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II. Burke and the Ancient Constitution—a Problem in the History of Ideas

Part of: Retrospect: The Ancient Constitution and the Languages of Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

J. G. A. Pocock
J. G. A. Pocock
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
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The intention of this paper is to inquire into Burke's doctrine of traditionalism—as it may be termed—from a point of view not quite identical with that usually adopted. The aspect of Burke's thought thus isolated may or may not be the most important or the most characteristic, but it is the most familiar and that with which the student first becomes acquainted. Burke held—to summarize what may be found in a hundred text-books on the history of conservatism—that a nation's institutions were the fruit of its experience, that they had taken shape slowly as the result, and were in themselves the record, of a thousand adjustments to the needs of circumstance, each one of which, if it had been found by trial and error, to answer recurrent needs, had been preserved in the usages and established rules of the nation concerned. He also held that political knowledge was the fruit of experience and that reason in this field had nothing to operate on except experience; from which it followed that, since the knowledge of an individual or a generation of individuals was limited by the amount of experience on which it was based, there was always a case for the view that the reason of the living, though it might clearly enough discern the disadvantages, might not fully perceive the advantages of existing and ancient institutions, for these might contain the fruits of more experience than was available to living individuals as the sum of their personal or reported experience of the world. It also followed that since the wisdom embodied in institutions was based on experience and nothing but experience, it could not be completely rationalized, that is, reduced to first principles which might be clearly enunciated, shown to be the cause of the institutions' first being set up, or employed to criticize their subsequent workings. There was, in short, always more in laws and institutions than met the eye of critical reason, always a case for them undiminished by anything that could be said against them.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , June 1960 , pp. 125 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1960

References

1 Meinecke, F., Die Entstehung des Historismus (2nd edn., Munich, 1946), part 1, ch. viGoogle Scholar; Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, 1945), ch. xxix, 605–7, 612, 614, 618.Google Scholar

2 Meinecke, op. cit. 278.

3 Laslett, P. (ed.), John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1960), introduction,. passim.Google Scholar

4 Burke, , Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Works (Bohn's Libraries edn., 1901), ii, 304–5.Google Scholar

5 The words in quotation marks are, of course, from the closing sentence of Locke's Second Treatise. Burke did not allude to that work in this part of the Reflections.

6 What follows is to some extent a development and reformulation of some points made in Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957)—hereafter referred to as ACFL—especially chs. ii, vii and ix.

7 For the foregoing see ACFL, ch. ii and generally.

8 Burke, op. cit. 306.

9 Burke, op. cit. 307.

10 Burke, ibid.

11 Davies, Irish Reports (1614—London edn. of 1674), preface.

12 Coke, Twelfth Reports, Prohibitions del Roy (12 Co. Rep. 65).

13 Coke, Seventh Reports, Calvin's Case (7 Co. Rep. 3 b).

14 H. A. L. Fisher's preface to his History of Europe, 1946, v.

15 Hobbes, English Works (ed. Molesworth, 1839–45), VI, 5–7, 14–15, 62–3.

16 It is printed as an appendix (pp. 499–513) to vol. v of W. S. Holdsworth's History of English Law. A hint at the date of its composition may be found in John Aubrey's letter of 3 Feb. 1673, in which he seeks to further the publication of a work on law by Hobbes, saying that Hale ‘has read it and much mislikes it’ (Brief Lives, ed. Clark, 1898, 1, 394). It is still very improbable that Aubrey is referring to the Elements of Law, as some most scholars have concluded.

17 Holdsworth, op. cit. v, 501–2.

18 Ibid. 503.

19 Ibid. 504.

20 Holdsworth, op. cit. v, 505.

21 This too was published posthumously in 1714. Since Hobbes's Dialogue was unpublished until 1682, the whole story of the contact between these two minds, of some importance to the understanding of the recurrent themes in English political thought, was overlooked until Holdsworth and Pollock brought it to light.

22 The key passage for the above interpretation of Hale's thought is in ch. IV of his History of the Common Law (2nd edn., 1716, 57–65). See also ACFL, 174–8.

23 Holdsworth, op. cit. v, 499.

24 Burke, , Works (Bohn's Libraries edn., London, George Bell and Sons, 1877), vi, 413–16. This fragmentary study is usually exempted from the controversy concerning the authenticity of the Essay towards the Abridgment of the English History, with which it has been printed.Google Scholar

25 Burke, loc. cit. 414.

26 The speech does not occur in Hansard. In the editions of Burke's collected works it appears in an incomplete form.

27 Burke, loc. cit. 146–7.

28 It is easy, for reasons glanced at earlier in this paper, to think of Locke as if he transformed the whole character of English political thinking and inaugurated a period in which it was conducted exclusively in rationalist terms. The present writer was once led (ACFL, 243) to speak of the customary concept of English law as ‘running underground’ between Hale and Burke, and an American reviewer developed the idea of a ‘rationalist hiatus’ in English thought. To such over–simplifications the history of ideas seems prone.

29 Burke, loc. cit. 148.

30 Laslett, P. (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford, 1956), 7–10.Google Scholar

31 Butterfield, H., George III, Lord North and the People (1949), 341–52Google Scholar; Christopher, Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (1958), ch. III, ‘The Norman Yoke’, 94–122.Google Scholar

32 ACFL, 127.