The scientific elements of Marxism

Today, German Social Democracy accepts as the theoretical basis of its activity the social doctrine which Marx and Engels worked out and called scientific socialism. That is to say that, although Social Democracy, as a fighting party, represents certain interests and tendencies, although it seeks to achieve goals set by itself, it does, in the final analysis, determine these goals in accordance with knowledge capable of objective proof, that is, knowledge which refers to, and conforms with, nothing but empirical experience and logic. For what is not capable of such proof is no longer science but rests on subjective impulses, on mere desire or opinion.

In any science, we can distinguish between pure theory and applied theory. The former consists of cognitive principles which are derived from the sum total of the relevant data and which are, therefore, regarded as universally valid. They are the constant element in the theory. An applied science is based on the application of these principles to particular phenomena or to particular cases of practice. The knowledge gained from this application, and put together in propositions, provides the principles of an applied science. These constitute the variable element in the system.

Introduction

The Sermon on the Mount is at the centre of Christian worship and morality. It contains both the Lord's prayer and the injunction to love not only neighbours but also enemies. Thus it makes a distinct statement about both Tables of the law. However, it was less the content of Christian revelation than its moral standing which was the concern of Burke's time.

The deists argued that God's moral character could not be reconciled with the partial distribution of revelation. The standing assumption was that revelation was necessary to salvation. But as it was diffused slowly over time and that to only a few countries, it followed that the means of salvation were not available to all mankind – in fact, to a few only. If one wished to suggest that God was fair to everyone, it followed that revelation, at best, was superfluous to salvation. As one writer put it:

If revelation was irrelevant, what was offered as a substitute? The complement of deist criticism was the assertion that what man could discover through his own reason, unassisted by revelation, was sufficient for his salvation. Thus, deism implied an assessment of reason.

Introduction

Richard Burke, who followed his father's career closely, suggested in 1790 that Edmund's political opinions never arose suddenly. ‘There is one thing … which I know from an intimate experience of many Years’, he wrote:

Nowhere is this reflection more fully realized than in Burke's view of the French Revolution.

When the summer of 1789 signalled the beginning of the French Revolution, Burke was about sixty years of age. His thought had developed continuously. Its basic stance had been established at an early stage, as is usually the case if thought is to develop and mature. The assumption that the divine order was manifested through inequality is found in writings produced before Burke was thirty. He had praised revelation and considered the benefits of a propertied order when an undergraduate. He had explored the way in which nature tended to form societies, elevate some men above others and encourage improvement in his Philosophical Enquiry of 1757 and shown the benefits in liberty and civilization accruing from one such society, in the Abridgement he wrote soon afterwards.

Introduction

When Burke reminisced about Ireland in 1780, after fifteen years devoted largely to the politics of England and America, he claimed that on first entering Parliament ‘What was first and uppermost’ in his thoughts was the hope ‘to be somewhat useful to the place of my birth and education, which in many respects, internal and external, I thought ill and impolitically governed’. This is likely enough, for Ireland preoccupied Burke from his teens. His earliest speeches and writings, composed as an undergraduate, provide many criticisms of Irish society, especially its disregard for good taste, its low morals and economic backwardness. These points focussed, in the end, on the failure of the propertied order of Irish society to provide the leadership which their station made possible.

Did Burke react against that order? He had a sense of its potential for good. He mentioned the case of one gentleman who had benefited his tenants greatly by a benevolent policy of improving his estate. The example was not entirely isolated. Another observer suggested that ‘a man has a figure in his country in proportion to the improvements he makes’. When Arthur Young toured Ireland a little later (in 1776) he found a number of agricultural improvers at work. A few years before Burke himself had arranged that ‘one of the finest bull calves … of the short-horned Holderness breed’ should be sent to a cousin's farm.

Edmund Burke is sometimes presented as an apostle of development. The description is apt in that his own work displays a continuous elaboration, sometimes theoretical and sometimes practical. The object of this collection is to illustrate its course by presenting a series of texts, dating from Burke's time as an undergraduate to his response to the French Revolution of 1789.

Burke's views embraced both theoretical disquisitions on theology, society and aesthetics, and practical reflections on Ireland, America, India and France. This profusion of themes in two modes of writing, one might feel, envelops ordered description in a cloud of complexity. The editor trusts that the apparatus of this small edition will do something to dispel that feeling. The introductory essay outlines Burke's interests and their connection. It considers the texts printed here (and some whose inclusion considerations of space forbade) as moments in Burke's story. The shorter introduction prefixed to each text says something more about its individual character, particularly about the political circumstances which called for the practical writings. The footnotes, the chronological table and the biographical entries are intended to assist the reader's progress by explaining historical and literary references in the text.

The edition aims to give a concise presentation of Burke's views before his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Because brief it concentrates on matters fundamental to understanding his thought, excluding others which would claim attention in a more extended treatment (just as it does not comment on the literature about Burke, save for the remarks in the bibliography). The editor will make good this omission elsewhere.

