212612018 _eademie Onefile- Document - The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Indviduals": Edmund Burke's Defense of Cll Society The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals": Edmund Burke's Defense of Civil Society Richard Boyd The Review of Politics. 61.3 (Summer 1999): p465, Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Notre Dame Abstract: Contemporary critics have treated liberalism as synonymous with individualism. In light of this bias, too little attention has been focused on historical variations within the classical liberal tradition. The “associational” contributions of Burke, Tocqueville and other self-conscious liberals have been neglected largely because they do not conform to common assumptions about the contractarian and individualistic bases of liberal thought. This oversight has obscured perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Edmund Burke's political thought: namely, his attention to that domain known in contemporary terms as "civil society." In his defense of intermediary institutions Burke demonstrates a prescient understanding of the requirements of modern constitutional arrangements. His thoughts on religious groups, political parties, and other intermediary attachments challenge the anti-associational bias of classical liberals such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Madison, and Bolingbroke. Burke's attention to these relationships marks a significant qualification of classical liberalism’s early obsession with the perils of pluralism and its dawning sensitivity to the vices of individualism. Full Text: Debates over the nature and pedigree of Edmund Burke's political thought have raged for centuries. (1) But whether he is to be taken as the founder of modern "conservatism," or as an uneasy proponent of “iberalism," what seems certain is that, ike Hobbes and Hume before him, Edmund Burke sought the proper measure of authority necessary to constitute liberty.(2) Far from an uncomplicated blessing, liberty must be “combined with government, with public force. . . with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long."(3) In a statement exemplary of his life work, Burke observed that "to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful and combining mind."(4) As Burke himself contended, one cannot comprehend his thought, with its seemingly contradictory ‘emphases on liberty and order, without seeing his work as part of a larger constitutional dilemma.(5) It should be no surprise, then, that one can locate examples within Burke's corpus of both his "liberal" inclination toward the values of toleration, liberty, relief, and reform, while at other moments, one can hardly ignore his "conservative" emphasis on political order, decency; and state authority. This delicate balancing act placed Burke on the side of traditional constitutionalism and the state in the English and French context, as well as on the side of reformism or even radicalism, in the Irish and Indian cases. Given all this, Burke's relationship to the tradition of classical liberalism remains ambiguous. This ‘owes as much to rigid contemporary definitions of liberalism as to any lack of careful attention to his thought. For instance, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, C. B. Macpherson, and other critics have equated "liberalism" with "atomism," "unencumberance,” and "possessive individualism," respectively; and surely these values held an important place in the classical liberal pantheon.(6) Yet as Burke observes, when taken to extremes, an undue emphasis on the values of reason, consent, and wholesale emancipation from status relationships threatens liberalism's primary commitment to the value of liberty itself. Thus, in aligning himself with its defense of limited government and its opposition to arbitrary power - over and against its contractarian and exclusively consensual suppositions - Burke defends a “liberal conservatism," intended to resist the arbitrary power implicit in both the radical ‘emphasis on boundless human liberation and the reactionary dismissal of the value of human autonomy.(7) Burke's attention to the nature and function of civic associations is central to this larger project of amending classical liberalism's anti-associational bias. hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloatiawalborary.capslretriove.do?tabIO=T0028resullistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResutsType=SingleTab&se.... 1/172782018 Academie OneFle- Document The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv": Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society ‘As we shall see, what distinguishes Burke's variant of constitutionalism is a sensitivity to those intermediary attachments between individual and state. Burke was among the first to question classical liberalism's attack on such attachments and to defend these institutions, both as intrinsic goods and as fundamental to the divergent constitutional aims of balancing liberty and order. Edmund Burke and the Tradition of the Analysis of "Civil Society" There are two conceptually distinct traditions in early modem political thought that speak of “civil society." The first, of which Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are exemplary, treats civil society as largely synonymous with political society. In order to remedy the defects of the state of nature, so the argument runs, a conventional political association is brought into being.(8) In this contractual view, "civil society’ is formed by solitary individuals whose entry into the civil compact subsequently permits them to cultivate the variety of nonpolitical attachments which give life meaning.(9) In the second and contemporary meaning, "civil society" refers narrowly to nonpolitical attachments such as the family, church, party, and enterprise associations. While not originally the case, this tradition has come to employ the term "civil society" to denote the antithesis of "political society" or the “state."(10) This tradition generally treats these nonpolitical attachments as more fundamental or natural than the political union. These intermediary attachments are not only present outside of the political compact. They also represent a sphere that should by its very nature be free from political interference. We find variations of this argument in the thought of Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Paine, and other eighteenth-century moralists, as well as in the descriptive tradition of contemporary social science. Edmund Burke's relationship to these traditions is unclear. Though he devotes much time to discussing their political importance, Burke does not directly refer to institutions between individual and state as "civil society.” Indeed in certain key passages his language implies, as did Hobbes, that “civil society" is equivalent to "political society."(11) Moreover, he seems to assume, again with Hobbes, that the collapse of the commonwealth returns a society to its composite individuals and all the incommodities of a precivil state, "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality, and at length dispersed to all the winds of heaven."(12) In this view, Burke's definition of "civil society" has little or no bearing on important contemporary discussions. But several points complicate efforts to place Burke somewhere in or between these two traditions. First, although Burke does not explicitly describe the intermediary domain between individual and state as "civil society," he does use language that suggests at least a potential distinction between the “civil" and “political” bond. While often treating the “civil” and "political" as synonymous, Burke also ‘employs a compound formulation, as in describing a "civil and political scheme," a “civil and political mass," or the curiously redundant "civil social man."(13) In other passages, Burke implicitly contrasts political “liberty” or "government" with nonpolitical "morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners."