Edmund Burke spent the bulk of his maturity dealing with political affairs, and his political thought reflects this experience. Indeed, Burke’s emphasis on the importance of tradition and history, along with his questions about the harmful effect of purely theoretical standpoints in politics has led some to dismiss him as unphilosophical. In fact, as we will see, Burke’s writings engages seriously with the great themes of political philosophy, although almost always in the context of particular questions of policy and choice. As a young man, moreover, he wrote an important work on the origin and meaning of beauty.

Burke’s writings have also had an important practical effect. His thoughtful opposition to the extremes of the French Revolution has made his Reflections on the Revolution in France a perennial source for understanding that event. His discussion of political parties in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents is a basic source for understanding the meaning of modern party government. And his work was one source of the postwar American conservatism that resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan.

The Defects of Our Nature

Burke follows Aristotle and precedes Tocqueville in identifying associations as fundamental to human flourishing. For Burke, the best life begins in the “little platoons”—family, church, and local community—that orient men toward virtues such as temperance and fortitude. It is in the local and particular that we are able to live justly. In seeing political life as best conducted within an order of particular habits and presumptions—specifically, the order of the British Constitution—Burke resisted the attempts of some of his contemporaries to study man as if he could be viewed in isolation, apart from all the trappings of society. This type of political speculation, which for Burke is most dubiously practiced by Rousseau, postulates an original “state of nature,” in which “man is born free,” but is everywhere in chains.

Burke thought on the contrary that men are born constrained by the traditions of their forbears; ill-considered reforms that stem from abstract theoretical designs are therefore dangerous. The proponents of a new age of “light and reason” who fomented the French Revolution are likely to harm us by tearing away “the decent drapery of life.” In doing so they deny the presumptive excellence of ruling gentlemen, the implicit contract among the present, past, and future, a proper place for the exceptional prudence of men such as Burke himself, and a decent appreciation of religion. The speculative and theoretical proponents of political revolution fail to see themselves and us as indebted to a larger tradition that includes the art, literature, ritual, and customs established over the course of millennia. Without these way stations, which are “necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature,” it is difficult to endow men with greater dignity—itself a central aim of the Enlightenment. Burke’s often highly rhetorical attacks on the French Revolution and other harmful political projects were in the service of these basic structures of excellence and stability.

The Limits of Political Science

By 1789, the French had almost completely eliminated their inherited political, social, and cultural order—one of kings, aristocrats, and clergy known as the ancien régime—and attempted to begin the world anew. Their method, which aimed to understand man based on reason alone, or reason as they unreasonably understood it, was anathema to Burke, who wrote that “The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.” Useful changes to political order must begin not with abstract speculation, but with a serious understanding of the limitations imposed by existing conditions. Civilization is too complex to be understood, and, especially, to be secured, by abstraction alone. Opinion, prejudice, habit, individual facts and events, and chance are the necessary elements of political life. Authority cannot be secured by theoretical arguments.

Especially as manifest in the French Revolution, unbridled abstract speculation sacrifices present individual happiness to the future of an abstract humanity and dissolves the virtuous restraints that check individual licentiousness and immorality. One must secure and improve the British life one has, rather than govern according to speculative thought whose practical result will be disastrous. “Very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions,” Burke writes. This questioning of grand theoretical plans that led Burke to clarify the milieu of practical activity is not only an immediate warning about the French Revolution, but is also a signal contribution to reflection about politics, reprising elements of Aristotle’s understanding of prudence and practice, although from a different and ultimately less theoretical standpoint.