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Critics of
Enlightenment
Rationalism
Edited by
Gene Callahan · Kenneth B. McIntyre
Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism
“Callahan and McIntyre have brought together a distinguished and cosmopolitan

array of contributors who have produced a lively and provocative collection of
essays exploring and analyzing the modern phenomenon of Enlightenment ratio-
nalism, whose distinguished critics range from the historically important Edmund
Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to our near contemporaries
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Eric Voegelin and Michael Oakeshott. The connecting and
fascinating thread that runs through the volume is a relentless critique of a style of
thinking that prioritizes the pursuit of certainty, and a blind belief in the powers of
instrumental reason to overcome all adversity.”
—David Boucher, Professor of Political Philosophy and International
Relations, Cardiff University, UK
“This volume could not have arrived at a better time. McIntyre and Callahan have
given us an excellent set of essays that speaks directly to the fetishization of human
reason. Each of the thinkers examined reminds us of the fallibility of human
beings—a lesson we sorely need to revisit every generation or so.”
—Richard Avramenko, Professor, Department of Political Science,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
“This is a remarkable and remarkably comprehensive collection on thinkers who

questioned enlightenment rationalism, both in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
tury. The list is impressive: Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Burke, Nietzsche, Eliot, as
well as Oakeshott, Hayek, Alasdair MacIntyre, and a number of others equally
stellar, and equally deep and complex. The essays are by accomplished scholars,
and show that the opposition to enlightenment rationalism was both diverse and
strikingly coherent, and a treasure trove for thinking beyond the enlightenment. It
will be especially valuable for those with interests in one of these thinkers to see
them in the context of the larger fraternity to which they belong.”
—Stephen Turner, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy,
University of South Florida, USA
“The variety of topics considered, the range of thinkers included, the striking and
ultimately illuminating juxtaposition of approaches combine to cast, not a spot-
light, but indeed multiple of points of light on a rich selection of important think-
ers from the later-modern period. Scholars and students interested in modern
critics of modernity will benefit from the range of figures treated here and the
depth of the commentaries on them.”
—Alexander S. Duff, Assistant Professor of Political Science,
University of North Texas, USA
Gene Callahan • Kenneth B. McIntyre
Editors
Critics of
Enlightenment
Rationalism
Editors
Gene Callahan Kenneth B. McIntyre
New York University Sam Houston State University
Brooklyn, NY, USA Huntsville, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-42598-2 ISBN 978-3-030-42599-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
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institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sam Houston State University for its financial sup-
port and for granting me a sabbatical in which to complete the project. I
would also like to thank The Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy
at The University of Wisconsin for inviting me to spend the 2019–2020
academic year as a Visiting Scholar at the Center, and providing financial
support for the year. Thanks to my mother and father for all of the support
over the years. I want to thank my two daughters, Flannery and Julie, who
rarely agree with me, but, at least, find me occasionally humorous. Finally,
thanks to Maria for taking care of things.
Kenneth B. McIntyre
4 September 2019
Madison, WI
Many thanks to the patience of my wife, Elen, to the support of my
children, Eamon, Emma, and Adam, to Leslie Marsh for encouraging us
in this project, and to David Boucher for his mentorship. Selah.
Eugene Callahan
5 September 2019
Brooklyn, NY
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Gene Callahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre
2 Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State 15

Ferenc Hörcher
3 Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship Between

Reason and Freedom 33
Travis D. Smith and Jin Jin
4 Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism 47

Robert Wyllie
5 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello 61

Justin D. Garrison
6 “Pagans, Christians, Poets” 79

Corey Abel
7 Wittgenstein on Rationalism 95
Daniel John Sportiello
8 Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity107

Jack Simmons
vii
viii Contents
9 Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems125

Steven Knepper
10 Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism139

Charles W. Lowney II
11 C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man159

Luke C. Sheahan
12 Hayek: Postatomic Liberal179

Nick Cowen
13 “Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical

Tradition: Situating Gadamer’s Philosophical
Hermeneutics”193
Ryan R. Holston
14 Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism211

Michael P. Federici
15 Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism227

Wendell John Coats
16 Isaiah Berlin on Monism237

Jason Ferrell
17 Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence251

Nathanael Blake
18 Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities263

Sanford Ikeda
19 Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of

Modern Moral Philosophy279
Kenneth B. McIntyre
Index295
Notes on Contributors
Corey Abel studied the history of political thought at The London

School of Economics and Political Science, where he earned an MSc., and
The University of Chicago, where his Ph.D. was on the thought of Michael
Oakeshott. He has taught in both political science and interdisciplinary
humanities at The United States Air Force Academy, The University of
Denver, Metropolitan State University, The University of Colorado, and
The Colorado College. He is the editor of Intellectual Legacy of Michael
Oakeshott and The Meanings of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism.
Nathanael Blake earned a PhD in political theory from the Catholic
University of America, and has written for a variety of scholarly and popu-
lar publications. He resides in Missouri.
Gene Callahan has a PhD in political theory from Cardiff University and
a Master’s in the philosophy of the social sciences from the LSE. He is the
author of Economics for Real People, Oakeshott on Rome and America, and
co-editor of Tradition v. Rationalism. He teaches at New York University.
Wendell John Coats is Professor of Government at Connecticut College
where he teaches courses in the history of Western political theory, ancient,
medieval and modern. He is published widely in the field of political the-
ory, especially with regard to the work of the twentieth century, English
philosophic essayist, Michael Oakeshott.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Nick Cowen has a PhD from the Department of Political Economy,

King’s College London, and degrees from the University of Oxford and
University College London. He has written for the American Journal of
Political Science, Critical Review and the Review of Austrian Economics.
Michael P. Federici is professor and chair of the Political Science and
International Relations Department at Middle Tennessee State University.
He received his B.S. in economics from Elizabethtown College and his
M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from The Catholic University of America.
He is the former president of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters
and the author of three books and three edited volumes: The Political
Philosophy of Alexander Hamilton, The Challenge of Populism, Eric Voegelin:
The Search for Order, The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and
Politics: The Modest Republic, Rethinking the Teaching of American History,
and The Catholic Writings of Orestes Brownson.
Jason Ferrell currently teaches political theory at Concordia University,
having also taught McGill University and Mount Allison University. His
research interests include the thought of Isaiah Berlin, value pluralism,
and distributive justice. His articles have appeared in Political Theory,
Contemporary Political Theory, and the Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy. He has also authored a “Glossary of Names”
for the second edition of Isaiah Berlin’sRussian Thinkers.
Justin D. Garrison is an associate professor of political science at Roanoke
College in Salem, Virginia. He is a political theorist who researches the rela-
tionship between politics and the imagination. He is the author of journal
articles, book chapters, and the book An Empire of Ideals: The Chimeric
Imagination of Ronald Reagan. He is also co-editor of the book The
Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal in a Post-Constitutional Age.
Ryan R. Holston is Professor and holder of the Jonathan Myric Daniels
‘61 Chair for Academic Excellence at Virginia Military Institute. He is also
an Associate Editor at the journal Humanitas. His published work has
appeared in History of Political Thought, Telos, and Harvard Theological
Review, among other places. He is currently writing a monograph, whose
working title is Tradition and the Deliberative Turn, and is co-editor of a
forthcoming book entitled The Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal in a
Post-Constitutional Age (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Ferenc Hörcher is a political philosopher and historian of political

thought. His PhD was on the Scottish Enlightenment. He is research pro-
fessor and director of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at
the National University of Public Service in Budapest. He is senior fellow
and earlier director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences. His publications include Prudentia Iuris: Towards a
Pragmatic Theory of Natural Law (2000) and the coedited volume: Aspects
of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Politics, and Religion (2004). Most
recently he co-edited an co-authored the volume: A History of the
Hungarian Constitution. Law, Government and Political Culture in
Central Europe (2019). A Political Philosophy of Conservatism, Prudence,
Moderation and Tradition is in print with Bloomsbury, scheduled to get
published in 2020.
Sanford Ikeda is Professor of Economics at SUNY Purchase. He is an
internationally recognized scholar of Jane Jacobs’ work, and the author of
Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
Jin Jin is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He
received his B.A. with honors in Political Science from Concordia
University in Canada, winning the Renée Vautelet Prize as the most out-
standing student in his program. His honors thesis, entitled “The Seas to
Rove and the Sea of Roving Men: Self-Awareness in Tocqueville’s
Recollections and Fortnight in the Wilderness,” discusses Tocqueville’s
self-awareness as a pathway to his thought on human nature.
Steven Knepper is an assistant professor in the Department of English,
Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. His
research interests include American literature, tragedy, and aesthetics. His
writings have appeared in Telos, The Robert Frost Review, The Cormac
McCarthy Journal, Religion & Literature, and other journals. He is cur-
rently writing about the philosopher William Desmond’s approach to
literature.
Charles W. Lowney II is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hollins
University, Roanoke, Virginia, USA. He received his masters in philosophy at
Boston College, where he studied Continental Philosophy, and his doctorate
at Boston University, where he studied Analytic Philosophy. He is interested
in applying the concepts of emergentism and tacit knowing to ethics, society,
and religion, and has done so in articles such as “Authenticity and the
Reconciliation of Modernity” (2009), “From Science to Morality” (2009),
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
“Morality: Emergentist Ethics” (2010), “From Morality to Spirituality”

(2010), and in a chapter, “Four Ways of Understanding Mysticism” in
Mysticism and Silence (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, Laura Weed, ed.).
Lowney is also the editor of Charles Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the Critique
of Modernity: Pluralist and Emergentist Directions (2017).
Kenneth B. McIntyre is Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston
State University. He is the author of The Limits of Political Theory: Michael
Oakeshott on Civil Association, Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence,
and Skeptical Politics, and has also written essays on the philosophy of his-
tory, ordinary language philosophy, American constitutionalism, and prac-
tical reason. He is currently working on a book on value pluralism, liberty,
and the rule of law.
Luke C. Sheahan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duquesne
University and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Program for Research on
Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) at the University of
Pennsylvania. He researches the intersection of First Amendment rights
and political theory. Sheahan’s scholarly articles and reviews have appeared
inThe Political Science Reviewer, Humanitas, Anamnesis, and The Journal
of Value Inquiry He has lectured widely on religious liberty, freedom of
speech, and freedom of association. His book Why Associations Matter:
The Case for First Amendment Pluralism is forthcoming from the
University Press of Kansas. From 2018–2019, Sheahan was Associate
Director and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Freedom Project at
Wellesley College and from 2016–2018, he was a postdoctoral associate in
the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He received a
PhD and MA in political theory from the Catholic University of America
and a B.S. in political science from the Honors College at Oregon State
University. Sheahan is a five- time recipient of the Humane Studies
Fellowship, a 2014 recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Fellowship, and a
2018 recipient of the Leonard P. Liggio Memorial Fellowship.
Jack Simmons is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgia Southern
University, in Savannah, Georgia. His research focuses on discourse ethics
and hermeneutics, leading to publications in bio-ethics, film, television,
technology and science.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Travis D. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia

University in Montreal. he has published on Thomas Hobbes and Francis
Bacon, and is the author of Superhero Ethics (Templeton, 2018) and co-
editor (with Marlene K. Sokolon) of Flattering the Demos (Lexington, 2018).
Daniel John Sportiello is an assistant professor of philosophy at the
University of Mary in North Dakota. He has published several book
reviews with the Notre Dame Evolution Working Group; he also contrib-
uted a chapter on Eric Voegelin to Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin,
Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others.
Robert Wyllie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science
at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses upon Spinoza’s
moral psychology as a pivot in the modern understanding of envy. His
work, which includes several articles on the political theory of Kierkegaard,
has appeared in Perspectives on Political Science, Res Philosophica, Telos, and
other journals.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Gene Callahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre
Enlightenment rationalism may be said to have been birthed with the

writings of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and to have come to self-
awareness in the works of the French philosophes (e.g., Voltaire, Diderot,
Condorcet, and d’Alembert), and their allies, such as Thomas Jefferson,
Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Paine. But almost contemporaneously with
the birth of this movement, it attracted critics. The aim of this project is to
provide an overview of some of the most important of the many critics of
“Enlightenment rationalism,” a term we use in an historically loose sense,
to cover not just leaders of the Enlightenment itself, but also latter figures
whose model of what is rational closely resembled that espoused during
the Enlightenment.1
The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commen-
tary on that thinker, but also to place him in the context of this larger
stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history
of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a his-
tory. Some may wonder at the mixed bag of thinkers we address: poets,
G. Callahan (*)
New York University, Brooklyn, NY, USA
K. B. McIntyre
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA
e-mail: kbm014@SHSU.EDU
© The Author(s) 2020 1