(14) It is tempting to dismiss these passages as simple redundancies or ambiguous language. However, we must also be open to the possibility that they reveal some deeper qualitative distinction that Burke has either not fully elaborated or, as is possible, has chosen not to make explicit in the context of a tract whose rhetorical purpose is to denounce revolution These implicit oppositions are insufficient to prove that Burke holds, along with Ferguson, Smith, and Paine, that “civil” relationships of property, family, and intermediary association are historically prior to or even tenable outside of political society. However, it is worthwhile to note that with the possible exceptions of Adam Ferguson and Thomas Paine, other notable members of the second tradition - Smith, Hume, and Mandeville - did not speak of "society" or "civil society" in terms of a strict antithesis to political society, Rather than any anarchic conception of the dispensability of government, what unites these eighteenth-century figures is the conspicuous attention they devote to such "social" relationships - as did neither Hobbes, Locke nor Rousseau. based on this attention alone, one has tpg gategroup com .ezproxyblootawalarycal freviove.do7tabl0=T0028resulistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResulsType=SingleTabéso.... 2472782018 Academie OneFle- Document The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv": Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society grounds for suggesting Burke's affinity to Scottish and contemporary sensibilities. For Burke accords vital significance to these primordial attachments as the “first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind": "To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections."(15) These concentric circles of affection - ties to family; locality, religion, property, and class - are links to the abstract political order we are otherwise incapable of experiencing directly: "No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection to a description of square measurement."(16) "Society is indeed a contract,” Burke concedes, even as he emphasizes the need for the "pleasing illusions,” “decent drapery," "mild majesty and sober pomp,” and "little images" that societies rely upon to preserve its inviolability.(17) The awe, reverence and "primeval" appeal of these nonpolitical relationships serves to obscure the conventional aspects of any given political association.(18) These sentiments of primordial attachment are derived from analogies to the "natural" intimacy of family and locality: "we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars."(19) Burke's attention speaks volumes given that other founding texts of classical liberalism ignored or dismissed intermediary attachments between individual and state. Hobbes saw intermediary associations as inevitably divisive "lesser commonwealths’or "bodies politique,” akin to "wormes in the entrayls of a naturall man.” For Hume, these “factions,” "sects," or "weeds" inevitably "subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection."(20) Even Locke, who allowed for an intermediate stage of "society" between the state of nature and the commonwealth, viewed this as a transitional stage; and his thoughts on the political role of the church, family or party are largely undeveloped.(21) While his corpus is at moments characterized by similar complaints and assumptions, Burke was among the first to question this bias against associational involvements and the normative turn toward individualism it presumably entailed Although a barrier to precise taxonomy, Burke's position midway between these two traditions of "civil society" may actually prove an asset. Instead of treating "civil society" as an antonym for the "state," as does the currently prevalent usage, or as synonymous with or merely subordinate to political society, as did the original tradition, Burke calls attention to its conceptual indeterminacy. Rather than offering a rigid distinction between political society and nonpolitical or "civil" society so as to intimate the superfluousness of the former, as did Paine or today's libertarians, or merely assuming the latter to be the handmaiden of political life, as do today's communitarians, Burke is profoundly aware of the tension between these qualitatively distinct forms of human association. For him, a civil society entails more than a society of vibrant groups. Not every intermediary institution merits his recommendation, which serves to remind us of the inevitably moral and evaluative nature of what contemporary social science refers to descriptively as "civil society." Burke's consideration of the place of these intermediary relationships in the social and political order therefore anticipates - as well as importantly qualifies - contemporary fascinations. Reflections on the Revolution in France: On the Dignity of Religious Institutions Appreciating these elements of Burke's argument requires us to look beyond his diagnosis of the ails, of France, and to focus instead on his positive assessment of the function of religious and political association in England. In contrast to the Revolutionary seizure of church property in France, Burke calls attention to the favorable, even privileged treatment of religion in England: Itis on some such principles that the majority of the people of England, far from thinking a religious national establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without one. . . . This principle runs through the whole system of their polity. They do not consider their church establishment as convenient, but as essential to their state, not as a thing heterogeneous and separable, something added for itig0.alog:oup.com.szproxybbloatawaltrary.calpsiatieveo7tabID=T0028resulListType=RESULT_LISTAsearchResutsTypo=SingloTabsse... 3472782018 Academie OneFle-Document- The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv" Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society accommodation, what they may either keep or lay aside according to their temporary ideas of convenience. They consider it as the foundation of their whole constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union.(22) The established church of England supplies a certain moral ballast, accounting for the perpetuation of scientific and scholarly knowledge, educational traditions, and more general moral sensibilities of society.(23) Burke duly emphasizes the benign consequences of religion, but he explicitly rejects the functional treatment of religion adopted by many political thinkers. Its salutary consequences notwithstanding, religion is more than a matter of "convenience" or “accommodation.” It forms "the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort"; for "man is by his constitution a religious animall."(24) This view of religion as an intrinsic good has tended to escape political thinkers in the liberal age, and it is remarkable that Burke, the quintessentially political man, should be the one to reveal why religion can not be regarded as the handmaiden of politics.(25) At the very least, Burke calls attention to the possibility that functional justifications are not incompatible with religion's underlying goodness and truth; that is, to suggest that religion is good for political life does not necessarily imply one's insincerity or that religion is not also good for its own sake. Indeed, as J. S. Mill was later to suggest, such instrumental justifications of religion's “utility” might prove the last grounds for its defense in a disenchanted age.(26) But how does one account for Burke's endorsement of an established Anglican church in light of subsequent arguments by Tocqueville and other liberals, who appreciated not only the benefits of voluntary religious association but also the dangers of a church too closely allied with political affairs? This was, after all, one of the few points upon which Tocqueville later distinguished himself from Burke.(27) The first and most obvious response is nothing more than the standard recourse to the place of tradition in Burke's analysis. Regardless of the ideal relationship between religion and politics, England was the legatee of a tradition of religious establishment. To urge a break with these traditions would be radically un - Burkean,(28) But efforts to explain Burke's defense of religious establishment strictly in terms of tradition are unsatisfactory, For they reduce Burke's thought to the blind affirmation of the traditional, on the one hand, or to empty speculation, on the other. They miss Burke's "Tocquevillian" focus on the effectual truth of religious establishment in England. The foremost significance of an established, state- supported church in England is that this arrangement actually allows the clergy to be less dependent on political affairs. Owing to the condition of legal establishment, the clergy in England were in fact secure to act in a dignified and autonomous manner, insulated by their property and their institutional structure from the state interference and subservient clientelism by which the French Catholic church had been reduced.