Edmund Burke and Classical Conservatism

okay so anyway so what I wanted to do start out with or focus on today is Burke himself last time I introduced classical conservatism and I spent quite a bit of time on it and I'm going to do that again today because I think it's such an unusual concept for students that it's hard for them to you know understand where conservatism started as opposed to to it now and I mean it's a little bit of a gloss but you can almost say contemporary conservatism is more like classical liberalism like what we studied in the previous unit as far as its emphasis on small government and individualism and the sort of the goodness of rational self-interest and all of that so contemporary conservatism is more like classical liberalism and classical conservatism is like something you hardly see in this country anymore okay so it's it's a different breed of cat but it but it raises some important issues and concerns about classical liberalism and by consequence about contemporary conservatism as I make sense okay so and then Friday we will get to Christian conservatism and we're going to talk a little bit about neoconservatism too so I'll eventually end up dealing with more contemporary type of conservatism but I wanted to spend more time on Edmund Burke and particularly getting into the the short reading that you had it has two parts to it they're both from his book reflections on the revolution in France so we'll we'll take a look at what he had to say I wanted to back up a little bit and just remind people this is in your textbook but remind people of who he was he was a member of parliament he was I mean what we would call an intellectual by trade almost because the way that he got to that seed was by impressing people in the aristocratic class who then basically said everybody run for this seat it was a pocket full of pocket boroughs are areas that are basically of certain people okay people who own the land in that area intended to control the boat and had influence and they basically Burke didn't have to run for this position to become member of parliament because of that so he was more of an intellectual I guess you might say than a politician and that he didn't have to run for office and do all that but once he became a member of parliament he became a pre vociferous member of parliament he would make big long speeches he was really quite passionate about the issues that he was attached to and we'll talk about a few of them today but so he also spent time and debate with people over political ideas he wrote books he wrote tons and tons and tons of letters people used to you know kind of like the way we can go back and forth on email now you know they they said back and forth these letters it took a little longer than a base they serve the same purpose at least hopefully you can have a dialog using email absolutely so he wrote this book reflections on the revolution in France and one person that he was addressing almost and almost in a letter like fashion it was nominee Paine one of the American you know admirers of revolution advocates of the American Revolution and admirer of the French Revolution but more generally reflections on the revolution in France is a critique not so much just about the French Revolution as it is a critique really of revolutionaries and revolutionary thought in his own country and elsewhere ok so it's a I guess more of a reaction to the revolutionary mindset generally ok and so in it we find as I said mentioned last time that reaction is the fact that there was revolutionary ideas in the air at this time and people were actually saying maybe England needs to follow France you know this is why we get this reaction that comes to be known as conservatism if it weren't for that there would be no need for Burke to make these statements ok so what we see first in this excerpt that you have is a real angry kind of tirade against a dr. Richard Price okay dr. Richard price was a Unitarian minister Unitarianism meant Unitarians believed that there was one guy typically in certain first-mover God not a personal God they didn't in other words things like the Christian Trinity so denial with the idea of three persons one God okay so with Christ and in the picture you have on Christianity in Unitarianism with one God as sort of the maker of the universe not necessarily okay so Unitarian is intended to be more attractive to sort of enlightenment intellectuals of the day who were you know questioning all things traditional but still believed in some sort of creator okay Thomas Jefferson uses that type of language in his you know in the Declaration of Independence right the idea of the the maker of the universe comes out there right the creator sort of a mind behind it all right who sets things in motion and then doesn't necessarily so anyway that's Richard Price well Richard price was a minister of the Unitarian persuasion which as Burke points out through his language is was non-conforming okay what he means by non conforming is that you know there was an established church in England the legal Church of England was the Anglican Church okay so Anglicanism was the established faith the one supported by the government actually supported by people's tax dollars others could be discouraged to reading depending upon the whims of the monarch okay so at this point in time dr. Richard price and people like him were allowed to speak and allowed to hold services and so on and so forth but they were heavily criticized both you know for being human tyrannies for not believing like they should according to the majority in the traditional concept of the Trinity but also because they questioned politically so much you know this was where a lot of people would go if they tended to be questioners questioning tradition questioning Authority all right so Burke picks Richard price there were others he could