The question is whether a given society’s hierarchy relates to and encourages service to the common good.

Place, its Importance, and its Limits

by Bruce Frohnen

The awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence,—and…having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, 

not according to our will, but according to His, He has in and by that disposition virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us. We have obligations to mankind at large, which are not in consequence of any special voluntary pact. They arise from the relation 

of man to man, and the relation of man to God, which relations are not matters of choice. On the contrary, the force of all the pacts which 

we enter into with any particular person or number of persons

 amongst mankind depends upon those prior obligations. 

In some cases the subordinate relations are voluntary, 

in others

 they are necessary,—but the duties are all compulsive.–

Edmund Burke,Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

Anyone who takes seriously this crucial passage from Burke can pretty much count on being told “if we believed that, we never would have rebelled against the British and African Americans would still be slaves.” Which is a bit odd, actually, because Burke opposed the British actions that brought on the War for Independence and wanted to allow the colonies to secede, in addition to which he condemned chattel slavery and promoted a plan for reforms intended to hasten its demise by enforcing respect for human dignity and natural human attachments.

What brings this up is some recent commentary on an old book of mine (Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism, a book which, if nothing else, manages the not insignificant feat of garnering dismissive reviews twenty years after its publication—perhaps I’ll address the commentator more directly some other time). Of course, in that book I made matters worse for my egalitarian friends by commenting on our each having an actual station in life that we should accept, be it high or low, and the duties of which we should seek to fulfill.

Two points at the outset: 

•  first, Burke was writing within and for a still-largely aristocratic society, so in describing his thought it was and is necessary to speak explicitly in terms of station; 
• second, the analogy between aristocratic stations and stations in a democratic society is far from perfect, but much more relevant and robust than liberal democrats today would like to admit.

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