burke

Essay on Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
by Charles Glenn

Above all, Edmund Burke was a patriot. In citing "zeal" as the primary motivation of the English for the preservation of monarchy and for the union of church and state, he revealed his own zeal for the preservation of England as it was in his time. It is possible that Reflections can be characterized as a fearful reaction to the bloody events in France, written by a man who was seeking to justify his own aristocratic station in life.

However, such a simplistic evaluation does not do justice to the depth of thought that Burke applied in dealing with the nature of man, government, and revolution.

Burke’s letter was a comparison of England and revolutionary France, and besides severely chastising the French, he managed to touch on some significant topics. His philosophy of human nature was, surprisingly, very unconstrained.

He went so far as to say, " . . . He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed thereof the state – He willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection." Such faith in the state, he admitted, was "out of fashion" with the intellectuals of his time.

He defended it effectively, however, by arguing that France would have done better to have modeled their new government on England than on some theories developed by what he called "professors of political metaphysics."

For Burke, such questions as the "rights of man," and "equality," were already effectively dealt with by the English, who had achieved a balance of power in their limited monarchy. In Burke’s idealistic England, which was perhaps less popular than he believed, all citizens were "content" with their "inherited" lot in life.

The quality of English politics that he loved the most was the paternal inheritance of liberties, property and titles, providing what he called " . . . a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement." Furthermore, this limited monarchy that England enjoyed, as epitomized by the tradition of inheritance, was derived from (and justified by) nature.

Burke did not so much object to the revolution as he objected to what replaced the French monarchy, and most stringently, he objected to the French separating church and state. England’s "glory," in his mind, was the strong state religion. The French, in his view, had "thrown the baby out," too.