By Darrin McMahon

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France has much to say to a self-proclaimed era of “change.”  A classic meditation on that very subject, the book has long appealed to those who would deny it, serving to this day as a foundational text of the conservative tradition.  Yet given that self-styled “conservatives” in the United States have apparently abandoned any semblance of conservation—preferring instead to squander the resources of posterity, trample on traditional rights, and pursue reckless foreign adventures—perhaps it is time for liberals to take a closer look at a book that offers sound advice on how to innovate, while keeping what we have.

A child of the eighteenth century, Burke was the product of an age that invented change as a social and political ideal.  Whereas earlier generations had tended to regard the world as given—the fixed creation of an eternal order, replete with established hierarchies and immutable laws—men and women in the eighteenth century became increasingly conscious of their capacity to shape it.  Using reason, they believed, together with experience and practical judgment, they could fashion for themselves a better world—happier, more just, more humane.

That progressive conviction comes across in the new definition of “revolution” that emerged in the eighteenth century.  Prior to that time, the word implied movement in a circle, like the “revolution” of a planet or wheel: to “revolve” was to travel round and round, beginning and ending at the same place.  Gradually, however, the word took on a different sense, implying unprecedented and fundamental change.  “Revolutions” were linear, not circular, they took us someplace new.  

Burke’s contemporaries had used the word in reference to England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and the “American Revolution” of 1776, among other such upheavals.  But Burke recognized sooner than most that the “revolution” initiated in France in 1789 was itself revolutionary.   “All circumstances taken together,” the Reflections declares in a famous line, “the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.”  It would usher in “a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe.”  

Written in the Fall of 1790 at a comparatively early stage in the Revolution—several years before the Jacobin Terror and the beheading of the king and queen—the Reflections is full of such portentous warnings.  Burke cautions that the mob violence on display in episodes like the taking of the Bastille set a dangerous precedent for demagogues, who would be quick to flaunt the rule of law.  He argues that the revolutionaries’ fateful decision to nationalize the property of the Church in order to pay France’s debts was another terrible harbinger, a first step towards further usurpations and the “utter abolition” of the Christian religion.  And he warns that the revolutionaries’ penchant for “untried speculations” and their disregard for established practices and ancient laws would prove disorientating, leaving France “without a compass,” and without a port to which to steer.  

That many of these ominous predictions proved accurate only enhanced Burke’s prestige among the aristocrats and crowned heads of Europe who greeted the Reflections as a stalwart defense of their interests.  And let there be no mistake: The Reflections is just such a defense.   No matter how much contemporary conservatives might care to gloss over the fact, the truth remains that the Reflections defends a world that is lost.  In a rhetoric bristling with passion that on occasion descends into bombast (the representatives to the French National Assembly, for example, are written off as “country clowns”), Burke dismisses human equality as a “monstrous fiction,” sings the praises of inherited titles and entailed estates, bends over backwards to uphold the virtues of prejudice, and takes gratuitous swipes at ordinary men and women, singling out tallow-chandlers (candlemakers) and hairdressers as practitioners of  “dishonorable” professions.  At the same time Burke indulges in a recollection of Marie Antoinette of such saccharine sentimentality that it reads now like a Harlequin romance (“and surely never lighted on this orb … a more delightful vision … glittering like the morning-star….”).  When it comes to explaining the complicated origins of the Revolution, Burke turns to a dangerous simplification, using conspiracy theory to indict the “literary cabal” of “intriguing philosophers” and a shadowy “monied interest,” who have allegedly collaborated in a great plot to destroy Christianity and bring France to its knees.  Burke also flirts with a nasty rhetoric that associates Jews and “Jew brokers” with that same monied interest.  Subsequent conspiracy theorists of the Right, it need hardly be said, would make all-too-effective use of such associations.  Not only was Burke on the wrong side of history, he was playing with fire.

Largely as a consequence, liberals have long seen Burke as an avowed enemy.  In one of the earliest and most famous attacks, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) laid into Burke’s “outrageous abuse” of the principles of liberty, accusing him of “rancor, prejudice, and ignorance.”  Yet even Paine recognized Burke’s “paradoxical genius,” and it is worth considering that at least part of his pique was due to a sense of betrayal: Prior to the Revolution, Burke and Paine had been friends.

Indeed, prior to the Revolution, Burke was hardly a conservative, let alone a reactionary.  True, he had long evinced principles that receive their most eloquent formulation in the Reflections—a preference for pragmatism and experience over abstract speculation and political metaphysics, a sense of the importance of religion and manners to maintaining social cohesion, and a deep respect for the guiding power of established precedents, customs, and laws.  But those are principles with which many liberals might agree.

Moreover, Burke was throughout his career a Whig, not a Tory, the more avowedly conservative of England’s two nascent political parties.  He was a principled opponent of English imperialism, a defender of indigenous rights in India and his native Ireland, and most importantly, a vocal proponent of the American Revolution.  Burke, in short, was no opponent of change, a fact that too many of his more recent conservative admirers have been inclined to forget.  As he insists in the Reflections, a “slow, but well-sustained progress” is critical, for a “state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”  Progress and preservation went hand in hand.

It was that conviction that prompted Burke to embrace the American Revolution and to oppose the French on perfectly consistent grounds.  The Americans fought, he believed, to protect established liberties and rights, moving forward with an eye ever to the past.  The French, by contrast, had embarked on a dramatic departure from anything its citizens had known. Historians today might care to contest those characterizations, but the principle itself is sound.   Successful change involves not only innovation but restraint, and sometimes to set out in a new direction is really just to return to ideals that have been forgotten or lost.  For Burke, “at once to preserve and to reform” were the twin goals of statecraft.

President Obama, I think, has an intuitive understanding of this Burkean dynamic, for his “change” is in many ways a recovery of forgotten American ideals—liberty and equality,  realism and idealism, justice and freedom for all.  No reckless innovator or lover of political abstractions, the president rather is a pragmatist, who appreciates that reforms are necessary to guard our inheritance.   Burke famously declared that “Society is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”  American conservatives may have forgotten that truth, but future generations, mutatis mutandis, will be grateful if liberals don’t.  

Darrin M. McMahon is a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of Happiness: A History.