Edmund Burke’s Rhetorical Ideas

Burke was strongly against ideology that flows from the contractual, the scientific, or the rational principles of reason. These cannot capture the varied and organic nuances and subtleties of life. His writings indicate that circumstances are far too complicated, far too messy and human, to be neatly summed up. This mistrust of abstract political systems, quasi-metaphysical principles founded upon reason, seeks a good of society as a good in itself, not tradition for its own sake. The accumulated wisdom of society, its good to be passed down through the generations, is confirmed by trials of experience. Humans are hardly capable, Burke thought, of reaching in one lifetime the fullness of understanding required to summarily dismiss the customs and institutions of society, no matter how brilliant their capacity, words, and actions. Yet this prejudice should be coupled with the recognition that not every tradition, custom, or institution is worthy of preservation. Cautious reform is the cure for always-imperfect human creations, not abandonment because of possible disharmony with an impulse of reason. And inconvenience, as Burke warns in Reflections, will never fade. Ideas are not in perfect union with the disordered reality represented:

“The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating, or reforming, it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of government being therefore so practical in itself and intended for such practical purposes – a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be – it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has been answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patters of approved utility before his eyes.”

Ideas are not wholly agreeable to the represented reality because the most useful forms of knowledge are based on experience rather than ideas. The articulation of knowledge is thus symbolic and incomplete, limiting the human ability to reason. Burke could be classified as an anti-rationalist. Calling for Parliament in 1774 to “revert to your old principles” and leave America to “tax herself,” he said, “I am not here going into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them.” Sympathetic to the notion that a people’s ties to the past provide a better answer to its political problems than abstract reasoning, he believed a great perversion of culture was a misconception of the role of democracy, and that the most pressing duty of the believer in culture is to define democracy and keep it within its place, so as to not only preserve it as a viable form but also to protect those other areas of activity which are essential to supply a different kind of need, the spiritual. The rhetoric of a culture and social order depend upon history. All questions susceptible to rhetorical treatment arise out of history, and it is to history that the rhetorician turns for his means of persuasion, mourning the loss of humanity’s historical consciousness.

Burke the politician also contended that the debated solutions to a crisis require more than the wisdom of an organic historical order and lessons from comparable times past. Present realities and the balance of interests in an actual situation weighed heavily on his mind as a man intimately immersed in the controversies of a globe-spanning superpower. He thought that a studied contemplation of immediate and practical advantages in the trade-offs of public policy ranked high as a source of acceptable solutions. This would come to be known in America more than a century later as “political realism” or “expedient compromise.” Burke labeled it “prudence.” One example of imprudent rationalist Enlightenment action was regarding liberty as a political abstraction instead of a regulation under the traditions of common experience and law. The tyranny of the majority circumscribed in law was a triumph of the general will formalized into a founding document, such as Article Six of the French constitution. Viewing this article, he saw the state as infused with the authority, in the name of the general will, to deny natural rights beyond those which the state saw fit to allow. And so the National Assembly could, in effect, be dominated by a group arbitrarily deciding which rights citizens were to be granted or denied. The prudence of Reflections and many of Burke’s other writings on revolution and constitution were a defense of the principles of constitutional sovereignty and also an attack on the principles of popular sovereignty. In this, he was willing to be alienated from his party, his constituency, and a large number of his countrymen.

Ideas of pure rationality as the guide to morals and politics dominated the first half of Burke’s Eighteenth Century. Critiquing Locke, Hume, and Kant, we might characterize Burke as believing that what we learn in this world we learn through custom, repeated experiences, rather than through pure Reason. Religion is derived from Reason but also from Revelation and Faith; it cannot be sustained by just logical argument, which betrays Christianity to its enemies. Every revolution, the parliamentarian stated in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, contains in it something of evil. David Hume, another figure revered by many conservative thinkers and a fierce critic of rationalism, is remembered in part for statements about the illuminating light of reason bordering upon the darkness, dazzling yet confounding, and making assurance of any one object problematic. The ideology that drives revolution, the promise of rational thought and constant improvement, was the sort of systematic and autonomous initiative that struck fear into the heart of Burke. And existing against the age of ideology would come to serve as a unifying force for later figures of disparate lives, judgments, and prejudices (yet owing much to Burke) as they readied their pen to warn against ideologues immune to experience and insistent upon dogmatism toward creed.