have chosen but Richard price is sort of a symbol of what's wrong in his mind okay so some of the language that he uses might have confused you and that's why I want to spend some time on this too he says he preached at the dissenting meeting house of the old Jewry to his club or society a very excellent extraordinary miscellaneous sermon the old jewelry was an actual districting in London that was and I'm not sure at the time whether it still was but tended to be you know an area more populated by Jews so this is why it's called that and there I mean as an aside there's not much evidence of it there's no evidence of it other than that in the reading that you have but as an aside liberals conservatives and ever between was anti-semitic pretty much at this time in other words it was so normal to do things like equate Judaism with selfishness and things like that that Thomas Paine did it and Edmund Burke did it no difference so that's just kind of for your information okay so he says for my part I looked on that sermon as the public declaration of a man much connected with literary Kabbalah's and intriguing Lassa furs so here's a minister in other words that's connected to philosophers and people who were Kabbalah's are people who are applying and scheming they're creating cabal's fighting and scheming with each other with political theologians and theological politicians okay and that's very important language because you find that he greatly disagrees with the mixing of politics and religion in this way political theologians and theological politicians we don't need this combination so he's very critical of that in other words Richard Price mixes politics with religion okay and when he goes and he gives the speech he's talking about how Christianity or or I should say more generally religion properly understood should support political liberalism okay does that make sense if you believe in God God wants revolution in other words right so this is the kind of message that he's sending so Burke says that sermon is in a strain which I believe has not been heard in this kingdom in any of the poets which are tolerated or encouraged in it since the Year 1648 he's referring there to the English Revolution the Civil War in the mid 17th century that we mentioned what we talked about Hobbs remember how the people at that time they actually executed Charles the first instituted a parliamentary type local system without King and then you had the restoration of China the Charles to Simon who came back to England after it was safe okay so he's talking about not since the English Civil War when we when we had ministers on the revolutionary side okay have I heard this type of language okay he said when a predecessor of dr. price reverend hugh peters made the vault of the King's Own chapel at st. James ring with the honor and privilege of the Saints who with the high praises of God and their mouths and a two-edged sword in their hand were to execute judgment on the heathen and punishments upon the people to bind their kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron he's very fond of going back and forth between religious sounding language and political language himself in an attempt to demonstrate this what he thinks of as a poisonous mixture between religion and politics so that he's referring to a reverend from that time who basically used his church as a means of of violence you know that reference to the two-edged sword and inciting violence inciting revolution few harangues from the pulpit except in the days of yore League in France that's the Catholic the holy League of Catholic Catholics in France or in the days of the solemn League and covenant in England which was a was a covenant between the the Scots and the English just that the Scots would support the Presbyterians in England in that previous revolution so not since these types of cabal's or groupings of zealously religious and political people have I seen and have ever three less of the spirit of moderation than this lecture in the old jewel and so he was sort of tying up Richard Price with the past with past in England and he's basically saying you know what this guy sounds a lot like these previous people that brought turmoil and but you know the killing of the king and revolution and all of that to us before okay and then he goes on to say no sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity the cause of civil liberty and civil government's gains as little as that of religion by this confusing of duties okay so there he makes it pretty clear that for him the duties of the politician and the religious authorities are different they're just different categories okay so you've got a church over here and what does the church take care of that what would first say that the primary responsibility of the churches okay charity or love right and that has to do with people's souls so in other words we sometimes get confused about what this even means today by love or charity whether it's done you know either by giving people things or just by being with people was supposed to convey the love of God and therefore the curing the curing of souls so the speaker the saving of souls and then you have government over here and what's government's job well you know this is one area where he heard D agrees with Locke and the letter concerning toleration it's not about souls okay now that's despite the fact that he approves of the establishment in other words he doesn't have a proper does not have a problem in fact he rather admires the idea the Church of any one supported by government right but as far as their tasks go they're very different the church should not comment upon what the government does and the government should not tell the church how to how how to do its job okay so there's a little bit of a potential problem there for a liberal but so the government does does