Political thought in eighteenth-century Britain reflected the circumstances of a post-revolutionary society. In the first half of the century the need to legitimate the Revolution of 1688 and its twin products, the new regime and the new British state, shaped the structure of political argument. In the second half, the increasing friction within the empire and the renewal of a demand to increase the extent of religious toleration introduced new themes and new stresses. Together, the colonial rebellion and the French Revolution were to pose the most severe challenge to the usefulness of the conceptual language of 1688.

Because the distinction between the person of the sovereign and the power of sovereignty was still being delineated in early modern Europe, and because it was (and remains) easier to generate loyalty to a person than to an abstraction, an altered royal succession undermined the foundations of obedience. The flight of James II and his replacement by William and Mary meant that the re-establishment of secure loyalty, last faced in England after the execution of Charles I and the creation of the Commonwealth (1649), was the chief political priority. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, its defenders and opponents debated questions such as the legitimacy of resistance, the legalities of succession, the power of Parliament and the rights of kings.

The Preface

This publication owes its rise to the Remarks I wrote on Dr Brown's proposal for a code of education. Several persons who were pleased to think favourably of that performance, (in which I was led to mention the subject of civil and religious liberty) were desirous that I should treat of it more at large, and without any immediate view to the Doctor's work. It appeared to them, that some of the views I had given of this important, but difficult subject, were new, and showed it, in a clearer light than any in which they had seen it represented before; and they thought I had placed the foundation of some of the most valuable interests of mankind on a broader and firmer basis, than Mr Locke, and others who had formerly written upon this subject. I have endeavoured to answer the wishes of my friends, in the best manner I am able; and, at the same time, I have retained the substance of the former treatise, having distributed the several parts of it into the body of this.

In this second edition, I have also introduced what I had written on Church-authority, in answer to Dr Balguy's sermon on that subject, preached at Lambeth chapel, and published by order of the Archbishop.

Introduction

Whilst Burke's interest in India was excited and, indeed, partially sustained by his connections, personal and political, the mind he applied to it was furnished with the doctrine and experience he had accumulated. Reflecting on India combined many facets of his thought and the combination was creative. For whilst it would be easy for the superficial reader to see in Burke on India merely another variation on the theme of conquest, it was more besides. His sympathies were extended to embrace a civilization different from the British; and because he conjured with a devastation in India far more terrible than the handicaps to liberty and improvement he had conceived in Ireland, England and America, his mind was focussed upon the foundations of society.

The Rockinghams took up Indian issues as a way of harrassing North's government during the later 1770s. In 1776 Lord Pigot, governor of Madras, was deposed illegally from his office by a cabal comprising discontented servants of the East India Company and a native ruler, Muhammed Ali (better known to history as the Nawab of Arcot). The components of this situation reflect the state of Britain's role in India. The Company was the principal agency of Britain's penetration of the sub-continent. The Company's primary aim was commercial, but commerce soon became inseparable from political affairs.

Introduction

‘There is not a more difficult subject for the understanding of men than to govern a large Empire upon a plan of Liberty’, Burke observed early in the debate on America. The reconciliation of empire and liberty was the constant refrain in his speeches. To see that constancy in its proper setting we must understand how he mingled prepossession, principle and practicality. For his speeches provide a reflection at once of Burke's own experience and thought, of the requirements of public consistency and of political convenience.

To discuss the British empire in terms of liberty and subordination was a natural continuation of his interests. It flows not just from the proprietorial regard for liberty so congenial to the Rockinghams and the concern for the liberty of dependent bodies we expect from an Irishman addressing England. There is also Burke's view that obedience to political authority should be given freely. Obedience freely given accorded with the principles of imitation in human nature. It took place where the governors felt they could rely on the governed and so could dispense with coercion. That in its turn would happen when the governed were habituated to civilized behaviour.

These were not Burke's only prepossessions. He also had a congruent view of America itself. There is a parallel with his concern that the England of George III should be governed by an unfettered opinion, for it was that sort of government he had in mind for America: if ‘an Englishman must be subordinate to England’, Burke observed, ‘he must be governed according to the opinion of a free land’.

Introduction

It was natural for the despairing author of Burke's Tracts on the Popery Laws to look outside Ireland for a properly constituted society, just as one might expect the admiring author of An Abridgement of English History to find it on the other side of St George's Channel. Yet the intellectual energy Burke gave to English society assumed rather than expounded the role he attributed to the property and social leadership of the aristocracy. He came to develop a different concern: the view that England's political arrangement was under threat. When he came into Parliament, he wrote later, he found the House of Commons ‘surrendering itself to the guidance of an authority not grown out of an experienced wisdom and integrity, but out of the accidents of Court favour’. We must set this view in the history of English politics.

England prided itself on possessing a balanced constitution. The most striking theory, that of Montesquieu, identified the three parts of the legislature (King, Lords and Commons) as bodies which balanced one another for the benefit of the governed. In Paley's words, ‘there is no power possessed by one part of the legislature, the abuse, or excess of which is not checked by some antagonist power, residing in another part’. But precisely how the balance should be constituted, as a matter of right, had been left vague. Its indistinct character permitted the disputes about the proper role of the monarchy in government which characterized the 1760s.