G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment
Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_1
2 G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE
philosophers, economists, political theorists, and urbanists. But there is

unity in this diversity. Although these authors worked in a variety of forms,
they all sought to demonstrate the narrowness of rationalism’s description
of the human situation. It is our hope that surveying the variety of per-
spectives from which rationalism has been attacked will serve to clarify the
difficulties the rationalist approach to understanding faces, rather than dis-
persing our critical attention. In other words, we hope that these diver-
gent streams flow together into a river, rather than meandering out to sea
like the channels of a delta.2
The subjects of the volume do not share a philosophical tradition as
much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among mod-
ern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonable-
ness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the
presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences. In epistemol-
ogy, this scientistic reductionism lends itself to the notion that knowing
things consists in conceiving them in terms of law-like generalizations that
allow for accurate predictability. In moral philosophy, scientism leads to
the common notion among modern ethicists that any worthy moral the-
ory must produce a single decision procedure that gives uniform and pre-
dictable answers as to what is moral in any particular situation.
While the subjects of the volume are united by a common enemy, the
sources, arguments, and purposes of their critiques are extraordinarily
various and, though they often overlap, they often contradict one another.
There are epistemological pluralists like Gadamer, Oakeshott, and Berlin
who draw sharp distinctions between scientific, aesthetic, historical, and
practical modes of discourse, and, thus, reject the Enlightenment rational-
ists’ claims concerning the superiority of scientific explanation. There are
religious believers like Kierkegaard who criticize the “faith” in human rea-
son exhibited by Enlightenment rationalists (this group of critics tends to
be Augustinian Christians). There are aesthetes like Eliot, Lewis, and Kirk
who decry the insipid and desiccated conception of humanity put forward
by the Enlightenment rationalists. There are critics of modernity itself like
Heidegger and MacIntyre who deplore not merely Enlightenment ratio-
nalism, but other forms of modern rationalism associated with many of the
other subjects of this collection. And there are those who attack the
Enlightenment rationalists’ understanding of scientific activity and expla-
nation, like Polanyi and Hayek.
Other than Nietzsche, we have not included thinkers who are deeply
skeptical of any form of human reason, and who view human interactions
1 INTRODUCTION 3
almost solely as the result of power relations or unconscious desires,

motives, or beliefs. So the variety of postmodern thought that owes such
a great debt to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is not included (Lacan,
Foucault, Derrida, et al.), though all are highly critical of Enlightenment
rationalism. Additionally, due to limitations on space and time, we were
not able to include a number of other figures within our bailiwick, such as
Herder, De Maistre, Carlyle, Coleridge, Spengler, Arendt, Gray, and
Scott. We hope to produce a second volume that can remedy these
omissions.
Having looked at our criteria for selecting what thinkers to include, let
us now turn to the thinkers themselves. In his chapter on Edmund Burke
(1729–1797), Ferenc Horcher argues that Burke’s critique of the French
Revolution focuses specifically on the inappropriateness of the philos-
ophes’ and revolutionaries’ attempt to apply an abstract and rationalistic
blueprint to the messy complexities of French political life. According to
Horcher, Burke is justly understood as the founder of a political tradition
which might with good reason be labelled as British conservatism. One of
the central features of Burke’s position is his skepticism about the useful-
ness and applicability of theoretical abstractions in political affairs. Horcher
notes that Burke’s criticism of the French philosophes centered on the
practical destruction caused by their “social engineering,” and on the ever
more radical (and more bloodthirsty) revolutionary regimes created by
such “social engineering.”
Further, Burke argued that the nature of politics is exceedingly com-
plex. (As Jane Jacobs, discussed later in this volume, would have put it, it
is a matter of organized complexity, rather than simple order or pure ran-
domness.) Thus, the optimism characteristic of enlightened intellectuals
when they enter the political arena is not only logically unfounded, but
also politically counterproductive and often pernicious. Horcher focuses
his attention on those parts of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in
France which helped to identify a less optimistic, but more realistic view of
politics which has characteristic British traits, the most significant of which
is a belief in the value of such non-instrumentally rational political institu-
tions as precedents, custom, and political experience.
Travis Smith and Jin Jin discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805–1859)
nuanced criticism of rationalism by examining his views on the relation-
ship between philosophy and politics in Democracy in America and
Recollections. According to Smith and Jin, Tocqueville claims that the
preservation of liberty requires a new political science to educate the
ineluctably emerging democratic social state. Tocqueville argues that the

ascendant political science of the Enlightenment, which aimed at whole-
sale social engineering, is actually an unscientific and partial ideology that
is oblivious to certain aspects of the human condition, and obliterates
other parts.
For Smith and Jin, Tocqueville’s recognition that both ethics and poli-
tics require educated virtue means that reason and political liberty are
inherently complementary. However, Tocqueville notes that the kind of
rationalism espoused by the French philosophes depends on assuming
ever more control over people’s lives. Smith and Jin observe that
Tocqueville witnessed at firsthand multiple attempts to implement ratio-
nalistic systems following the end of the Old Regime, and his more realis-
tic science of politics explains why they necessarily failed to produce the
supposedly just society or free people they were purportedly designed to
construct while succeeding instead at fostering ever more dehumanizing
injustices.
According to Smith and Jin, Tocqueville insists that political freedom
requires virtue, and virtue requires reason, but reason is best developed
when human beings are given the freedom to meet their greatest poten-
tial. Politics dominated by uncritical veneration of reason, especially an
Enlightenment conception of reason that is simultaneously excessive and
deficient, undermines virtue and freedom alike.
While Tocqueville focused on the political and social consequences of
the spread of Enlightenment ideas, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855),
often considered to be the first existentialist philosopher, turned his atten-
tion primarily to the theological and ethical conflicts following in their
wake. Nevertheless, he addressed political matters as well, as noted by
Robert Wyllie in his essay on the Dane: “Kierkegaard is a famous critic of
rationalism, though less well known as a critic of political rationalism”.
Kierkegaard condemned what he saw as his era’s tendency to replace deci-
sive action with political “talkativeness, chatter, or chit-chat”: such a trend
betrayed a lack of passion on the part of citizens. The age, he believed,
“lets everything remain, but subtly drains the meaning out of it”. Wyllie
draws a connection between the object of Kierkegaard’s critique and the
concept of the rationality of the public sphere in the work of Habermas.
As Wylie portrays it, Kierkegaard could be viewed as offering a century-in-
advance takedown of Habermas. For Kierkegaard, politics, at least as prac-
ticed in his age, was a distraction from fixing one’s own character. The
rationalism he criticizes consists in the belief that endless palaver about the
1 INTRODUCTION 5
“reasons” such-and-such should occur can take the place of true, ethical
commitment to an ideal of life.
Justin Garrison offers an account of Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900)
critique of Enlightenment rationalism which is unique in this volume in
that, according to Garrison, Nietzsche rejects not only Enlightenment
rationalism, but even the idea of rational discourse itself. Garrison offers us
Thomas Jefferson, rather than the French philosophes, as his primary foil.
Of course, Jefferson was a great admirer of the philosophes specifically and
the Enlightenment generally. As Garrison notes, Jefferson consistently
proclaimed the innate goodness and rationality of human beings, and
believed that governments propped up by irrational claims of authority,
particularly the “monkish ignorance” of religious authority, had subverted
these qualities too often. For Jefferson, a new science of politics, one
grounded in reason rather than superstition, offered hope because it
allowed for the discovery of a rational foundation for government worthy
of the people it would serve.
Per Garrison, Nietzsche would find Jefferson’s political thought naïve
and unphilosophical. Nietzsche argued instead that Enlightenment ratio-
nalism did not inaugurate a break from the religious past so much as it
re-packaged pre-existing ethical and political beliefs in verbiage stripped of
many pre-existing theological and metaphysical associations. Thus, mod-
ern rationalism was not a new thing under the sun, but was instead an
example of a serious problem Nietzsche believed he had already identified
in Christianity: nihilism. Garrison explores Nietzsche’s understanding of
reason, morality, equality, Christianity, and democracy, and applies
Nietzsche’s analysis to those elements in Jefferson’s political thought. By
borrowing Nietzsche’s hammer to “sound out” Jefferson’s mind, Garrison
suggests that Jefferson’s oft-celebrated democracy of reason is tinged with
misanthropy and world hatred. In other words, such a vision is a manifes-
tation of the ascetic ideal and thus is ultimately nihilistic. Because many see
Jefferson as a paradigmatic figure in the American Founding, even as an
incarnation of the American spirit, the chapter has broad implications for
interpreting a fundamental dimension of the American political tradition.
Corey Abel grapples with the conundrum of how T.S. Eliot
(1888–1965), one of the paradigmatic “modernist” writers, could also
have been a staunch defender of tradition. Abel quotes Eliot arguing,
“The sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put
to the axe,” and describes the quote as “a vivid image of Eliot’s modernism”.
So, for this paradigmatic modernist, what, exactly, is the value of tradi-
tion? Abel argues that Eliot actually had a nuanced view of culture and art
grounded in a robust conception of tradition. He interprets Eliot as believ-
ing that, “from the poet’s standpoint, a tradition provides buoyancy…
Tradition, for the artist, is the gift of form”. When poets are writing within
a tradition, each poet has less work to do to express themselves than does
any poet who attempts to abandon all traditions. (Of course, as Oakeshott
demonstrated, such an abandonment is never really possible.) Abel sug-
gests that Eliot’s sensibility provides a view of tradition that powerfully
challenges modern ideological habits of thinking.
Daniel Sportiello, in his chapter on Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951),
examines how Wittgenstein’s later philosophy brings into question many
of the assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism, especially its focus on
quasi-mathematical reasoning. According to Sportiello, the focus of
Wittgenstein’s critique of rationalism was his rejection of the thesis that
there is a single right way to do whatever it is that we do, and that way can
be discovered by the use of an abstract faculty called reason.
Sportiello observes that, for Wittgenstein, our words and deeds are
justified only by the rules of particular language games, but these language
games are themselves justified only insofar as they meet our needs; cer-
tainly none of them need be justified by reference to any of the others. In
claiming this, Wittgenstein is something more than a pragmatist since he
believes that the rectitude of all of our discourse is a matter of its use (for
whatever ends we happen to have). Taken together, our language games
constitute our form of life, though this form of life is not entirely arbitrary,
as some of its features can be explained by reference to our nature.
Nonetheless, per Sportiello, Wittgenstein claims that our form or forms of
life could be different in many ways. Indeed, the forms of life that have
characterized human communities have been and will continue to be
marked by significant differences. Thus, for Wittgenstein, the failure of
Enlightenment rationalism lies in its attempt to reduce the variety of lan-
guage games and forms of life to a single, abstract, rational unity. Sportiello
suggests that Wittgenstein reminds us that, on some level, we all know
this. Philosophy at its worst is the attempt to forget it; philosophy at its
best is, therefore, the attempt to remember it.
The work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jack Simmons says, can
be understood largely as a critique of scientism. As he writes, “Science sees
the world scientifically and Heidegger contends that this method of reveal-
ing the natural world conceals non-scientific ways in which the world
1 INTRODUCTION 7
might appear to us, ways that might represent a more authentic encounter
with the world”. As Simmons notes, the supposedly timeless “natural sci-
entific reasoning” is itself an historical phenomenon, and has no valid
claim to resist being evaluated as such. And, in fact, “The reductionist
approach of modern, scientific reasoning makes it well-suited to a utilitar-
ian worldview Heidegger calls technological thinking”. Here we might
note the similarity to both Marcel’s and Oakeshott’s attacks on “the tyr-
anny of technique.”
According to Simmons, the relevance of Heidegger‘s critique of tech-
nological thinking is demonstrated by “Our current affinity for STEM
education, wedding science to technology, engineering and mathematics,
in order to satisfy the needs of the community as determined by a reduc-
tionist, economic theory, and reducing the student to an economic
resource”.
Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), notes Steven Knepper, hosted one of
the most important salons in Paris both before and after the Second World
War, attended by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Maritain,
Emmanuel Levinas, and others. As such, he influenced several major intel-
lectual movements, such as Catholic personalism and existentialism. He
would doubtlessly be better known today if he had chosen to align himself
with some such movement, and adopt a “doctrine” which could have
yielded him “followers.”
However, Knepper argues, “Marcel worried that such labels distort or
lead to assumptions”. Philosophy should be an open inquiry that did not
imprison him in a “sort of shell”. Nevertheless, an attack on “technocratic
rationalism” is a continuing theme in Marcel’s work.
Marcel’s concern with the “tyranny of technique,” which “drowns the
deeper human in a conspiracy of efficiency and a frenzy of industry” closely
echo Oakeshott’s criticism of the “sovereignty of technique,” and
Heidegger’s attack on “technological thinking.” The focus on technique
tended to turn life into a technological problem to be solved, and other
human beings into resources to be possessed for the assistance they might
provide in solving life‘s problems. (As evidenced by the ubiquity of
“human resource” departments.) Mystery is drained out of existence:
death becomes a tricky biomedical challenge to be handled as discreetly as
possible, and love is a matter of achieving as high a “relationship rating”
as possible in some romance “app.”
This solution to this problem, for Marcel, was not to abandon tech-
nique, or reject technological progress. Instead, he argued, “What I think
we need today is to react with our whole strength against that disassocia-
tion of life from spirit which a bloodless rationalism has brought about”.
Charles Lowney’s essay on Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) argues that
Polanyi’s work demonstrates that the Enlightenment’s standards defining
knowledge contain distortions that often have destructive effects, and in a
variety of ways. According to Lowney, Polanyi was a sympathetic critic of
the Enlightenment, which makes sense given Polanyi’s own success as a
natural scientist. Polanyi admired the Enlightenment’s political ideals, but
its rationalism led to a misunderstanding of the character of science, a
misunderstanding that Polanyi called “scientism.” Lowny notes that, for
Polanyi, this ideological “scientism” tended to reject the objectivity of
anything not based on physics and chemistry, thus relegating human val-
ues to the realm of the purely subjective.
Lowney claims that Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy revises
Enlightenment standards to more accurately reflect the limits of knowl-
edge and how science actually proceeds. This involves critiquing (1) the
viability of complete objectivity, (2) the adequacy of Cartesian explicit
analysis to simple self-evident truths, (3) the concomitant reductive analy-
sis of reality to smallest physical components, and (4) reductive dichoto-
mies between mind and matter, and between fact and value. Polanyi
accomplishes this with his conceptions of (1) personal knowledge, (2) tacit
knowing, (3) emergent being, and (4) discovery and indwelling. For
Lowney, Polanyi’s work undermines the traditional conception of scien-
tific knowledge, and shows that, instead, science moves toward truth, and
better contact with reality, by using the same tools of practical knowing
that produce understanding in those cultural and religious traditions that
are open to dialogue and discovery. Values, and not just physical facts, can
be real discoveries about the world. Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology
thus provides a non-skeptical fallibilism that goes beyond simple dualisms
and reductionism, forestalls a regression into nihilism, and renews hope in
human progress.
C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), notes Luke Sheahan, may seem an unlikely
candidate for inclusion in a book on anti-rationalists. After all, in a series
of books, he used reasoned arguments to defend the Christian faith. But
he believed that the effectiveness of such arguments “depended upon a
deeper mode of knowing”. Lewis is considered one of the most prominent
Christian apologists of the twentieth century. But he held a deep distrust
of the work of the rational faculty that was not properly oriented by the
imagination, which explains in large part his turn to writing imaginative
1 INTRODUCTION 9
fiction later in his life. Through his fiction Lewis was trying to demon-
strate, rather than rationally explain, what the world would look like if
Christianity and the broader moral worldview in which it exists were true.
Lewis explains this understanding of the imagination and its importance
for right thinking in a variety of essays and in his two most profound
books, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image.
F.A. Hayek’s (1899–1992) anti-rationalism, argues Nick Cowen, is
founded upon a revival of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism combined
with a psychology that rejects a correspondence between human orderings
of experience and “reality.” Despite the epistemic restrictions this view
apparently imposes, Hayek believes that humans can use their capacity for
“pattern recognition” to generate and sustain cooperative social orders
through a process of trial and error. Institutions that allow this cooperative
order to emerge centrally include private property, voluntary contract, and
the rule of law. Unlike many utopian theorists, Hayek does not rely upon
fundamental normative claims for his political ideas. Thus, Cowen argues,
his ideas are compatible with a cosmopolitan order made up of people
with varied conceptions of morality. He connects Hayek’s argument
against rationalism to other such critiques, which often rely on a distinc-
tion between the concrete and the abstract, when he notes that: “A neces-
sary feature of concrete orders is that they always have more dimensions
and features to them then we have apprehend. They are irreducibly com-
plex. Abstract orders, by contrast, are the simplified models and categories
that we use to make sense of our experience and communications with
others”.
In his chapter on Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), Ryan Holston
explores Gadamer’s ambivalent relationship to Martin Heidegger (the
subject of his own chapter in the current volume) and the unusual way in
which Gadamer combined Heidegger’s historicism with the tradition of
Western metaphysics that was the very target of Heidegger’s own critique
of Enlightenment rationalism. According to Holston, Gadamer, while
acknowledging his deep indebtedness to Heidegger, moves beyond
Heidegger’s relativistic historicism to a position that is more deeply
indebted to the long tradition Western philosophy beginning with Plato
and Aristotle.
For Holston, Gadamer’s achievement is to offer an alternative account
of human epistemology which grounds human knowledge in the facticity
of human ontology. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics collapses the
fact-value division which is characteristic of Enlightenment rationalism,
and, as such, combines a descriptive and normative epistemology. Holston

