The politics of empire and conquest were among Burke’s most intense and abiding preoccupations throughout his life as a writer and legislator. He took up these themes in some of his earliest published writing, his contributions to An Account of the European Settlements in America, written with his friend William Burke and first published in 1757, and he continued to dwell on Indian and especially Irish affairs until his death. Burke’s career spanned a period widely seen at the time, as well as by later historians, as one of imperial crisis. Before entering parliament, Burke returned to his native Dublin in the early 1760s as an aide to William Hamilton, chief secretary in Ireland, during the early phase of the Whiteboy disturbances, when Protestant landlords and the Irish government were savagely suppressing Catholic peasant unrest with reprisals, mass arrests, and judicial murders. By the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Britain had acquired substantial new territories, with diverse and seemingly alien populations, including Quebec, with its large population of French Catholics, and in India, after Robert Clive’s decisive defeat of French ambitions there. British efforts under the Grenville ministry to recoup the costs of the war in America, most infamously through the 1765 Stamp Act, opened the breach with the American colonies that Burke struggled in vain to repair with his policy of conciliation. The crisis in the American colonies dominated Burke’s early years as a member of parliament, especially after he began in 1774 to represent Bristol, the ‘second city in the British dominions’, and a trading city whose prosperity was bound up perhaps more than any other in Britain with colonial commerce. Soon after the break with America, Burke began his fourteen-year campaign to stem the corruption and despotism of the British East India Company, the work for which he claimed near the end of his life to value himself the most (WS, IX: 159).

Burke’s Fears for the Future of Europe.

Scholars of Burke’s writings have sometimes seen his engagement with the French Revolution, towards the end of his life, to have been an ‘unkindness of fate’, on the grounds that a person ‘who has all his life surrounded himself with a mental paradise of order and equilibrium and belief’ was forced to confront its antithesis. Such an interpretation correlates with a view of the eighteenth century, and of Britain above any other country, as being characterised largely by equipoise, calm, and order. Burke was laying the foundations for Victorian self-confidence, and was on the side of progress in defining and defending the British constitution, and more particularly the manners it rested upon, as the great bastion against immoderation and excess, whether in the form of atheistic or democratical enthusiasm. Yet Burke’s fears about the future, and the future of Europe especially, antedated 1789. Like Gibbon too, he had long been worried about the instability of Europe, because of the gap between the military strength of small and large states, which rested in turn upon the economic ability of bigger states to exploit large markets and to create a public debt, on the basis of anticipated income from taxation, that provided revenues for war. Aspiring imperial powers, always likened to Rome, germinated in such soil, and explained events like the partition of Poland by Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1772. The event had exercised Burke in a letter to the scion of a prominent Prussian family in 1774, and represented one of many laments for the prospects of Europe’s small states. Burke called Poland ‘but a breakfast’ (C, II: 512–14).

To all intents and purposes, Burke’s connection with the Whig party was over by May 1791. An emotional debate in the House of Commons indicated the final severance from Charles James Fox, and brought to a head disagreements that went back to early 1790. Thereafter, Burke was to suffer increasing sniping and criticism from other Whigs. In Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs he offered a sort of unapologetic valedictory in which he restated his understanding of Whiggism and vindicated his political consistency. He had reason to be concerned about both because he had done more than anyone else to provide a cogent intellectual justification for the party. He had joined the connection led by the Marquess of Rockingham in 1765 and quickly rose to become a leading advocate for its causes both in parliament and in print. He gave system and policy to their belief that the power of the Crown was increasing and ought to be diminished, and also provided firmer grounds for the connection cohering as a party. Hence, when by the early 1790s he was charged with abandoning everything he had held dear, it was essential to show that he at least remained true to Whig convictions even if those around him were losing theirs. This chapter examines Burke’s thinking about the constitution: its ideal forms, the threats it was exposed to, and the solutions proposed between the 1760s and 1780s.

The Mixed and Balanced Constitution

The constitution in the eighteenth century was the subject of persistent self-congratulation. The central leitmotif was provided by William Blackstone’s Commentaries. The separate systems of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were all liable to various disadvantages, but ‘happily’ Britain had mixed them together. The executive power was lodged in one man and so provided the strength associated with absolute monarchy. The legislature, however, was entrusted to ‘three distinct powers, entirely independent of each other’.

