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Editorial Review Product Description
This new and up-to-date edition of a book that has been central to political philosophy, history, and revolutionary thought for two hundred years offers readers a dire warning of the consequences that follow the mismanagement of change. Written for a generation presented with challenges of terrible proportions--the Industrial, American, and French Revolutions, to name the most obvious--Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France displays an acute awareness of how high political stakes can be, as well as a keen ability to set contemporary problems within a wider context of political theory. ... Read more Customer Reviews (8) 
The Prototypical Neo-Conservative
I struggle with how to rate this book. It's of course a classic political text of immense historical importance, making Five Stars the only proper rating. But it's also outrageous anti-democratic balderdash, a plethora of aspersions on the abilities of"us the people" to govern ourselves without aristocratic supervision, and a blast of Bulldog British chauvinism. And, though few readers have dared to say so, it's pompous, repetitive, snide, and pedantic, impelling one toward a reader-cautionary One Star. So... no absolutist I! I'll compromise and call it Three Stars. The very sort of compromise between popular passion and genteel propriety that Plato spurned for his Republic.
Burke was a Whig, a free-trade liberal, a 'friend' of the American rebels in 1776. Just as the Cold War inflamed hegemonist Democrats, Ronald Reagan for one, and cooked them metamorphically into neo-con Republicans, the French Revolution -- particularly the imprisonment of the king in Paris -- ignited the monarchist in Burke and prompted him to write this meta-pamphlet "Reflections of the Revolution in France." That was in 1790, before the execution of Louis, before the "Reign of Terror", fearsome sequels to the events that upset Burke that have made many historians consider his fulminations prophetic. Burke broke with the leadership of the Whigs, and at places in the Reflections he waxes bitter at finding himself aligned as a Tory.
Burke's voluminous pamphlet was immediately assaulted -- refuted, I would say -- by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft's "On the Rights of Men" is not widely read today, but Paine's "The Rights of Man" stands a one of the greatest expositions of democratic principles in Western history.
So what were the "Rights" that Burke denied and that Paine acclaimed? Very close to the beginning of Reflections, while Burke is denouncing English supporters of the French revolution, Burke declares that the revolutionaries have invented the following spurious 'rights' that are "new and hhitherto unheard of":
1. "To choose our own governors."
2. "To cashier them for misconduct."
3. "To frame a government for ourselves."
These so-called rights, according to Burke, as "fictitious" as well as pernicious, and the rest of the text is composed to prove that commitment to such rights would destroy all happiness and order in society.
Indeed, Burke is a coherent conservative in the root meaning of the term. His argument is that the institutions of English polity -- the not-entirely-written Constitution -- are a fortunate inheritance, a sort of communal property of the English people, and like ALL forms of property, sacred! It is PROPERTY above all that stabilizes and legitimizes government, and therefore it should be the holders of property who constitute the governing class. Particularly those holders of enough property to be idle, and those whose antiquity of family wealth has given them the special grooming for governance, must inevitably be the most capable and trustworthy governors. Lawyers, especially rural ones, doctors, poets, and shoemakers may all be skilled at their own artisanry or swollen with knowledge of their own study, but they lack the makings of proper Lords of the state. Burke's references to shoemakers, by the way, seem to me an explicit allusion to Plato and Socrates, who used shoemakers regularly as examples of the absurdity of entrusting government to ordinary people. Clergymen, likewise, and especially parish clergy without the savoir-faire of bishops and cardinals, should stick to their preaching of salvation and stay out of public affairs. What horrifies Burke, therefore, about the revolutionary leadership of France is that it is composed of the lower orders - of small-town lawyers and clergy, of writers and intellectuals without property, of (gasp!) merchants and even mere craftsmen.
Here is what Burke urges as wisdom upon the French, if only they had followed 'reasonable' conservative principles and upheld their ancient regime:
"You would have shamed despotism from the earth, by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppressive but a productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free constitution; a potent monarchy; a disciplined army; a reformed and venerated clergy; a mitigated but spirited nobility, to lead your virtue, not to overlay it.... you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognise the happiness that is found by virtue in all conditions; in which consist the true moral equality of mankimd, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it can never remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid..."
What Burke is saying amounts to this: the fundamental human right is the Right to INequality. No wonder Tom Paine was outraged! Burke's smug assumptions of class superiority are enough to make me sing the Marseillaise at the top of my voice, to wave the red flag of liberty, almost enough to make me wish to reinvent the guillotine.