not deal with souls who deals with things like law enforcement you know providing what people need right there's a lot to be done but it doesn't include this so this is this is one of his criticisms I mean maybe it surprises you a bit that revolutionary thought could come through Christianity but then maybe not you know it's this is where people meet every week right this is where people talk about right and wrong and even in the American civil rights movement the black churches were the main source of the original civil rights movement and continued to be play a major role in in organizing people okay so why because that's like I said that's where people get together that's where they talk that's where they talk about right and wrong so in a way it's sort of a natural thing to occur but yet Burke believes that it goaded it has gone off the rails in other words at least in this case and it's kind of hard to untangle in classical conservatism what belongs to a particular case and what's a more general concept but at least in this case that has become radical and so what we have with dr. price is somebody who's more of a revolutionary than he is a minister okay that makes sense okay all right so then he goes on to deal with some of crisis political thought which is the revolutionary strain of liberalism that we touched on last time egalitarianism he focuses on crisis condemnation of monarchies now the way the price apparently did this was to say I'm not going to criticize the king of England because he's the only one but the only King I can think of that is actually approved up by the people and price would have been thinking of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 where we get not an elected monarchy but a parliamentary system and we get this sort of agreement between the monarch that returned William and Mary the Monarchs that returned and the people as to you know where you would draw a line where their authority how far they go so after 1688 England's monarchy was not absolute the Monarchs were not absolutely in power they had to share power with Parliament so Christ can say you know our monarchy is okay because you know the people have approved but I look around and I see all these other monarchies of Europe and they're illegitimate because they don't have popular approval okay now Bert tends to take that as a rhetorical ploy in other words to avoid persecution to avoid being cut off from being able to speak people like price say we're the exception okay but everybody else is breaking the rule and that's a way that he can get his radical message out without being stopped by an arm but yet and this is very typical way for a conservative to think of this type anyway the fact that he says these things where he says them in the heart of London basically calling into question the legitimacy of monarchy it's a very destabilizing way of thinking and what's going to happen if these views continue to be heard and they spread what will happen to our society how will they think of monarchy differently than they do will that lead to social unrest you know maybe eventually a revolution here so you know there's this again I think I've mentioned last time this notion of the law of unintended consequences you start here and it maybe it sounds kind of harmless but what what will happen what will be the case two or three years later okay so so this is why Burke spends quite a bit of time on on all of the city says down at the bottom of the second page speaking of price his doctrine his doctrines affect our Constitution in its vital parts he tells the revolutionary society in his political sermon that His Majesty is quote almost the only lawful king in England England our only lawful King in the world sorry because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people in court as to the kings of the world all of whom accept one this arch pontiff of the rights of men that's nice because he started me sort of comparing him to the Pope right but the political Pope in other words the arch pontiff of the rights of men with all the plenitude and with more than the boldness of the papal this deposing power in its meridian fervor of the 12th century there's some anti-catholicism there he's like the Pope in Diaz in at the church's most powerful state whereas most people in England were not Catholics an anti Catholicism was just about as easy as anti-semitism so he's just blasted price with you sound like weirdly like a political you know Pope of southern fire puts into one sweeping Clause of bad and anathema and proclaims you surfers by circles of longitude and latitude over the whole globe it behooves them to consider how they admit into their territories these Apostolic missionaries in other words if you are in a position of authority and power here came in this country in England as well as any other you should be very careful about allowing somebody like Christ in because these ideas are destabilizing so freedom of speech and first view it's not something to totally throw out but on the other hand there's a limit to it because he seems to be saying the King of England would be wise if he were to suppress this particular movement here because if it directly threatens the order of England alright so what we see Berg doing then and then this is very classical conservative he validates tradition in England the tradition he says is not what Bert or what price says it is it's not that the monarch is somehow approved by the people in England the monarchies hereditary that's our tradition to be accepted because it's a long-standing and we're used to it and therefore we should be very very careful about changing it okay and that belies a particular way of looking at the world that you can sort of extrapolate from that particular instance the classical conservative view that tradition represents an underlying reason or function that should