Conservatism & the politics of prudence
On Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk & the conservative ethos.
All profound political movements draw their strength from some earlier body of belief: twentieth-century socialism from the Marx of the middle of the nineteenth century; Russian revolutionary violence from French Jacobinism; radical liberalism from Rousseau, whom Burke had called “the insane Socrates of the National Assembly.” Kirk’s source of wisdom was Edmund Burke.
—Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (1995)
No one can read the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority without feeling that here was the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the same ideals of society and Government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other. The same danger approached the same man from different directions and in different forms, and the same man turned to face it with incomparable weapons, drawn from the same armoury, used in a different quarter, but for the same purpose.
—Winston Churchill, “Consistency in Politics” in Thoughts and Adventures (1932)
Now and again, Burke praises two great virtues, the keys to private contentment and public peace: they are prudence and humility, the first pre-eminently an attainment of classical philosophy, the second pre-eminently a triumph of Christian discipline. Without them, man must be miserable; and man destitute of piety hardly can perceive either of these rare and blessed qualities.
—Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (1953)
No student of the thought or statesmanship of Edmund Burke can ignore the contribution of Russell Kirk to the renewal of Burkean wisdom in the twentieth century. As Kirk freely acknowledged, Burke was largely the source of Kirk’s own political wisdom, and Kirk, from the early 1950s onward, did much to draw out the conservative resonances of Burke’s thought and action. Kirk first wrote about Burke in the summer of 1950 in a Queen’s Quarterlyarticle tellingly called “How Dead is Edmund Burke?” Kirk very much believed that Burke was relevant to addressing modern discontents and that the Anglo-Irish statesman’s wisdom and “moral imagination” (a Burkean phrase from Reflections on the Revolution in France much beloved by Kirk) could play a central role in renewing Western and Anglo-American civilization. This was at the beginning of the Burke revival marked by the scholarship and advocacy of Ross J. S. Hoffmann, Thomas Copeland, Francis Canavan, Peter Stanlis, and Robert Nisbet, among others. Kirk was at the center of this Burkean constellation even if he was less a Burke scholar than a learned and eloquent partisan of Burke’s contribution to the sustenance and renewal of the conservative mind. Kirk’s own writings on Burke are particularly sparkling and have their share of Burke-like aphorisms and bon mots. They are memorable and eminently quotable and are among the part of Kirk’s work that will surely endure.
Like Winston Churchill, himself a profound admirer of Burke, Kirk fully appreciated the unity and consistency of purpose underlying Burke’s thought and action. As Kirk writes near the beginning of The Conservative Mind, Burke was at once a liberal as well as a conservative—“the foe of arbitrary power, in Britain, in America, in India” (and, one might add, in Ireland, where the Catholic majority of the late eighteenth century was still subject to brutal repression under the increasingly archaic Penal Laws). Kirk reminds us in several places that in 1789, Paine, Mirabeau, and others expected Burke the liberal, the critic of arbitrary power, to lead the fight for a regime of pure popular sovereignty in England and to express robust sympathy and support for the French Revolution as it attempted aggressively to destroy all remnants of the old regime.
They did not understand that Burke, the conservative-minded liberal, adamantly opposed the intrusion of abstract theory into practice (like the “little catechism of the rights of men” that dominated French Revolutionary doctrine and rhetoric with increasingly destructive results), and the brutal assault on the inherited wisdom of the ages. Burke did not hesitate to defend sound “prejudice”—the reason inherent in tradition and collective wisdom. He was a friend of political reason or prudence (“the god of this lower world,” as he called it in the “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol”) but the deadly enemy of every form of abstract Rationalism. He denounced the excesses of King and Court, as well as the marauding and brutal Warren Hastings of the British East India Company, precisely for their “innovations” and their disregard of old and well-established liberties and customs. At times, Burke would appeal to “common humanity” and “the eternal laws of justice” (as in the decade-long impeachment of Hastings).
Burke, the conservative-minded liberal, adamantly opposed the intrusion of abstract theory into practice and the brutal assault on the inherited wisdom of the ages.
But in doing so he was appealing to what Kirk suggestively calls the “universal constitution of civilized peoples”: respect for tradition and inherited morality, support for equality under God but only under God, and fierce opposition to “doctrinaire alteration” of the rules of civilized existence. Burke abhorred slavery and injustice but did not try to remake long-established societies in a stroke. He supported reform as a means of conservation as long as the changes promoted by reformers were largely so gradual as to be insensible and therefore not destructive of the continuity of society. Burke thus carefully kept his conservatism and liberalism in balance, each reinforcing the other. Paine and Mirabeau (among others) initially mistook Burke for a doctrinaire man wholly at home in the Enlightenment. This was a mistake they would come to regret, as Burke became their fiercest and most gifted rhetorical enemy. Like Churchill, Kirk appreciated that conservative ideas underlie even Burke’s liberalism and his accompanying struggle with arbitrary power in all its forms. It is these “conservative ideas” on which Kirk puts particular stress in The Conservative Mind and in his 1967 biography of Burke, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (which was republished by isi Books in 1997).
As Kirk was careful to note, Burke never made natural right the direct foundation of political life and political judgment. That was too revolutionary and too doctrinaire, and it risked separating the rights of man from one’s equally important duties as a human being and member of the social order. But he defended a traditional system of morals indebted to Aristotle, Cicero, the Fathers of the Church, and Hooker and Milton. Burke claimed no originality in this regard, as Kirk points out. But through his eloquence and fiery Irish spirit, he “put new warmth into their phrases, so that their ideas flamed above the Jacobin torches.” He thus renewed old and enduring wisdom, what Kirk, following Eliot, called the “permanent things.” It is in this limited sense that Burke’s politics of prudence perfectly coheres with the “natural law,” understood as moral verities that largely transcend historical change and cultural variation. As Greg Weiner argues in an impressive forthcoming book on Burke’s and Lincoln’s views on prudence, Burke believed that political judgment was essentially circumstantial but that moral truths came closer to reflecting unchanging truths about human nature and the divine and natural “constitution of things.” So understood, Burke is both a partisan of prudence (not to be confused with fearful timidity or “the false, reptile prudence” that Burke denounced in the Letters on a Regicide Peace) and the moral law as articulated by the moral traditions of the Christian West and by other civilized peoples. This moral consensus is related to “the universal constitution of peoples” mentioned above. To affirm a politics of prudence is not to deny a common “moral constitution” that belongs to man as man. In that limited sense, Burke is as “universalist” as Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas. And Burke adds, as Kirk is right to observe, a note of Christian humility before the moral inheritance which is among the great gifts of classical and Christian civilization.
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