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; expanded second edition, 1759) acts as a sort of midwife at the birth of modern aesthetic theory, but really it belongs to the pre-history of the discipline. Burke never uses the term ‘aesthetic’, and he is unlikely to have known that the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten had recently adopted the word to describe the ‘criticism of taste’ in his treatise Aesthetica (1750). The true etymology of ‘aesthetic’ – the Greek aisthetikos means ‘pertaining to what the senses perceive’ – was much insisted upon by Immanuel Kant in 1781, who pointed out that any such science is by definition empirical, and confined to the mechanics of sensual perception. Modern aesthetics begins with Kant’s disappointment at Burke’s refusal to move beyond such preliminaries in the Philosophical Enquiry. Kant calls for a new a priori or ‘transcendental aesthetics’, one that establishes a synthetic system for how sensible objects ought to be judged, rather than merely reporting how they are judged. Likewise, Hegel declares at the beginning of his lectures on aesthetics that he must break with the old application of ‘aesthetics’ to works of art ‘with regard to the feelings they were supposed to produce, as, for instance, the feeling of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so on’. Burke, for his own part, insists that the most interesting effects of sublime and beautiful objects strike us before we can reason about them or judge them. By the standards of his contemporaries, Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry was not particularly philosophical.

And yet the Philosophical Enquiry is much more than a museum piece, consigned to the footnotes of philosophy by the German Idealists. It demands to be read in the context of its own controversies – even though the polemical nature of Burke’s engagement with those controversies is often concealed behind a screen of polite methodicality.

One of the most notable developments in Burke scholarship during the last two or three decades has been the increasing attention paid to Irish experiences and contexts, and in particular to Burke’s lifelong commitment to the abolition of the penal code. In ‘Tracts on the Popery Laws’, written at the very outset of his political career, Burke anatomised the inequalities that resulted from the incomplete conquest and colonisation of Ireland. The background was the agrarian unrest raging in the southern province of Munster, where oathbound gangs of Whiteboys were resisting the enclosure of common land. The vicious reaction of the local Protestant elite crystalised Burke’s hostility to ‘the unfeeling tyranny of a mungril Irish Landlord’ (C, I: 147). Three decades later, in his Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792), Burke described the Protestant Ascendancy which ruled Ireland as a ‘plebeian oligarchy’, a monstrous contradiction in terms (WS, IX: 600). The natural relationship between property and authority, he contended, had been contorted by ethnic and religious antagonisms resulting from the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Cromwellian plantations, so that Protestant tradesmen and servants were raised above Catholic noblemen, whereas Catholic landowners, farmers, merchants and even ‘titular’ bishops were lumped together with a ‘licentious populace’ merely because of their religious beliefs (WS, IX: 602). In December 1796, shortly before the arrival of a French fleet in Bantry Bay, Burke continued to express his opposition to British policy in Ireland from his deathbed, writing sympathetically of ‘the Jacobinism which arises from Penury and irritation’ (C, IX: 162). In the periods between these well-known interventions, he frequently commented on Irish affairs, and he was an important influence on the Irish policy of Whig administrations. Moreover, this preoccupation with the social and psychological aftershocks of conquest would resonate throughout Burke’s writings on England, North America, India and France.

Burke’s training in, knowledge of, and appreciation for law is generally recognised. Indeed, Anglo-American jurists have been quick to claim him as their own and to employ him as an authority in present debates. But his extensive use of legal language obscures how little he actually said or wrote about legal theory. Burke’s comments on the law were typically made in specific and complex, rapidly changing, political controversies. His reflections are often little more than the obiter dicta of political and public debates and should not be confused with more formal commentaries on the laws. Pregnant with meaning for the present, Burke’s thoughts must, here as elsewhere, be viewed in context. When this is done, his texts suggest a picture that is often at odds with common assumptions about him and his relationship to the law. The Irishman’s opinion of English jurisprudence is, for example, complex and not wholly complimentary. Especially in his early pre-political writings, Burke’s jurisprudential asides presented a challenge to ‘vulgar Whiggism’ and insular English and common law histories. His parliamentary statements also suggest that he emphasised the centrality of the legislature rather than, as is often suggested, the courts of common law. Perhaps most importantly, Burke’s use of legal terms – contract, partnership, prescription, rights – is often rhetorical, defined against his wider understanding of the relationship of morals, manners, and history.