only be carefully changed okay people might not even know why it is their country as a hereditary monarchy and if you look at it on the surface it doesn't make a whole lot of rational sense sometimes I think they had monarchs that weren't very right they had mothers that were crazy some were better than others so it would seem so easy to knock the idea of a hereditary monarchy down as irrational but what Burke is saying is there must have been a reason why this was instituted and why it continued for generation after generation after generation and we may not fully understand that reason that's a general way of thinking a classic conservative you may not understand that but there must be a reason and we need to be very respectful of these traditions okay not that we can't change them at all but we can we should just sort of throw them out they don't make these sense because then what happens if you throw out a traditional practice as irrational what do you have to do that well you know you have to come up with another one that makes more sense and that's where people have problems they think that they know you know what will make more sense in what will work but in practice it doesn't always work and that's exactly what happened with the French Revolution but really great ideas yeah the monarchy didn't make a lot of sense and it was failing at the time to serve the people but getting rid of it all they then had to replace it with something that they thought made more sense and it went out of control okay so there's this respect for tradition not because we understand it completely but because we can see that it grew up over time it sort of goes along with society this is the way people think and therefore it's easy for them just to accept what they've been doing for centuries even if it's imperfect and that leads to stability in society if we change it we should change it very slowly as their point of view okay all right so that being said we do need to know burke was a member of a Whig party Vittorio's were the more conservative of the two okay so the Tories we're the party that supported the traditional notion of divine right monarchy that if it would have it they could have gone back prior to 1688 and recreated absolutism okay the Whig Party was fairly liberal in the sense that they accepted the Revolution of 1688 and they wanted to hang on shared powers between the Parliament and the king so he was in a party that was somewhat strangely progressive okay and he admired the Glorious Revolution and the way he deals with it in this book which you don't have this part but it's interesting the way he deals with it is he says the English people made a change while maintaining continuity so that this revolution wasn't like the French Revolution okay because they changed who the monarch was and therefore made the monarchies more immutable or conforming to their religious days they didn't even get rid of the notion of inheriting the monarchy they just made a slight deviation he says from the order of succession so that James the second child would not be his son would not become the king but rather his daughter and her husband okay and therefore it was okay this is the exact language he uses a slight deviation and he says in this way they they preserved the tradition of hereditary monarchy so people didn't have his heart of a time dealing with that and could accept it and then they actually pledged obedience to the monarchy at the same time that they did have the Bill of Rights and other you know other agreements in place and in doing so what changed they doing it to make it as traditional as it possible to be this is a better way of doing a revolution in Burke's view because it preserves what people are comfortable with and what people are comfortable with is what creates order a revolution like a french revolution that throws all that out creates disorder because it creates confusion and aimlessness and it also creates opportunity for for basically opportunists to come in and take advantage okay so now you know how would somebody like Thomas Paine or dr. price view this this strange treatment of the English Glorious Revolution do you think what would their response be to all of this business about preserving hereditary monarchy and throwing available yeah and here are they wrong with it the way that the society is being they are interesting right absolutely they would have thought this was in fact Thomas Paine said to the extent that the English people you know made this slight change and then reestablish this obedience to their monarchy they were simply doing something irrational and slave like you know and they should and and basically he ridiculed the idea that they could somehow pledge not only their own allegiance but all future generations he says how can you even do that you know and the English monarchy itself allows you know people have a certain amount of power after the Glorious Revolution but it preserves the idea of its of its special Authority in the you know the inheritance of it and this just is irrational it's not it's it's not democratic right right so there was a lot of ridicule of this this particular line of reasoning that Burke put out there is being kind of cowardly as you know just not facing facts wanting to hide his basic approval of the revolution behind some you know traditional veneer and being maybe even hypocritical but you know I mean very characteristic of this classical conservative view is that you know I hate to repeat myself but you've got to be very careful about change and so you know to it may seem hypocritical to throw a bail over to use language to kind of obscure what it is that you're doing that you did make a change from absolutism to parliamentary you know monarchy but it may seem hypocritical but it's actually being responsible because you're maintaining that continuity so people