Selected Letters of Edmund Burke / Thomas Jefferson: Writings

...In short, critical or realigning elections are a return to America's origins for the sake of its ends...

...In the same way, his patronage of agrarianism was turned by others, with an unbecoming ease, into a defense of the morality of slavery...

...Making allowances for the private nature of most of his shocking pronouncements, Jefferson does not seem as undignified or as radical as some conservatives today think...

...Burke was not opposed to change as such...

...There have been ingenious efforts to evade this dead end by finding or inventing a native Burkean tradition, dragooning John Randolph of Roanoke, Orestes Brownson, and others into the act, but these well-meaning attempts are in their own way an eloquent admission that the public life of America has been sadly un-Burkean...

...The superficiality of much of conservatism's devotion to Burke is apparent in its disregard of this profound study (Gertrude Him-melfarb is one of the few conservative scholars to have appreciated it...

...In a 1925 book review in the New York Evening World, long before his triumphant election to the presidency, FDR wrote, "Hamiltons we have today...

...Yet it was the great truth at the heart of Jefferson's Declaration, "that all men are created equal," that provided the moral light by which both secession and slavery were seen to be evils and, through a long and bloody Civil War, came to be vanquished...

...He meant to absorb the Federalists within his own party, effectively obviating the need for permanent party competition...

...But as the author of the Kentucky Resolutions, whose extreme states' rights arguments would be adopted and championed by the Confederacy, Jefferson was more irresponsible than many conservatives would admit...

...This account of Burke's political philosophy, however, slights its most distinctive theme, which is prescription, "this great fundamental part of natural law," as he called it, which describes and ought to govern the inheritance and transmission of property and constitutions from the dead to the living to the yet unborn...

...Though indirect, this was perhaps his greatest contribution to American politics...

...Needless to say, conservative politicians prefer to win rather than lose elections, and American elections cannot be won by espousing Burkean theories...

...To a great extent, every critical election in America, including the election of 1860 that precipitated the Civil War, revolves around which party will claim Jefferson as its own...

...The Democrats have appropriated him ever since the New Deal (it was the Roosevelt Administration that put Jefferson on the nickel and built the Jefferson Memorial...

...Ever since, politics in America has taken place within the horizon set by that party, as the names of the major parties of today show: The Democrats and Republicans are parts or wings of the original Democratic-Republican party...

...It is telling that the Burke they have taken up is not in the first place the defender of the American Revolution, but the opponent of the French Revolution...

...Burke provides what Aristotle and Aquinas would have thought a contradiction in terms-a theory of prudence, which, by making prudence immanent in the British Constitution, and in similar constitutions that have grown rather than been made, goes far toward identifying what is best with whatever has evolved...

...BOOK REVIEWS CONSERVATIVE DILEMMAS SELECTED LETTERS OF EDMUND BURKE Edited by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr./University of Chicago Press/$16.95 THOMAS JEFFERSON: WRITINGS Edited by Merrill D. Peterson/Library of America/$30.00 Charles R. Kesler Ask a conservative to discuss the axioms of his politics, and the conversation will soon come around to the political philosophy of Edmund Burke...

...To contemporary conservatives, he thus comes to sight as the modern defender-of prudence or practical reason, and perhaps even of a version of Thomistic natural law, as over against modern natural rights doctrines...

...Instead, as Mansfield says elegantly, "prescription is prudence crystallized in theory...

...Each of the critical elections since 1800 (by most counts, 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932) represents a kind of replay of the 1800 contest, which was itself a peaceful reenactment of the events of 1776...

...To the extent that there is such a tradition, it can be summed up, exasperatingly, in that arch description of conservatives "standing athwart history and yelling 'Stop!'" Of course, history has not stopped, and so one wonders what exactly it is that conservatives want...

...To effect this, American citizens have been asked to consent in two different kinds of party contests: those that take place between a more or less established majority party (on the national level) and its minority opponent, and "critical elections" that determine which the majority party shall be...

...No other philosopher has written so much and so eloquently on the conditions of prudential judgment, on the importance of circumstances and consequences in evaluating political action...

