Everywhere in Supply Chains

I am grateful to Daniel Klein for his thoughtful review of my book (“Collins’s Burke,” April 19). Yet a few clarifications are in order.

First, I do not argue that Burke believed commodification and frivolous moneymaking were a cause of the French Revolution. I contend that Burke’s analysis of the French Revolution is heavily influenced by his belief that the character of modern Europe emerged from a cultural inheritance that did not reduce social relations to the principles of utility, commodity, and calculation.

For Burke, then, the soul should not be mechanized. Society was a divinely inspired moral compact, bathed in a sacred reverence and elevated by ancient manners. This is why Burke refers to an “unbought grace of life.” He maintained that a society based primarily on transactional and contractual relations, without the guiding presence of the clergy and nobility, would struggle to nourish the sentiments and attachments necessary to sustain civilization and dignify a people. All of these insights remain at the core of his attack on the revolution.

Second, Burke did see Rousseau as a leading influence on the revolutionaries, not because Rousseau was a prophet of consumerism but because he was a prophet of vanity. In Burke’s judgment, the lure of vanity granted revolutionaries an air of exploded license to debauch the nobleness of humility and manipulate human beings like soulless objects of — yes — utility, in pursuit of utopian ideals.

Third, Klein insinuates that I use Burke as a means to convey my own pro­spective intellectual agenda. The opposite is the case. Like Klein, I first began to study Burke through a classical-liberal lens, but I soon realized that this framework, beyond its anachronism, was insufficient to capture the depth and complexity of his thought. It was the substance of Burke’s own writings and speeches, and not any underlying ideological motivations, that led me to the conclusion that the idea of market activities governed by unbought grace — not the other way around — was the touchstone of Burke’s conception of political economy.

Greg Collins West Hartford, Conn.

Daniel Klein responds: I would agree that vanity reveals itself in Rousseau and often his admirers, but did Rousseau preach vanity? Was he a prophet of vanity? I think the vanity enters more in the denial of the psychological fact that what Rousseau preached and projected, strong social cohesion throughout the polity, no longer fits human circumstances. Rousseau was a sort of reactionary, anti-liberal in politics and illiberal in manners — both corollary to the same root atavism. Rousseau was a hypocrite and a fraud, but I would not call him a prophet of hypocrisy and fraudulence.

Classical liberalism is compatible with the unbought grace of life. Really.