It is a great irony that Burke, a reforming politician and perennial challenger of the abuse of power, ended his life as the most famed reactionary in Europe. In many ways, the apparent dichotomy between Burke, the defender of the American Revolution, and Burke, the most well-known opponent of the French Revolution, exemplifies the startling and paradoxical conclusions of his thought. For the greatest irony of all is that the French revolutionary philosophy, which emphasised liberty to the exclusion of all else, was least able to maintain those freedoms. Thus Burke’s attempts to curtail royal prerogative and his critique of revolutionary ideology were part of the same struggle for liberty against tyranny.
For fatally misunderstanding the nature of man and human institutions, the revolutionaries would destroy the very frameworks which best-preserved freedom. Burkean conservatism, therefore, turns the philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment (and modernity) on their head. It presents a vision of humanity as fundamentally and ineradicably flawed, and only liberated by the institutions and norms which the revolutionaries believed were at the heart of man’s oppression. Human reason is not perfect, but fallible and inadequate to the task of creating a new and better world from scratch. Comprehending the Humean dictum that reason should be the slave of the passions, Burke sought to articulate a more holistic conception of human motivation, encompassing the value-systems and diverse desires that really drive action. For, man was not, as the revolutionaries had him, an atomised and selfish individual actor, but a communal being surrounded by the rich texture of social life, embedded within the local loyalties and interpersonal relations.
From this new conception of human nature, arose a new vision of social institutions as the sources of practical knowledge and the foundation of moral order. Understanding that calculation alone could not create a unified polity, he emphasised the importance of emotion, ‘the moral imagination’; that, ‘to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.’ According to Burke, a decentralised civil society, the local, devolved loyalties of the ‘little platoon’ and an interlocking system of communities, are a stronger foundation for liberty than the tyranny of an all-encompassing state. Since the state represents aims and hopes that cannot be realised in a single generation, the transitory social contract of Locke is re-imagined as a transcendent institution, a trust between the living, the unborn and the dead.
Religion, for Burke, was not an irrational and backwards force, but the creator of values and the consecrator of state institutions. Just as importantly, Burke discerned that proven institutions which had stood the test of time are more likely to be effective than the abstract constructions of fevered imaginations. Traditions, similarly, are what countless generations have found useful and are, therefore, a valuable means through which knowledge and norms are transmitted. As Popper was to later point out, these traditions create regularities in social life, and are a better guide to the complexities of reality than unaided human reason.
Therefore, the prioritisation of the practical over the impracticable and the particular over the general are central to Burke’s philosophy. As Oakeshott writes, conservatism ‘is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried…the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.’ Politics, therefore, should not be the pursuit of abstract and unrealistic principles, but a gradual process of reconciliation and reform that is close to the real and immediate concerns of the people. It should be made congruent to a pre-existent institutional and social framework, improving systems of government whilst preserving the stability necessary for evolutionary growth. Utopian objectives, constructed by fallible human reasoning, usually result in destructive and unintended effects. Civilisation, fragile, contingent and constantly threatened by the darker undercurrents of human nature, is risked when practical political reform is disregarded to build ‘castles in the air’.
As a new generation of iconoclasts and ideologues seeks to tear down established institutions and norms, attacking everything from religion to the nation-state, and leaving only a vacuum in their place, Burkean conservatism has never been more relevant. In the face of the anomie, atomization and instability brought about by these reckless assaults, this philosophy offers a political alternative through which the excesses of capitalism can be humanised; a means through which compassionate communities and new visions of higher ideals can be re-forged. As the Western world now seeks to reform its political and economic course, it is this vision of human possibility and renewed social value that should be the future of conservatism.