(29) In contrast to the beggary of French clergy, the English are the equals of any noble, in terms of wealth, dignity and social status.(30) They possess that dignity and autonomy by which alone they can exercise moral and exemplary guidance over the leading men of the time: "A poor clergy in an opulent nation can have little correspondence with the body it is to instruct, and itis a disgrace to the public sentiments of religion."(31) To preserve this dignified autonomy, the English people could hardly envision "turing their independent clergy into ecclesiastical pensioners of state. They tremble for their liberty, from the influence of a clergy dependent on the crown; they tremble for the public tranquillity from the disorders of a factious clergy, if it were made to depend upon any other than the crown, They therefore made their church, like their king and their nobility, independent."(32) This much being said for establishment leading to independence in the English context, Burke also appreciates that politics and religion are both impoverished by their conflation. In terms that Tocqueville would endorse to the letter, Burke observes the benign effects of segregating religious matters from political matters so far as possible. This boundary between religion and politics is not absolute, of course, but rather ideal and permeable: tpg gategroupcom.ezproxyblootawalerarycalpsretiove do abID=TOO2AresulListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResulsTypesSingleTabése.... 4/472782018 Academie OneFle- Document The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv": Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs ‘on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.(33) In this passage early in the Reflections Burke reveals his concems about the ramifications of Revolutionary ideas in England. Radical dissenters such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley represented not only the entry of religious controversies into political life, but also the application of the insidious philosophical doctrine of consent to political affairs. In this extremism lay not only a danger to the established church, but by an extension of its logic, a "concurrent design to subvert the state." (34) In France, political versions of radicalism threatened to dissolve religion, while in England religious radicalism cast into doubt the traditional bases of political society. Burke employs the terms "political theologian” and “theological politician” with equal derision.(35) In the English context Burke attempts to defend the prescriptive basis of religious and political life from the contractual logic that religious dissent presumably introduces. These become a single dilemma, as Burke assimilates religious dissent and Revolutionary contractarianism together into a single "Lockean" amalgam.(36) Burke does not mention Locke by name in the Reflections, but his speeches on dissenters reveal his attempts to point out the contradictions between the "Lockean" account of the voluntary basis of religion and politics and Locke's own defense of toleration: If the Church be, as Mr. Locke defines it, a voluntary society &., then it is essential to this voluntary society to exclude from her voluntary society any member she thinks fit, or to oppose the entrance of any upon such conditions as she thinks proper. For otherwise it would be a voluntary society acting contrary to her will, which is a contradiction in terms.(37) Extending the argument of his adversary to extremes, Burke suggests the possibility that a purely consensual theory of political or religious association blurs easily into a theory of intolerance. This is an insight as easily applied to the events of the French Revolution as those of Burke's England Edmund Burke Against the Eighteenth-Century: On the Dangers of a Purely Consensual Religion As we have seen so far, Burke's defense of religious establishment has its basis in the fear that without some institutional support, religion will lose its autonomy and its gravity: in effect, disestablishment amounts to "equal neglect."(38) However, Burke deepens this argument by suggesting that the condition of disestablishment - an evanescent world of "“factious ministers” and small sects - is in fact most likely to endanger "public tranquillity" by encouraging a dangerous combination of religion and politics.(39) As we shall see, Burke's defense of religious establishment is borne from his realization that in practice, a strictly consensual theory of religious and political association is more likely to lead to a fanatical intolerance than to a decent "spirit of moderation."(40) This recognition puts Burke at odds with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century faith that by privatizing religious belief one could eliminate its publicly disastrous consequences.(41) Burke's attack on the theory of contractual consent has three dimensions. First, the model of individuals rationally consenting and withdrawing from political society does not adequately describe the history of English liberties. Second, Burke objects to it normatively because of the sense in which the extreme Lockean doctrine of individual consent tends toward the dissolution of any given regime: the “obvious consequence” of this "unwarrantable maxim is to "stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation."(42) hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloatiawalborary.capslrtiove.do?tabIO=T0028resullListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResutsType=SingleTabsse.... 5/172782018 Academie OneFle-Document- The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv" Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society Beyond these two more familiar objections, there remains yet a third: namely, the ease by which the consensual theory of political society blurs in practice into a spirit of persecution. In Burke's own understanding of political and religious association - where one's consent is either tacitly implied, established by habit, or prescribed by institution - the consequences of dissent are tolerable. A dissenting individual is tolerated within limits or is negatively repressed by being denied the benefit of full participation in political life.(43) By de-emphasizing the importance of active consent, Burke argues, the effect is to foster a spirit of toleration, “as a principle favorable to Christianity."(44) Conversely, a situation where active consent becomes the criteria for membership introduces newfound possibilities, not just for societal disintegration but also for active persecution. English dissenters “not only entertain opinions, but entertain them with a zeal for propagating them by force, and employing the power of law and place to destroy establishments."(45) A society founded on the expectation of consent demands whole-hearted conformity of will. To withhold one’s active and complete assent - to seek to reserve something of one's self beyond the totality of citizenship - becomes grounds for religious and political persecution. Speaking of France, Burke observes that any deviation from a totality of committed citizenship - whether in the form of moderation, principled discussion, or love of a subsidiary part - leads to violent retribution or even expulsion from the political community: "They think everything unworthy of the name of public virtue, unless it indicates violence on the private."(46) Moreover, "Carried on with much greater fury. .. . In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other."(47) This point leads directly to Burke's thoughts on civic association. For one's commitments to subsidiary institutions may be interpreted as threatening to diminish one's commitment to the larger political society. Writing in light of the early revolutionary events of 1789 and 1790, Burke in the Reflections could not have known of the subsequent law which abolished all civic associations regardless of their nature and merit. Burke would have been horrified but hardly surprised by the fateful language of the National Assembly's 1791-92 directive: The National Assembly, considering that a truly free state should not suffer in its body any corporation, not even those which contribute to the public good, is justified in the name of the love of country to decree the following Article One: The corporations known in France under the name of secular congregations, ecclesiastical . .. and generally all religious corporations and secular congregations of men and women, religious or secular . . . are dissolved and suppressed from the date of the publication of the present decree.