suggests that Gadamer has described what is fundamental to any true,
authentic, or genuine interpretation/understanding. To put it differently,
one might say that he is describing a normatively positive category of
human experience which encompasses understanding the human world in
a way that abstract “scientism” cannot.
According to Holston, Gadamer’s critique of modern rationalism arises
from his concern about the forgetfulness of being, and he sees that forget-
fulness as characteristic of scientific inquiry (understanding “from a dis-
tance”) in which the observer is conceived as not part of the reality being
observed. By calling attention to the ubiquity of “application” to present
circumstances that is part of all understanding, Gadamer aims to remind
us of our continuous involvement in a reality that transcends both “sub-
ject” and “object” of interpretation. That inescapable involvement of the
interpreter in the reality that interpreter attempts to describe was also a key
theme of our next thinker.
Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) is a hard theorist to summarize, as his 34
volumes of political philosophy include “multiple changes in focus and
emphasis,” according to Michael P. Federici. Federici notes that Voegelin
was not focused in his writing on “the Enlightenment itself but a broader
intellectual genealogy of which the enlightenment was a part”. Voegelin
was concerned “primarily with the rise of political religions [which were]
the outgrowth of existential closure to the truth of existence”.
Enlightenment rationalists were “interesting to Voegelin in so far as they
contributed to the development of... the western crisis of order that
inspired his work”. As Federici puts it, “Enlightenment thought has been
described as the religion of reason and the religion of humanity, language
that conveys Voegelin’s characterization of the enlightenment as apostatic
revolt”.
Similarly to Michael Oakeshott, Voegelin understood Enlightenment
rationalism to be irrational, “because it is reductionistic”. For Voegelin,
Federici writes, Enlightenment rationalism, following the lead of Voltaire,
takes “a part of human experience... the animal basis of existence... as its
whole” so that “man’s participation in transcendent reality is eliminated
from consciousness”.
“Removing consciousness of... transcendent structures from the life of
human beings and human civilization eliminates the very source of order
on which the ends of politics depend”. As Federici puts it, “a just political
1 INTRODUCTION 11
and social order, including rational discussion on which it depends, are

only possible if human beings are open to transcendent reality”.
Wendell John Coats, Jr. contends that the works of Michael Oakeshott
(1901–1990) on rationalism, from the 1940s and 50s, “develop in detail
the implications of a view of human knowledge and experience articulated
initially in the more philosophic Experience and Its Modes”. The earlier
work sets out a case that arguments from various “modes” of experience,
such as science, history, and practical life, are mutually irrelevant to the
advancement of other modes. For instance, a practical argument suggest-
ing that we would be better off if we could travel faster than the speed of
light should have no impact on a scientific case for whether or not such a
thing is physically possible.
Coats says that “Oakeshott’s fundamental critique of [rationalism] as
an approach to human activity and conduct is its partiality in the definition
of ‘rationality’”. The rationalist misses the essentially poetic, and not pro-
saic, character of human experience. In other words, Oakeshott’s critique
of rationalism is essentially an ontological one.
Jason Ferrell’s essay on Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) focuses on the vari-
ous ways in which Berlin deploys the term “monism” as a critique of a
variety of reductionist forms of theorizing. Ferrell notes that, though
Berlin associates monism with one of the primary historical traditions in
Western philosophy, Platonism, Berlin extends this critique of monism to
the kind of modern conceptions of moral philosophy and scientific ratio-
nalism associated with the Enlightenment. According to Ferrell, Berlin’s
understanding of monism manifests his pluralist and anti-reductionist
conception of the character of human experience, and is best understood
as consisting of three claims. Berlin avers that monists of various stripes
claim that, first, all questions have one and only one genuine or correct
answer; that, second, there is a means of determining these answers; and,
third, that the answers to all of the questions are compatible with one
another.
Ferrell then examines three different ways in which Berlin contrasts
monism with richer, more pluralistic conceptions of human activity. First,
he offers an account of Berlin’s critique of the attempt to apply the meth-
ods of the natural sciences to the human sciences, especially history. Ferrell
explains both Berlin’s critique of scientism and determinism in the study
of human action as connected to a conflation of the notion of causality in
the natural sciences, which is a logical and empirical notion, and causality
in the human sciences, which is a question of making actions intelligible.
Second, Ferrell surveys Berlin’s account of the character of philosophy and

why monist approaches to that subject tend to get things wrong. According
to Ferrell, Berlin takes philosophical questions to be those which cannot
easily be classified as empirical or logical, and claims that the error of phil-
osophical monism, especially modern “scientistic” monism, is to attempt
to reduce all questions to the empirical or logical. Finally, Ferrell offers an
account of Berlin’s critique of political monism, which once again focuses
on its fatal reductionism and its ignorance of human moral and social
plurality.
Nathaneal Blake, commenting on Russell Kirk (1918–1994), seeks to
place him in the context of the American conservative movement of the
mid-twentieth century. Blake claims that Kirk’s great achievement lies in
his steady insistence on the fundamental limitations of human rationality,
especially when that rationality is applied to social or political activity.
Blake notes Kirk’s Burkean opposition to schemes for collectivizing prop-
erty and centralizing power, and connects that opposition to his conten-
tion that such rationalist plans fail to account for the limits of human
knowledge and goodness. When implemented, they brought and continue
to bring misery to millions. Against the rationalist confidence of the cen-
tral planners, Kirk set tradition, which he saw as a repository of human
experience and the tried and true wisdom of the past.
Blake also notes that Kirk’s most famous work, The Conservative Mind,
brought about a revival of interest in Edmund Burke and solidified Burke’s
reputation as the founding figure of modern conservative political thought.
According to Blake, Kirk also offered unique insight into Burke’s blend of
natural law thinking and historical consciousness, and this blend offers
valuable insights into the real working of political communities. There are
real moral obligations upon us, but the mystery of human existence pre-
vents us from delineating once and for all a perfect system of moral phi-
losophy, or an ideal political system. Finally, Blake points out that, for
Kirk, truth, whether moral, cultural or political, is apprehended as much
by the imagination as by reason.
Sanford Ikeda, in his essay on Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), ties her cri-
tique of rationalist urban planning to Hayek’s analysis of the problems
facing any such planner, whether they are attempting to plan a city, an
economy, or an entire social order. (This, by the way, justifies Jacobs inclu-
sion in this volume: her concern was not merely with urban planning, but
also with broader questions of the nature of social order.) Ikeda notes how
Jacobs understood rationalist urban planners to be under a similar
1 INTRODUCTION 13
egophanic spell as other prophets of utopia: “As in all utopias, the right to
have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge”.
Ikeda makes clear the utopian character of Jacobs’ targets in a series of
sketches of their ideas; for example, Ebenezer Howard is quoted as boast-
ing that his schemes would create “garden cities” “in which all the advan-
tages of the most energetic and active town life, withal the beauty and the
light of the country, may be secured in perfect combination”. In common
with all utopians, Howard seems to lack any sense that life might involve
inescapable trade-offs: he suggests we can live in a place as lively as London
and as serene as the Lake Country. One wonders that he did not also
promise that his garden cities would be both as warm as the Congo and as
cool as Antarctica! Similarly, Ikeda quotes Frank Lloyd Wright’s claim that
implementing his planned communities would “automatically end unem-
ployment and all its evils forever”. And the arch urban rationalist, Le
Corbusier, sought to create a “theoretically water-tight formula to arrive
at the fundamental principles of modern town planning”. Again, the ratio-
nalist seeks to replace practical experience with a theory. As Ikeda con-
cludes, all of the urban rationalists “do not appreciate the nature of a living
city as an emergent, spontaneous order”.
In his chapter on Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–), Kenneth McIntyre (no
relation) examines MacIntyre’s critique of modern rationalist moral phi-
losophy and his attempted resuscitation of the Aristotelian tradition of
virtue ethics. According to McIntyre, Alasdair MacIntyre offers not only a
critique of Enlightenment rationalism, but a critique of modern moral
philosophy as a whole. MacIntyre proposes a revitalization of Aristotelian
and Thomistic ethics as an alternative to what he takes to be the desiccated
and deracinated nature of modern deontology, utilitarianism, and emotiv-
ism. What went wrong during the Enlightenment, according to MacIntyre,
was that philosophers jettisoned the anchor that tied moral rules to sub-
stantive human results, leaving practical reasoning and moral judgments
unmoored to any conception of human flourishing. As McIntyre notes,
for MacIntyre, as for Michael Oakeshott, the rationalist conflates practical
and theoretical/scientific reasoning. For MacIntyre, this is an outcome of
the modern rejection of Aristotelian teleology. As an alternative, MacIntyre
offers an account of human practical knowledge which rejects the modern
scientistic account of human reason as primarily instrumental and techni-
cal instead of insisting that it is acquired only by an engagement in the
variety of specific human practices themselves. Since to know a practice is
to understand the history of that practice, a notion MacIntyre adopts from
R.G. Collingwood, there is an inherently traditional aspect in human

