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“The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals”: Edmund Burke's Defense of Civil Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Richard Boyd
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Extract

Contemporary critics have treated liberalism as synonymous with individualism. In light of this bias, too little attention has been focused on historical variations within the classical liberal tradition. The “associational” contributions of Burke, Tocqueville and other self-conscious liberals have been neglected largely because they do not conform to common assumptions about the contractarian and individualistic bases of liberal thought. This oversight has obscured perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Edmund Burke's political thought: namely, his attention to that domain known in contemporary terms as “civil society.” In his defense of intermediary institutions Burke demonstrates a prescient understanding of the requirements of modern constitutional arrangements. His thoughts on religious groups, political parties, and other intermediary attachments challenge the anti-associational bias of classical liberals such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Madison, and Bolingbroke. Burke's attention to these relationships marks a significant qualification of classical liberalism's early obsession with the perils of pluralism and its dawning sensitivity to the vices of individualism.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , Summer 1999 , pp. 465 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1999

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References

1 For the “liberal” interpretation, see most notably, O'Brien, Conor Cruise, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), esp. “Introduction,” and pp. 595–97Google Scholar. For the “conservative” interpretation, see Kirk, Russell, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958), esp. pp. 7–9, 24–25Google Scholar; Canavan, Francis P., The Political Reason of Edmund Burke (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; and Stanlis, Peter J., Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1965).Google Scholar

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30 Ibid., p. 117.

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71 “I remember an old scholastic aphorism, which says, ‘that the man who lives wholly detached from others, must be either an angel or a devil.’” Cf. Aristotle, , Politics, I,1Google Scholar; quoted in Ibid., p. 190.

72 Ibid., p. 190.

73 Ibid., p. 185–86.

74 Ibid., pp. 185.

75 Aristotle, Politics, Bk. I; Bk. Ill, x, xv.

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77 Sanford Lakoff similarly takes Burke and Tocqueville's attention to pluralism as a distinguishing element of their “liberal conservatism.” See his “Tocqueville, Burke and the Origins of Liberal Conservatism,”esp. p. 456.

78 Here I follow Nancy Rosenblum's multiple liberal traditions thesis, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and Reconstruction in Liberal Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

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80 Ibid., pp. 70–71. Hannah Arendt later acknowledged Burke's prescience on this point (The Origins of Totalitarianism [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951], pp. 294–96Google Scholar).

81 Reflections, p. 88.

82 Ibid., p. 40.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., pp. 51, 217, 258.

85 Ibid., pp. 217, 258. Unlike Burke, Tocqueville saw the advent of this atomization in the centuries-old administrative centralization of the Bourbons. But the two agree about its disastrous consequences. Cf. Tocqueville, , Ancien Regime, pp. 205–207.Google Scholar

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87 Ibid., p. 48.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid., pp. 69, 9. Burke also decries the concealed vanity of the spirit of philosophical reform: “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors” (Ibid., pp. 37–38).

91 In Burke's thought, as well as in social reality, the distinction between voluntary association and prescriptive institution blurs. For example, Harvey Mansfield has properly emphasized the sense in which Burke envisions political parties to be “establishments”—that is, inherited, quasi-institutional structures rooted in social gradations and vested interests—and not voluntary “associations,” as Jefferson intended. See his Statesmanship, esp. pp. 193–96. Yet even “voluntary” associations have ascriptive dimensions: they are rooted in traditions, we tend to belong from habit, and often exit is an unimaginable option. Tocqueville's later account of American associational life does not escape this ambiguity. Consider Democracy in America, esp. Vol. I, Pt. 2, chap. 9, where Tocqueville describes religious association as a “moeur” and as a “political institution” Vol. II, Pt. 1, chap. 7, where civic associations are characterized as a “general habit or taste” a “technique” or “spirit,” which must be “taught.”

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94 Ferguson, , An Essay on the History of Civil Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), p. 56.Google Scholar

95 Far from presuming the harmony of pluralism, classical political thought was also well aware of its tensions. Compare the predicament described by Augustine, City of God, Bk. XIX, chaps. 7–10,17.