Burke's evils of the French Revolution
This was required reading for a graduate course in the history of the French Revolution.In Burke's book Reflections on the Revolution in France, he penned a diatribe against the evils of the French Revolution,believing that there was a pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians joined by money-jobbers whose aim was to topple not only the old regime in France, but to export their "plague" throughout Europe.Thus, Burke astutely understood and abhorred the influence that Radical Enlightenment ideas had on the French Revolution.One instantly detects, in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, a conservative philosophy by which he not only understood his own society, but the entire human civilization.Much of his work was an appeal to a politically conservative notion of a "created order" of the world, which from this reading seemed to be universal to all European nations.This reader sensed that Burke's Reflections were written as a warning to the rest of Europe not to follow the model of change embodied in the French Revolution, and to adopt the steady reforms that took place in England.
Burke found no social redeeming value in the French Revolution and when he wrote Reflections, the worst of the "reign of terror" had yet to come.In fact, if one used Georges Lefebvre's notion of "four acts" to the Revolution, Burke poured out all his criticism against the first two acts, the aristocratic and bourgeois revolts.This reader found Burke's long sections on British history used to buttress his case; that change should have come to France within a more staid social order as either ignorant of the complex socio-economic and political factors that led up to the Revolution, or as a naïve belief that that the French people were so culturally close to the English that they should both react in similar fashion to socio-political upheaval.Burke delivered a literary "tongue lashing" to the French for how easily they turned their backs on their socio-political traditions."You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew.You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you" (31).This reader found Burke's argument on this point a little disingenuous.He lectured how Britain's "Glorious Revolution" in 1688 should have been the model for reform.However, he barely mentioned the bloody English Civil War that Cromwell staged, including the regicide of Charles I.In addition, one's impression of Burke's information is that he had received a very narrow view of the history leading up to the Revolution and its opening days, which seemed confined to correspondence from a small circle of friends.Burke had high praise for the First and Second Estates.His opinion of the nobles he knew was that they were, "...for the greater part composed of men of high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honour....They were tolerably well bred; very officious, humane, and hospitable" (115-116).Not the impression one is left with after viewing the movie Dangerous Liaisons!In describing his personal contacts with the French clergy, he noted that, "I received a perfectly good account of their morals, and of their attention to their duties" (123).
Burke essentially observed a "cabal" that planned the opening of the Revolution to include a pronouncement of aristocratic intentions to abolish feudalism, the National Assembly's adoption of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man," and the confiscation of Church property.Burke blamed two evils for the old regimes' demise.First, he blamed the philosophes whose atheistic literature he believed provided the influential ideas necessary to set the Revolution in motion."The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion" (94)."Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind" (95).Second, he blamed the doubling of the Third Estate's representation in the National Assembly who were led by an overabundance of undistinguished lawyers and whose ambitions were to grab the reins of power.Burke described these men as "the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members of the profession" (36).Burke also ascribed to this cabal; the desire to reorder society through the confiscation of property, which he decried in his Reflections."I see the confiscators begin with bishops, and chapters, and monasteries; but I do not see them end their" (128).Thus, Burke found that the pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians were too enamored of the "new religion" of enlightenment science and had no respect for tradition or the wisdom of religion."They conceive very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous" (75).
Alexis de Tocqueville noted how Burke misjudged the Revolution."At first he thought it meant that France would be weakened and virtually destroyed" (94).Burke also feared that this "irrational" revolution would infest his own countrymen similar to a plaque."If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it." (76).
Burke was no stranger to enlightened ideas.After all, he had been a supporter of American and Irish liberty.Burke was a Conservative Enlightenment figure, defending "reason" with tradition and religion.However, what Burke, was condemning in its earliest form is what we now recognize as ideology.And what he understood with great foresight is the power of modern intellectuals, acting as a literary clerisy, to produce it.Thus, Burke found that the pernicious cabal of philosophes and politicians were too enamored of the "new religion" of enlightenment science and had no respect for tradition or the wisdom of religion."They conceive very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous" (75).
Recommended reading for anyone interested in political philosophy, enlightenment history, and the French Revolution.
Edmund Burkes contribution
This book is excellent because it is exactly what I needed, that is an account of Edmund Burkes thinking, what it is he contributed to our understanding of government.