rationality.
McIntyre offers a sympathetic account of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique
of modern moral rationalism, emphasizing the importance of MacIntyre’s
recognition of the teleological character of a significant part of human
activity, while also suggesting that his critique owes a great deal to other
modern critics of moral rationalism, like Hegel and Collingwood. McIntyre
also suggests that the primary weakness of MacIntyre’s version of virtue
ethics is that it does not adequately answer the challenges posed by mod-
ern moral pluralism to a unified conception of the human telos.
Notes
1. We are not concerned with delineating a specific historical event or series of
events in the manner of an intellectual historian, nor are we interested in
offering a rationalized version of the “philosophy” of the Enlightenment or
a cultural history of the Enlightenment. For academically significant exam-
ples of each, see respectively J.G.A. Pocock’s magisterial history of
Enlightenment historiography Barbarism and Religion, Volumes One, Two,
and Three (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 1999, 2003);
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Fritz C.A. Koelln and
James P. Pettegrove, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); and Peter Gay,
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Volumes One and Two (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1966, 1969).
2. We are also not involving ourselves in the ongoing historical debate about
the Counter-Enlightenment. Whether the Counter-Enlightenment is best
understood as a discrete and internally coherent tradition of criticism of
Enlightenment thinkers and their ideas or whether it is best understood in a
pluralistic way as composed of a group of thinkers without a single target or
a unified argument is beyond our remit in this volume. The thinker most
often associated with the notion that the Counter-Enlightenment consti-
tuted a coherent and directed attack against the Enlightenment is Isaiah
Berlin, though this line of argument has been supported in recent years by
thinkers like Zeev Sternhell. See Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of Enlightenment:
Vico, Hamann, Herder, Second Edition, Henry Hardy, ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000) and Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-
Enlightenment Tradition, David Maisel, trans. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010).
CHAPTER 2
Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason

of State
Ferenc Hörcher
“Il faut… tout détruire; oui, tout détruire; puisque tout est à recréer.”1
1
One of the most sophisticated minds of twentieth century political phi-
losophy seems to have completely misunderstood Edmund Burke’s frame
of mind. In his magisterial work, Leo Strauss presented Burke as a histori-
cist–relativist–particularist, almost a post-modern thinker, who did not
have any long-term values, but used political rhetoric for his own pur-
poses. He argued for the complete lack of natural law in Burke.2 In fact,
he found him lacking in rationality. He claimed that Burke “parts com-
pany with the Aristotelian tradition by disparaging theory and especially
metaphysics. He uses ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysician’ frequently in a
derogatory sense.” His “opposition to modern ‘rationalism’ shifts almost
F. Hörcher (*)
Research Institute of Politics and Government, National University of
Public Service, Budapest, Hungary
Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities,
Budapest, Hungary
e-mail: horcher.ferenc@uni-nke.hu

16 F. HÖRCHER
insensibly into an opposition to ‘rationalism’ as such”.3 Here we have

Burke presented as the prophet of irrationalism.
There is another possible, even characteristic, opposite misunderstand-
ing of Burke by those, who—starting out from his fierce opposition to the
ideas, and even more the practice of the French Revolution—thought that
he was a dogmatic thinker.4 It is argued that he is an old-fashioned reli-
gious reactionary. An advocate of religious superstition and an unsubstan-
tiated Natural Law, he is claimed to be determined to fight against social
justice and progress. This is Edmund Burke, the dogmatic ideologist of
religious reaction and doctrinaire natural law thinker.
This paper does not want to argue against Strauss’ interpretation of Burke,
or address the problems of presenting Burke as a religious dogmatic. It sim-
ply takes it for granted, that neither was Burke a scholastic crypto-Catholic,
nor a thinker of almost post-modern, or at least romantic irrationalism, who
did not trust reason at all, and therefore urged his readers to set free irrational
political passions.5 Rather he is going to be taken here as someone convinced
of the use of a constrained activity of reason in politics, and who did himself
believe that practical wisdom could—on the long run—lead us to recognize
those truths, which are generally labelled as the precepts of natural law. I will
argue that this Burkean approach to politics is genuinely conservative (even
if he himself was a Whig), or not to become anachronistic, that it is in har-
mony with a sceptical, British type conservatism. I will also argue that this
sort of pessimistic, practical rationality is derived from the Aristotelian
account of phronesis, which was transformed into the Roman and later
Christian virtue of prudence. Finally, I will show the parallel between the
prudence attributed to the successful individual human political agent, and
the reason of state attributed to the early modern state.
To prove these claims I will rely on Burke’s reaction on the French
Revolution, famously elaborated in the Reflections, his most influential
political work, and will concentrate on his use of the term reason and
rationality. As it will be seen, I was influenced by two classics of Burke
scholarship, most importantly by the relevant works of J.G.A. Pocock, and
of Francis P. Canavan, S.J., to whose positions my own is perhaps the clos-
est.6 Yet I will not try to overcome Pocock’s magisterial historical scholar-
ship. Instead, I will try to read Burke with the intention to make him
useful for our present day concerns. As for Canavan, the present chapter
will position Burke closer to the British conservative tradition, more
embedded in the particularities of the common law tradition and less in
the Thomistic and scholastic discourse, while keeping the basic elements
of a Christian Aristotelianism, that Canavan uncovered in his thought.
2 BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 17
2
In his fierce political pamphlet, written in the form of long letters, pub-
lished under the title Reflections on the Revolution in France, in 1790,
Edmund Burke tried to make sense of the fresh news about the revolution
in France. Or to put it in a more precise way: he was shocked by the news
of the events over the channel, and felt obliged to reflect on the possibility
whether the strange French disease can put its head up in his own country.
By giving his thoughts expression, the British Whig politician was able to
stir up a huge public debate about the situation, and about the necessary
measures to react upon the urgent challenges. What he was doing was not
much more than comparing the rhetoric of the French revolutionaries
with their own deeds, in order to show how much they were misleading
not only themselves and their own population but also the international
community. His strategy was a kind of dissection of revolutionary com-
munication, a rhetorical deconstruction, in order to reveal the actual polit-
ical stakes involved.
Perhaps the most important linguistic struggle in the Reflections went
around the notion of rationality. The revolutionaries claimed that the
political structure of the Ancien Régime had become anachronistic by
their day, and therefore it was irrational to sustain it any longer. Their
argumentation was based on the enlightened ideas of rationality recently
promulgated by people like Kant, who famously claimed that the
Enlightenment is not much more than the ability to “Sapere aude!” (appr.
Dare to know!, or Dare to think for yourself!). This trust in the potential
of human reason gave the name to the age: enlightenment, meaning a
kind of secular revelation induced by reason, or simply the Age of Reason.
This latter term was popularized by Thomas Paine, in his The Age of
Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, published in
1794. Paine’s work, undoubtedly the most influential attack on Burke’s
Reflections, was a defence of Deism, an intellectual movement believing in
a passive God, influenced by early eighteenth-century British Deism.
Burke’s work was attacked by Paine partly because Burke himself criticized
with strong words such famous contemporary dissenters as Richard Price
and Joseph Priestley for the political theology they preached.
One should certainly ask, on what grounds Burke attacked these firm,
and most of the time worthy believers of human reason? Well, to be sure,
not on the grounds of irrationality, either in the sense of a religious mysti-
cism or of a Romantic form of it. I would argue Burke himself is to be
18 F. HÖRCHER
construed as an enlightened thinker, not an obscure believer of secret dog-

mas. His doubts in the power of reason in politics are not rooted in reli-
gious or other forms of irrationalism. His anti-rationalist argument is
limited in the Reflections to social and political issues. As he sees it, con-
trary to what is propagated by the “new conquering empire of light and
reason” the reason of an individual human being is not necessarily reliable
when it comes to the creation of new social or political systems.7 He pro-
poses that we should not rely solely on its power; on the contrary, we need
“to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason” in these
spheres.8 As it turns out he thinks that in social and political matters indi-
viduals lack the experience required to collect the empirical data which can
help to build up general principles of politics. “The science of govern-
ment… (is) a matter which requires experience, and even more experience
than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observ-
ing he may be.”9
3
Burke seems to have learnt a lot from his contemporary, the Scottish-born
British philosopher and historian, David Hume. It was Hume, who in his
essay Of the Perfect Commonwealth argued that “the bulk of mankind” is
“governed by authority, not reason”, and therefore it is better to rely on a
power that is established, than on experimenting with new solutions.10 He
was criticizing Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, works, which aimed at
great political transformations, but whose plans—when more closely
inspected—proved to be nothing more than plainly imaginary. Philosophers
should avoid, so argued Hume, to get directly involved in the affairs of the
state, as their theories might have very negative side effects (the famous
unintended consequences of the Scottish Enlightenment) which they can-
not control from the far distance.11 Philosophers should also take into
account, warned Hume, that in human nature “Reason is, and ought only
to be the slave of the passions.”12 And it was Hume who famously left his
cell when he felt that his “reason is incapable of dispelling” his “philo-
sophical melancholy and delirium”, and let nature solve the problem left
unsolved by philosophical reason: “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon,
I converse, and am merry with my friends, and when… I would return to
these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous.”13
I would like to argue that Burke shares this scepticism concerning the
intrusion of philosophy into common life, and it might have been actually
influenced by Hume—but this is less important for us here. The more

important fact is that Burke distinguished his own position from that of a
metaphysically inclined philosopher: while the latter had a role “to mark
the proper ends of government”, “(it) is the business of the politician,
who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those
ends, and to employ them with effect.”14 The important thing for us here
is that after his own early efforts to write philosophy Burke lost his illu-
sions about philosophy’s practical use. To put it more precisely: he seems
to have lost his belief in the capacity of philosophy to transform (to make
better) politics and society. An important part of this disillusionment must
have been his decision to become an active politician. The decision to
become one was in a way a necessary one. As it is argued, “Need for a
secure income led him into political service.”15 But interestingly as well as
importantly, the way to politics led him first to become a writer of works
of philosophical interest (Vindication (1756), Philosophical Enquiry
(1757)) and a public figure.16 The young Burke became the editor of the
brand new, but soon influential Annual Register, an annually published
organ both cultural and political, originally bearing the subtitle “A View
of the History, Politicks and Literature of the Year…”, and published by
his earlier publishers. Due to the fact of receiving a well-founded educa-
tion at Trinity College Dublin first, and then a legal apprenticeship at the
Middle Temple in London, he had no problem in joining public debates
in Doctor Johnson’s London.17 As a result of his public recognition and
his success as editor he became an MP in 1765 and remained in the
Westminster in that position—except for a short interval—for almost
30 years, until he withdrew from politics in 1794. Although he was an
intellectually minded person who was unable to achieve political success as
a political leader, he soon became a distinctive voice in the Parliament,
arguing for a number of rather different cases with a rhetorical skill hardly
paralleled in his time. His success depended on a personal combination of
his intellectual inspirations: on his belief in God and the responsibility of
the educated, on his earlier philosophical interests both in Berkeley-like
scepticism and in Lockean empiricism, and his political experience in the
British Parliament, as well as his familiarity with the great Aristotelian–
Ciceronian tradition of political and moral philosophy. It is his remarkable
achievement to create from this colourful intellectual baggage his very
characteristic political convictions and his particular Burkean manners.
As far as the conceptual distinction between rationality versus rational-
ism is concerned, Burke’s main intention in the Reflections is to show that
20 F. HÖRCHER
both the French revolutionaries and their British advocates have a specific
understanding of the relationship between reason and politics, and this
understanding is based on a misconception of the nature of politics, and of
the possibility of philosophical ideals to get realized. As he sees it, the phi-
losophes—he often uses the term sophisters, comparing them to the soph-
ists of ancient Greece—think that their philosophical ideals can directly be
planted into the practical field of politics. In other words, they do not
recognize the difficulties, indeed the risks of efforts to change the social
and political machinery, and the difference in nature of the terrain of phi-
losophy, often identified by Burke as metaphysics, and that of practical
politics. This is, in fact, a philosophical mistake on their part, a conceptual
confusion of the two realms. Burke in a famous quote sharply criticizes
this confusion of reality and the ideal world of philosophical concepts:
“The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in propor-
tion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.
The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not
impossible to be discerned.(…) Political reason is a computing principle:
adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally, and not meta-
physically or mathematically, true moral denominations.”18 The extremity
Burke refers to, here, is, of course, philosophical extremism: pushing your
point too far. In certain cases, this strategy pays well in philosophy. But in
politics it is by definition dangerous. Apparently, Burke finds similarity
between such radical thought and religious enthusiasm. His criticism of
Priestly and Price is formulated in the British enlightenment discourse on
enthusiasm, as it was analysed most prominently by Pocock. This discourse
had the Glorious Revolution as its political background, based on a com-
promise between opposing camps both in theology and in politics, which
is only possible if moderation (both in religion and in politics) is taken
seriously. The revolution settlement which covered the whole eighteenth
century until the time of the French Revolution “had come about without
civil war, without a dissolution of the government, and without any inter-
lude of rule by plebeian religious fanatics”.19 Pocock went so far as to
argue that in the age “English and Scottish political thought was deeply
antirevolutionary”, which is quite close to his further conceptual innova-
tion of a Conservative Enlightenment. As Pocock points out the motiva-
tion behind the characteristic language of political theology used by Burke
is not primarily motivated by religion or even by a reactionary attitude.
Rather, it is the result of sensing an attack on the terms of the revolution
settlement of the Glorious Revolution by the radical dissenters. The point
is illustrated by a reference to the similarity of the argumentation of

