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The Foundations of Society

Burke is not generally known as a thinker who was fond of speculating about the foundations of society. On the contrary, readers have applauded his warning that peering too closely into the origins of our social customs and institutions would only brew disaffection with them and invite social unrest.1 Such a reading of Burke is not entirely baseless. Burke certainly despaired of philosophers who, having allegedly discovered that civilization was founded on deceit and violence, leapt to the conclusion that it must therefore be illegitimate. In the worst-case scenarios, he feared, such inquiries could encourage attempts to replace established social institutions with improved imaginary alternatives. Idle inquiries into where society came from and how it may have gone astray were never, to Burke's mind, politically innocent.

Burke's hostility to speculation into society's origins has, however, been overstated. This becomes particularly clear when we consider his first major publications, the Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). On the surface at least, both texts qualify as philosophical investigations into the origins of social life. The first engages in a clever ploy by taking freethinker attacks against revealed religion and then extending them to civil society, thereby ironically portraying all government as one massive and pernicious fraud. Just as priests had spun tales to justify their authority, Burke pretended to claim, so too had governments conjured lies about their indispensability to peace, justice, and prosperity to secure obedience. Exactly what Burke was up to with this excoriation of the institutions he would spend much of his life defending will be examined below, but for now it should be noted that only a writer sincerely interested in how society came about could have written it.

The second work, the Philosophical Enquiry, took as its theme the origins of our distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Ostensibly this was a psychological treatise purporting to explain how different objects and experiences stimulate different mental and emotional responses. In fact, however, the scope of the book was much wider. By plumbing the depths of our psychology, Burke explored how social relations came into existence as well as anatomizing passions such as obedience, deference, and respect that political society relied on for its continued existence. If Burke occasionally feigned scorn at philosophical work on the origins of society, he did so from a place of deep familiarity with the genre and the questions that gave rise to it.

Examining each of these works in turn offers a valuable opportunity to see Burke's mind at work on serious theoretical issues before he became swept up in the cut-and-thrust of parliamentary business. It also gives us a chance to see which of the ideas that made him famous originated in this pre-political stage of his career. At the same time, however, we need to guard against projecting the concerns, commitments, and passions of the older Burke onto the younger.2 There is a tendency among historians of political thought to read a thinker's work teleologically and to regard early works as either immature or, at best, faint anticipations of what was to come. The early Burke is worth reading on his own terms, not least because there was arguably no other point in life when he was so unencumbered by political responsibility and thus so free to let his mind roam.

Natural Religion and Natural Society

As a satire that required a readership alert to irony, the Vindication of Natural Society was a risky work, which may explain why Burke - still an unknown twenty-seven-year-old who had just given up on his legal studies - chose to publish it anonymously. Adopting the epistolary style that he would return to in later writings, the young Burke adopted the voice of an elderly nobleman writing to a young Lord to follow up on a conversation they had begun about the 'Foundations of Society'.3 Burke's readers might have expected the old man's letter to proceed along the lines of the conduct manuals popular at the time, and so teach his young addressee to respect the customs of the civilized society he was about to enter. Instead, the old man's letter presents a systematic demolition of that very society, laying down argument upon argument for why civilization had produced nothing but pain, oppression, and violence. The book's subtitle accurately summed up what was to follow: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind from Every Species of Artificial Society with 'Artificial Society' standing in for any institution contrived by human beings that drew them away from the serenity they had enjoyed in the state of nature.

Before unpacking the content of the Vindication's arguments, it is essential to know something about what Burke was up to rhetorically. As he made clear in a Preface to the second edition of 1757, Burke had written the work as a kind of parody of a style of sceptical argument found in the posthumously published writings of Lord Bolingbroke. Assuming that Burke's aim was at least partly to cause a stir in the London literary scene, this was a sound choice of target. Bolingbroke was known as a dissolute Tory politician whose ill-judged decision to back the Stuart pretender to the English throne resulted in a long exile in France. During his time abroad Bolingbroke had developed a rationalist defence of natural religion that cast doubt on the veracity of scripture, denied the divinity of Christ, and did away with Providence altogether. Although several of Bolingbroke's more controversial opinions were well known during his lifetime, the bulk of these writings only began to appear in print posthumously in 1754, causing exactly the kind of scandal that a writer of Burke's talent could easily exploit. Burke's goal in the Vindication was to demonstrate what would happen if Bolingbroke's scepticism regarding the origins of organized religion was redirected towards the origins of the state. Or, as he explained in the Preface, to show that

the same Engines which were employed for the Destruction of Religion, might be employed with equal Success for the Subversion of Government; and that specious Arguments might be used against those Things which they, who doubt of everything else, will never permit to be questioned.4

As the above makes clear, Burke's targets were critics of religion who, following Bolingbroke's lead, aspersed revelation, while taking it for granted that government rested on more secure epistemic foundations. Burke's task was to puncture this complacency. If rationalism taken to extremes could cut down revelation, it could cut down government too, along with any other artificial institution. If, Burke implied, Bolingbroke's followers wanted to shield political authority from rationalist scrutiny, then this would immediately beg the question as to why their own rationalist assault on religion was not subject to a similar limitation.

To accomplish his reductio ad absurdum of rationalist argumentation, Burke had his Noble Writer speculate on how society came into existence and the horrors that accompanied its arrival. The Noble Writer begins by painting a rosy picture of pre-civilized human existence. In the state of nature humans lived peacefully as equals, subsisting mostly on vegetables, living outdoors, and forming families. Human appetites in this bucolic state, the Noble Writer explains, were simple and easily satisfied. The Noble Writer accepts the Lockean argument that the lack of a common arbiter to settle disputes generated 'Inconveniences', but these paled in comparison to the benefits of a life lived without social distinctions, ranks, or hierarchy of any kind.5 All of this was squandered, however, because the 'great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop' or be 'satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement'.6 And so, the Noble Writer reasons, humans sought to improve on the advantages already accrued from binding together into families by forging a 'Union of many Families' into 'one Body politick' or state.7

Readers of the Vindication who cite the high quality of the arguments as evidence that it may have been written in earnest have not paid sufficient attention to this one.8 By the standards of the day this was a shoddy account of the origin of the state. For a start, it is unclear why 'Nature' would give humans passions that made it impossible for them to remain in the state of nature for any length of time. The point of Burke's satirizing, however, was precisely to blur the boundary between the natural and the artificial. What those who held up nature as a test of legitimacy failed to realize was that the desire for improvement that drove humans to abandon the state of nature and develop civilization was itself a natural impulse. As Burke would much later argue in reply to those who championed natural rights as a moral standard, to laud nature over and against artifice was to rely on a false dichotomy. Ultimately 'art is man's nature'.9

Having sketched the origin of the state, Burke's Noble Writer examines the consequences of its arrival for human welfare. His main...