India was one of the great causes of Burke’s political career, one that he pursued from around 1780 until his retirement from parliament. Indeed, in his own retrospective judgement, it was the cause ‘on which I value myself the most’ (WS, IX: 159). By ‘India’ here is meant the incipient British empire in India or, more precisely, the regime of the English East India Company, to which parliament had ceded not only a commercial monopoly, but also authority over those parts of India that came under British control. ‘India’ also denotes the distant country and people as Burke tried to imagine them, and for whom he became a passionate advocate.

Burke became convinced that the East India Company (and by extension parliament) was abusing its trust by perpetrating (or permitting) severe forms of oppression and plunder of India and, more ominously, destroying the social foundations of a great, though alien, civilisation. Analysing and exposing the various abuses of imperial rule, Burke (together with his fellow Whigs under Fox) called for reforms. More dramatically, as a way of raising both parliamentary and public consciousness about the affairs of India, Burke pursued the prosecution and impeachment of Warren Hastings, the former governor-general of Bengal, whom Burke believed had directed and personified many of the abusive practices.

Edmund Burke is one of the most important figures in the history of modern political thought, yet his thinking about politics is not easily reducible to a general or fully coherent philosophy. This is partly because of the practical character of much of his intellectual enterprise: elected to parliament in 1765, he remained – despite a brief hiatus in 1780 – a practicing politician for almost twenty-nine years. During this time, he never set out to produce a systematic work of political philosophy, and he repudiated attempts to read his various pronouncements on politics in this way. His account of his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) – ‘I was throwing out reflexions upon a political event, and not reading a lecture upon theorism and principles of Government’ – arguably applies to the whole sweep of his political writings (C, VI: 304). His ‘works’ are largely a compilation of disconnected performances urging practical responses to specific problems from rebellion in America to revolution in France to political corruption in England to the abuse of power in Ireland and India. Whether or not one can abstract from these contexts a general doctrine or corpus of thought is debateable. And if such abstraction is possible, it is far from clear that his thought was consistent across contexts. He boasted later in life that if ‘he could venture to value himself on anything, it is on the virtue of consistency that he would value himself the most’, but his critics would continue to insist that this was a virtue in which he was most derelict (Works, III: 24).

Thus Burke’s writings are not swiftly convertible into a theoretical system and much of what he said might be regarded as explicitly hostile to any such endeavour. He was, after all, famously critical of abstract theory and called for a more modest and contextual approach to moral and political problems. ‘I cannot stand forward,’ he insisted, ‘and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.’

When Thomas Pitt was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1750s, he received a series of letters of advice from his uncle William, at the time the dominant speaker in the House of Commons. The orator left him in no doubt about the direction his studies should take: ‘You are to be a gentleman of such learning and qualifications as may distinguish you in the service of your country hereafter; not a pedant, who reads only to be called learned, instead of considering learning as an instrument only for action.’ As the Elder Pitt, a competent classicist, must have known, the idea that learning should be valued primarily as ‘an instrument for action’ was a commonplace of Roman thought. It was expressed most completely in the figure of the orator who brings speculative knowledge to bear upon public causes and questions. In the eighteenth century, that idea still meant something to the educated elite. It informs Burke’s conception of public life and of the politician as a philosopher in action.