Burke’s and Gibbon’s respective criticism of Priestley: “Both the pious
Burke and the sceptic Gibbon pointed to this passage from Priestley’s
writings as evidence that the wild fanaticism (or ‘enthusiasm’) of the
seventeenth-century sectarians was not extinct.”20
4
One point still needs clarification. Burke did not discount passions from
political and social affairs, as a radical Stoic would do. Rather, what he sug-
gests is in fact a balance between the passions and reason: a rational con-
trol of passions, and (natural) passions controlling the dogmatism of
reason. “It is true indeed that enthusiasm often misleads us. So does rea-
son too. Such is the Condition of our Nature… But we act most when we
act with all the Powers of the Soul; when we use Enthusiasm to elevate and
expand our Reasoning; and our Reasoning to check the Roving of our
Enthusiasm.”21
This demand for an equilibrium between passions and reason (as
opposed to Hume’s hierarchy between the two) is fairly easy to under-
stand even today for those who are familiar with the specific development
of the Ancien Régime in Britain. The possibility of the birth of a commer-
cial society in Britain was created by finding a modus vivendi between the
opposing social camps of the higher nobility and the middle classes, and it
was something the Whig oligarchy had to defend, and could defend suc-
cessfully only, if religious debates were not opened fully in political con-
texts, even if it was a rather shaky compromise, as pointed out by Jonathan
Clark in his influential account of the Ancien Régime.22 But one should
question what exactly has this to do with the French affair. After all, British
deists did not share the radical sceptical epistemology of the French philos-
ophes. Priestley’s sermon of 1789 made Burke recognize that there were
parallel tendencies in both societies to deconstruct the political edifice of
Church and State which guaranteed the success of eighteenth-century
British politics. Pocock underlines this parallelism the following way “In
England, there was now a militant (and anti-Trinitarian) movement with
goals extending as far as a separation of church and state; in France, there
was a revolutionary movement, attacking monarchy and aristocracy, aim-
ing at the reduction of the Church to a branch of the national govern-
ment, and employing the rhetoric of an anti-Christian philosophical
deism.”23 When Burke, therefore, mentions French sophistry and
22 F. HÖRCHER
metaphysics, he is in fact attacking this effort on the French side, built on

a politically radicalized philosophical vocabulary, as one could see in the
writings of people like Voltaire to Rousseau, but influencing people, like
Priestley and Price, in Britain, too.
5
If rationalism in the French Enlightenment style is dangerous for the
political equilibrium of late eighteenth-century Britain, what has Burke on
offer as an alternative? There are interpreters who suggest that in fact he
has no alternative but either reactionary slogans, or empty rhetoric which
has nothing to help a Britain on its way through industrial revolution in
industry to global commerce in business and to global power in interna-
tional relations.
In fact there are two interrelated answers to the above seemingly diffi-
cult question I would like to refer to. One is that, against the philosophical
radicalism of the French Enlightenment intent on working out an apoliti-
cal idea of a priori reason which can radicalize the whole Europe, Burke is
dedicated to work out a discourse of “reason of state”. This interpretation
of Burke is by now well developed, as we can see from the publications of
people like Armitage, Whelan and Richard Bourke. The argument here is
that in fact Burke belongs to that European trend of political thought,
which appeared on the scene in the late sixteenth century, and tried to
provide ideological support for the newly emerging centralized, territorial
or national state before, and, even more, after the birth of the Westphalian
system. In accounts like those of Richard Tuck and Maurizio Viroli we
have sweeping narratives of this development in political theory. Although
they present the new vocabulary as an alternative to the traditional dis-
course of political virtue, I would like to underline the continuity between
the two, at least in Burke’s understanding of the term.
But there is an alternative answer to the question of Burke’s alternative.
This is provided by those theorists who regard Burke as a late Aristotelian–
Ciceronian thinker, who keeps moving within the rhetorical orbit of a
discourse of prudence or practical reason. In what follows, I will do two
things. First, I will show that this second interpretative strategy has a very
strong and convincing potential. Secondly, I will try to prove that in fact
the central concept of practical reason understood as a virtue is in fact
closely connected to the reason of state discourse mentioned before. In
other words, I will argue that the two answers are connected because
Burke indeed was an advocate of the virtue of prudence understood as

practical political reason, and that his references to reason of state in fact
belong to this very discourse. That Burke could connect the discourse of
prudence and the discourse of reason of state, I will argue, is a great
achievement not only of his rhetorical skills, but even more importantly of
his political vision of post-Westphalian Europe. As I see his Reflections, it
is the result of his recognition that the novelty of the French Revolution
endangers that vision. The main aim of Burke in this situation is nothing
less but to defend the Westphalian system of national sovereignty against
the discourse of universal political rights, which radicalizes European soci-
eties, and threatens the European equilibrium. To achieve this, however,
he in fact introduces the basic elements of a new ideology in the Reflections:
that of modern Conservatism.
To prove this thesis, I will rely on Canavan. He shows how political
reason in general, and prudence in particular is presented in Burke’s
Reflections. Burkean political reason, he claims, does not look for universal
truths. Rather, it is interested in policy formation and decision making.24
First of all, the aim of political action should be “the good of the com-
monwealth”.25 But this is a good which is concrete, practicable, complex
and imperfect good. Canavan convincingly showed that indeed Burke’s
focus is on this non-ideal components of the political good. He quotes
Burke claiming that “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society
are of the greatest possible complexity.”26 Canavan’s Burke does not
believe that philosophers or metaphysicians can simplify this complex, on
the contrary, as he sees it, if they try to do so, they can cause even more
serious problems: “Indeed, all that wise men even aim at is to keep things
from coming to the worst. Those who expect perfect reformations, either
deceive or are deceived miserably.”27
This minimalist account by Canavan of the chances of pure reason in
Burke’s account of politics does not mean, however, giving up the human
capacity to reason. It is only a recognition by Burke that human rationality
is seriously limited in this realm. But there is a chance to learn, and to
acquire skills which might help to make decisions which will help to draw
rational conclusions that would avoid the worst scenarios. Burke’s down-
scaled political reason is, therefore, not radical scepticism; neither is it
nihilism or a form of post-modern anything goes. When it is acquired
through experience and through learning from earlier examples, Burkean
political reason can in fact come close to Aristotelian–Ciceronian pru-
dence. Canavan, as we saw, identifies the practical concerns of Burke’s
24 F. HÖRCHER
political thought with the traditional idea of prudence. Instead of affirm-

ing a priori reason in human affairs, the wise statesman acquires prudential
skills. Burke’s prudence is the result of a certain self-fashioning on the part
of the political agent—to learn to live together with the infirmities of
human social and political life. It means to give up the hope to solve politi-
cal problems, even more to solve them universally—prudence cannot help
to find generally valid rules and norms: “The rules and definitions of pru-
dence can rarely be exact; never universal.”28 Rather they can lead—but
only imperfectly—to practical solutions in given hard cases. Burke imag-
ines prudence along the lines of the moral sense of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson
and the Scottish school: political wisdom is an ability to find the proper (or
the least improper) judgement in a given case—but not by deducting it a
priori, not even by building it up inductively from empirical data. Rather,
it is found by something like a skill, which is the result of practice, like the
ability of swimming or riding the bicycle, habituated, but most often not
reflected. “No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They
are a matter incapable of exact definition…” the British thinker cautions
his readers already in 1770, but, he adds, they will help “a prince to find
out such a mode of government, and such persons to administer it, as will
give a great degree of content to his people; without any curious and anx-
ious research for that abstract, universal, perfect harmony, which while he
is seeking, he abandons those means of ordinary tranquillity which are in
his power without any research at all.”29
Canavan’s point about Burkean prudence as a practical skill is backed
by the fact that since the Glorious Revolution the British political elite has
accumulated a reservoir of political experience on which individual players
could build their own strategies. This experience had the ideas of balance
and compromise in its centre. This striving for compromise, argued Burke,
enforced by human selfishness as well as by the nature of political reason,
has been the great lesson which is neglected by political Platonists,
Kantians and other universalists, like dissenter British or philosophical
French Deists. “For you know, that the decisions of prudence (contrary to
the system of the insane reasoners) differ from those of judicature; and
that almost all the former are determined on the more or the less, the
earlier or the later, and on a balance of advantage and inconvenience, of
good and evil.”30 It is here, that we can search for Burke, the founding
father of modern British conservatism. After all, what he claimed was that
the tradition of British politics, built up in the revolution settlement and
afterwards in the eighteenth century and covered by the term of the
ancient constitution, is worthy to preserve. And this preservation can be a

maxim of politics, which, however, does not exclude, in fact encourages
smooth, step by step reformation.
But Canavan has a larger point as well. He wants to point out that the
British form of cautious compromise, favoured by Burke, is not simply
advocating unprincipled, or even sometimes immoral political dealing.
Rather, the prudence which is referred here, is in fact the traditional
Christian virtue of prudentia. Through it, Burke connects his theory of
compromise, balance and other prudential considerations to the Christian
natural law doctrine. According to Canavan, Burke’s theory this way is
grounded not only in traditional Christian moral theory, but also in its
metaphysical basis, that of a created universe of order. After all, Christian
prudence was not a denial of eternal truths or the natural law. Neither did
Aristotle deny the metaphysical teachings of Plato, when he worked out
his practical philosophy. He only tried to work out a more elaborate sys-
tem of application between universal rationality and practical reason. It is
in this context that one should understand Burke’s famous passage of
social contract, as a metaphysically enlarged version of “partnership in all
science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all
perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many
generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are liv-
ing, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who
are to be born.” In Burke’ vision of natural order a politically right practi-
cal decision will be in harmony with the precepts of a universal order,
because “(e)ach contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great
primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher
natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed
compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all
moral natures, each in their appointed place.”31
It is this created order which ensures that prudence rightly conceived
will never lead us against the basic moral values. In other words, Burke
seems to claim that there is an order between the principles of external
order and the demands of our human conscience, such that “acting in
accordance with the natural law, man obeys God, but is at the same time
most true to himself.”32 As Canavan presents it, Burke’s use of the concept
of prudence was meant to bridge the distance between invariable general
principles, which cannot be expected to purely prevail in political life, and
the constantly varying circumstances which threaten us with moral relativ-
ism in a Machiavellian sense. “Circumstances perpetually variable,
26 F. HÖRCHER
directing a moral prudence and discretion, the general principles of which

never vary, must alone prescribe a conduct fitting on such occasions.”33 In
this mediating function, Burke’s prudence, which always has the right
aims, cannot adhere to the unconditionality of logic, as a guide of human
action: “The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematicks.
They are broad as deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they
demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made
by the process of logick, but by the rules of prudence.”34
6
If Canavan is on the whole right in his appreciation of Burke’s concept of
political reason or prudence, there is one more step one can make in this
direction. One should realize that the Christian understanding of the car-
dinal virtue of prudentia belongs, in fact, to the great Aristotelian–
Ciceronian tradition of political thought.35 In this tradition, prudence is
not a Machiavellian skill, or a source of moral relativism. Rather, it is a key
virtue for the human being, who is understood as a zoon politikon, a politi-
cal being. To understand the full relevance of what this tradition teaches
about the proper prudential action in the political community, one should
look at the definition of phronesis in the 6th book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics. Or better to say, one should realize the significance that Aristotle
distinguishes between practical wisdom (phronesis), craft knowledge
(techné), scientific knowledge (epistemé) and theoretical wisdom (sophia)
or understanding (nous). But the relevant point of Aristotle here with the
distinction is not that these forms of knowledge should be interpreted
along a hierarchy from the one whose share of reason is the smallest pro-
portion to the one which is fully immersed into it. Rather, these are all
different forms of knowledge—in other words even practical wisdom is
also fully reasonable. The difference lies partly in what is known by the
given sort of knowledge, and what function (sort of activity) is expected as
a result of it. Without going into finer details let us recall how he defines
practical wisdom. It is knowledge of human things, in order to prepare
deliberation to act properly. In other words, it is “a true state involving
reason, a practical one, concerned with what is good or bad for a human
being”.36 It is very telling that after this definition, he offers Pericles and
people like him as examples of those people who are practically wise
“because they have a theoretical grasp of what is good for themselves and
for human beings, and we think household managers and politicians are
like that.”37 If practical knowledge is about human beings, whose action