A Warning to Those in Love with Unbridled Power and Vulnerable to Anything New
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)wrote REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE in 1789 which was four years before the rise of the fanatical Jacobins and the execution (murder)of Louis XVI.This book was not only well written but very prophetic on the tragic events that were part of the French Revolution.Burke showed historical insight and warned both the British and the French what was going to happen.
Burke cited conditions in France prior to the French Revolution. He certainly did not give a false representation of the economic and social conditions in France, but he was clear that, while not perfect, the French had advanced culture and tolerable living standards.He also warned the French that abrupt changes without recourse to tradition and legal norms were dangerous and would end in tyranny. Readers should be aware that Burke's assessment of the French political system was that the French had reasonble politcal freedom and prosperity. To destroy this political system would end in political disruption, social and political violence, lack of law-and-order, and the rise of tyrannical military leaders.
One should note Burke's assessment of the members of the French National Assembly which was vacilating and subject to the whims of any "political interest group" was serious.He suggested that military officers would be among those "pleaders" would be military officers who would be difficult to control.He also warned that when someone who understood the art of command got control of the military officers, the days of the French Republic and the National Assembly were over.The military commander would be in total control, and this is exactly what happened when Napolean I (1769-1821)started to exhibit military genius, he quickly got power by a coup d' etat in 1799 and became the French Emperor by 1804.
Burke's warnings of disaster and tragedy were fullfilled.From at least 1792 until 1815, the French were almost constantly at war with most Europeans.While the French Empire expanded beyond anything prior French monarchs ever dreamed of, the collapse of the French Empire came quickly, and the French empire was ended by 1815 at terrible cost in both blood treasure.Burke warned of these dangers, and his predictions were accurate.
Burke lived just long enough to see the rise and fall of the maniacal Jacobins which included the Reigh of Terror (1792-1794)and the execution of King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie antionette.Had Burke lived a few more years, he could have resorted to remarking, "I told you so."
Edmund Burke has been defined as a conservative which is true.However, Burke was not a reactionary.Burke realized that progress, whatever that may mean, is often slow and within the confines of historical tradition, legal norms, and established law.Burke warned his readers, to use modern parlance, against "wipe the slate clean."Burke clearly understood that to "wipe the slate clean, meant mass dislocation of men and ultimately mass executions (mass murder).Subsequent modern political revolutions vindicate this view.
Readers may wonder why Burke expressed support for the American Revolution but strongly opposed the French Revolution.A careful examination of these revolutions provides the answer.The American "revolutionaries" were arguing for their "Rights of Englishmen" which had a long tradition in Great Britain.Henry II (1154-1189) started the use grand juries.The English had the right of trial by jury by the time of Edward I (1272-1307). The fact is the American colonists wanted to rules of common law and long established legal traditions to apply to them.The British wanted to rule the American colonists with administrative law using clever bureaucrats, as Burke would probably have called them, rather than use British Constitutional Law and the Common Law which many American colonists demanded.The French, on the other hand, wanted to replace a weak monarch with "clever bureaucrats" which Burke knew very well could not work in France.
Readers should note that Thomas Paine (1737-1809)wrote a response to Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION titled THE RIGHTS OF MAN.While Paine's views were different than those of Burke's Paine's book was just as brilliant as Burke's.Readers should read both works if they want exposure to profound political thought and excellent writing.This is much preferred to the current political nonsense that is pushed by media talking heads and journalists who cannot think or write.Burke and Paine were well read men and offered readers history lessons as well as politcal lessons.
Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE is highly recommended regardless of one's political persuasion.This book is not a light read and takes time.However, one will be better informed and wiser for doing so.Again, this reviewer suggests the reader should read Thomas Paine's THE RIGHTS OF MAN to draw comparisons and contrasts.
A Classic of Conservative Thought
In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, Burke received a request from a good friend living in France to provide his thoughts on the Revoution. The result- one of the finest pieces of political discourse ever written. For those encountering Burke for the first time, his adament defense of the crown, and of hereditary succcesion, seem to make a hypocrite of this self-proclaimed liberal. Burke, however, was not defending an absolute monarch who ruled under the charter of divine right, but rather, pointing out the danger of a perfect democracy, whose sovereign (the national assembly) was compelled not to a moral authority such as a Church, nor to a fixed consitution. In short, liberty was safer restricted in civil socity, than left unchecked.
Whether you find Burke's analysis, consistent with your political leanings, or more likely, you find his writing very offensive, you can appreciate both the efffect of this work on American and European political though, as well as the reason and intelligence with which it was written.
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