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.

Preface

It is of great importance, that all the subjects of government should have a just idea of their natural and civil rights, and that they should be apprized when they are invaded. As few of the pieces that I have seen on the subject of government in general, or concerning the attempts which have been made on the liberty of this country, are sufficiently plain and intelligible, I have endeavoured to supply the defect, by treating of these subjects in the way of Questions and Answer, which gives me an opportunity of touching the true state of the litigated points in the clearest manner.

I have not knowingly misrepresented any facts: the reflections I have made upon them are such as I could not avoid, and the liberty I have taken with the measures of government, is no greater than the constitution of this kingdom both admits and requires; any thing farther than this, is no concern of mine. I shall contentedly and cheerfully leave the issue to the merits of the cause, and to that good Providence which disposes of all things.

Sincerely do I deplore the infatuation of those who were the authors of the measures that I have animadverted upon, but more that of those who persist in carrying them on, notwithstanding their consequences are, every day, more and more alarming.

What sort of thinker was Edmund Burke? His mind was equal to a wide range of concerns – theology, aesthetics, moral philosophy, history, political theory and public affairs – a range which seems bewilderingly diverse to the cautious eyes of a later day. In fact, these interests were intimately connected. Burke's theoretical writings suggested that the world was patterned unequally, whilst his practical works explored the possibilities of political inequality and, in the case of Reflections on the Revolution in France, defended it. The object of this introduction is to show the steps by which Burke moved to these positions.

When Burke was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, he and his friends founded a society devoted, like many such before and since, to improving themselves and the world. We discover from the club's minute book and from the writings which Burke published at the same period that he concerned himself especially about three matters: the revealed word and its effectiveness; aesthetics and virtue; and the possibilities of power and wealth for the good of society.

The first concern was expressed in ‘an extempore commonplace of the Sermon of Our Saviour on the Mount’ and was amplified when Burke asserted ‘the superior Power of Religion towards a Moral Life’.

Introduction

Burke seems to have turned to this subject after finishing his Philosophical Enquiry, published in 1757. His second edition of 1759 criticized the theory of moral sense as one which had ‘misled us both in the theory of taste and of morals’, specifying that it ‘induced us to remove the science of our duties from their proper basis, (our reason, our relations, and our necessities).’ ‘Religion’ gave Burke's ‘proper basis’ to moral theory in the course of developing a wider argument.

Why should the paper be called ‘Religion’? The common feature of moral sense and deism, two of the objects of Burke's enmity, was to his eyes an insufficient regard for God. The former had no explanatory role for Him in aesthetic or moral theory. Whilst the latter did not involve that omission, it made another by discounting His revealed word. Burke, having attended to aesthetics, turned to morals and revelation in order to relate them both to his understanding of God.

How did Burke's moral explanation use ‘our reason, our relations, and our necessities’? Relation and reason are important at the most general level. Burke used them to explain duty. He took it that we ‘cannot conceive that a reasonable Creature can be placed in any Relation that does not give rise to some Duty’. Relation, a term of scholastic origin, denotes the comparing of two ideas. For instance, we might conceive God as powerful and man as weak.

Introduction

Burke's first extended publication has baffled commentators over two centuries. For Thomas Burgh it was a juvenile squib. To William Godwin, who exploited its material for his own ends, it was ‘a treatise in which the evils of the existing political institutions are displayed … while the intention of the author was to show that these evils were to be considered as trivial’, whilst to Lord Wedgwood it offered ‘arguments against authority’. To the less engaged mind of Sir George Clark it was ‘an ironical book which still puzzles commentators who try to interpret its purpose’. The work, viewed by itself, is evidently not easy to interpret.

Its purpose is more readily intelligible if we recollect Burke's position on religion and society. Deism, which he had rejected, suggested that revelation was inessential to the divine economy because its benefits were confined to a limited section of mankind. If we set this objection in a general form we have: any state of affairs whose goods are distributed irregularly lacks a properly divine warrant. A Vindication applies the formula to the social order. In particular it suggests that political and social hierarchy – in the language of the piece Subordination – was responsible for man's ills.

Burke's argument is usually described as whimsical or ironical. It focusses upon the reductio ad absurdum of a single assumption, namely the sufficiency of nature. Deism suggested that man's natural faculties sufficed for his salvation and that revelation was superfluous or, indeed, an opportunity for evil.

Introduction

The ‘Extempore Commonplace’ and A Vindication of Natural Society suggested that revelation was recognizably part of the divine order. The earlier text had praised revelation for informing moral conduct, whilst the later work suggested that the logic of deism admitted a view of the social order unacceptable to most minds in eighteenth-century England. By the same token, A Vindication implied some approval of society as presently constituted. A further form of inequality had found its way onto Burke's agenda. His attachment to an unequal social order had been expressed at Trinity, when he adverted to its potential for good. That position now achieved a theoretical elaboration.

The Enquiry employed the idiom of nature and did so with a determinate purpose. As ‘Nature’ was attractive to the eighteenth century, the content attributed to it varied with a writer's object. Deists had emphasized nature as reason. Rousseau had found nature in the simplest of lives. Burke himself set out to show that natural passion was God's medium of expression and suggested that nature grounded inequality.

To understand Burke's case we should consider another of his interests. At Trinity he had declared himself not only about religion and property, but also about taste. Burke took the view that the province of the imagination was important for forming good morals. It followed that the beliefs people entertained about aesthetics had a bearing upon their conduct.