This is part 1 of a three-part post on Conservatism and Modernity
Modern conservatives often trace their intellectual lineage to Edmund Burke, and rightly so. His Reflections on the Revolution in France is a foundational text of modern conservative thought. For conservatives, the importance of Burke’s Reflections is less the subject at hand — the French Revolution — than it is the political outlook that he brings to bear on the subject.
Yet, Burke wrote his Reflections as a counter-revolutionary not as a conscious conservative thinker. Like Joseph de Maistre, Mallet du Pan, and Louis de Bonald, he understood that the ancien régime needed serious reform. But instead of prescribing the appropriate medicine, the revolutionaries were prescribing a catastrophic poison. Writing as a loyal Whig, Burke offers the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as an ideal model of reform.
The Glorious Revolution was glorious because it was a limited response to a real crisis. It restored rather than destroyed. It prevented radical change to the basic principles of the British Constitution. Most important, the revolution was glorious because it established no new principles.
It is in this context that Burke uses the noun conservation rather than the adjective conservative. In explaining the basis of the Glorious Revolution, Burke writes, “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”
This brilliant passage underlies his thought on change and reform and is connected to an organic model of the state in terms of growth, decline, and renovation. However, this is a prescription for ordered change in a traditional premodern world. But Burke is facing the emergence of something radically different, and he knows it.
In a book full of insightful reflections, Burke offers his most perceptive reflection within the first few pages. Here the subject of his Reflections takes center stage. Burke recognizes the French Revolution as a different type of revolution than those found in the past. It is a new and unprecedented political event. And this is what concerns him.
Burke writes, “it looks to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world.”
Unlike the Glorious Revolution that established no new principles, the principles of the French Revolution are the new philosophical products and pretensions of the Enlightenment. They are also — as we now know — the foundational principles of the modern world.
The French Revolution is not guided by a prudent and practical understanding of growth, decline, and renovation. It is guided by an entirely new way of looking at the world. If this new worldview were peculiar only to the French, this would be one thing. But as Burke rightly points out, it is a worldview based upon abstract principles that are asserted as self-evident and universal. The crisis in France thus threatens the whole world.
Burke responds to this crisis with a passionate defense of traditional order rooted in historical experience. A defense of a world that values the guiding light of past experience. A defense of a world that is humbled by the immense complexity of a civilized existence. A defense of a world that did not need to be mounted until now, as this world had been an unmistakable truth of human lived experience.
It is to this defense that modern conservatives rightly trace their intellectual lineage. His defense is what we would call a conservative outlook, but it is only conservative from the perspective of the post-revolutionary world.
This is not a pedantic distinction. It is a distinction that understands the French Revolution as does Burke: as an astonishing event with no precedent in the past. This unprecedented event compelled a complementary response. Burke offers a complementary response, but he does so not as a conscious conservative.
Whether we find the origin of modern conservatism in Burke or view it more broadly as a body of knowledge that stretches back several millennia, it is a word first used to describe a political viewpoint only after the French Revolution. The word conservative was coined in 1818 by Chateaubriand, who named his journal Le Conservateur. It is not a coincidence that liberalism, which has its antecedents in the seventeenth century with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, emerged as a word to describe a political viewpoint at about the same time. Both conservatism and liberalism are post-revolutionary — or modern — words to describe contending yet complementary political viewpoints.
Understanding modern conservatism this way has important implications. The worldview that Burke valiantly defended was increasingly being replaced by a worldview that he only faintly understood. In hindsight, we can see that this was a modern worldview that shifted the balance between the past and the future. Modern conservatism emerged in the post-revolutionary world as both a response to, and a reluctant participant in, this modern worldview.