in the light of those ends, obligations descend upon the present generation from the past, and there are obligations in regard to generations yet unborn.
Men achieve their natural social goals only in history. The structures inherited from the past, if they have served and still serve those goals, are binding upon those who are born into them. These persons are not morally free to dismantle the structures at pleasure and to begin anew from the foundations. For the goals in question are not those alone of the collection of individuals now present on earth, but also those of human nature and of God.
The constitution of a society, conventional and historically conditioned though it is, becomes a part of the natural moral order because of the ends that it serves. This is the thought that lies behind Burke’s rhetorical language in the next part of the passage on the contract of society:
Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law.44
The “great primaeval contract” and the “inviolable oath” are, of course, the moral order of the world as established by God. That moral order furnishes a law to which civil societies as well as individuals are obliged to conform.
WHEN REVOLUTION IS JUSTIFIED
But are people never free to change the constitution and their government? Burke does not quite say that. “The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles.”45 The key phrase in this statement is “at their pleasure.” There is also the unspoken assumption, characteristic of Burke, that a political revolution would be tantamount to a dissolution of society as such. Underlying that assumption was a conception of the constitution which one writer has well described in these words: “Burke . . . understood ‘constitution’ to mean the entire social structure of England and not only the formal governmental structure. . . . Included in his concept of constitution was the whole corporate society to which he was devoted.”46 No people, Burke said, had the right to overturn such a structure at pleasure and on a speculation that by so doing they might make things better.
Nonetheless, he could not and did not deny that a revolution was sometimes necessary. He only insisted that it could not be justified but by reasons that were so obvious and so compelling that they were themselves part of the moral order:
It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or force. But if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow.47
One may think that here Burke has gone beyond rhetoric into rhapsody. Yet the lines of his argument are clear enough. In An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, he made them more explicit and clearer still. It is difficult, therefore, to understand why Frank O’Gorman says: “The present writer has always found it strange that Burke rarely refers, either explicitly or even implicitly, to the principles that are supposed to have been the foundations of his thought. Burke was, indeed, uninterested in the workings of the Divine power.”48 It seems obvious to this writer that, particularly in the Reflections and An Appeal, Burke not only refers to but also elaborates in detail the principles that are the foundation of his theory of civil society and political authority. He was, it is true, a practicing politician, not a philosopher, and in these two works he wrote a polemic, not a dispassionate treatise on political theory. But his polemic included the presentation of a countertheory to the theory he was attacking. The countertheory depended in turn on explicitly stated premises of a moral and metaphysical nature. The premises are expounded, one must admit, in rhetorical language, especially in the Reflections. But they are, to borrow Burke’s words, not impossible to be discerned.
BASIC PREMISES
OF BURKE’S THOUGHT
Briefly, the ultimate premises of Burke’s political thought are provided by the metaphysics of a created universe. They assume the superiority of reason or intellect to will in both God and man. Part of this universe is the natural moral order based on the nature of man as created by God. Man’s nature is oriented by creation toward ends that may be globally described as its natural perfection. Since civil society is necessary to the attainment of that perfection, it too is natural and willed by God.
The authority of the state derives from the rational and moral ends that it is intended by nature to serve. Consent plays a role in the formation of the state and the conferral of its authority on government, since both involve human acts of choice. But the obligation to form a civil society is prior to consent, and, for those born under a constitution, consent to the constitution is commanded by the previous obligation to obey a government that is adequately serving the natural goals of society. Rights also play a part in Burke’s political theory. But the basic political right is the right to be governed well, not the right to govern oneself. In Burke’s thought, purpose and obligations are more fundamental than rights and consent.
FRANCIS CANAVAN
Fordham University
In this volume, the pagination of E. J. Payne’s edition is indicated by bracketed page numbers embedded in the text. Cross references have been changed to reflect the pagination of the current edition. Burke’s and Payne’s spellings, capitalizations, and use of italics have been retained, strange as they may seem to modern eyes. The use of double punctuation (e.g., ,—) has been eliminated except in quoted material. We have corrected Payne’s occasional confusion of Charles-Jean-François Depont to whom the Reflections on the Revolution in France were addressed and Pierre-Gaëton Dupont who translated the Reflections into French.
All references to Burke’s Correspondence are to the 1844 edition.
1729 Burke born in Dublin, January 12.
1735–40 Lives with mother’s relatives in countryside of County Cork.
1741–44 Attends Abraham Shackleton’s Quaker school in Kildare.
1744–48