...His letters are more daring, more idiosyncratic, more troublesome, but they are, after all, letters, and provide a wonderful record of the many-sidedness of Jefferson's genius...

...Burke thought that parties should be led by landed gentlemen of the great aristocratic families, their ambition tempered by their inheritances, their principles supported by their friendships...

...American conservatives have long been attracted to Burke-at least since Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953)-but their attempts to propagate his principles have always faced an embarrassing obstacle: namely, the almost complete lack of a Burkean tradition in America...

...Thomas Jefferson: Writings, the new anthology edited by Merrill D. Peterson for the Library of America, is a great repository of the man's soul, a sort of animate Jefferson Memorial...

...Thus Jefferson's primary institutional legacy to his country is its only Burkean "establishment," the practice of party government, although (if you are a Burkean, because) Jefferson did not intend to create a two-party system...

...A good place to begin to think about this question as it bears on Burke and America is the Selected Letters of Edmund Burke, edited and introduced by Harvard political scientist Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., and recently published by the University of Chicago Press...

...Whether Republicans will reassert their claim to embody his principles-as they did in 1860 and 1896-remains to be seen, though President Reagan is making efforts in that direction...

...The argument that shines through the Declaration, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, his early pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America, is remarkably consistent...

...They can be won on Jeffer-sonian grounds, and they usually are...

...and it is the political predicament of American conservatism when it attempts to combat liberalism by modeling itself along Burkean lines...

...Jefferson's victory in 1800, which he considered to be a revolution as great as that of 1776, marked not only the death knell of the Federalist party but also the emergence of Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans as the party of America's future...

...Alas, not even Ronald Reagan seems to make Charles R. Kesler is assistant professor of political science and associate director of the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont-McKenna College...

...His notorious remark that "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical," is, for example, a throw-away line in a letter to Madison, which cannot be easily squared with the stately doctrine of the people's right (and duty) of revolution in the Declaration...

...The only thing resembling a debate is the scramble for the accelerator and the brake...

...America's first and in some ways its greatest party politician was Thomas Jefferson...

...Which is not to say that we cannot learn much from Burke...

...These are impossibilities-and besides, the attempt to duplicate them in America would itself be un-Burkean, the imposition of an alien theory upon our native practice...

...Today, conservatives should be asking the same question-if they intend to govern the country, and not just to lament its decline...

...When conservatism seeks its principles and its tradition, it turns first not to the American past but to Burke, to the Anglican or the Catholic Church, to Herbert Spencer, to Austrian economists...

...Is a Jefferson on the horizon...

...Both prudence and natural law are therefore made historical, and it is this historicism-not the traces of classical natural law in Burke's thought-that exerted the greatest influence on subsequent political philosophy and political practice...

...In his brilliant Reflections on the Revolution in France and in the scarcely less brilliant sequels to that pamphlet, Burke attacked the French Revolution as the first "complete revolution," a "revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions" that reached "even to the constitution of the human mind...

...But then the shift from the one to the other ought not to be perplexing, for if you identify growth with the conservation of life, and life with progress, then "the law of conservatism," as Wilson put it, "is a law of progress...

...His book, Notes on the State of Virginia, complicates and darkens his thought, but is hardly the congeries that some people believe...

...This is the intellectual predicament of Burkean conservatism when it tries to oppose the historicism of the left...

...Nonetheless, the implications of this new doctrine of natural law are explained with breathtaking authority and clarity in Mansfield's introduction to the Selected Letters, which succeeds in saying everything important about Burke's politics that could be said in so many pages...

...But even they distrust him for his support of civic virtue and agrarian republicanism...

...it is Burke's innovation, though he would never have abided the term...

...Strange to say, but the single American statesman who was profoundly affected by Burke was Woodrow Wilson, whose Burkeanism was finally indistinguishable from his progressivism...

...The fact is that none of these branches of present-day conservatism is really at home with the American political tradition...

...but he did not realize how many mansions there were in the house he was building...

