make everybody stop drinking alcohol how are you going to prevent alcohol from coming in across the border how are you going to prevent the rise of organized crime are the consequences of this reform going to be worse than the evils you seek to eliminate will you in fact be able to eliminate these evils simply by passing a law can you control reality at that level and burke would say i know i don't think you can i've seen how people relate to alcohol i think the chances of you getting them of getting america to actually go dry are really quite limited well it turns out after making the experiment the reformers have to eat their words in this case we have reform that is appealing at the level of theory seems like a good idea but in practice we can't make it work well this is the strong point of berkey and conservatism there are certain kinds of issues certain kinds of reforms that turn out not to work very well in practice burke tells us before we institute a reform to be reasonably certain that it's going to work in practice and the only way you can do that is by actually testing it empirically don't tell me that you have a theory and a graph that shows that drunk driving goes to zero the year after we institute prohibition it just doesn't happen that way it's a lovely theory but i don't judge the world on the basis of theories i judge the world on the basis of the way the world works there is a certain degree of kind of homey practicality to burke that's the attractiveness of this guy here's the downside of it and i think it's an important downside all the great moral advances in the in political life that have happened in the modern age have been unprecedented the abolition of slavery you can't imagine a or more dogmatic or a more improbable drive and comes out of the enlightenment prior to the enlightenment slavery existed all over the world and it has existed for 20 30 40 50 centuries now if you're an empiricist and somebody says that what i'd like to do is abolish slavery on a global basis and make everyone free well burke is going to say about that the same thing he said about prohibition only in spades and much more emphatically because this project of abolishing slavery of creating universal human freedom is obviously some journal it's obviously kind of thing some german thought up englishmen don't think up stuff like that unless of course they're moved by religious piety as opposed to skeptical empirical philosophy so burke would say and this is not an irrational thing to say that there are many potential dangers even in such a praiseworthy project is the abolition of slavery the equality of women the shortening of the work day the extension of voting rights burke was very strongly against the democratization of politics he certainly did not want to extend the franchise on the basis of one man one vote he says do we have any experience with that well yes we do we have stories in our histories about democracy if you ever if you are familiar with the city's peloponnesian wars well in that when we look at the results of athenian democracy it was disastrous and it was the actual inability of athenian democracy to make intelligent decisions that causes them to lose the peloponnesian wars alcibiades who says let's go invade syracuse and the people really like it and democracy says that yes we'll go do this because the people are very aroused by it it's disastrous they lose the war and the culture is destroyed now for the empiricist for the skeptic for the conservative there's a moral there democracy the democratization of politics regardless of whether the categorical imperative says you have to regardless of whether rousseau likes it or not regardless of whether continental thinkers are going to approve of you makes no difference the democratization of politics is downright dangerous and in some respects it's more dangerous than the abolition of slavery because that hasn't been tried before we've tried democracy before it's a blasted disaster so what burke likes is whatever we happen to have and this is going to be true of every conservative if you if you're working conservative by kind of outlook or inclination if you get born in japan in feudal ages you're going to think that feudal japan is a terrific set of institutions as well there's a certain sort of piety about what you were raised with in burke's ideas which he gives a kind of philosophical formulation to so the upside of berkey and conservatism is that it restricts us from doing implausible impractical kinds of reform the downside of it is that it prevents us from making salutary reforms and that to be honest there's a a sort of temer there's a sort of timidity to it which i think i don't know passes for wisdom but is often just timidity which is often just a fear of taking a chance rational risk minimization is a good thing and i must confess prudence is a virtue my point in suggesting that there are limitations to this is that prudence is not the only virtue and that taken to an extreme it may be that prudence is sometimes a vice prudence has no understanding and no appreciation of the heroic virtues that attach to ruthlessness ruthlessness allows for great virtue and great vice burke limits what we might call the standard deviation of virtue advice we don't get too bad we don't get too good we have more or less kind of what we had before maybe we can make things a little bit better but don't get out of hand about this that's really dangerous don't get enthusiastic be prudent burke counsels us to prudence and i think that prudence is sometimes a vice as well as being a virtue that's the the difficulties with this now in addition there are two more contributions that burke makes to political science which are departures from the earlier political conceptions characteristic of both the english and the french enlightenment and in addition to that they are things that are still with us today one way or another ideas that have been introduced that are quite important the first and most important idea that burke comes up with is the idea that political parties are not only legitimate but necessary yesterday somebody happened to ask me about political parties well here's your answer in the ancient political tradition parties are the extreme superlative form of faction and faction is understood to be intrinsically evil all of political theory in the ancient world it doesn't matter whether it's platonic or aristotelian or roman or greek or is all organized around the problem of preventing society from breaking