can be otherwise, this knowledge cannot be universalized in the way sci-
entific knowledge, for example, is universalizable. Scientific knowledge is
about the parts of nature whose starting-points do not admit of being
otherwise. Practical knowledge, however, is only probable, as we would
say today, according to Aristotle.
The point to be made here is that Burke’s criticism of rationality is not
a criticism of the use of reason as such. Rather, it analysis those typical
sorts of mistaken uses of reason which can cause more problem than what
they actually solve. His fierce judgement of metaphysicians and sophistry
is a criticism of those who think that what they claim is true metaphysically
should be realized in practice, and possibly right now. Burke’s criticism is
a rational criticism of rationalism, in the sense of Aristotle’s concept of
practical wisdom (phronesis), claiming that in politics this is the form of
knowledge one should rely on.
7
By now I take it to be established that Burke’s prudence is to be inter-
preted as belonging to the Aristotelian–Ciceronian account of virtues, also
taken over by Christianity. I also claim that Burke’s reference to reason of
state should be understood in this Aristotelian–Ciceronian and Christian
context. If Canavan is right, and order (ordo) is a key principle of the cre-
ated universe, then it seems that his views of reason of state should be
interpreted in the context of an international order. This supposition,
which we do not have time here to fully verify, is supported by the insight
that balance was a key notion for Burke in internal affairs, and the concept
of “balance of power” is well known to be his guiding principle in interna-
tional affairs.38 And as balance and compromise did not mean in his views
of internal British affairs a denial of conflict and competition, his balance
of power and reason of state are only two poles of the same equilibrium,
and not a means to universal peace à la Kant. A state in the international
arena is subject to the same sorts of constraints as the individual human
agent or the statesman in the internal affairs of the political community. If
prudence explains the rationale of the individual political agent, some-
thing similar should be expected from the state as well, as a political agency.
Prudence in the internal context is, therefore, something similar to reason
of state in the international one. If prudence does not conclude in moral
relativism, neither should a reliance on reason of state mean simply the
28 F. HÖRCHER
affirmation of the common place that might is right. As compromise and

order are the most important values in internal affairs, so a balance of
power is required in the international arena to keep order. This is why it
seems Armitage is right, when he claims in connection with Burke’s under-
standing of reason of state: “The opponent of ‘Machiavellian’ expediency
could equally well be the proponent of Ciceronian ‘necessity’”.39 Armitage
also points out convincingly that Burke’s recognition of a French threat to
European peace was based on notions of prudence, reason of state, and
international order. “As Burke showed with an appendix of extracts from
Vattel, intervention against France would be a ‘prudent precaution’ for all
European states precisely because the French republic presented an
unprecedented threat to their natural reasons of state—their interests,
their security, and above all their shared political maxims as partners in the
commonwealth of Europe.”40
8
To conclude: in this paper I argued that by his full blown and sometimes
rather violent attacks on French “sophistry” and “metaphysics” Burke did
not become a prophet of irrationality or a moral relativist. Rather, I
claimed, he criticized the radical use of universal metaphysical claims (like
those of the new human rights of the French philosophes and of their
British dissenter sympathizers) in the realm of politics as a form of enthu-
siasm, which reminded him of earlier British debates of political theology
which lead to long-lasting conflicts and political disorder in the seven-
teenth century. His offer, instead of such sophistry and metaphysics, was
to rely on the practical knowledge of practising politicians which had been
accumulated by generations of the British political elite by his time, and
which he describes as a form of practical virtue or prudence. Prudence, as
he understood it, aimed to preserve what proved its usefulness, but not in
an unprincipled way. Rather, prudential action aims to preserve order, and
it was for this purpose that it was ready to accept compromises and even
reforms, when really necessary.
While prudence described the rationale of the action of the individual
human agent, the term reason of state describes the same sort of princi-
pled, yet flexible sort of rationality on the level of the state. It does not
exclude exceptional measures when necessity requires it, as it was accepted
also in the prudential paradigm of the Aristotelian–Ciceronian tradition.
By relying on this acclaimed reason of state, states did not behave
irrationally or immorally. On the contrary, their aim was to serve the com-
mon interest of their own community and the international community.
In both of these realms, the rational aim was to preserve order, which was
made possible in those contexts not by realizing universal truths, but by
accepting the balance of powers and conserving the compromised results
of political experience.
Notes
1. Rabaud de St. Etienne, quoted by Edmund Burke: Revolutionary Writings.
Reflections on the Revolution in France and the first Letter on a Regicide
Peace, ed. Iain Hampsher-Monk, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2014, 171. (All further quotations of the Reflections are from this edition.)
2. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1953, 300–314.
3. Ibid., 311, 313.
4. For this position see for example: Albert O. Hirschman: The Rhetoric of
Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.; Corey Robin: The Reactionary
Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 2011.
5. As for his relationship to Catholicism, Pocock reminds us that “it is prob-
able that the families of both /of his parents/ had only recently converted
from Catholicism.” He also adds, however that “he was a baptized mem-
ber of the Church of Ireland and a vehement defender of the Church of
England.” Both of these quotes in: J.G.A. Pocock: ‘Introduction’, in:
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. with intr. and
notes by J.G.A. Pocock, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/
Cambridge, 1987, vii–xlviii, ix.
6. Pocock’s position was first formulated in his book on The Ancient
Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957). Its more elaborate version is to
be found in his own edition of the Reflections, for details see above.
Canavan’s relevant piece is: Francis P. Canavan S.J.: Edmund Burke’s
Conception of the Role of Reason in Politics, The Journal of Politics, vol. 21.,
No. 1, Febr. 1959, 60–79.
7. Burke: Reflections, 79.
8. Burke: Reflections, 35. See also his statement: “There is, by the essential
fundamental constitution of things, a radical infirmity in all human contriv-
ances.” The Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (4
vols., London, 1844), III., 117.
30 F. HÖRCHER
10. David Hume: ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in his: Essays, Moral,

Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, Liberty Fund, Minneapolis,
1985, 512.
11. Craig Smith: The Scottish Enlightenment, Unintended Consequences and the
Science of Man, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, vol. 7., No. 1, March
2009, 9–28
12. David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature – Reprinted from the original
edition in three volumes and edited, with an analytical index, by L. A. Selby-
Bigge, Revised by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1978, 415.
13. Hume: Treatise, 269. In this interpretation of Hume’s scepticism of solv-
ing metaphysical dilemmas, I rely on Donald Livingston’s works on Hume,
most importantly on his Hume’s Philosophy of Common Sense, Chicago
University Press, Chicago, 1984, and his Philosophical Melancholy and
Delirium. Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago and London, 1998.
14. Edmund Burke: Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770),
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols., the Rivington
edition, London, 1803–1827, II. 335.
15. Iain Hampshire-Monk: ‘Editor’s introduction’, in: Edmund Burke:
Reflections, xi-xxxvi., xi.
16. For a short account of his life, see: Ian Harris: Edmund Burke, The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/burke/>
17. For Burke’s early education in Dublin, we have by now Lock’s and Bourke’s
detailed biographical monographs. See F. P. Lock: Edmund Burke. Volume
I: 1730–1784, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999. and F. P. Lock: Edmund
Burke. Volume II: 1784–1797, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006. Richard
Bourke: Empire and revolution: the political life of Edmund Burke. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 2015. For an early effort to take Burke’s edu-
cational background into account, see Francis P. Canavan: S.J.: Edmund
Burke’s College Study of Philosophy, Notes and Queries, N.S. IV (1957),
538–543. Both Johnson and Burke were founding members of The Club
proposed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1764. Yet their political positions were
much of the time antagonistic, as they were the spokespersons of the Tory
and the Whig cause, respectively.
19. Pocock: Introduction, xi.
20. Pocock: Introduction, xviii.
21. Edmund Burke: Religion of No Efficacy Considered as a State Engine,
Notebook, 68–69. Quoted in: Richard Bourke: Empire, 102.
22. Jonathan Clark: English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and
Political Practice During the Ancien Regime, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1985. 2nd (revised) ed. English Society 1660–1832: Religion,
Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2000.
23. Pocock: ‘Introduction’, 27.
24. See Canavan: Edmund Burke, 62.
25. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 63, quoting: Burke: Letter to Sir Hercules
Langriske, 3 Jan. 1792, Works, VI, 318.
26. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 64, quoting: Burke: Reflections, 62.
27. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 65, quoting: Burke to Shackleton, 15 Aug 1770,
Correspondence, I, 231.
28. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68, quoting First Letter on a Regicide Peace
(1796), Works, VIII, 87.
29. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68–69, quoting Thoughts on the Cause of the
Present Discontents (1770), Works, II, 269.
30. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68, quoting Letter to Sir Hercules Langriske
(1792), Works, VI, 309.
32. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 74.
33. Burke: Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), Works, VII, 197–8.
quoted by Canavan: Edmund Burke, 76.
34. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 77., quoting Burke: Appeal from the New to the
Old Whigs (1791), Works, VI, 97.
35. For a full blown elaboration of this argument see my A Political Philosophy of
Conservatism. Prudence, Moderation and Tradition, Bloomsbury, London
etc., 2020.
36. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, tr. by C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing
Company, Indianapolis, Cambridge, 2014, 1140b1, 102.
37. Ibid.
38. Burke wrote: “The balance of power had been ever assumed as the com-
mon law of Europe at all times, and by all powers.” Burke: Third Letter on
a Regicide Peace (1796), Works, IX, 338.
39. David Armitage: Edmund Burke and reason of state. Journal of the History
of Ideas vol. 61., No. 4, 2000, 617–634., 620.
40. Armitage: Edmund Burke, 631. Armitage’s reference is to this work by
Burke: Edmund Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), in
Writings and Speeches, ed. Mitchell, VIII, 474; the “Appendix” of extracts
from Vattel is inexplicably omitted from this edition. For a fragment of
Burke’s working notes on Vattel see Sheffield City Libraries Wentworth
Woodhouse Muniments, 10/27, (passage transcribed from Vattel, Droit
des Gens, II. 12. 196–97, printed in Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the
Allies [London, 1793], 207–9).
CHAPTER 3
Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy

Friendship Between Reason and Freedom
Travis D. Smith and Jin Jin
A Science of Freedom
Free persons and societies depend on the confident exercise of human
reason. Our capacity to gain significant understanding of ourselves and the
world, and our ability to take actions that improve our lives and society,
are worthy of some pride. Despotism flourishes when people are con-
vinced that reasonable people can accomplish little through their own
efforts. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) worried that individuals in
modern democracies would allow their freedoms to fall fallow in the belief
that irresistible historical forces govern their lives. It was an audacious
variety of rationality that engendered this fatalistic attitude, however.
“New kinds of slavery” follow, Tocqueville finds, when reason becomes
“insolent” (OR 300n53; see also DA 641, 662; Rec. 62).1 Having divined
our collective destiny, Enlightenment thinkers derived an imperative to
T. D. Smith (*)
Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
e-mail: travis.smith@concordia.ca
J. Jin
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
e-mail: jin.jin@wisc.edu