(48) ‘Anew abolition law of 1793 added academic and literary societies, as well as economic and industrial organizations, to the list of suppressed associational forms.(49) Burke glimpses this attitude in the Revolutionary assault on all intermediary bodies between individual and state. In attempting to distinguish that "the love to the whole is not diminished by this subordinate partiality,"(50) Burke presciently anticipates some such jealous revolutionary attempt to strip the individual of all organic connections of locality and sentiment, and then to prohibit even the recombination of such individuals into new subsidiary associations, lest this pluralism limit one's. complete devotion to the whole. The spirit of English liberty takes as given public engagement by means of concentric circles of affection, Religion is an institutional structure which molds individual morals, connecting the individual to the larger nation as a moral community. In light of his constant concern that the individual might lose touch with the social fabric of which he is but a single part, the strong institutional network of the church merits Burke's endorsement as "the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind."(51) However, this pluralism is overlooked by the jealous French assault on any intermediary institution between individual and state, no matter how salutary or innocent that institution might prove to be. By seeking to cultivate an abstract regard for a distant center, for metaphysical postulates and slogans, or for "new descriptions of square measurement," the tpg gategroupcom.ezproxyblootawalerarycalparetiove do abID=TO02AresulListType=RESULT_LISTASearchResulsTypesSingleTaDEse... 617212612018 Academie Onefile- Document - The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals": Edmund Burke's Defense of il Society French revolutionaries undermined any "pride, partiality or real affection."(52) Their attack on the church is but one facet of their larger mistake. Burke's challenge of this rejection of institutional religion is evident in his "A Vindication of Natural Society." In his posthumously published works Bolingbroke had argued that deism offered a way beyond the dangers of religious sectarianism. Bolingbroke blames organized religion - and by connection, political parties formed around these disputes - for discord and social upheaval.(53) A typical political man of the eighteenth century, Bolingbroke's complaint is nonetheless a refrain heard in many quarters of the time: the superstition and collective enthusiasm of religious matters infect the pristine logic of political life.(54) In Bolingbroke's view, a religion based solely on natural reason eliminates these difficulties The question Burke poses to Bolingbroke and those like him, who would blame religious association for all the conflicts of civil society, is a novel one. Namely, has the effect of political association been any less dangerous? Political association, in general, and party government, in particular, share with religious association a similar ambivalence: "If pretended Revelations have caused Wars where they were opposed, and slavery where they were received, the pretended wise Inventions of Politicians have done the same. But the slavery has been much heavier, the wars far more bloody, and both more universal by many Degrees."(55) When applied to politics, Bolingbroke's objections to religion seem to dissolve the very basis of political society itself. The mere fact that religious association has been known throughout history to endanger political liberties proves neither that it will do so in all cases, nor, more importantly; that a society in which the seeds of such religious association were eliminated would prove able to maintain political liberty in their absence. As framed by Bolingbroke, this difficulty is obscured Bolingbroke is not alone on this point. Early modem political thought from Machiavelli onward has dealt with religious matters in this way, if not always to the satisfaction of religion itself. Without religion's palliative effects, so the argument goes, the ignorant and superstitious would otherwise lack even a remedial sense of moral decency. Recognizing the partial truth of this view, Burke remarks, "The Christian statesmen of this land would indeed first provide for the multitude, because it is the multitude, and is therefore, as such, the first object in the ecclesiastical institution, and in all institutions."(56) Yet Burke also recognizes the self-defeating nature of manifest religious hypocrisy. Religion can never justly be regarded as "a mere invention to keep the vulgar in obedience."(57) The need for religion is by no means confined to the masses who are incapable of attaining reason. Above all itis the political elite - those entrusted with political power - who are even more in need of its moral sustenance: "They are sensible that religious instruction is of more consequence to them than to any others - from the greatness of the temptation to which they are exposed; from the important consequences that attend their faults; from the contagion of their iii example."(58) As we shall see, Burke's defenses of party government and religious institution are intimately related: political men require religion to maintain a moral compass in their dealings with one another and to avoid the temptations to which they are subjected by the proximity of political power: "All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society."(59) Men are not "angels," in this view of politics, but there is nonetheless a remedial hopefulness that they will amount to something more than devils. Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents: "Connexion" versus "Faction" Given Burke's ability to maintain fine distinctions, one should be little surprised to find what Harvey Mansfield has characterized as "the first argument in the history of political philosophy for the respectability, not merely the necessity, of party government” inscribed in the midst of a tract, hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloattawalborary.capslretriove.do?tabIO=T0028resullListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResuhsType=SingleTabsse...._7i17212612018 Academie Onefile- Document - The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Indlviduals": Edmund Burke's Defense of Cil Society denouncing the evils of faction.(60) Burke's "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents” intends to distinguish the responsible virtues of "connexion" from the ills of “faction.” According to Mansfield, Burke defends the dignity of political association in an intellectual climate where parties were either seen as irrelevant, on the one hand, or coeval with faction, and hence to be deplored, on the other. In Hume's Essays (1741), for instance, we have little sense of the advantages of political association or party government. Politics seems an activity best left to the care of well- designed and venerable institutions: "A constitution is only so good, as it provides a remedy against maladministration." Parties are to be tolerated but hardly celebrated given the likelihood of their "zeal" turning "a good constitution into a bad one, by the violence of their factions."(61) Yet Burke cautiously defends the potential for responsible political leadership. Burke does not argue for the idealistic, fanatical, and rigidly "principled" parties Hume so rightly denounces as "the most extraordinary and unaccountable phoenomenon that has yet appeared in human affairs."(62) Nor does he defend the individualistic statesmanship championed by Bolingbroke, Instead, we shall see that Burke defends political engagement on grounds of the political knowledge gained only by collective participation in intermediary institutions. More than a century earlier, Hobbes and Ascham had recommended privatism and collaboration as the only political virtues consistent with civil order.