Speech was to be at the centre of Burke’s activities for much of his political life. Although he enjoyed the conventional education of the Irish professional classes, his education as an orator was in an important sense self-made. Lacking serious wealth and influence, young Irishmen of his rank knew that without rhetorical skills they would find it difficult to rise in the world. Many looked to Trinity College, Dublin to prepare them for their entry into public life. By all accounts the classical curriculum at Trinity, where Burke matriculated in 1744, was thoroughly taught, and he was able to extend the knowledge of the rhetorical canon he had already gained at Abraham Shackleton’s school in Ballitore. Yet we know from his early correspondence that he was frustrated by the rigidity of Trinity’s methods of instruction and stifled by its insistence on the study of scholastic logic. In the end, his extra-curricular activities as a youthful speaker in Dublin may have taught him more about the business of persuasion than anything he heard within Trinity’s walls.

When Burke attends to wrongs committed by the state, as he does in relation to British actions in Ireland and India, he reaches for the notion of an ‘immutable, pre-existent law’ (WS, VI: 350) that cannot be trumped by positive laws or human authority. Similarly, when facing down the philosophical zeal of the French revolutionaries, he makes appeal to a normative conception of nature that he claims the philosophes violate. Burke’s resort to natural law language is neither frequent nor systematic. Nonetheless, a treatment of the theme is warranted, because of the dramatic role such references play in what Burke considers to be extreme situations of state-sanctioned injustice or immanent European chaos.

Recent commentators on Burke can be forgiven for giving this topic a fairly wide berth. More heat than light has emerged from recent exchanges about the importance or otherwise of natural law thought in Burke’s writings. Tribal loyalty or hostility to ‘natural law’ or ‘Thomist’ readings of Burke can take the place of more nuanced and differentiated evaluations. More recently, the terms of the older debate as to whether Burke is a ‘natural law’ or ‘utilitarian’ thinker, tend to be seen as redundant, with a consensus that the complexity of Burke’s work is not unlocked but distorted by using the lens of a single philosophical system, whether that be utilitarian or Thomist. Rather, the task for Burke scholars is more commonly conceived to be that of tracing a large number of diverse discourses and influences, with a tendency to emphasise the lack of any systematic theory in Burke.

In a letter sent to his Quaker school-friend, Richard Shackleton, at the start of his third year as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, Burke identified a mania for syllogistic reasoning with the dark days of Scholastic philosophy, contrasting its procedures with those of ‘these enlightened times’. He had encountered neo-Aristotelian logic through the textbooks of Franciscus Burgersdicius and Martinus Smiglecius during his first year at university; at the same time, he was exposed to the Logica of Jean Le Clerc. By the mid-1740s he was associating the former with the kind of pre-enlightened ‘ignorance’ that modern philosophy had helped to overcome (C, I: 89). A decade later, in the Account of the European Settlements in America, which Burke composed with his close friend, William Burke, the passage from ignorance to enlightenment is set within a conventional, Protestant historiographical framework. Technological and scientific progress, along with humanism and the Reformation, are presented as having created the conditions for material and intellectual improvement. These developments, moreover, are shown to have occurred in tandem with the consolidation of modern monarchies, the revival of politeness, and the establishment of a ‘rational’ – meaning prudently oriented – politics. Altogether, learning prospered, manners improved, and policy became enlightened. In a fragmentary ‘Essay towards an History of the Laws of England’, which Burke undertook around the same time, the slow, faltering march towards a government of laws is taken to have been ‘softened and mellowed by peace and Religion; improved and exalted by commerce, by social intercourse, and that great opener of the mind, ingenuous science’ (WS, I: 322). What these diverse observations illustrate is that enlightenment for Burke encompassed the progress of society through the expansion of commerce under the protection of law, the improvement of morals under the government of Providence, and the liberalisation of religion under the influence of science.

Burke’s Reflections generated a huge controversial literature directed at an increasingly wider and politicised public. However, Burke neither responded directly nor addressed this emerging public. He claimed not to have read any of the responses – except Paine’s – whose Rights of Man is quoted in the Appeal, without attribution, as the views of the Foxite Whigs (Works, III: 68–75). Burke’s audience remained the traditional, and limited political ‘public’, a subset of the 400,000 or so voting individuals.

