Page 25 - History 2020

Burke tore into the Revolutionary idea that a clean sheet in politics and government

would create a utopia. He argued for tradition, and for a reliance on historical
experience, not idealist Revolutionary blueprints or abstract concepts of “natural
rights.” Rather, societies changed gradually, in an organic way. Locke and Rousseau
said there was a “social contract” between people and their rulers; but to Burke
“society is a contract between the generations: a partnership between those who are
living, those who have lived before us, and those who have yet to be born.” One
writer calls this idea “the democracy of the dead”.

Burke condemned the idea that the idealistic Revolutionary ends justified using
violent and oppressive means, warning that it would end in democratic, demagogic
tyranny. Remarkably, he wrote his earliest condemnation of the Revolution as early
as 1790, long before its extremist trends were revealed in the execution of King Louis
XVI (1792) and the Reign of Terror (1793-4). This gave his criticisms great moral
authority. He even predicted that the Revolutionary chaos would make “some
popular general the master of your whole republic”, probably with Cromwell in mind

but equally fitting Napoleon who became dictator in 1799.

His writings were lauded by enemies of the Revolution all over Europe. They also
inspired equally celebrated ripostes from radicals Thomas Paine and Mary
Wollstonecraft. However, in political life Burke was became even more isolated. His
condemnation of the French Revolution led to a break with the Fox Whigs and he
moved towards backing Tory Prime Minister Pitt the Younger. But the Tories never
forgot his early criticisms of George III. Burke was also critical of British repression in

Ireland (as he had been in America) which he warned might provoke “Jacobinism”*
to spread to his native Ireland (he was right; it did, in the 1798 Irish Rebellion). At the
end, Burke’s political influence was almost nil; Pitt spurned his advice and the Whigs
never forgave his desertion. His final years were overshadowed by the death of his
only son.

*The name “Jacobin” came to be applied to anyone during and after the French Revolution with
radical or extreme revolutionary opinions. Originally, they were the followers of Robespierre, the
most radical of the leading French Revolutionaries. They were called Jacobins because they set up
their political club (“The Society of the Friends of the Constitution”, October 1789) in an old convent
founded by the Dominican friars near the Catholic Church of St Jacques (Latin “Iacobus”) in Paris.
The original “Jacobins” were thus medieval Dominican friars. They should not be confused with the
British “Jacobites” - rebels loyal to the Catholic King James II (Latin also “Iacobus”), removed by the
Glorious Revolution of 1688.

What was Burke’s legacy?
Burke’s intellectual legacy was not a tidy philosophical theory, but a set of ideas
expressed in a violent anti-Revolutionary polemic. Thus, modern conservatism was