put it another way, a spiritual truth becomes real only insofar as it becomes flesh. By contrast, the revolutionary finds that the limitations of the flesh enchain the spirit, and he therefore attempts to strip away appearances—conventions, habits, prejudices, customs, and traditions—in order to recover the essential reality beneath them, as Jeffrey Hart has explained.5 The spirit of revolutionary liberty is disembodied, and pervades an international atmosphere, inspiring universal movements now in one place, now in another, requiring universal declarations of the rights of man now in one time, now in another. Bodies, whether they are legislatures, churches, families, or individual persons, are merely accidental. Indeed, they have always been, throughout history, the limiting factor in the revolutionary’s achievement of his goals. The revolutionary envisions an immediate liberty with no social institutions outside the self to limit his freedoms.
Burke never believed that the achievement of liberty, in historical time, could enable men somehow to transcend their human nature. The sort of liberty he envisioned enables men to realize their nature to the imperfect degree that it is possible on earth, but not to overcome their natural limitations. The paradoxical truth is that those fleshly limitations, especially as they are mediated by the artificial institutions of society, are the very means by which men achieve such liberty as they can. “Art is man’s nature,” writes Burke in An Appeal. In contrast to the sentimental French citizen, who saw art as opposed to nature, Burke writes:
The state of civil society … is a state of nature; and much more truly so than a savage and incoherent mode of life. For man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated, and most predominates. Art is man’s nature. We are as much, at least, in a state of nature in formed manhood, as in immature and helpless infancy. [p. 168]
Burke had argued against the revolutionary notion of a “natural society”—a society constructed with reference to an immediate “nature” and without reference to the actual practices of government—ever since his first published work, the satirical Vindication of Natural Society (1756).
The belief that our liberties must be mediated to be enjoyed has consequences for both the individual and the corporate construction of freedom. In the earliest work printed here, the letter to Depont, Burke lays out the conditions for judging when a nation has achieved a “real practical liberty, with a government powerful to protect, [and] impotent to evade it…” (p. 11; Burke’s emphasis). He does not believe these conditions preclude a strong government, as Schama believes they did in France. On the contrary, practical liberty requires strong government. The individual, Burke writes, needs security of property, a free market for labor, freedom from confiscatory taxation, and freedom of expression. The corporate body, the state, needs a constitution which affirms the rule of law according to precedent, administers equal justice by an independent judiciary, gives control of the armed forces to a freely chosen legislative body, and provides for the security of ancient, prescriptive rights.
Toward the end of the letter to Depont, Burke begins to develop another individual precondition for practical liberty: virtue. The pursuit of virtue is what Burke means by “education” in the widest sense. In Letter to William Elliot, Burke says that the educated gentleman would not use his freedom as a pretext for throwing off morality (p. 274). Rather, morality and liberty are dependent upon each other, as he explains in yet another text:
Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites… . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. [ A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, p. 69]
As Burke well knew, the literary culture preceding the Revolution rejected as stultifying or unnatural, artificial or scholastic, the kind of moral reasoning he recommended. He knew that passion—whether the romantic passion of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse or the political passion of the revolutionary—was thought to justify itself by its own intensity and sincerity. The sympathies elicited by Rousseau’s novel and his other works, especially Emile and the Confessions, were, again, very different from those that Burke considered necessary to an educated gentleman, and he profoundly disagreed with a revolutionary education. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that while the revolutionary citizen preferred the heart to the head, the Burkean gentleman preferred the head to the heart. In Letter to Philip Francis, where Burke responds to the criticism that his famous remembrance of the Queen of France is “pure foppery” and that her moral failings made her unworthy of Burke’s attention, he protests that Francis’s “natural sympathies” are disordered:
What! Are not high rank, great splendour of descent, great personal elegance and outward accomplishments, ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in the misfortunes of men? The minds of those who do not feel thus, are not even systematically right. “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?” Why, because she was Hecuba, the queen of Troy, the wife of Priam, and suffered, in the close of life, a thousand calamities! I felt too for Hecuba, when I read the fine tragedy of Euripides upon her story… . [p. 23]
An education in Shakespeare and Euripides, Burke implies, teaches one how to feel for a queen. This is not to say, however, that all feeling is good, regardless of its object; Burke’s opponents would be more likely to maintain that view. He maintains his preoccupation with the gentleman’s proper mode of feeling from the first to the last in this volume, concluding A Letter to a Noble Lord with a meditation on how one of his friends would have felt, in 1796, had he witnessed the Revolution.
The debilitating effect of false sympathy, created by a misguided education, is explained in A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. Burke warns against the Assembly’s “scheme of educating the rising generation, the principles which they intend to instil, and the sympathies which they wish to form in the mind, at the season in which it is the most susceptible… . Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his life he is their canon of Polycletus; he is their standard figure of perfection” (p. 46 – 47). The “natural” education of Emile and of Julie (in La Nouvelle Héloïse) removes them from a sympathy with their families and previous social relations. Reflecting on Julie’s illicit passion for her tutor, Saint-Preux, which commanded the sympathies of Rousseau’s readers, Burke comments, “That no means may exist of confederating against their tyranny, by the false sympathies of this Nouvelle Eloise, they endeavour to subvert those principles of domestic trust and fidelity, which form the discipline of social life” (p. 54).
Burke had already written in the Reflections that “[w]e begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.” 6 By sending out their children to the Foundling Hospital and refusing to form a family, that most demanding and rewarding of all social relations, Rousseau and his mistress became for Burke the very antithesis of society’s guardians. The Rousseauian education, charges Burke, teaches “[b]enevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual… .” The revolutionary citizen is prepared to exercise compassion among the liberated, universal masses, but as to individual Frenchmen, particularly family and neighbors, that’s quite a different story. Beginning with the repudiation of actual family relations that should (according to the ancients quoted in A Letter to a Member) naturally elicit one’s sympathies, the modern, revolutionary citizen ends with nothing more than a promise of redirecting his sympathies toward an abstract concept: the masses. By re-educating his sympathies away from the traditional and the familial, the habitual and the customary, the revolutionary citizen “liberated” himself from the very circumstances in which most ordinary citizens enjoyed their liberty.
One final contrast between the education of the gentleman and that of the citizen, with large consequences for the constitutional Parliamentarian,