(63) Burke's concerns in "Thoughts" were not to engage this original anti-associational intellectual current. Rather he took aim at Bolingbroke, whose works and "political schoo!” of pamphleteers lent him posthumous authority, as well as the expressed opinions of political men such as Lord Bute, who gave voice to these ideas. 64) For his part Lord Bute alleged, in Burke's words, "That Connexion and Faction are equivalent terms."(65) Against these familiar arguments, political and philosophical, Burke insisted that free government was linked necessarily to party government: "Party divisions, whether on the whole operating for good or evil, are things inseparable from free government."(66) The ambiguity of this "inseparability" of free and party government bears our consideration. On the one hand, Burke's judgment pessimistically implies that faction and political combination are perennial limiting conditions on political life. Burke would concur fully with Madison's later judgment that "the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man." At best they can be tolerated and potentially minimized by venerable constitutional arrangements. Yet Burke ventures a novel, and potentially important second meaning. The former and latter are "inseparable" because free government collapses without their support; free government is itself untenable without these party divisions. As we have seen, this is a point he was later to echo throughout his more familiar writings on France. Burke urges on his audience the ability to distinguish between the common conflation of party with faction, But what are these advantages of party government, and what are its accompanying vices? One ought not to dismiss party government because of its well-known abuses, which Burke willingly concedes: "I admit that people frequently acquire in such confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and proscriptive spirit; that they are apt to sink the idea of the general good in this circumscribed and partial interest."(67) However, Burke suggests that any collaboration or profession - individual or collective - is liable to such abuses. The mere tendency toward abuse, however, does not proscribe the possibility of beneficial collective action. Whereas the abandonment of political life by the good virtually guarantees that the bad will combine and persevere. Burke begins with the premise of the political impotence of the individual: ‘when they lie dispersed, without concert, order or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable."(68) Under such conditions it is beyond the power of solitary individuals, however good, to oppose the alliance of bad men. Yet Burke's argument extends deeper than this commonplace. Burke reverses the common estimation of Hobbes and Hume, who associated enthusiasm and collective passions with "bodies politique,” "irregular systems," or "parties of principle."(69) Instead it is the lone individual whom Burke stigmatizes as irrational. The individual who seeks to reform politics by his own efforts should be regarded as delusional and potentially dangerous: "No man, who is not tpg galegroup com ezproxybblootawalearycalparetiove do abID=TOOZAresulListType=RESULT_LISTASearchResulsTypesSingleTaDEse... 172782018 Academie OneFle-Document- The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv" Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory; unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens."(70) In this view, it is the individual statesman we should fear; for individual efforts to single- handedly reform politics disguise an ambitious disdain for sharing the glory of success and the spoils of victory. These "vain-glorious" men are to be feared not applauded. They are to be feared in large part because they are unknown and ultimately unknowable. Among the virtues of "connexion" for Burke is the advantage of mutual scrutiny by one's peers in political life. The designs and conceits of a lone statesman are known to no one but himself; they are revealed to the public only once they are a fait accompli. But the vanities of a party politician are known to all his associates. Party politics thus serves as an extraconstitutional filter by which to discourage or frustrate the designs of ambitious individuals who might seize liberty in their own name. Referring to such "vain-glorious" individuals who eschew party, Burke invokes the scholastic version of Aristotle's maxim of the Politics: namely; he who lives outside the political community must be reckoned either a beast or a God.(71) Burke insinuates the devilish designs nursed among men outside of groups: "When I see in any of these detached gentlemen of our times the angelic purity, power, and benificence, | shall admit them to be angels. In the mean time we are born only to be men. We shall do enough if we form ourselves to be good ones."(72) Still there lurks a glimmer of hope behind these complaints. Party is potentially developmental. This is an insight previously overshadowed by the seventeenth and eighteenth century obsession with the rational individual's tendency to lose himself in the passions of collective involvement. For Burke, however, party government offers the virtuous norms of collective restraint and "the principal ground of friendship and attachment . . . capable of forming firmer, dearer, more pleasing, more honourable, and more virtuous habitudes."(73) Extending the developmental analogy to its extreme limits, Burke likens parties to families: "and we may as well affirm, that our natural regards and ties of blood tend inevitably to make men bad citizens, as that the bonds of our party weaken those by which we are held to our country."(74) Civil Society and Burkean Liberalism: Intermediary Institutions as Cornerstones of Liberty? We began by suggesting that Burke's attention to the domain known today as "civil society," or what we might otherwise term his "pluralism," distinguished his variant of classical liberalism or constitutionalism. However, it must first be acknowledged that the ancient and medieval traditions were not unaware of prepolitical attachments to family; party, and locality. Aristotle treated the naturalness of the household, family, or village and defended a government of laws in opposition to tyranny.(75) Catholic social doctrines of subsidiarity described the integrity of the prepolitical, and both Augustine and Aquinas counseled the importance of civil government.(76) How, then, can one speak of Burke as an innovator? Burke combines two previously distinct arguments in light of a uniquely modern threat to liberty. Burke not only treats family, locality, and party as a natural part of the prepolitical order of society, as did these classical thinkers; but he also appreciates the crucial role of these attachments as a bulwark against tyranny. Aristotle and Augustine had failed to make this connection for two reasons. In part, it was unnecessary given that they could not conceive of these institutions apart from their political and moral significance; for them, the "social" did not exist as distinct from the "political." But second and more importantly, Burke's attention to the political ramifications of prescriptive institutions and voluntary associations addresses a uniquely modem problem: namely, the perils of individualism brought into being by the democratic revolution itself, including the centralization of political power which has proven both the cause and consequence of that individualism. Ferguson, Burke and later and more explicitly, Tocqueville were among the first to see the relationship between modern social conditions contributing to the breakdown of pluralism and the tyrannical centralization of state power. (77) In this recognition they point the way toward "another liberalism," self-conscious about classical hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloattawalborary.capslretriove.do?tabIO=T0028resullListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResuhsType=SingleTabsse.... Si17212612018 Academie Onefile- Document - The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals": Edmund Burke's Defense of il Society liberalism's extreme emphasis on individualism and more robust than contemporary criticisms have allowed.(78) Surely Burke's pluralism owes some debt to classical traditions, as has been suggested by numerous ‘commentators intent on emphasizing his broader natural law pedigree. But his rediscovery of the naturalness of this domain leads toward a recognizably modem defense of liberty. This is evident in his attempt to strike a liberal balance between the naturalness and inviolability of the prepolitical and its inevitable conflicts with the state. Burke shares with both classical and modem liberalism an anxiety about arbitrary state interference in the domain of family, property, locality, and private association.