up into antagonistic factions we want a unity of sentiment a unity of purpose which characterizes the good polis now if we look back at history we have good reason for believing that faction party leads to civil war in our understanding of history at least in the understanding of history characteristic of 18th century england look back at thucydides peloponnesian wars right the revolution of course cyra the civil wars that are detailed in there all proceed from the breaking up of society into antagonistic factions who define their interest oppositely a virtuous individual will be public spirited will have no separation of their interest from the interest of society as a whole that's why the platonic guardian class is not allowed to have their own family and is not allowed to have their own private property because that would give them a special particular interest independent of the interest of the society as a whole by reducing them to no other interests except the interest of the city as a whole it prevents at least in plato's mind the emergence of the guardians of the gold class as a faction with separate interests and a separate agenda independent of what's good for the society as a whole now that idea that faction and party are intrinsically evil a sign of disease within a society and potentially the result the result which will represent potentially result in a civil war which means back to the state of nature the war of all against all this idea is taken up the factions and parties are bad and it comes right into political theory and it goes at least as far as hume hume is the first political thinker in his political essays i think this is the essay on the ideal commonwealth which brings this up he kind of wants to allow for the idea of legitimate opposition which is what parties do they make it possible to focus and organize opposition to the government and to the dominant party and at the same time he wants to avoid the dangerous element of faction and party because he thinks it potentially could lead to civil war the gist of it is something like this that the idea of legitimate political parties of a loyal opposition of legitimate descent is a peculiarly modern idea and burke helps us legitimize that idea think about the ancient world and the medieval world in the ancient and medieval world a government legitimized itself by reference to the will of god or their of ultimate rationality in the case of the platonic ideal city or with reference to some set of myths that legitimize the king divine right monarchy is the best example of this why do you have to be the king when he tells you to do something because he's god's friend or he's god's chosen he's god's electors he has some special connection to god that differs from you and there's a hierarchy if you remember aquinas we've got the god up here and the k and the angels and then the king here and down below him or the nobles and below them are people like you and the reason why you have to obey people that are higher in the hierarchy is god made the hierarchy that way if you tell the king you don't like his laws if you tell the king you're opposed to his policies you're essentially opposed to the king and if you're opposed to the king you're opposed to god and if you're opposed to god you're opposed to morality and virtue and goodness and that means you're a friend of satan and should be killed what that means is that in the ancient political tradition in the mid and it moves all the way up to the medieval age the idea of legitimate dissent never comes up dissent is by definition evil since the government is backed by god when we move into the modern world social contractarianism an idea of political legitimacy which says that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the people who allegedly get together in the state of nature and form the social contract and all that jazz well when that becomes possible then that means that there's no divine sanction for the government and one way or another we are going to have to make possible the idea of legitimate descent of a loyal opposition because it means that people think governmental policy is mistaken are not children of the devil it just means they have a different opinion that can't happen until the secularization of politics and that can't happen until the enlightenment what that means then is that first of all the idea of a loyal opposition of legitimate descent is an immensely sophisticated thought it is a peculiarly modern thought and it needs certain adjustments in our political theory particularly since we now have representative legislatures it is necessary for us to be able to organize people that support governmental policy and people who are opposed to it so that we can effectively legislate or at least obstruct legislation within the legislature itself in other words the rise of representative legislatures and the rise of human man-centered political theory means that we're also going to have the rise first of all of legitimate dissent and loyal opposition and also it means the rise of legitimate political parties which are not seen as being a threat to the state but rather seen as being the natural condition of human beings who intrinsically have different perspectives on the world so once politics is sanctioned only by the will of the people then legitimate descent has to be made room for because it's a simple empirical fact and if it's a simple empirical fact then the older tradition which says that all parties and all factions are evil has to be gotten rid of now hume starts to do that when he creates what's called the court of competitors in that essay on the ideal commonwealth he wants to take potentially factious members potential potentially powerful opponents of the government and give them a limited kind of negative supervisory role in the government what's he doing there he's trying to create the idea of a legitimate opposition it's a brilliant thought but also all when you look at his political essays he constantly says that we have to avoid faction we have to avoid party that could create a civil war and we all know from history that that's a very bad thing so hume is something between the political the ancient tradition of political theory and the modern enlightened political theory which says there'll be a diversity of plurality of ideas and voices hume is halfway between the two burke remarkably enough is the first man to say that political parties are not only desirable but they are necessary because you can't run a