34 T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN
realize it through ambitious innovations in social engineering. Those who

claimed to be qualified sought authority to execute this plan.2 Unimpressed
by ordinary personal and political liberties, they promised emancipation
and equality (especially equality!)3 for all, armed with the rectitude and
certitude that only a truncated conception of human nature can bring.
In pre-Revolutionary France, the abstract theories of intellectuals who
had little actual political experience paved the way for rationalistic ideolo-
gies and political institutions premised on them (OR 197). Democratic
souls, Tocqueville observes, make recourse to general ideas and causes in
explaining the world. They imagine that systems are readily transformed
by the imposition of abstract principles and universal rules (DA 411, 415),
without being particularly solicitous of specific persons or complex par-
ticulars (DA 456–57). Proceeding apace from the top, the reconstruction
of society shall penetrate the foundations of society (OR 196–97). French
philosophes were hostile toward the biblical tradition, yet their ideologies
affirmed absolutes and resembled religious crusades (OR 99). Their fol-
lowers who sought power exhibited a “rival’s pride” toward God and a
“parvenu’s pride” toward human beings (OR 300n53).
Tocqueville is a modern liberal,4 and his ideas are largely informed by
Aristotle. He recognizes that politics should not be mistaken for what is
highest in human beings. As political animals, exclusion from political par-
ticipation is dehumanizing, but so, too, is being totally dominated by
political priorities. We are also rational beings. Philosophical or scientific
inquiries inherently exceed politics and cannot be subordinated to political
purposes without serving prejudice and power rather than truth.
Tocqueville’s political philosophy recommends distance between politics
and philosophy for the sake of both—or rather, for our sake, as free actors,
and to prevent “stagnation of thinking” (DA 410).
Through our reading of Tocqueville, we discern that politics and phi-
losophy have an uneasy friendship because reason and liberty are indis-
pensable to each other and yet in tension. Intellectual integrity and
discovery require freedom, and freedom requires reason so as to avoid
descending harmfully into license.5 Excessive rationalism, however, is the
enemy of freedom of action and thought alike (DA 12)—both in the
minds of those who adhere to it, and in the lives of those subjected to it.
Human beings reach their potential only through responsible voluntary
activity, in imperfect circumstances with incomplete information, in asso-
ciation with others who are likewise imperfect but free and reasonable,
settling for results that are less than ideal. Political rationalism assumes
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and patience; but if they are associated with anxiety and impatience,
their usefulness is completely frustrated. If relatives are chosen, they
should be such as know how to regulate their feelings—when to
withhold, as well as when to impart. On the other hand, those who
have no feeling, no commiseration, (and there are such among
women), should be fully excluded from such an occasion, and there
should not be one person present as a mere spectator. But of
ordinary attendants, the selection of a good nurse is of chief
importance. It should be essential that she have discharged maternal
duties; that she be experienced—good tempered—moderately active
—of good understanding—modest, not forward; and not loquacious.
She should know how to discharge the duties of her office without
stepping beyond it. She should have judgment enough to buoy up
the spirits when they needlessly flag, and caution enough not to
permit unusual symptoms to arise without the cognizance of those
on whom that responsibility more particularly rests.
Persons whose minds have been little cultivated, are apt to seek
undue commendation, and to gain by improper means the
confidence of their employer. However well disposed and well
informed the lady, perhaps her knowledge of parturition may be
circumscribed by her personal experience. But the nurse is
supposed to have gained much knowledge, beyond the immediate
obligations of her own station, by her intercourse with medical
practitioners. She thinks herself competent to the comparison of the
different methods of management which may consist in mere
circumstantial differences, but which by her are made important. She
thinks herself competent to change diet, to administer medicine, to
regulate the time of rising and sitting up, in the absence of the
practitioner, and often even contrary to his orders. Because they
have seen spirituous liquor given in some cases without actual injury,
they think it may be given in all; and it is often only by a positive
injunction this can be counteracted. They propagate unnecessary
follies respecting the peculiar dangers of certain days. And if the
patient be dejected, they rally them, and often urge the necessity of
premature rising to dinner or tea, to promote cheerfulness. Within the
last few weeks, though spirits had been decidedly prohibited in a
case of first parturition, as soon as the practitioner had left, the nurse
so boldly urged some brandy, that the lady could not refuse
compliance. The obtrusiveness and loquacity of this person very
materially affected the recovery of an interesting woman. We
express ourselves strongly and decidedly on this point, because we
pity a delicate inexperienced female, who happens at so critical a
moment to be managed by an ignorant or obtrusive nurse; and
because we have no question that most of the evils which spring up
subsequently to parturition, arise from the contravention of proper
orders, either respecting quietude or diet. During the first few days or
week in all cases the entire regulation of even minute particulars
should be under the direction of the medical attendant; and in some
cases this attention must be carried farther. It must not be tolerated
that a woman who shall have had the longest experience, and who
may even be able to detect striking differences, should prescribe
either counter to established regulations, or when medical advice is
accessible. There certainly are instances of sudden transition, in
which the nurse must act according to her best judgment, and in
which, if wrong, she is not blame-worthy. When on this topic, I
cannot totally exonerate the accoucheur from some connivance in
the assumed importance of the nurse; and through a want of
explicitness and decision, she has often been left either to the
selection of her own plans, or plans have been so carelessly or
loosely suggested, that it may justly be questioned whether it was
intended they should be enforced.
It would indeed be a great advantage to society, if persons of this

description were not permitted to assume the office of nurse without
testimonials: but as the field is now open, not only should ladies be
circumspect in the selection, but it behoves the guardians of the
public health, even if it be unsolicited, to counsel their friends in the
choice. In their intercourse with nurses, they are best qualified to
assert their respective merits, and they ought to distinguish between
the meritorious and the ignorant or froward.
At the time of child-birth, there are some practices which are

extremely hurtful, and which cannot always be guided by
professional advice. And it would be well for ladies themselves to
predetermine in what manner these things should be regulated. The
exhaustion consequent to child-birth, has occasioned the pretty
general custom of allowing the patient to lay an hour undisturbed;
but at the end of this hour, it is often inevitable, whatever the degree
of indisposition, that the patient must be raised into an erect posture,
before she can be placed in bed, owing to the improper arrangement
of dress and bed-clothes.
Hemorrhage, fainting, and many inconveniences under these

circumstances, are not unusual. Amongst the higher and more
intelligent nurses this practice certainly is nearly unknown. Where
there is time before-hand, dress and bed-clothes should be so
managed, that there shall be no occasion to raise the patient from
the horizontal posture. However trivial this may seem, it is, without
the smallest doubt, a frequent cause of very serious alarm; and no
practitioner can safely leave a house till this removal has been
undergone. It would be commendable if ladies themselves exercised
their thoughts on this subject, and on which they may take counsel,
with great propriety, previous to the commencement of indisposition.
We are not now presuming to address the members of the

profession. Yet, for the sake of female practitioners of midwifery, the
unnatural and improper custom of giving opiates immediately after
every case of parturition must be decried. The apology for this
practice is to ease the after-pains; that is, to counteract those
contractions of the womb, by which it regains its natural state.
Truly cases happen in which the constitution sympathizes so

greatly with these pains—the patient becomes so irritable, that an
opiate, seasonably interposed, acts almost as a charm; but when
administered through habit, it checks secretion—constipates the
bowels—prolongs the after-pains—and very seriously affects the
head.
To practitioners of this description, I would also say, that

especially in lingering cases, the management of mind is truly
important. The mind is in the condition of the quickest sensibility.
Every thing transacted about the patient should be done openly. All
whisperings or attempts at secrecy, excite the utmost curiosity, and
essays at evasion only heighten the distress. All allusion to
unfavourable cases should be most sacredly avoided. Nothing
should tempt the individual on whom reliance is placed in these
instances, to concede the truth—a falsehood once detected,
contravenes all future trust; and however there may be exhibited the
external signs of belief the mind will be harassed with the most
painful suspicion. A most guarded prognostic too, not only in
reference to the issue, but the duration, is essentially requisite. The
endurance of pain, ever raises more or less anxiety for ease; and as
in child-birth it is known there is a limit—a period when the trouble
shall instantly cease—there is peculiar desire to ascertain the
probable duration of suffering. The hopes and wishes of practitioners
often seduce them into a definition. The period arrives, and is
succeeded by disappointment—another is fixed, which equally
disappoints the expectation, and ceaselessly enervates the patient.
A disposition in the attendants to excite unwarrantable expectation
too, should be early checked. The solicitous inquiries of the patient,
must be met by a candid avowal of her situation—a decided
assurance, that although it is not possible to define the duration, the
procedure is perfectly safe. A distinct assurance should be given,
that although there are numerous little circumstances which retard or
expedite delivery, they do not affect the termination. That with the
prospect of a safe deliverance, a somewhat prolonged suffering is
comparatively trivial. And, in most cases, however serious, it is easy
to suggest some exemption, for the absence of which thankfulness
should be cultivated.
Varied as the cases of parturition are, if the principle is kept in

view, an intelligent mind will supply the deficiency. And a female will
be conducted through a lingering labor with much less suffering, and
much less exhaustion than under more unguarded treatment. The
choice of food under these circumstances, certainly is not indifferent.
In the time of labor, all the functions are disturbed—not only by
sympathy, but by the positive influence of pain. Such diet should be
adopted as is least irritating, and with most facility is converted into
nutriment. Gruel, preparations of arrow-root, sago, &c., without wine
(except under peculiar circumstances) are best, and the patient
should be encouraged to take them at proper intervals.
After labor, quietude is the chief subsidiary; but some regard must
be had to the state of the patient. The sudden transition from long-
suffering to almost entire case, produces a striking moral effect, and
effusions of grateful expression generally succeed. The stimulus of
distension and pain, being withdrawn, a great degree of faintness
often supervenes. The administration of a small quantity of brandy or
wine in some gruel, is highly proper where this happens in any
threatening degree—but should only be continued till that sensation
is removed. Some ether in camphorated mixture, we have often
seen very speedily remove the faintness and agitation which
succeed delivery.
Soon there is an adaptation to the change—the functions regain

their accustomed office—the palpitation of the heart subsides—the
pulse, which might have been fluttering and intermitting, becomes
regular, though still quick and full. Stimulant substances must be
entirely withdrawn, and gruel, or other simple articles of nutrition
must be substituted.
Often, early after labor, pain and throbbing in the head, aversion
to light and sound arise; attended sometimes with a quick, at others,
a very slow pulse; the latter, indicating a great degree of congestion,
or accumulation of blood in the head. In this case, medical advice
ought to be promptly solicited, especially if it has not subsided by a
gentle aperient—as castor oil. Powerful doses of purging medicine
will become necessary; and, perhaps, bleeding from the arm, or
leeches to the temples, may be required.
Whenever the body becomes sore and painful, especially if it be

attended with suppression of the discharge, constipated bowels, and
fever, no time should be lost in demanding medical assistance.
In child-bed fever, early and free employment of bleeding and

purging, with strict attention to low diet, will almost universally
succeed.
In reference to the child, where there is no disease, the chief

object of attention should be, to secure it against unnecessary
exposure. Too much washing at first may be pernicious; and the
practice of using spirits in these ablutions, merits reprobation. By the
celerity of their evaporation, they produce a degree of cold much
more intense than would be produced by the application of cold
water, which would be universally condemned.
It would be totally incompatible with a small pamphlet, and with

this extemporaneous address, to trace and delineate all the varieties
of child-birth. Yet, we think enough has been suggested to secure as
much safety in the time of parturition, as is attainable amidst the
uncertainties of human life.
Perhaps, however, it is not proper to overlook some peculiarities
in premature birth.
Abortion or miscarriage, which usually is accidental, sometimes

becomes habitual; and at about the same period of conception, on
many successive occasions, this disappointment will happen.
If there is a strong claim in the ordinary occurrences of pregnancy,

for an attentive regard to the condition of mind as well as body, it
acquires its utmost urgency in those conditions in which habitual
miscarriage happens. The claim is urgent in behalf of the unfortunate
individual, whose life is a perpetual series of suffering and anxiety,
who is not only subjected, perhaps, every six or eight months to the
debilitating effect of excessive hemorrhage, but whose mind is
oppressed by disappointment, arising out of domestic and conjugal
relationships, even more heavily than by the influence of personal
suffering.
Until our present knowledge is enlarged respecting the

association of mind and body, and the ultimate connexion of different
systems of structure, we cannot appreciate the extent of moral
influence.
Blushing shews the influence of mind on the circulating system;

loss of appetite and sensation of stricture across the stomach, its
influence on that organ; and perhaps the diaphragm, palpitation on
the heart. Various phenomena indicate the influence of the mind and
nervous system on secretion and absorption. And although we may
believe the mind to act on the nervous system, that system on the
vascular and absorbent, we never shall fully understand the nature
of most diseases till the nature of this intercourse be more clearly
developed. But if we allow the ascendancy of mind, its agency
becomes most powerful when most sensitive; and when, with this
morbid sensibility, it is most subjected to molestation.
How interesting and impressive are the claims of a female under

these circumstances; and attempts to administer relief, by the
unassisted aid of medicine, will, not unfrequently, issue in
disappointment.
The causes of miscarriage vary; and as various as are the

causes, must be the medical treatment. These causes primarily
belong, in general, to the parent; but they may exist independently in
the conception. With the former only we are interested at present.
They may arise in the parent from either general or local causes.
Every thing affecting the general circulation, deranges that of the
womb in particular. But there are cases, in which there appears
congestion or accumulation in the womb, without any manifest
general disturbance. We must recur to a former observation; for till
we understand the manner by which mind and the nervous system
affect the general circulation of blood, we cannot understand the
phenomena of abortion. Yet, is it a fact, that sudden mental affection,
whether arising from excessive joy or sorrow, disgust or fear,—will
often speedily and inevitably produce it.
And in cases happening without any cognizable incident, analogy

justifies the inference of moral agency, as its predominance in
producing congestion, and in deranging action, in other parts is
perceptible.[5] It is not intended to deny, that mind is often affected
consecutively; and in these cases, there is a pernicious reflected
action on the body.
In the management of these cases, especially when they may be

deemed habitual, moral treatment is in the highest degree
momentous. It is an indispensable pre-requisite, that not only the
judgment, but the candor of the practitioner be fully appreciated,
before perfect acquiescence can be commanded in precautionary
measures. Sacrifices of great domestic interest must often be
required.
It may be necessary to enjoin an almost constant observance of

