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The Political Economy of Burke&s Analysis of the French Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

J. G. A. Pocock
J. G. A. Pocock
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements, the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence of the statements’ being made.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 331 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 Earlier versions have been presented to seminars at Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Cambridge, and to the Midwest American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I am indebted to all these audiences for their comments and suggestions.

2 The Historical Journal, III, 2, 125–43Google Scholar; reprinted in Politics, language and time (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

3 Here I am particularly indebted to members of the King's College Research Centre's project on the history of political economy, and to the conference which they held in May 1979. See Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael (eds.), Wealth and virtue: political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Cf. Hirschman, Albert, The passions and the interests: arguments for capitalism before its triumph (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar; Forbes, Duncan, Hume's philosophical politics (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar; Winch, Donald, Adam Smith's politics: an essay in historiographic revision (Cambridge, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCoy, Drew R., The elusive republic: political economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill and Williamsburg, 1980);Google Scholar and other works.

5 See Kramnick, Isaac F., The rage of Edmund Burke: the conscience of an ambivalent conservative (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

6 For other presentations of this argument see my The Machiavellian moment (Princeton, 1975) chs. 13 and 14Google Scholar; ‘Between Machiavelli and Hume; Gibbon as civic humanist and philosophical historian’, in Bowersock, G. W. and Clive, John (eds.), Edward Gibbon and the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The mobility of property and the rise of eighteenth-century sociology’, in Anthony Parel and Thomas Flanagan (eds.), Theories of property: Aristotle to the present (Waterloo, Ontario, 1979)Google Scholar; ‘The Machiavellian moment revisited: a study in history and ideology’, Journal of Modern History, LIII, I (1981), 49–72.Google Scholar

7 N. T. Phillipson, ‘Towards a definition of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in P. Fritz and D. Williams (eds.) City and society in the eighteenth century (Toronto)Google Scholar; ’Culture and society in the eighteenth-century province; the case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Stone, Lawrence (ed.), The university in society (Princeton, 1974)Google Scholar; ‘Hume as moralist; a social historian's perspective’, in Brown, S. C. (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Hassocks, 1979)Google Scholar; ‘Manners, morals, civic virtue and the science of man’, presented to the Fifth International Congress on the Enlightenment (Pisa, 1979)Google Scholar; ‘Adam Smith as civic moralist’, in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and virtue. Also Davie, George, The Scottish Enlightenment (Historical Association Pamphlets, General Series 99, 1981).Google Scholar

8 The best account of this incident is in The diary of the Rt. Hon William Windham (London, 1866), pp. 60–1, 63–4Google Scholar. I am indebted to Mr E. E. Steiner (Yale Law School) for this reference.

9 Price, Richard, Two tracts on civil liberty, the war with America, and the debts and finances of the kingdom (London, 1778), ‘Additional Observations’, pp. xiii-xiv, 25, 38–39, 47, 51–2, 153n.Google Scholar

10 An exception must be entered to Macaulay's observation (History of England, ch. xix) that only Burke was ‘free of the general delusion’ that the debt would destroy society. He did not fear it in England, but did in France.

11 The works of the Rt. Hon Edmund Burke (London, 1826; the Rivington edition), v, 88.Google Scholar

12 Works, v, 151.

13 The works of William Robertson (London, 1824), III, 28–33, 55–7 (chivalry and feudal law), 65–71 (canon law), 72–4 (chivalry)Google Scholar. Note the association of both phenomena with commerce and towns.

14 Text in Lehmann, W. C., John Millar of Glasgow (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 210, 212–18 (chivalry)Google Scholar; Millar, , Historical view of the English constitution (London, 4th edn, 1818), I, 109–26;Google Scholar II, I35–7.

