This great political writer from the 1700s seems to be speaking directly to us in the present.
This great political writer from the 1700s seems to be speaking directly to us in the present.
W hen we read texts from a bygone era that relate to the present, we often think things like, “It seems like the author was reading the news today,” or, “How did the author know this was coming?” We marvel at the author’s foresight, and we are surprised that a text so old could be so relevant.
Marveling at the foresight of a long-departed mind reflects a disbelief in that thing which people allege from time to time called “human nature.”
It’s certainly true that scientific progress has rendered many old beliefs to be wrong, and a science textbook from 1825 will probably lead you astray. But even though today we live with technology and culture that would be utterly alien to an ancient Sumerian, our nature as humans hasn’t changed much in the past 10,000 years. The hardiness of human nature is one of the central beliefs of conservatism. If an insight into human nature is good and accurate, it is timeless.
We shouldn’t be the least bit surprised when an author from the 1700s seems to be speaking directly to us in the present. And the really good ones from the 1700s will help us see things about today that we did not see before.
Edmund Burke was a great political writer, so he seems to be speaking to us in the present. Burke was a member of Parliament and a prolific writer on many issues in Britain in his time. In his sixties, Burke was on fire and wrote his most famous works. From the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 and continuing until his death in 1797, Burke focused on the new set of slogans, opinions, sentiments, manners, visions — modes of feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting — that he saw rising throughout Europe.
In those years, Burke wrote with burning vitality. His target was radicalism. It was the radicalism of the Jacobins and their intellectual fellow-travelers throughout Europe. Burke was offering Reflections on the Revolution, particularly in France — but the problem was not specifically French or confined to France. In the modern world the problem is everywhere and perennial.
Reading Burke’s thoughts on the radicalism of his day, you see radicalism today. Many today trace radicalism to thinkers such as Karl Marx and ideologies such as socialism and progressivism. But Burke was writing before Marx was born, and before our modern idea of state-socialism had fully emerged.
He was looking across the English Channel to France, in tatters after the overthrow of Louis XVI. “You may have subverted monarchy, but not recovered freedom,” he wrote in his “Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont” in November 1789.
In that short work, we get a good sense of what Burke means by “liberty.” He believes it to be “the birthright of our species” but rejects a “solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will.” No, instead, “liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. . . . This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions.”
The construction of those institutions is not to be trifled with because “rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in an hundred years,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France.
As a politician, Burke supported many different reforms in his day. He wrote a plan for the gradual emancipation of African slaves. He supported reforms to the British East India Company, which he believed had abused the British public’s trust in it. He supported Catholic emancipation in England. He favored letting the American colonies secede from Britain, without a fight.
What he couldn’t stand was radical proponents of change for its own sake. In 1796’s “A Letter to a Noble Lord,” Burke outlines what he calls “a marked distinction between Change and Reformation.” He writes that change “alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them.” Change throws the baby out with the bathwater. On the other hand, reformation is “a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of.”
The advantage of reformation, Burke says, is that “if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.” The French did not have that advantage in their revolution. The revolutionaries “complained of everything; they refused to reform any thing; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all unchanged,” Burke wrote. And they ended up in squalor and conflict.
Radical philosophers and ideologies don’t cause the natural human penchants and instincts that attract people to radicalism. Radical philosophers and ideologies are downstream of those penchants and instincts. In the latter years of his life, Burke explored the threat, upstream and downstream, showing us the perennial battle we cannot help but involve ourselves in.
Burke devoted the last years of his life to fighting against radicalism, dogmatism, and stubborn, foolish instincts. The radicalism we see today is not the product of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marx, left-wing universities, socialist intellectuals, or the Frankfurt School. Those are cop-outs. Radicalism is a product of human nature, and that hasn’t changed since Burke put pen to paper.
There is something natural about radicalism, and like other wayward natural penchants, like our penchant for sweets, it must be overcome through training and education, through instituting a complex, layered sense of duty. Burke has plenty to tell us about how to go about that task, and don’t be surprised that the words of the 1790s are cutting right to the heart of the matter today. As Burke said, “If we do not take to our aid the foregone studies of men reputed intelligent and learned, we shall be always beginners.”
This piece is adapted from Edmund Burke and the Perennial Battle, 1789–1797, a book of Burke’s quotations edited by Klein and Pino and published by CL Press (a project of the Fraser Institute) in partnership with National Review Institute, the Acton Institute, the Fund for American Studies, and the Edmund Burke Society. Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble for $9.
Daniel B. Klein is a professor of economics and holds the JIN Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Dominic Pino is the Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at National Review Institute.