(79) But against his Revolutionary opponents - and their modern liberal legates - he nizes that, when taken to extremes, rigid distinctions between the political and social - or “public” and "private" - obscure the intimate relationship between our ties to family, church, party, or locality and the larger political order. This leads to the fateful denial of the political character of social man that Burke discerns in the Revolution's philosophical abstractions: "The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false."(80) The culmination of this "falsehood’ is tyranny. The most conspicuous feature of Burke's liberalism is his opposition to arbitrary power. For whether it ultimately resides in a single centralized state, or in a newly sovereign people, "power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which opinions and manner perish."(81) Yet only if it is broken up, diverted, or checked and balanced by tradition, habit, and institutions with prescriptive roots in civil society will liberty be preserved, Burke's seemingly combines Aristotelian and Christian tenets of the naturalness of pluralism with strikingly modern descriptions of how these institutions function to check and balance power: “diversity of members and interests" begets "that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe."(82) By dispersing power throughout society, one derives the social analogy of Montesquieu's doctrine of separation of powers. Or, in the Madisonian description, ambition is made to check ambition, and overlapping interests and memberships blunt fanatical ‘commitment to any single cause. From these collisions arise invaluable habits of "deliberation," “moderation,” and most importantly; "temperaments preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations."(83) Whatever its antecedents, Burke's account suggests a modern, institutional understanding of the preconditions of liberty. Burke reveals this same preoccupation with political liberty's debt to pluralism and civil society when treating their breakdown in France. The unnatural and indecent Reign of Terror was yet to come. But the scenario of a society in which institutional connections to political liberty had been undermined was already before Burke's eyes. The removal of checks and balances in the interest of an idea of pure efficiency, a detached system of representation without accountability, a hapless and politically dependent church, the removal of the last vestiges of the parliaments, and the broader pulverization of all bodies between individual and state made inevitable some great miscarriage to liberty.(84) Just as Burke predicted, a society in which all subsidiary organizations between individual and state - "the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism" - were pulverized proved easily dominated by the charismatic leadership of Napoleon.(85) In Burke's estimation, anarchy will likely prevail “until some popular general . . . who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself."(86) Beyond his hopeful portrayal of the proper role of intermediary institutions in socializing individuals lies a deeper and less sanguine recognition of the place of vigilance and even overt resistance in the modern regime. Power, authority, and reverence vested in "civil habitudes and connections" represent that much less in the hands of a centralized regime. In the worst case, its opposition is impossible without these countervailing powers. Burke also speaks to the problem of political education that occupied classical and modern thinkers alike. If a new political class is to share in ruling, it must possess sufficient moral ballast to resist the temptation that power affords. Describing the composition of the French National Assembly, Burke worries of "the consequences of supreme authority placed in the hands of men not taught habitually to hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloattawalborary.capslretriove.do?tabIO=T0028resullistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResutsType=SingleTabgs,... 10/172782018 Academie OneFle-Document- The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv" Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society respect themselves, who had no previous fortune in character at stake, who could not expect to bear with moderation, or to conduct with discretion, a power which they themselves must be surprised to find in their hands."(87) "Who could flatter himself that these men, suddenly and, as it were, by enchantment snatched from the humblest ranks of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness?” Burke wonders.(88) These sorts are easily drawn by others into “laborious, low, and unprofitable chicane."(89) Even the well-intentioned are liable to do unintentional harm without the practical political knowledge that the art of government demands, Because "the science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori" we find that "new power in new persons" poses a special danger (90) This dangerous lack of practical political knowledge is evident in the way that speculative, metaphysical schemes pass successively and unsuccessfully through France's new governing classes. The metaphysicians are succeeded in turn by the geometricians, the economists, and the ideologists. Lacking a solid base of practical political knowledge, these speculative philosophers cum statesmen had no recourse beyond their metaphysics. Any vestiges of political leadership of which the Revolutionaries might have availed themselves - the clergy, the parliaments, the voices of reason and political moderantisme - were dismissed as hindrances or as disloyal. Despite Burke's fixation on the Revolution, he could fully envision neither the democratic age of mass opinion it ushered in, nor the modern commercial society that lurked just around the corner. A new man by his own efforts and talents - an Anglican, Whig, and an Englishman by choice - Burke's own life vividly calls attention to his position midway between a premodern world of prescriptive intermediary institutions and a modem society in which commerce and social mobility shattered once and for all these ascriptive bonds. Burke's treatment of intermediary institutions shares that ambivalence.(91) But whether one looks to the prescriptive institutions of Burke's England, or the voluntary associations of Tocqueville's America, the common problem lies in the individualistic solvent of the modern age. Whatever their differences, Burke and Tocqueville both clearly suggest that the preservation of constitutional government depends on institutions capable of reintegrating individuals into the habits and traditions of the larger political order. Ironically, this dilemma of modern individualism may well have been part and parcel of the classical liberal solution to the problems of an earlier age. As several commentators have observed, in a seventeenth-century world characterized by religious enthusiasm, fanatical intolerance, and civil war, free government required a new-model commercial citizen: individualistic, calculating, rational, and solitary.(92) Only by socializing such individuals might fanatical combination and political disorder be overcome. Yet for Burke this individualism finally amounts to a weakness, not a virtue. The "unsteady and precarious contribution of individuals" can serve as a sound basis neither for politics nor for any other social institution.(93) By the late eighteenth century we find a growing sense of the limitations of this individualistic model of political socialization of which Burke is exemplary. Adam Ferguson, for example, could praise the achievement of modern constitutionalism, even as he worried that after “repressing the civil disorders in which the activity of earlier ages chiefly consisted . . . they employ the calm they have gained, not in fostering a zeal for those laws, and that constitution of government, to which they owe their protection, but in practising apart, and each for himself, the several acts of personal advancement, or profit, which their political establishments may enable them to pursue with success."