are not questioning everything and you could still have an orderly Society all right that reminded me and some of you taken the intro to put a little odd class with the notion that Machiavelli puts forward pretty early on in the prince that it's easier to maintain a principality of inheritance in other words if you had to prefer which type of rule to have you would you would want to have a hereditary monarchy okay because Machiavelli says you know if you inherit your power in this fashion even if your father was even if your father the king was kind of bad and abusive and even if you just simply follow in his footsteps people will accept that and deal with that and they will feel strangely comforted by the fact that nothing much has changed because you know one thing Machiavelli understood that Burke also understands is people fear change and change of any type makes people afraid and when people become afraid they shut down they're not as productive now of course Machiavelli spent once you have gotten rid of the old prince what is he saying he says everybody there is going to be but whether they supported you being there or not everybody's gonna be asking questions about you they're gonna want to know you know where do we stand in this whole scheme what are we gonna get out of it okay where's our power where's our stuff so you know then you have a whole nother set of issues to deal with in a lot of Machiavelli's Prince is about how to deal with all those people and all their demands and expectations and how to actually establish power whereas it would be better if you simply inherited the rule alright so and kind of underlying all this as a distinction that bird makes between licence and liberty now Payne would say well you know or any revolutionary of this time would say well you know the monarchy that you admire does not allow a Liberty you know people don't have enough power in that system but Burke says there's a difference between Liberty and license he says if you allow an excess of Liberty what you get is the opposite of Liberty when you allow people to be able to be free to do and say and live any way they want what you get is a lot of harm as people play around and basically hurt themselves and other people now you know looking at that we come from society we think well that's it's almost paternalistic it is paternalistic that's what's something meaning meaning it's almost like he's saying you know you you can't make these decisions for yourself you need some sort of authority to help you decide how to live your life and what to believe in that kind of thing and yes he is kind of saying that because he says the result of allowing people perfect freedom is that they will abuse it and they will create disorder and that the strong will end up rule ruling because whenever there's disorder what happens is the stronger but not necessarily they are morally right and being in charge so Bert redefines Liberty as not just freedom pure and simple but ordered liberty or order to freedom its freedom within the context of some Authority in fact in another part of the floor lists all these things of people have a right to as I mentioned last night and among them are a right to guidance a right to community a right to be cared for a right to be nurtured a right to be educated okay all of which sounds kind of communion caring and it kind of is basically he's saying you know we are as human beings we are social creatures okay and so we're not really just atomistic individuals out there deciding things for ourselves we are influenced by what goes on around us we do listen to other people when trying to decide what we think and what we are going to do and in his view it's irresponsible to not try to identify opinion leaders of actual worth of merit if that's the case because otherwise who comes up in his mind parties anti-revolutionary dr. Richard price people like him come up OK to tell people what to think so because we're social creatures you need to be nurtured we have context including authority to guide us doesn't mean that we can't think beyond what the authority says and I think that Edmund Burke did to a certain extent but but you can't start out with absolute liberty and problem end up you are useful Cali how about making some sense when you're raising children not that adults or children but when you're raising children you don't start out telling them the absolute truth about moral matters like lying okay the absolute truth is that if you completely consistent in your moral rule not to lie even actually harming people you don't tell a five-year-old that as they grow and develop sometimes they figure that out for themselves or teaching it to them by having a conversation about it your moral position becomes more sophisticated the more mature you become but imagine if we didn't give children any sort of just absolute guidance at first what would they end up like would it be the Lord of the Flies you know that's what yeah could happen some people think so we start out with quite a bit of restriction but then hopefully people so what he's saying there is not the verb so it was very critical power in a lot of cases it wasn't trying to advocate for no freedom of thought or speech but he did tend to think that that the government society ought to provide a good structure of people so that's ordered freedom ordered liberty okay so some of these we've already dealt with there's a couple I specifically specifically wanted to get to so I'm gonna roll through the natural aristocracy we talked about last time was basically the idea that FERC supported the notion of people like himself not just people who were born into the wealthy class but people like himself he was born into what we would call the middle class who were capable of understanding leading ought to be able to lead and be supported in doing so he also supported this idea of