...Americans reject Burke's advice precisely in order to overturn laws and customs that contradict or dishonor the abstract principles that have ever been at the heart of our national life...

...The real mystery is why so many American conservatives have looked to Burke to find principles for American conservatism...

...Is it to be the governing majority in American politics, taking responsibility for the direction of our history, or is it to be a pristine Remnant, standing back from history and volunteering "I told you so...

...But he was for slow change and adaptive growth...

...Paradoxically, American conservatism adopts Burke's great philosophy of practice not as a guide to practical politics but as an excuse for not being practically minded, while it leaves its successful political leaders (e.g., Reagan) to be guided by a makeshift Jeffersonianism to which it could never give its intellectual assent...

...At that point, the difference between conservatism and liberalism (nee Progressivism) is simply how fast you want to go, or more precisely, how fast you think you can tolerably go...

...To be sure, some conservatives have tried to identify American Burkeanism with the cause of the Confederacy, but it is doubtful that Burke would have appreciated having his principles, which he traced to the evolving splendors of the free British Constitution, sullied with the defense of slavery...

...or it tries to interpret the American past in the light of one of these (the list is by no means exhaustive) authorities...

...The best book on this subject, indeed the best book on Burke's political philosophy in general, remains Harvey Mansfield's Statesmanship and Party Government (University of Chicago...

...American elections thus exhibit a cycle consisting of a few critical elections separated by many non-critical or ordinary ones...

...And it isn't even a fair scramble, since liberalism always gets to sit behind the wheel...

...Nor should we forget that he was also the inventor of the idea of party government-of the legitimacy and respectability of an enduring party system with organized political parties competing to have a turn as the party in power...

...in fact he held that "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation...

...Burke's Selected Letters is not the best place to begin the study of his political philosophy-read his speeches and pamphlets-but it is invaluable for understanding Burke the political man, particularly in his relation to the birth of party government in Great Britain...

...Of course, American conservatives don't live in France, so Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution devolves instead upon the New Deal, or upon the world revolution led by the Soviet Union, or-and here is where the real problem begins-upon the American Revolution...

...The pre-eminent event of 1776 was the decision for Independence, announced and justified in the great Declaration, which was principally Jefferson's handiwork...

...In the United States, too, political parties have worked to limit and direct the ambitions of political men, but they have not been led by landed aristocrats (sometimes not even by gentlemen), and they have had the more democratic task of structuring popular participation in the government, to prevent the consent of the governed from degenerating into plebiscitarianism...

...Burke opposed both notions, because looking at beginnings could overturn long-accepted customs and inheritances, and because searching for abstract principles would radicalize political life...

...above all, he was against planned change or political action guided by theoretical reason...

...There is no debate over the destination, because both sides admit that they won't know where they are going until they get there-but that they know they aren't there yet...

...That is to say, you have to be so resourceful in discovering the tradition because you cannot enroll the obvious Americans in it-Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, to name a few...

...the list, for he speaks the vernacular not of Burke's conservatism but of Jefferson's optimism and individualism...

...Not many conservatives today have kind words for Jefferson-the abstract principles of the Declaration of Independence are anathema to Burkeans, his egalitarianism is disliked by the diehard partisans of the more aristocratic Federalists-and it may be that he only remains a hero for the libertarians...

...The United States, to put it mildly, has had little truck with Burkean notions of prescriptive or inherited right and settled "establishments," and no serious conservative has ever advocated reproducing the bulwarks of the British Constitution, so beloved of Burke, here in America: the monarchy, the established Church, the great families of the landed nobility...

...Prescription is not part of the natural law as described by Aquinas, nor as discussed in Cicero...

...American parties are not the same as Burke's parties, of course...

...With the natural law refracted through human customs and inheritance, prudence ceases to be the virtue described by Aristotle and Aquinas, mediating between what is best everywhere and always and what is possible here and now...

...What made it so radical was its basis in theory, in abstract or "metaphysical" principles whose extremism, universality, false simplicity, and sovereign indifference to the circumstances and consequences of political action destroyed any possibility of decent moral and political life...