How does the rule of the masses turn into the rule of the wealthy? This perplexing picture is precisely what Burke aims to present. It is also a matter of which social class gets a share in political power. The power of the masses means the power of the public opinion, and the power of the individuals or parties who can muster and direct public opinion.
This ironical combination demonstrates how modern democracies are vulnerable, if not accommodating, to the preponderant influence of capital. For this reason, Burke was ready to declare as early as that the democratic revolution in France would lead to its own demise towards a corrupt oligarchy.
After the abolition of feudal rights in August , he saw no collective social power such as the church or nobility to obstruct and balance the power of, first, the masses, and later, the monied class. Tragicomically, democracies end up undermining their own egalitarian imperatives.
In a further historical irony, many of things that Burke criticized about democracy later became means of demanding or defending it. This is one of the most peculiar aspects of the history of democracy: its revival as a modern idea was pioneered by its fiercest opponents as much as its supporters.
Salih Emre Gercek is a doctoral candidate in political theory at Northwestern University. Title image: Frontispiece to Reflections on the French revolution. France, London: Pubd. Holland No. Bourke, Richard. Hampsher-Monk, Iain. Innes, Joanna and Philp, Mark eds. Menke, Christoph. Reflections of Equality, trans. This followed from what Dr. Certainly, he said, it was unknown to the leaders of the Revolution in The house of lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the house of commons; no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom.
Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the house of commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender.
The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities.
The operative moral principle, it will be noticed, is that the terms of the constitution, once set, must be observed. This passage may seem to imply that there is no standard of natural right anterior and superior to the constitution. Price and others presume that it is possible to appeal to those rights in order to determine what rights men ought to have now, in an old and long-established civil society.
It is this appeal that Burke says English statesmen of the past rejected in favor of the historic rights of Englishmen. Original rights, which are objects of speculation rather than of experience, can give rise to conflicting absolute claims that can tear a society apart.
Burke never denied that there had been a state of nature, that men had original rights in it, or that civil society had been formed by a compact. Either he accepted these beliefs as one tends to accept the commonplaces of his age or he knew that others accepted them so generally that to deny them would be to lose the argument at the outset.
For whatever reason, he restricted himself to arguing that the original rights of men were not unreal, but irrelevant to civil society. These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line.
Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction.
If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to do justice; as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation.
They have a right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death.
Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. But their civil rights are not merely the legal form taken, after the social compact, by their original natural rights.
The purposes of government are specified by the natural wants of men, understood not as their desires, but as their real needs. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. There are conceivable circumstances in which any of these, in a limited degree and for a limited time, might do someone more good than harm.
But they could be justified only as a means to good ends, for these things are not in themselves human goods.
Therefore, they cannot constitute the ends of life or the purposes of society. On the other hand, one can name human needs that do specify, in a general way, what civil society is for, and Burke did name some of them. Civil society exists to guarantee to men justice, the fruits of their industry, the acquisitions of their parents, the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, instruction in life, and consolation in death.
These are among the advantages that civil society exists to provide for men. But it is impossible to define antecedently, in the abstract and for all possible circumstances, the concrete forms in which these advantages are to be acquired and safeguarded. That must be left to social experience and the gradual development of custom and law. The end of civil society, then, in global terms, is to promote what is good for human beings. They will therefore set the outer limits of what government may do to people and define what it may not do to them.
Burke was not inconsistent when he denounced the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and Warren Hastings in India for violating natural law by their treatment of the populations subject to their power. To deny that natural law is an abstract code of rights is not to say that it forbids nothing. Human goods must be limited and trimmed in order to be simultaneously attainable in society. Not only that, but evils, which are negations of good, must be tolerated, sometimes even protected, in order that any good at all may be attained.
A society ruthlessly purged of all injustice might turn out to be a vast prison. These considerations are particularly relevant to the right that was fundamentally at issue between Burke and his opponents. They held that every man in the state of nature had a sovereign right to govern himself and for that reason had a right to an equal share in the government of civil society.
But this implies that purpose, rather than original rights and individual consent, is the organizing and legitimizing principle of a constitution. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science. Who, then, shall make the practical judgments of politics? The question cannot be answered by appealing to the rights of men. The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate. The nature of man is intricate; 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.
When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.
But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.
All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it.
When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of all power not standing on its own honor and the honor of those who are to obey it.
Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle. We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles and were, indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.
The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas and by furnishing their minds.
Happy if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union and their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
See the fate of Bailly and Condorcet, supposed to be here particularly alluded to. Compare the circumstances of the trial and execution of the former with this prediction. I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation.
Already there appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness, and a vulgarity in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors.
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