(94) Secure in the short term from the militancy of party and sect, constitutional arrangements nevertheless face a longer range threat. Whereas classical liberalism either denied or lamented pluralism in light of the extreme conflicts to which it gave birth - as we have seen in Hobbes's fear of civil war and Hume's denunciations of faction - Burke and Tocqueville defended a potential harmony between what we have come to call in light of subsequent developments the "public" realm of political institutions and the "private" domain of family, locality, economy, and voluntary association. Both are surely self-conscious enough to concede the itig0aleg-oup.com.ezproxybibloatawaltrary.calpsiatieve.oIabID=70028resuListType=RESULT_LISTAsearchResutsTypo=SingloTabéso.. 11472782018 Academie OneFle- Document The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv": Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society inevitable tension this pluralism brings into being: the problem of divided loyalties, or mankind's ‘simultaneous membership in two (or more) cities.(95) But beginning with the French Revolution they witnessed an age of centralized political power, the atrophy of political responsibility by an aristocratic class, and the concomitant democratic revolution. Perhaps for the first time in the history of political thought, the vices of individualism seemed to outweigh the perils of pluralism. And the twentieth- century bears witness to Burke and Tocqueville's prescience. Their convictions of pluralism's naturalness and political desirability confront twin perils: first, from political trends that would crush intermediary institutions and stifle voluntary association, and second, from an intemal dynamic that fosters the apathy; privatism, and the "individualism" Tocqueville was to decry nearly a half-century later. This paper was written as a Summer Fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University. Benjamin Barber, Gary Glenn, Irving Louis Horowitz, Ralph Lerner, Carey McWilliams, Gordon Schochet and anonymous referees offered invaluable comments and criticisms 1. For the “liberal” interpretation, see most notably, Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. "Introduction," and pp. 59597. For the "conservative" interpretation, see Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958), esp. pp. 7-9, 24-25; Francis P. Canavan, The Political Reason of Edmund Burke (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960); and Peter J, Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1965). 2. For Hobbes's statement of this dilemma, see Leviathan, "The Epistle Dedicatory," ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1968), p. 75; David Hume, "On the Origin of Government," p. 40; "Of the Parties of Great Britain,” pp. 64-65 in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1987). 3. Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs- Merrill, 1955), p. 9. Unless otherwise indicated, all page references are to this edition, 4. Ibid., p. 289. 5. On the consistency of Burke's thought and his confrontation with this core constitutional dilemma, see his "Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs," in Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Daniel Ritchie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1992), esp. pp. 100-102. 6. Charles Taylor, "Atomism" in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontents: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996). 7. Sanford Lakoff so describes this Burkean impulse ("Tocqueville, Burke and the Origins of Liberal Conservatism,” Review of Politics 60 [1998]: 435-64). Phillipe Raynaud also suggests Burke's affinity to nineteenth century liberals - Constant, de Stael and Tocqueville - who defended a moderate liberal center against reaction and radicalism on right and left. See his "Introduction," Reflexions sur la revolution de France (Paris: Hachette, 1991), esp. pp. Ivi-lvii, c-ciii 8. The bond represents a linguistic and conceptual compound of civitas - or as Locke and Hobbes preferred, "commonwealth" - and the Latin societas, or voluntary association. For accounts of etymology, see John Locke, Second Treatise, X, 133; Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Oxford University Press), esp. pp. 199-203. 9. Or, as the critical demurrer of Rousseau would have it, which allow conventional inequalities to ramify. Cf. Burke, Reflections, p. 42. hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloatiawalborary.capslrtriove.do?tabI0=T0028resullistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResuhsType=SingleTabss,... 12/17212612018 Academie Onefile- Document - The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals": Edmund Burke's Defense of il Society 10. On this conceptual transformation, see Edward Shils, "The Virtue of Civility” in The Virtue of Civility and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1997), pp. 320-25. 11. For passages that suggest Burke's indebtedness to the first tradition of civil society, see Reflections, "The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution,” (p. 23); "You had all these advantages in your ancient states, but you chose to act as. though you had never been molded into civil society," (p. 40); and his discussion of the original contract (esp. pp. 6770). For a more Lockean view that suggests at least a rudimentary distinction between the social and political union, consider, "If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all descriptions of constitution which are formed under it" (pp. 67-68); "the change (in principles of succession) is to be effected without a decomposition of the whole civil and political mass for the purpose of originating a new civil order out of the first elements of society" (p. 24). Cf. John Locke, Second Treatise, X, 132; Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution (New York: Putnam's, 1894), pp. 307-311. 12, Reflections, p. 109. 13. Ibid., pp. 8, 24, 67. 14. Ibid., p. 9 15. Ibid., p. 53. 16. Ibid., p. 231. 17. Ibid., pp. 110, 87, 112, 231 18. Ibid., p. 110. 19. Ibid., p. 38 20. Hobbes, Leviathan, chaps. 22, 29; Hume, "Of Parties in General" in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, p. 55. 21. Locke, Second Treatise, X, 132; XIX, 211-12, 220. 22. Reflections, p. 113. 23. Ibid., pp. 111-17. 24. Ibid., pp. 102-103. 25, Russell Kirk appreciates this point (The Conservative Mind, pp. 28-29). On Mansfield's differing view of Burke's religion, see Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 232-33. J. C. D. Clark warns against attempts to supplant the religious basis of eighteenth century with secular rationalism, English Society: 1688-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 257 26. Mi “Utility of Religion,” in Three Essays on Religion (New York: Henry Holt, 1878), p. 70. 27. Tocqueville, Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor, 1983), pp. 6-7, 205; Democracy in America, ed. Mayer (New York: Harper, 1966), Vol. I, Pt. 2, chap. 9, pp. 294-301. hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloattawalborary.capslrtiove.do?tabIO=T0028resullistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResusType=SingleTabss,... 13/172782018 Academie OneFle-Document- The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv" Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society 28. This argument presumes that Burke should in principle prefer an established state religion However, there is also some evidence to support the view that in ideal terms Burke might well have seen the advantages of religious disestablishment. In principle, the advantages of a separation between religion and politics are evident in his favorable assessment of the role of voluntary religious association among the New England colonists" (A Speech on Conciliation with America," in Pre- Revolutionary Writings, ed. lan Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], esp. pp. 221- 24). This was also a position he supported in the context of the Irish question ("Tracts on the Popery Laws," ibid., pp. 95 - 96). In both these cases Burke appreciates that a spirit of religious dissent is at least potentially compatible with an independent and pious liberty. 29. Reflections, pp. 169-71 30. Ibid., p. 117. 31. "Speech on a Motion for Leave to Bring in a Bill to Quiet the Possessions of the Subject Against Dormant Claims of the Church," 17 February 1772 in The Works of Edmund Burke (Boston: Little Brown, 1894), 7: 139. 32, Reflections, p. 115. 33. Ibid., p. 13. 