Further Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

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СКАЧАТЬ “That discipline” is the direction of the multitudes by the natural aristocracy. Apparently, then, a merely hereditary, wealthy aristocracy does not lead to a virtuous liberty any more certainly than, as Burke recognized, a good education does. It is a help, like a good education, but not a guarantee. “Aristocrat” becomes, in Burke’s language, a designation for the virtuous gentleman.

      Burke finds an analogy for the political rights enjoyed under the British Constitution in the rights that accrue over time to the uncontested holders of lands—“prescriptive” rights. Whereas the revolutionary desires an immediate enjoyment of his liberty and submits to a government only upon sufferance, Burke believed that liberty, proceeding from God as natural law, is mediated through the established, prescriptive laws, usages, and customs of a people. Property rights are the outward and most visible manifestation of prescriptive rights.

      The origins of property rights, like the origins of virtually every historical government, are shrouded in antiquity and even rooted in injustice. They cannot survive revolutionaries’ continual questions concerning the legitimacy of their authority, especially if the revolutionaries suppose that the only legitimacy comes from the simple majority of a people at any given moment. But if, over time, a government fulfills the purposes of civil society—namely, the development of man’s moral and reasonable nature—then the government (like the property holder) acquires a prescriptive authority. By the same token, the citizens of that land acquire all the rights that have accrued to them over time, through custom, legal precedent, royal charter, and Parliamentary law.

      If the defender of revolutionary liberty finds this explanation of prescriptive rights unconvincing, Burke invites him to consider the ultimate consequences of his own argument: “Who are they who claim [land] by prescription and descent from certain gangs of banditti called Franks,” he asks of the revolutionaries, “… whilst at the very time they tell me, that prescription and long possession form no title to property?” (p. 166). Were he to nullify the force of prescriptive law, the citizen would nullify his right to his own land and citizenship in France. The rotten parchments and musty records of the statute books, which guarantee property and prescriptive rights, arouse Burke’s imagination as much as natural right arouses Thomas Paine’s. Against the natural rights asserted to be the foundation of revolutionary liberty, Burke defended prescriptive rights, found in actual statutes and sanctioned by custom, as the best guarantee for a just, constitutional liberty. Burke “is resolved not ‘to be wise beyond what is written’ in the legislative record and practice; that when doubts arise on them, he endeavours to interpret one statute by another; and to reconcile them all to established recognized morals, and to the general antient known policy of the laws of England” (p. 134). The object of this submission to precedent is not legalism, but liberty. “They did not wish,” writes Burke of the Rockingham Whigs, “that Liberty, in itself one of the first of blessings, should in it’s perversion become the greatest curse which could fall upon mankind. To preserve the Constitution entire, … in all it’s parts, was to them the first object” (p. 287). Burke knew that the inchoate tyrant begins by asserting an “extravagant liberty” against existing, repressive laws, and ends by ruling for his own pleasure (p. 119). The language of the statute books is not extravagant, but what it obtains, it keeps. The rotten parchments cannot compete with the promises of revolutionary liberty, but duly constituted courts guarantee what the tribunal must put off until the revolution is finally over.

      The system of practices which govern the citizen and regulate Britain’s mixed government of Kings, Lords, and Commons Burke calls the Constitution. Its prescriptions are authoritative, regardless of what a simple majority of persons living in England at any given time may think. The Constitution will change over time, as all living systems change, but its changes will come from its internal life and not, to repeat, from being acted upon by a majority maintaining that majority dictates alone possess legitimacy.

      In Burke’s view of practical liberty, the Constitution is where one must seek a resolution of the tension between principle and actuality. Or, rather, it is where one must seek a paradox at its most intense, as when Burke merges Windsor Castle with the Temple of Jerusalem as a symbol for the Constitution:

      But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion—as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor … oversee and guard the subjected land … [a]s long as our Sovereign Lord the King, and his faithful subjects, the Lords and Commons of this realm, the triple cord, which no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitutional frank-pledge of this nation … [a]s long as these endure, so long the Duke ofBedford is safe: and we are all safe together … . [ Letter to a Noble Lord, p. 310]

      Burke is symbolizing the Constitution as Coleridge defines “symbol”: the Constitution/Temple/Castle is characterized by the “translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible… .” ⁹ The individual elements of the nation (King, Lords, Commons) participate in the unity of the Constitution without losing their identity. Or, as Coleridge said of Burke’s metaphorical language in another place, this language expresses “meaning, image, and passion triunely. ” ¹⁰ Here, in Burke’s example, one sees the merging of meaning and image, of ideal and concrete. There is always something beyond—in this example, the Sion that is not merely British. Yet Burke also leaves the reader whose sympathies derive from a Burkean rather than a Rousseauian education with the conviction that he has participated in a union of the spirit and the flesh, liberated within history to the highest degree possible.

      Nothing in Burke is immediate. The experience of liberty is not the immediate one that the revolutionary citizen wishes for. Practical liberty is mediated through a Constitution, which A Letter to a Noble Lord represents by the mediating symbols of Windsor Castle and the Temple. Nature is mediated through art, natural law through social institutions, the acts of a people through the leadership of a natural aristocracy. Burke’s view of practical liberty is complex, but its complexities are those of human life. Its satisfactions are limited, but its limitations are those of human life as well.

      DANIEL E. RITCHIE

       Bethel College

EDITOR’S NOTE

      Regarding the texts used for this edition, the letters to Charles-Jean-François Depont and Philip Francis come from Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke between the Year 1744, and the Period of his Decease, in 1797, eds. Charles William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, 5th Earl Fitzwilliam, and Sir Richard Bourke, 4 vols. London: Francis and John Rivington, 1844. They have been compared with the Copeland edition of Burke’s Correspondence. The other texts have been chosen in accordance with William B. Todd’s Bibliography of Edmund Burke (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964) to represent the most authoritative version of each work.

      The text of A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly is that of the first impression of the first English edition on 21 May 1791.

      The text of An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, first published on 3 August 1791, comes from the fourth impression of the first edition.

      Thoughts on French Affairs, written in December 1791, comes from the first impression of the first edition, published on 7 September 1797, in Three Memorials on French Affairs.

      Letter to William Elliot, dated 26 May 1795, comes from the first impression of the first edition of Two Letters on the Conduct of Our Domestick Parties, СКАЧАТЬ