- Length
- 400 pagesClark, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Stanford, 2001
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Reflections on the Revolution in France
An attack on a revolution written before it had done anything terrible, by a politician whose entire previous career had been spent opposing established power. It invented modern conservatism, predicted a military dictator nine years early, and provoked the reply that launched modern feminism.
- Date
- 1790
- Author
- Edmund Burke
- Region
- England
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 2 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 28 years
Thirteen thousand copies sold within a month, at least thirty published replies within a year, and the founding text of modern conservatism.
What the book says
A long letter attacking a revolution that had not yet turned violent, written by a Whig politician who had spent his career defending the American colonists and prosecuting the East India Company. Burke's argument is not that the French monarchy was well run - he concedes it was not - but that the method of reform adopted was certain to fail. A society is not a machine that can be dismantled and rebuilt to a plan; it is an inheritance of institutions, habits, loyalties and prejudices worked out over centuries by people responding to circumstances nobody designed. Its arrangements often cannot be justified in the abstract and work anyway, and the reformer who demands a rational account of every one of them before allowing it to stand will destroy more than he understands. Against the doctrine of the rights of man Burke sets prescription and inheritance: the English, he argues, secured their liberties by claiming them as an entailed estate handed down, not by deriving them from a principle. He predicts that the assembly will lose control, that the army will produce a popular general, and that he will end by taking everything - which happened, nine years later.
What it argues
That political knowledge is practical rather than theoretical, and that the accumulated arrangements of a society contain more wisdom than any individual reasoner can reconstruct. Burke does not defend the French monarchy or oppose reform; he opposes a particular method - the derivation of institutions from principles, applied all at once, by people with no experience of governing. His alternative is reform on the model of repair: change what is failing, in the terms the existing arrangement already provides, and preserve what works even where nobody can say why it does. The doctrine of prescription follows - long possession is itself a title - and so does the account of society as a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born, which is his answer to the claim that each generation may remake its own arrangements.
What it answered
The Social Contract 1762Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau and the rights of man, but the immediate provocation was English: a sermon by Richard Price welcoming the revolution and claiming the English had themselves cashiered a king in 1688. Burke's reply is that they had done nothing of the kind - that 1688 was a conservative act preserving an inheritance, not a revolution asserting a right - and much of the book is an argument about what the English constitution is, conducted through an argument about France.
What answered it
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1792Mary Wollstonecraft
Wollstonecraft first, within weeks, and then Paine, whose Rights of Man of 1791 sold in the hundreds of thousands and made the opposite case in prose deliberately stripped of Burke's ornament. Mackintosh answered too. The deeper reply came later from those who noticed that a defence of inherited arrangements is available to any arrangement whatever, and that Burke himself had spent his career attacking established powers in India and America - which raises the question of what principle distinguished those cases, and whether it can be stated without the abstraction he condemns.
How it argues
By rhetoric, and it is the best political prose in English. Burke does not proceed by argument so much as by making the reader feel the weight of what is being discarded - the famous passage on the French queen, the description of society as a partnership across generations, the image of the little platoon. This is a philosophical position and not only a style: if political knowledge is embodied in habits and affections rather than in propositions, then a book that works on the affections is arguing in the appropriate register. It is also why the book is so easy to quote and so hard to summarise.
The moment
1790, with the revolution not yet violent and most English liberal opinion in favour of it. Burke was an Irish-born Whig who had defended the American cause, campaigned for Catholic relief and spent seven years prosecuting Warren Hastings for the East India Company's conduct in Bengal - a record that made this book look, to his own party, like a betrayal. It split the Whigs and ended several friendships, including with Fox.
How it travelled
Fast, and then into a tradition. Thirteen thousand copies in a month, dozens of replies within a year, translations across Europe, and a reputation transformed by the Terror, which appeared to vindicate it. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became the founding document of conservative political thought in Britain and America, quoted by people whose politics Burke would not have recognised. Its readership has always included opponents: Marx read him with contempt, and much twentieth-century radical thought defines itself against this book.
The strongest objection
Wollstonecraft's, and it is the one Burke never answers. If the test of an institution is that it has lasted and commands affection, then every durable injustice passes - and the arrangements she was writing about, which kept half the population uneducated and dependent, were as ancient and as affectionately regarded as anything Burke wished to preserve. His position gives no way of distinguishing a prejudice worth keeping from one worth destroying except by appeal to how it feels to those who hold it, which is precisely the test that cannot see the people it excludes. Burke's own career against slavery and against the East India Company shows he had such a distinction; the Reflections does not supply it.
Why read it
Because the prose is extraordinary and because it is the best statement of a position most readers will disagree with, which is the most useful kind of book to have read. The passages on inheritance, on prejudice, and on society as a partnership across generations are the philosophical core. Read Wollstonecraft's reply afterwards - the pair works better than either alone.
- First printed
- 1790
- First in English
- 1790
- Digitised
- Yes
Burke revised through eleven editions in the first year. The Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs of 1791 defends the position against former allies who thought he had abandoned his own principles.
Written in English. All editions are public domain.
Where it stands
Live and unusually contested. Burke is central to conservative political theory, to arguments about tradition and reform, and to debates about the limits of rational planning - a line that runs through Hayek and Oakeshott. He is equally central to the critique of those positions, and his own record on India and America keeps the question of consistency open.
The passage
a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue
Reflections on the Revolution in France, on what a political society is. Public domain, and Burke's own words.
Contested
Whether Burke's position is a coherent philosophy or a set of brilliant rhetorical responses to particular occasions has been argued since 1790, and his defenders divide over whether he holds a natural-law position underneath the prescriptivism. Whether his career on America, Ireland and India is consistent with the Reflections is the standing charge. How much of the book's reputation rests on the Terror, which he did not live to see much of and which his argument did not specifically predict, is worth separating from what he actually wrote. And the prediction of a military dictator, often quoted as prophecy, is a general observation about armies rather than a forecast of Napoleon.