15 Works, v, 154.

16 Works, v, 155.

17 So it seems proper to read the phrase; but ‘the gods of our oeconomical politicians’ may be a gibe at Josiah Tucker, who had attacked Burke bitterly in 1776 and was said to ‘make religion a trade and trade a religion’. See Shelton, George, Dean Tucker and eighteenth-century economic and political thought (New York, 1981), pp. 164–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Remarks on the History of England, letter xiv (2nd edn, London, 1747) p. 169.Google Scholar

19 Works, v, 204–6.

20 Works, v, 215–18. For Denham and his poem, see Hehir, Brendan O, Harmony from discords: a life of Sir John Denham (Berkeley, 1968)Google Scholar and Expans’d hieroglyphics: a study of Sir John Denham's “Cooper's Hill” (Berkeley, 1969).Google Scholar

21 Dreyer, Frederick, ‘Burke's religion’, Studies in Burke and his time, xvii, 3 (1976), 199–212.Google Scholar

22 Works, viii, esp. pp. 38–45, where Henry VIII's tyranny recurs.

23 Cobbett, William, A history of the Protestant Reformation (two vols., London, 1829).Google Scholar

24 Works, v, 207.

25 D’Alembert, Essai sur la Société des Gens de Lettres (1754, 1771); Ranum, Orest, Artisans of glory: Writers and historical thought in seventeenth-century France (Chapel Hill, 1980)Google Scholar. Burke's analysis begins here to anticipate the views of Cochin, Augustin, Les sociétés de pensée et la démocratie (Paris, 1921), interest in which has recently been revived (n. 50, below).Google Scholar

26 Works, v, 172.

27 Works, v, 282.

28 A possible candidate is August Ludwig Meyer, formerly a librarian at Göttingen, who visited England and was in touch with Burke during 1788–90. See The correspondence of Edmund Burke, vi (ed. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith, Cambridge and Chicago, 1967), 256–7.Google Scholar

29 Hume, David, History of England (new edn, London, 1762), v, 55–6.Google Scholar

30 Ibid. pp. 56–7.

31 Green, T. H. and Grose, T. H. (eds.), The philosophical works of David Hume (London, 1875), III, 360–74 (‘Of public credit’).Google Scholar

32 Ibid., p. 368.

33 Ibid., p. 367.

34 Works, v, 347–8.

35 O.E.D., sub voce.

36 For armed ‘burghers’ in the Austrian Netherlands, see Correspondence, vi, 267.

37 Works, v, 349–50.

38 Thoughts on the present discontents; Works, II, 330.

39 Works, VIII, 53.

40 Works, VIII, 254.

41 Works, VIII, 172–3.

42 Works, VIII, 240–1.

43 Works, VIII, 244.

44 Works, VIII, 246–7.

45 Works, VIII, 253.

46 Works, VIII, 256.

47 Works, VIII, 259–60.

48 Darnton, Robert, Mesmerism and the end of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)Google Scholar for an ‘electric communication’ as sympathy passing immediately from person to person.

49 E.g. Mackinnon, W. M., On the rise, progress and present state’of public opinion in Great Britain and other parts of the world (London, 1828)Google Scholar; History of civilisation (two vols., London, 1846)Google Scholar. For the aspect of the Reform Bill debate mentioned above, I am indebted to Professor Barton L. Boyer (College of Idaho), a member of my 1980 NEH Summer Seminar.

50 Here again we are reminded of Cochin; n. 25, above. See Baker, Keith Michael, ‘Enlightenment and Revolution in France: old problems, renewed approaches’, Journal of Modern History, LIII, 2 (1981), 281–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a study of François Furet's revival of Cochin's views.

51 Works, VIII, 214.

52 Works, VIII, 170.

53 Works, VIII, 255–6.

54 It is not easy to imagine, since most of Marx's surviving references to Burke are merely philistine; he impugned his motives without considering his argument. Capital (Moscow 1959), 1, 170, quoted in Shelton, Dean Tucker, p. 264.Google Scholar

55 Works, VIII, 251–3.

56 This interpretation is reinforced by that of Macpherson, C. B., Burke (Oxford, 1981Google Scholar; in the Past Masters Series). Since this present writer has often differed from Professor Macpherson, it is a pleasure to record the closeness of their view on this subject.

57 Works, VIII, 172.

58 Correspondence, vi, 215.

59 Cobban, Alfred, Edmund Burke and the revolt against the eighteenth century (London, 1929, 1960).Google Scholar

60 Correspondence, vi, 419–20. Cf. Works, VIII, 141–2.

61 For references to Calonne in the Reflections, see Works, v, 243, 245, 246, 334–5, 374, 413, 421 and n. For Necker's report on the finances, v, 219–21, 236–40, 244, 402, 410, 425.