Burke writes, “All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.”

The Conservative Mission 

and Progressive Ideology

by George W. Carey

At the risk of seeming too parochial, I want to outline the dimensions of a problem that has been of special concern for me and other conservative students of the American political tradition, broadly defined. This concern is not as narrow as it may at first seem. Nor, by any standard, is it insignificant; it involves no less than the future direction of our nation and whether our society will retain its legacy of liberty and self-government. As I will also indicate, our tradition has long been under assault and I see no reason to believe that it will abate in this century. What is more, for reasons I will spell out, I believe that the defense and the restoration of the tradition are missions that necessarily must be undertaken by conservatives. Certainly it is safe to say that conservative scholars, in the academy and elsewhere, are best equipped for this task.

I want to deal first with certain background matters that are essential for understanding the nature and the dimensions of the concerns I have in mind. For this purpose, I can do no better than to start with Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Why so? Mainly because I have come to conclude, somewhat belatedly what many other conservative thinkers have long accepted as gospel, namely, that Edmund Burke is, indeed, the “father” of modern conservatism. In this capacity he identifies the broader missions of conservatism: what conservatives should be concerned about and what it is they should strive to conserve. He recognized that the French Revolution of 1789, fueled by various strands of radical “enlightenment” thought, represented an assault on the very pillars of Western civilization. He could see, more specifically, that the French Revolution was propelled by what today we call an ideology; an ideology that contained within itself answers to all manner of questions concerning the nature of man and his place in the order of being. Moreover, he knew that its core assumptions and teachings, quite apart from their application to French society, represented a challenge of unprecedented proportions to the civilized world and the values, beliefs, and assumptions informing it.

Near the beginning of Reflections - to emphasize, it seems to me, the enormity of what he sees taking place – Burke writes, “All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.” He takes note of its bewildering course: “Everything,” he remarks, “seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies.” “This monstrous tragicomic scene,” he continues, arouses “opposite passions” that “sometimes mix with each other,” namely, “alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternative scorn and horror.”[1] But Burke regarded the French Revolution unique in still another respect; it “has brought France undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal blessings.”[2] These calamities, he takes pains to make clear, did not result, as we might expect, from “fear” or retribution for oppression and abuse on the part of the king. On the contrary, he remarks, the “treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings throughout their harassed land” resulted from the revolutionary leaders’ “sense of perfect safety.”[3] Not only, we may say, did the revolution give free rein to the basest passions and instincts of man, but it was also ideologically driven.

As many have noted, what we now see as the ideology of the French Revolution has provided, albeit with slight variations, the rationale and underpinnings for the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.[4] For instance, the relationship between salient aspects of Rousseau’s thought and the principles that guided Lenin are readily seen. Even Burke’s characterization of the French experience can be appropriately applied to these more recent totalitarian states. For this reason, Reflections can be read retrospectively as a warning; that is, Burke can be understood as telling future generations that when change or revolution is predicated on the assumptions, principles, or beliefs that “inspired” the French Revolution, similar outcomes can be expected. What, perhaps, he could not have foreseen is the magnitude of the inhumanity that characterized these totalitarian regimes or the degree to which the underlying tenets of the French Revolution would solidify into an ideology so rigid and powerful that it could distort or block out existential reality.

Clearly the most important mission of conservatism in the twentieth century was resisting in the international arena the forces that Burke identified.
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