the horizontal posture; almost total seclusion from social intercourse,
at least such intercourse as may disturb the circulation; and even of
separating, for a considerable time, from conjugal association. And
these measures will never be fully and perseveringly adopted, but
when the mind is satisfied that the advice results from knowledge,
and when the progress is watched by the assiduities of kindness.
Frequent recurrences of discharge and pain, threatening

immediate miscarriage, certainly should not discourage. We have
frequently seen pregnancy go on to its completion, notwithstanding
these occurrences; but a slight deviation from the precepts we have
enjoined may undo all that the efforts of weeks or months had
accomplished. When once the womb has admitted of a full
developement, the change has often been most salutary. The period
of suckling—the lengthened period of freedom from pregnancy,
(which suckling will probably secure), conduces greatly to restore the
constitution, and to enable it to sustain future pregnancies without
inconvenience. In these protracted cases, occasional interposition of
medicine will be useful; but if a protracted course of medicine be
needful, it should be assimilated as much as is practicable with
domestic preparations, except in some anomalous instances.
In the allusions we have made to medical character, let it not be

inferred that the slightest reflection on the Physicians of Her Royal
Highness is designed. Writers in some of the public papers have
cruelly animadverted on the conduct of one of them, at least, in this
momentous event; and the only apology which occurs to us is, that
their censures were the illegitimate though too often fertile offspring
of vehement sorrow. Had the influence of these remarks been limited
to the gentlemen whom more or less they were intended to
reprehend, they would have been comparatively unimportant; but
they are scattered through the kingdom, and, without the slightest
authority, tend to alloy unmingled and consecrated grief. To cherish
the most latent doubt that the illustrious Princess did not derive the
utmost aid from human experience, will heighten and pervert the
general lamentation; and were it possible the surviving Prince could
be accessible to such a feeling, how would it embitter future years,
which, with undissembled sincerity, we hope he will survive, in useful
and happy life!
There are documents, however, before the public, from which

unfavourable inferences have been deduced; and our observations
will be impotent, unless the legitimate tendency of these documents
be traced.
It must be conceded, that interested as we were in the life of Her
Royal Highness, and as we ever have been, and continue to be, in
the life of our truly revered but afflicted Monarch, the brevity of official
communication creates disappointment; but are we justified in
propagating the opinion, that what is withheld is necessarily
unfavourable?
We have been informed, that a respectful solicitation, presented

to one of the Physicians, to publish the Princess’s case, has been
declined; and the prudence of his decision is very perceptible.
It would demand an extraordinary coincidence of rare qualities to

communicate the full result of ocular and tangible observation. To
designate a disease is by no means difficult; but to describe on
paper all the distinctions of an experienced eye, and all the erudition
of habituated touch, and to impart to them the full energy of the
original source of demonstration, would require a power of
delineation which is unattainable. However explicit, therefore, an
attempt might be to detail so affecting a case as this, it is impossible
the contumelious should not find something to censure, and the
wrangler something to dispute; and a fountain of interminable and
painful controversy might be opened.
It seems ostensible, that the honor of attending Her Royal

Highness devolved on Sir Richard Croft by voluntary and personal
choice; and however deeply and mournfully he may review the fall of
so illustrious a personage beneath his own eye, it cannot but ever be
a source of grateful remembrance, that he was the subject of such
distinction. There would be the utmost inconsistency in assigning to
patronage an election like this. Dr. Croft has long occupied an
eminent rank as an accoucheur; and more unequivocal testimony to
his qualification could not be rendered, than that the most clamorous
for public investigation have paid to his talents the meed of praise.
Of the celebrated Dr. Baillie, who occupies pre-eminently the

public confidence, and whose contributions to medical knowledge
will honour his name to the latest posterity, it would be insulting to
offer a defence. Nor indeed are we aware of an implication that
either his conduct or that of the other respectable physician, Dr.
Sims, was deemed impeachable.
Doctors Baillie and Croft seem to have been in attendance early

on the first day, and, in the evening of that day, the latter judged it
expedient to have, at immediate command, the counsel of Dr. Sims.
This, as a precautionary step, is honorable to Dr. Croft, and will ever
shield him against a successful imputation of temerity. It seems
probable, however, that Dr. Sims was not introduced to the Princess
till after the accouchement; and upon this circumstance, much
severity of comment has been indulged.
Advocating, as we have, the moral management of child-birth, we

believe, without the slightest reservation, that the arrangements
which were made, were best adapted to sustain confidence and
courage in a protracted case of natural labor; and that the
unnecessary interference of another practitioner would have been
improper. It is not certain that Dr. Sims was held merely in
reservation; but if he were, on Dr. Croft alone the competency to
judge could rest; and whilst experience justifies his competency, a
most striking pledge is given that he was not actuated by rashness.
A painful reference was made to the preliminary arrangements;

but in us their simplicity excites admiration. There is a certain, and,
perhaps, indispensable attendance on the parturient royal female,
unknown in subordinate society; but irrespective of this, it seems to
have been efficient and not superfluous. Can it be supposed that a
privilege was denied to this amiable Princess, which is claimed by
every woman in the country; that of selecting her own attendants?—
and that no supernumerary solicitous matron should be in waiting—
and that no unnecessary fears should be created by needless
medical introduction, exhibits a regard to moral influence which
should ever be in requisition.
All the lucubrations of censoriousness have not been noticed:—

because, by establishing prudence as well as reputation in the more
prominent and responsible acts, it may safely be believed that
objects of less moment were not disregarded.
To illustrate the cause of death would be indelicate. It was one of

those uncontrolable incidents which characterize the precariousness
of human life, and which must be referred to the “will of God,” the
wisdom of whose providential administration will be developed in a
future world.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Yesterday, Aug. 6, 1801,” (says the late excellent
Bishop Porteus), “I passed a very pleasant day at
Shrewsbury House, near Shooter’s Hill, the residence of
the Princess Charlotte of Wales. The day was fine, and the
prospect extensive and beautiful, taking in a large reach of
the Thames, which was covered with vessels of various
sizes and descriptions. We saw a good deal of the young
Princess. She is a most captivating and engaging child,
and, considering the high station she may hereafter fill, a
most interesting and important one. She repeated to me
several of her hymns with great correctness and propriety;
and on being told that when she went to South-end, in
Essex, as she afterwards did, for the benefit of sea-bathing,
she would then be in my diocese, she fell down on her
knees and begged my blessing.”—Life of Porteus, by
Hodgson, p. 160.
[2] We recollect a most striking instance of this dexterity. An
elderly and most susceptible lady was under the
management of a respectable country practitioner, for a
complication of nervous diseases. On paying one of his
accustomed visits, he was alarmed for the safety of his
patient. She had passed a night of unspeakable agitation,
and her irritability was then excessive. It was attributed to
an idea of having been poisoned by the compounder of her
medicine, and she believed herself in the embrace of
death. “Madam,” said the gentleman peremptorily, “I was
aware of the accident, and brought with me an antidote.”
He had immediate recourse to her former medicine, with
some little disguise, which she took, and soon became
tranquil. It is highly probable, had not some such method
been adopted, she might actually have perished. See also
a very interesting case in the Quarterly Review for July,
1816, p. 397.
[3] I do not think it inconsistent or irrelative to quote a
passage from the Sermon of a celebrated preacher.
“I am afraid that this unusual result should produce an
unhappy effect upon the spirits of those who are
approaching the hour of child-birth. Let them recollect, that
it is promised, ‘the woman shall be saved in childbearing if
she continue in faith, and charity, and holiness, with
sobriety.’ And, although it cannot be concealed that some
sink in the struggle, (and for unfathomable reasons, the
blow has fallen upon that illustrious personage, whose
memory is this day embalmed with a nation’s tears), yet
such occurrences, rare as they comparatively are, should
be no more brooded over, as bearing upon this particular
situation, than any of those calamities which are usually
termed the accidents of life, are considered to affect its
ordinary tenour and duration. It would be ungrateful, it
would be sinful, to draw unfavourable conclusions from
circumstances so extraordinary, against His tenderness
and providence, who hath hitherto delivered, and will still
deliver. Such persons are earnestly and affectionately
exhorted to ‘lift up their eyes unto the hills, whence cometh
their help,’ remembering, that their help cometh from the
Lord, who made the heaven and the earth. And under this
and every other instance of human instability and calamity,
one common principle remains as a hope which cannot be
shaken. We can look from earth to heaven, and say, ‘Thou,
O Lord, remaineth for ever, thy throne from generation to
generation.’”—Dr. Collyer’s Sermon, occasioned by the
Death of the Princess Charlotte.
[4] This caution against disgusting objects does not imply,
that in consequence of mental impression natural
deformities arise. This unquestionably is a popular error,
and the tales in circulation to justify it are either totally
unfounded, or assignable to other causes.
[5] We believe, that in delicate females, unequal distribution
of blood is the cause of that peculiar order of diseases,
denominated nervous.
THE END.
J. M‘Creery, Printer,
Black-Horse-Court, London.
This Day are Published,
DISAPPOINTED HOPE,
A SERMON,
on occasion of the
FUNERAL OF HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS
CHARLOTTE AUGUSTA,
Consort of His Serene Highness Prince Leopold of Saxe Cobourg;

preached in the Church of the United Parishes of St. Swithin
and St. Mary Bothaw, Cannon Street, on Wednesday,
November 19, 1817.
By HENRY GEORGE WATKINS, M. A. Rector,

Price 1s. 6d.
THE NATION IN TEARS,

A SERMON,
occasioned by the
DEATH OF HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS

CHARLOTTE AUGUSTA,

with interesting Anecdotes of Her Royal Highness.
Delivered at Weston Green Chapel, near Claremont, and at Esher.
By the Rev. JAMES CHURCHILL, of Thames Ditton, Surrey.

Price 1s. 6d.
TWO SERMONS,
occasioned by the
DEATH OF HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS

CHARLOTTE AUGUSTA.

preached at Lock’s-Fields Chapel, Nov. 9, 1817.
By the Rev. G. CLAYTON.
USEFUL WORK ON MIDWIFERY.
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PRACTICE OF

MIDWIFERY.
By the late THOMAS DENMAN, M. D. &c. &c.

Fifth Edition, considerably improved, 15s.
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Critics Of Enlightenment Rationalism

1st Edition Edition Gene Callahan

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Fury of Aggression (Dragonfury Book 8) Coreene Callahan

Fury of Frustration (Dragonfury Scotland Book 6)

Fury of Isolation (Dragonfury Scotland Book 5) Coreene

Memory and Enlightenment: Cultural Afterlives of the

“Callahan and McIntyre have brought together a distinguished and cosmopolitan

“This is a remarkable and remarkably comprehensive collection on thinkers who

ISBN 978-3-030-42598-2 ISBN 978-3-030-42599-9 (eBook)

2 Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State 15

3 Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship Between

4 Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism 47

5 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello 61

6 “Pagans, Christians, Poets” 79

8 Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity107

9 Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems125

10 Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism139

11 C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man159

12 Hayek: Postatomic Liberal179

13 “Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical

14 Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism211

15 Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism227

16 Isaiah Berlin on Monism237

17 Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence251

18 Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities263

19 Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of

Corey Abel studied the history of political thought at The London

Nick Cowen has a PhD from the Department of Political Economy,

Ferenc Hörcher is a political philosopher and historian of political

“Morality: Emergentist Ethics” (2010), “From Morality to Spirituality”

Travis D. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia

Gene Callahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre

Enlightenment rationalism may be said to have been birthed with the

© The Author(s) 2020 1

philosophers, economists, political theorists, and urbanists. But there is

almost solely as the result of power relations or unconscious desires,

ineluctably emerging democratic social state. Tocqueville argues that the

and, as such, combines a descriptive and normative epistemology. Holston

and social order, including rational discussion on which it depends, are

Second, Ferrell surveys Berlin’s account of the character of philosophy and

R.G. Collingwood, there is an inherently traditional aspect in human

Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason

© The Author(s) 2020 15

insensibly into an opposition to ‘rationalism’ as such”.3 Here we have

construed as an enlightened thinker, not an obscure believer of secret dog-

influenced by Hume—but this is less important for us here. The more

is illustrated by a reference to the similarity of the argumentation of

metaphysics, he is in fact attacking this effort on the French side, built on

Burke indeed was an advocate of the virtue of prudence understood as

political thought with the traditional idea of prudence. Instead of affirm-

ancient constitution, is worthy to preserve. And this preservation can be a

directing a moral prudence and discretion, the general principles of which

like that.”37 If practical knowledge is about human beings, whose action

affirmation of the common place that might is right. As compromise and

2 Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State 15

3 Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship Between

4 Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism 47

5 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello 61

6 “Pagans, Christians, Poets” 79

8 Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity107

9 Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems125

10 Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism139

11 C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man159

12 Hayek: Postatomic Liberal179

13 “Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical

14 Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism211

15 Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism227

16 Isaiah Berlin on Monism237

17 Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence251

18 Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities263

19 Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of