34, "Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians," Works, 7: esp. 47-57. 36, Reflections, p. 12. 36. James Conniff, The Useful Cobbler: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Progress (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), importantly suggests that the "Lockeanism” Burke attacks is not Locke's own (p. 105). Burke discounts Locke's presumption of "tacit consent," which resembles his own in many respects. The "Lockeanism" Burke finally indicts appears closer to Rousseau 37. "Speech on the Acts of Uniformity," Works, 7: 17 38. Reflections, p. 173. 39. Cf. the arguments of Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), Bk. V, Ch. 1, Pt. Ill, Art. 3, esp. pp. 314-15; James Madison, The Complete Madison: His Basic Writings. ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), p. 304. 40. Reflections, p. 13. 41, Burke here expresses the possibility of a "Protestant theory of persecution" later explored by Lord Acton. John E. E. Dalberg-Acton, "The Protestant Theory of Persecutior Essays in the Study and Writing of History (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1985), esp. pp. 98-102 42, Reflections, pp. 25-26 43, See Clark, English Society, esp. pp. 250-57. 44, "Speech on Relief of Protestant Dissenters," Works, 7: 24-26. 45. "Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians," ibid., p. 48, 46. "Regicide Peace 2," 5: 312; compare Reflections, pp. 12-13, 72-73, 78, 144, hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloattawalborary.capslretriove.do?tabIO=T0028resullistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResusType=SingleTabgs,... 14/17212612018 Academie Onefile- Document - The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals": Edmund Burke's Defense of il Society 47. Reflections, p. 144. 48. Proces-Verbaux du comite d'instruction publique, 1791-92. Quoted in Kung Chuan Hsiao, Political Pluralism (New York: Harper, 1927), p. 263. My translation 49. Hsiao, Political Pluralism, p. 263. 50. Reflections, p. 231; cf. Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk. II, chap. 3, pp. 156-57 51. Ibid., p. 53. 52. lbid., p. 231. 53, Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1841), 3: 485-488; 4: 108-109. 54, Hobbes, Behemoth, Or The Long Parliament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. pp. 2-3, 18-19, 22-27; Hume, "Of Parties in General" and "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm." 55. Burke, "Vindication," in Harris, Pre-Revolutionary Writings, p. 56. 56. Reflections, p. 115. 57. Ibid 88. Ibid., p. 116. 59. Ibid., p. 106; see also, pp. 115-16. 60. Harvey Mansfield, "A Sketch of Burke's Life" in Selected Letters of Edmund Burke, ed. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 31. 61. Hume, "That Politics may be reduced to a Science," in Essays, pp. 29, 26-27, 31 62. Hume, "Of Parties in General," ibid., p. 61 63. See for example Irene Coltman, Private Men & Public Causes: Philosophy and Politics in the English Civil War (London: Faber and Faber, 1962). 64. For Burke's own words on this “political school," see "Thoughts," p. 133. For an account of its pervasiveness and Burke's “counterrevolution," see Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government, esp. pp. 98-105, 111, 121, 178. 65. Burke, "Thoughts," p. 184. 66. Burke, "Observations on a Late Pamphlet Intitled 'The Present State of the Nation," Works 1: 9. 67. "Thoughts," p. 185. 68. Ibid., p. 184. 69. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. |, chap. 22, pp. 274-75; chap. 29, pp. 374-75; David Hume, “Of Parties in General" and "The Parties of Great Britain," in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, esp. pp. 60-62, 65-66. 70. "Thoughts," p. 184. hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloatiawalborary.capslrtiove.do?tabIO=T0028resullistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResuhsType=SingleTabas,..._ 15/17212612018 Academie Onefile- Document - The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals": Edmund Burke's Defense of il Society 71. "| remember an old scholastic aphorism, which says, ‘that the man who lives wholly detached from others, must be either an angel or a devil." Cf. Aristotle, Politics, I, 1; quoted in ibid., p. 190. 72, Ibid., p. 190 73. Ibid., pp. 185-86. 74. Ibid., pp. 185. 75. Aristotle, Politics, Bk. |; Bk. Ill, x, xv. 76. See for example, Heinrich Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought (New York: Greenwood, 1969), esp. pp. 143-44, 301-302; Emst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), 1: esp. 145-50. 77. Sanford Lakoff similarly takes Burke and Tocqueville's attention to pluralism as a distinguishing element of their "liberal conservatism." See his "Tocqueville, Burke and the Origins of Liberal Conservatism," esp. p. 456. 78. Here | follow Nancy Rosenblum's multiple liberal traditions thesis, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and Reconstruction in Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) 79. For Burke's attack on the legal positivism which would treat property, church, and private association as “fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom at pleasure they may destroy" (Reflections, p. 121). 80. Ibid., pp. 70-71. Hannah Arendt later acknowledged Burke's prescience on this point (The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951], pp. 294-96). 81. Reflections, p. 88. 82. Ibid., p. 40. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., pp. 51, 217, 258. 85. Ibid., pp. 217, 258. Unlike Burke, Tocqueville saw the advent of this atomization in the centuries- old administrative centralization of the Bourbons. But the two agree about its disastrous consequences. Cf. Tocqueville, Ancien Regime, pp. 205-207. 86. Reflections, p. 258. 87. Ibid., p. 48. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid 90. Ibid., pp. 69, 9. Burke also decries the concealed vanity of the spirit of philosophical reform: "A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors” (ibid., pp. 37-38). 91. In Burke's thought, as well as in social reality, the distinction between voluntary association and prescriptive institution blurs. For example, Harvey Mansfield has properly emphasized the sense in hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloatiawalborary-capslretiove.do?tabIO=T0028resullistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResutsType=SingleTabss,..._ 16/172782018 Academie OneFle- Document The Unsteady and Precarious Contibuton of nv": Edmund Burke's Defense of Chil Society which Burke envisions political parties to be "establishments" - that is, inherited, quasi-institutional structures rooted in social gradations and vested interests - and not voluntary "associations," as Jefferson intended. See his Statesmanship, esp. pp. 193-96. Yet even "voluntary" associations have ascriptive dimensions: they are rooted in traditions, we tend to belong from habit, and often exit is an unimaginable option. Tocqueville's later account of American associational life does not escape this, ambiguity. Consider Democracy in America, esp. Vol. |, Pt. 2, chap. 9, where Tocqueville describes, religious association as a “moeur" and as a "political institution"; Vol. II, Pt. 1, chap. 7, where civic associations are characterized as a "general habit or taste", a "technique" or "spirit," which must be “taught.” 92. Notably, Albert Hirschman, Passions and Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Ralph Lerner, “Commerce and Character" in The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 93. Reflections, p. 114. 94, Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), p. 56. 95, Far from presuming the harmony of pluralism, classical political thought was also well aware of its tensions. Compare the predicament described by Augustine, City of God, Bk. XIX, chaps. 7-10, 17. RICHARD BOYD is a William Rainey Harper Instructor in The College of the University of Chicago. Source Citation (MLA 8*" Edition) Boyd, Richard. "The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals’: Edmund Burke's Defense of Civil Society." The Review of Politics, vol. 61, no. 3, 1999, p. 465. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A55884767/AONE ?u=otta35732&sid=AONE&xid=5e2c6b82. Accessed 26 Feb. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A55884767 hntplgo.galegroup.com.ezproxybibloattawalborary.capslretriove.6o?tabIO=T0028resullistType=RESULT_LIST&searchResusType=SingleTabgs,... 17/17