precedent and we just talked about that so I'm not going to talk about that it did want to get to this because that this is what your second reading is about chivalry I guess or gendered honor is something that verdicts tolls and is characteristic of classical conservatism contemporary concerns although a sort of sort of romanticized version of it might be but in this case he starts off in your reading with the attack on Marie Antoinette in other words during the French Revolution one of the first things that happened was the revolutionaries many of whom were women who happened to be participating in this burst into the palace and basically you know frightened and treated abusively the Monarchs okay and so the language that he uses here specifically you know he doesn't really even deal with the king it's how they treated the Queen he says a first start out of how beautiful she was that he met her long ago beautiful okay Marie Antoinette was which he was beautiful but I'm sure but she was not particularly in tune to the needs of the people so that wasn't proud of her but anyway he says little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic distant respectful love that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her in a nation of gallant men in a nation of men of honor and of Cavaliers that's a reference to the fact that the French were France is the origin of chivalry okay I thought ten thousand swords must have leaked from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult but the age of chivalry is gone that of Safa stirs the II cannot Economist's and calculators has succeeded that's a bash against classical liberal ideas you can economists and calculators who think about profit and about their self-interest and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever never more shall we hold that generous loyalty to Rankin sex that proud submission that dignified obedience that subordination of the heart which kept alive even in servitude itself the spirit of an exultant freedom so it's very effusive language he's shocked you know he expresses um there's a connection between the way people treated this woman in this particular case and the way people treated women generally in the revolution at least women of rank and freedom or Liberty and interestingly kept alive even in servitude itself a spirit of exalted freedom okay now that's kind of key to understanding why chivalry chivalry is important to him okay and it may not they may not have been apparent what the connection is because normally women women now think of chivalry as something that's sort of almost oppressive a thing of the past and to a great extent it is but that is a thing of the past anyway but what underlies it is this notion of the strong protecting the weak okay that hat tends to reach us reached its fullest expression in this general principle that men don't hurt women even if women are not good right which would be the case with Marie Antoinette just a general rule that men don't hurt women is is like the most palpable expression of this more general principle of the strong should protect the weak and I know there's modern objections for the idea that women are weak but there wouldn't have been back then so much the the French Revolution starts that questioning you might say okay so the reason why this principle of the strong protecting the weak is important for liberty is because without it what you get is people just again thinking about how they can use their freedom to take advantage of people that are less strong than they are whether it's economically or because of physical strength or because of intellectual strength okay make the connection if you have people taking advantage of their advantages you again have disorder we have an argument for revolution change so chivalry because it has to do with gender put men into the habit of thinking in these times which generally made them better citizens in this field okay and so in general the classical conservative approves of gender roles you might they didn't call them happen anyway because of this social effect okay that if men think of themselves as protectors of their family you know protectors of their women and they are capable of forming this type of relationship with women the ideas that women perform their role of basically having tame male-male aggression okay so his point of view was men are different from women and men need to have a reason for self control and it's the female influence and the need for protection and the standards that women set so the classical conservative again tends to look at women Alexis de Tocqueville did this even in America he said women were the moral Center the American Society because of the husband's protectors etc etc again this is another case where you know we've kind of dismantled all that because we think it discriminates against women and it does it also discriminates against men who have to do all the protecting and stuff like that bunch of that is good you could argue what we tend to not look at is the consequences - this is what the classical conservative basically points out the not-so-great consequences you know less fewer intact families you know more social disorder less citizenship because there's no necessary connection made in the person's mind between the safety of their family which may not even be on the radar screen and you know what their government is doing all that stuff people put blinders on to their so anyway that's chivalry and then we have time the next time before we move on all right sorry kept you about a minute over

Channel: Political Philosophy: Dr Laurie Johnson

Views: 3,751

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Keywords: Edmund Burke, classical conservatism, conservatism, French Revolution

Id: VtI_lU9pI9k

Length: 49min 22sec (2962 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2016