The first work to appear after Reflections was the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. It remained – unlike Reflections – a true letter, to Francoise-Louis-Thibault de Menonville who had written to Burke praising Reflections. It contained Burke’s first insistence on outside intervention to reverse the Revolution. An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs defended his conservative interpretation of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and his claim to be its true inheritor, exposing the ‘new’, Foxite Whigs’ abandonment of the founding principles of their party. Following the split in the party, in A Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), he repudiated charges made by two ‘new’ Whigs, the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, that it was he who was the turncoat and had reneged on his reformist past by accepting a pension from the (Tory) government. The ‘Introduction’ to Brissot’s ‘Address’ (1794) was written for a translation – commissioned by Burke from his cousin Will – of Brissot’s speech (May 1793), calling for revolution throughout Europe, so vindicating Burke’s warnings about the revolution’s expansionist character. Burke was seeking to influence a political public dismayingly unenthusiastic about counter-revolutionary war. His final published work, the Two Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), urged continuation of an interventionist war and abandonment of the peace overtures begun that summer.

In an early fragment, Burke drafted ‘A Plan for Arguing’ in which he listed key strategies of debate: arguments from ‘justice’ were of fundamental importance, but crucial too were appeals to ‘interest’ and ‘convenience’ (N, 46–7). These would remain important rhetorical principles throughout Burke’s career as a statesman, but it is difficult to determine how justice, interest, and convenience exactly relate – or, indeed, if their relation is systematic or largely arbitrary – in his moral universe. This issue is central to an understanding of ‘utility’ – a key, but much disputed theme, in Burke’s political thought. He repeatedly insisted that the utility of a proposal was central to deciding its merits, but it was not always clear if this utility was independent or, in fact, constitutive of its justice. In 1765 he presented ‘utility’ – alongside ‘equity’ – as one of the two pillars of law (WS, IX: 456). Fourteen years later, however, utility seemed to have become not just a necessary legal principle, but a sufficient criterion of justice for lawmakers: ‘only the utility and convenience of the community as it happens by accident to be constituted’ were, he insisted, proper grounds for legislation (WS, III: 432). Somewhere down the line justice, interest, and convenience appeared to have merged.

Partly for these reasons, Burke is often considered to be a ‘utilitarian’ thinker. Clearly, much depends here upon the meaning of the word ‘utilitarian’ (a term that seems to have been first deployed by Jeremy Bentham in a letter in 1781) and the extent to which this represents a distinctive and systematic doctrine. Some might suggest that to attribute any systematic theory to Burke is already to distort his intellectual practice. It is worth reiterating that his major political writings were triggered by specific events and were practical responses to them; they were not offered as a comprehensive system of morals – and it is often the systematic character of utilitarianism (its ‘all-comprehensiveness and consistency’, as Bentham put it) that its adherents endorse and its critics disparage.

Edmund Burke was not a theologian, but a man of letters and a statesman: it was in these capacities that he was deeply interested in Christianity and its importance for society. He did not conceive religion as an activity of body or mind insulated from the rest of life and thought, but rather as a relation between God and people which, in a range of ways, characterised central aspects of their terrestrial lives as well as their eventual destiny. It will be best to turn to specifics in order to understand what Burke had in view.

Early Thought

Burke was educated – whether at home or Ballitore School or Trinity College, Dublin – at places where the truth of Christianity was assumed. By the time he left Trinity, he had an orientation towards religion, improvement, and politics. Ireland at that date was a place where reflective thinking had its main social setting in a small educational elite, much of it connected with the Church of Ireland. This elite contemplated a political class that owned much of the land, and consisted primarily of a gentry and peerage, headed by the king’s representative, the lord-lieutenant, but this elite saw too a tiny professional class, and a huge, illiterate, impoverished peasantry. The aim of the educational elite, which it shared with some of the political class, was improvement in the broadest sense, that is to say it connected self-improvement, via the arts and sciences and through the development of intellectual skills, with moral culture and with economic development. The Irish situation suggested a general rationale of practice to those who wished to improve themselves and others: improvement, if it was to spread outside the educational elite, must spring from the guidance and good will of the possessing classes – from the landlord who developed his property, from the priest who instructed and consoled the poor, and from the lord-lieutenant who used his power benevolently. In other words, direction was from above, and it needed to be given in an easily intelligible form.