legislature without them and how did he find that out he spent most of his career in a legislature as one of the rockingham whigs and he maintained party discipline and he said not only is this not a bad thing but i have no idea how you theorists would run a legislature without it and as a matter of fact it's eu theorists have no clue as to how to run a legislature because none of you have left the library let me tell you how legislatures really run in practice and then what i want you folks to do is create a theory which allows for this because practice comes first that practical english empirical approach to the world around us he says look i know a lot about legislatures i spent 30 years there so rather than me reading your french text about how all legislatures should work if you were to make yourself consistent with absolute reason or something along those lines he says this is the way they work in practice you create a theory which accounts for that that's called a scientific approach to politics as opposed to what he views as essentially a theological approach to politics and he says look if we're going to be scientific this is the way legislatures work you can't make them work without political parties and since we haven't had a civil war in england and since there's no sedition attached to this political party not only should we acknowledge them we should say that they're legitimate and we shouldn't be afraid to say that i'm a wig or i'm a tory and that's a great breakthrough it's the triumph of theory of practice over theory and that's a typically english idea one more thing and then i'll close on burke burke is also known for his theory of representation he offers the idea and this is again one of the throwbacks i would say to the older idea that there's a unified public-spirited uh approach to politics he says that there are two two ideas of representation what we'll call virtual representation and actual representation and he supports the idea of virtual as opposed to actual representation here's the thought a virtual representative is one who takes instruction from the people who elected him and he does exactly what they want in other words he represents the will of his constituency what that means is is that if the people that you that elected you want a policy and you think it's a mistake well then you do what they think as opposed to what you think because you are there as a representative of the people you actually represent their will this is a kind of naively democratic idea burke thinks it's a mistake because he has a partiality to hierarchical political theory he doesn't think everybody's equally smart or equally virtuous or equally wise and there's a there's a strong element of a kind of disdain for the average common man he refers in the reflections of the revolution of france the swinish multitude now we don't hear any of our politicians talk that way and it's not an accident right they don't talk about the swanish multitude burke does and he says look i'm not taking orders from the swanish multitude i mean hell i got elected to the house of commons in a rotten borough the marquis of rockingham talked to one of his pals who has a peer and voted me in on the basis of one vote here i come i'm in parliament now eventually he manages to win a seat from bristol on his own merits he actually has a real free election and he eventually gets bounced out of his seat at bristol kicked out of a popular elected position in commons because he writes a letter to his electors in bristol and says look you folks are under the misapprehension that i'm interested in what you think no i'm not an actual representative i'm a virtual representative a virtual representative is one who thinks about what is good for the nation as a whole he doesn't represent london or manchester or bristol or any particular locality or any particular group of people he represents the whole interests of society judged from the large perspective so what that means is that if we had a system of virtual representation here that senators from kansas and iowa wouldn't be particularly interested in farm subsidies senators from new york and new jersey wouldn't be particularly interested in mass transit people representatives from particular areas would not be so much interested in particular local issues as they would be and what's good for the society as a whole there's a certain degree of plausibility in that you can imagine that this would give honest conscientious legislatures legislators a rather broader perspective than they often have and perhaps they'd be less obsessively concerned with re-election although i'm not so sure about that the difficulty with it is is that it is essentially undemocratic what it means is that the virtual representative believes himself to be essentially nature's aristocrat believes that he's smarter than the people that voted for him and says look i really don't want your advice i know what's best or at least i'm doing my best to figure out what we ought to do and i'm going to vote that way i'm going to vote my conscience and frankly i have access to more information i know what the inside dirt is on everybody that's proposing these things and i know what the actual practical capacities of the legislature are so folks trust me i'm i'm gonna vote the way i think rather than the way you think because i'm a lot smarter than you are now he doesn't quite add in the last but it's implicit and the photos of bristol managed to figure it out and he got bounced in the election after he gave him that information about the fact that he was a virtual representative that didn't hurt him in terms of political party affiliation or in terms of membership in the house of commons he finds himself a rotten borrowing gets voted back in by the rockingham wigs i mean he understands how politics works he's something of an opportunist but that's the downside of what i think is a desirable pragmatism in his political philosophy he's an engineer not a scientist he wants to know how does it work in practice i'm not otherwise interested in your theory burke in that respect is the most philosophical of the practical politicians of the 18th century and a worthy heir to the english skeptical empirical practical tradition of politics and philosophy

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 76,320

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Burke, Enlightened Conservatism

Id: xZg4VAUfasA

Length: 44min 0sec (2640 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020