century, was profoundly skeptical of the Enlightenment and its claim to a moral and political wisdom greater than that of the ancients. “The author of the Reflections has heard a great deal concerning the modern lights,” writes Burke of himself, “but he has not yet had the good fortune to see much of them… . Where the old authors whom he has read, and the old men whom he has conversed with, have left him in the dark, he is in the dark still” (p. 147).
Burke’s strategy—which we may call a “useful fiction,” as long as we recall that the deepest truths are often conveyed by fiction—is to discover modern advances latent in the wisdom of the ancients. Burke is confident, for instance, that the constitutional settlement of the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) was a reassertion of ancient laws and that the Bill of Rights (1689) was merely declarative of preexisting liberties and rights. To Thomas Paine, who in this respect may serve as a model for the revolutionary citizen, Burke’s “referring to musty records and moldy parchments” was beneath contempt.
In An Appeal, Burke pleaded guilty as charged: “It is current that these old politicians [at the time of the Glorious Revolution] knew little of the rights of men; that they lost their way by groping about in the dark, and fumbling among rotten parchments and musty records” (p. 147). Not only does Burke argue that the ancients’ understanding of liberty was superior to Paine’s, he finds that they anticipated modern errors as well. He discovers in ancient (and medieval) letters the very categories of the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty that the moderns mistakenly believe they have invented. He continues by comparing the language of Paine with that of John Ball, a leader in the Peasant Revolt in 1381, and he quotes Tacitus on the Germans’ invasion of the Gallic provinces: the invaders used the cant of liberty, but their real motives for war were lust, avarice, and a wish to leave their homes. The ancients, Burke suggests, can teach us to distinguish practical from revolutionary liberty.
The dispute between ancients and moderns is a clear case of an individual matter—education—with corporate consequences. Burke expounds these consequences in Letter to William Elliot, where he calls for a new Maccabeus to “assert the honor of the antient law.” Also, in Letter to a Member, he marshals the authority of Juvenal and Cicero in his dispute with Rousseau over “natural” affections (p. 50–51). In Thoughts on French Affairs, Burke refers with horror to the offer of Condorcet to serve as the dauphin’s tutor. A year later, Condorcet’s Report on Education (April 1792) would conclude that a profound knowledge of Greek and Latin was too difficult to attain to justify it as a goal for the French citizen, that classical literature was “full of errors,” that the citizen’s education should be secular, and that the teaching of moral principles was to be derived directly from natural sentiment and reason, rather than mediated by religion.
Burke, by contrast, argues that for a man to be free from the fear of any earthly master, he needs to learn to fear God. The alliance between liberty and piety is thus fundamental: “[Despots] know,” he writes in A Letter to a Member, “that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage. Their object is, that their fellow citizens may be under the dominion of no awe, but that of their committee of research, and of their lanterne” (p. 55). Condorcet’s goal for education was to form citizens who were free, equal, and serviceable to the Patrie. The older ideal of the gentleman is, ironically, more individual and, submitting to instruction from Greeks and Romans, Jews and Christians, more cosmopolitan. Contradictory as it may seem, Burke suggests that English liberty requires gentlemen whose education is decidedly “non-English”: their natural sympathies for English authors can be assumed, but their sympathies for others separated by great distances of time and space must be cultivated.
After education, perhaps the clearest link between the individual and the corporate requirements for practical liberty is property. Of all the institutions that mediate between the British Constitution and the British gentleman, property and property rights summon up a number of Burke’s most characteristic images and deepest thoughts.
Burke maintains that the security of property, especially landed property passed down through generations, is essential to a free people. The security of property does not guarantee liberty, but it serves as a precondition for liberty. For instance, Burke invites his opponents to reflect whether “under that domination [of the French absolute monarchs], though personal liberty has been precarious and insecure, property at least was ever violated.” Property seems to be a necessary, though not sufficient, characteristic of a free society.
In Burke’s thought, the propertied classes are represented by the Whig grandees of the Glorious Revolution and the rest of the landed gentry. Why are English liberties safer with propertied men as leaders, rather than with unpropertied men? Propertied men are not desperate men, as Harvey Mansfield comments, and their political ambitions are therefore somewhat more limited and trustworthy than those of unpropertied, politically ambitious ideologues.7 “We know that parties must ever exist in a free country, Burke says in A Speech on Conciliation.8 The Constitution could safely incorporate party government, Burke thought, if party leaders were drawn from the landed gentry, because they would be as careful of constitutional rights as they were of their own property rights.
In addition to security of property, Burke believed that practical, constitutional liberty required that a free people be led by a “natural aristocracy”—a term that seems intentionally to contrast with “hereditary aristocracy.” Burke’s later works defended the constitutional rights of hereditary aristocrats, who made up the House of Lords, even though he trusted them less than he did the landed gentry. In the final two works printed here, Burke delights in the irony of a commoner defending noblemen whose radical sentiments would overthrow their own rights. In 1795, he wrote Letter to William Elliot in response to an attack by the Duke of Norfolk, earl marshal of England and the eighth-ranking nobleman in the land. That work was but a trial run, however, for A Letter to a Noble Lord, a withering response to the Duke of Bedford and Earl of Lauderdale, who had attacked Burke’s pension. “These noble persons,” Burke replies with scorn, “have lost no time in conferring upon me, that sort of honour, which it is alone within their competence, and which it is certainly most congenial to their nature and their manners to bestow” (p. 279). Despite his disdain for these aristocrats, particularly for their delusive self-images as radicals, Burke describes the leaders needed by a free people as a natural aristocracy. Here, the connection between the individual and corporate requirements of practical liberty is again very close, and it explains the prerequisites necessary for the individual to be “naturally” suited for political leadership:
To be bred in a place of estimation; To see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; To be taught to respect one’s self; To be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; To look early to public opinion… . To have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; To be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found… . To be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty… These are the circumstances of men, that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation. [ An Appeal, p. 168]
For a nation to maintain that it protects and enjoys liberty, it must be so constituted as to cultivate a natural aristocracy for its ruling class. This natural aristocracy is inseparable from the state, he says: “It is the soul to the body, without which the man does not exist.” Only a nation that functions under its direction, Burke believes, deserves to be called “a people.” A people is therefore neither the revolutionary mob addressed by John Ball, nor the counter-revolutionary mob that burned the home of Burke’s opponent, Joseph Priestley, nor any “majority of men, told by the head.” “The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial”—just as, one might add, all of society is artificial (p. 163). Burke’s natural aristocracy, which itself depends upon the artificial structures of a civilization, becomes the crucial term in his definition of a people: “When great multitudes
