Edmund Burke, Father of Modern Day Conservatism

by Donna Schoenkopf

In the last couple of months I’ve heard the name Edmund Burke fall lovingly from the lips of conservative Republicans. They are reminding us that Edmund Burke was the founder of modern day conservatism. They are proud of that. They hold him in great esteem.

Edmund Burke! Yikes! You’d think they would be embarrassed to admit that he is the father of their political philosophy.

Let’s stroll back to 1961, shall we? It was at the very beginning of the sixties, a revolutionary time. I was nineteen and in my first Philosophy class, taught by Dr. Pritchard. When you say the name Dr. Pritchard around here, fifty years later, the people who knew him get a gentle, sweet look on their faces.

Dr. Pritchard was thin, kind of short, beginning to bald, glasses, dark hair. He always had a gentle, sweet look on his face. I just Google-imaged him and got two obituaries. One had a picture that I saw in my mind when I thought of him back in 1961. The other has a photo when he was much older, with the gentle smile I saw when I was in his Philosophy 101 class. The obituary said that up until he died he taught Philosophy 101 to people who lived in his retirement community.

Our textbook was Great Political Thinkers—Plato to the Present, written by William Ebenstein. Ebenstein would preface each political thinker’s treatise with a description of the time and place of each man (yes, no women included in this book), what other political ideas had preceded the one he was about to discuss, and his brilliant analysis of each writer.

I learned about Aristotle warning the people about tyrants. “Tyrants will say, ‘Give people the games.’”

I learned of Hobbes’ “state of nature,” which described his view that human beings were basically bad and that unless the sovereign had control, our lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

I learned that Locke’s “state of nature” was more optimistic and that humans intrinsically realize they ought not to harm one another in “life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Golden Rule, right? All societies have that concept, right?

I met Rousseau in The Social Contract, in which he says a deal is made between the sovereign and the people, in which the people obey the laws of the sovereign and pay their taxes but MUST get something back in exchange—protection against invading hordes, protection against the abuse of power, a decent way to earn a living, an environment that is healthy and alive. In other words, a good life.

That book was so important to me that I have carried it from house to house over the many moves of my lifetime. I finally gave away almost all the books I lugged in the back of my car, in the back of pickups borrowed from friends, in the back of U-Hauls, because I realized that it was my ego that propped those books up on bookshelves, so that everyone could see I was a book lover, smart, an intellectual, not because I was ever going to read them again. (I also saw, every time I pulled them down to move, that they collected enormous amounts of dust and spiderwebs and stuff like that.)

But Great Political Thinkers was different. I knew I would read it again. I knew I would open pages to recollect principles and ideas. It’s on a shelf here in my house in Oklahoma, the pages thin and crisp and yellow, the spine’s covering torn. And even though I’ve only occasionally opened it, I did this past month. Edmund Burke made me do it.

So here, Gentle Readers, is the basic tutorial on Edmund Burke, the founder of conservatism.

Back in the 1700s, as revolutions were blossoming in Europe and here on the North American continent, there was a lot of discussion about what revolutions meant. Edmund Burke was on the anti-democratic side of the debate. He wrote about the impracticability of the democratic ideal, saying democracy degenerates into chaos and anarchy.

He believed in hierarchy in all aspects of society, saying that those at the top knew better than the masses because that’s why they were at the top in the first place. He hated revolutions and wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France as an argument against those who saw the revolution as the dawn of a new humanity.

Burke’s piece gave legitimacy to the enemies of the revolution. Kings and the upper class loved him. Ebenstein wrote in his preface that King George III excitedly told everyone who visited him, “It will do you good—do you good! Every gentleman should read it.” Our own Thomas Paine wrote Rights of Man as an impassioned response to Burke. Yeah, that Thomas Paine. The Thomas Paine who essentially put into words what the people of America were thinking and feeling and wanting.

Burke saw ordinary people as unable to think things through for themselves and saw a hierarchical structure being needed in society, with those at the top teaching those underneath them. His piece Vindication says speaking ill against the rulers and the rules was wrong because it would destroy the society.

Burke was a pessimist and doubted whether God even intended for Man to be happy and saw, like Hobbes, the need for laws and rules so that we wouldn’t all just run around killing and eating each other. (Do you see the same connection I do between trickle-down economics and Burke’s idea of the elite handing the Truth down to us poor dumb souls?)

Burke venerated the aristocracy and saw it as part of the divine plan and saw democratic revolution as part of the evil ambitions of people who had a lust for power. He called for a European movement to crush all revolutions by force.

But he didn’t resist all change. He thought change had to come very slowly, incrementally, and to be thought out and handed down to the masses from on high. He didn’t think democracy was a valid philosophy and didn’t endorse individual rights, but instead thought human beings should be considered, not as individuals, but as one big entity. (Fascism grew out of that idea. Yeah, that fascism.)

Although Burke didn’t approve of people in the lower classes actually being abused, he still thought they had no right to vote. “He saw wealth and aristocracy as the repositories of wisdom and experience,” according to William Ebenstein. Burke thought property is and should always be unequal.

And here is the part that gets me. Burke cared not a fig for the working man.

According to Burke, labor is a commodity and is subject to the fluctuations of the marketplace and there is no obligation on the part of anyone to give consideration to a living wage. He saw the poverty of the masses as the result of there being too many of their kind.

Though he rejected the concept of the Rights of Man, he had a different opinion on the Rights of Commerce. He considered them equivalent to the laws of nature. No wonder Republicans love him.

Okay. So. What did he think about liberty?

Well, he didn’t believe there are certain inalienable rights—as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He thought the Powers That Be should establish rights for us underlings and that all rights are dependent on whether the people are good enough to handle them. He never saw revolution as the result of the lengthy suffering of ordinary people. He always saw the monarchy, aristocracy and church as having all the answers.

For modern day Republicans to proudly point to him as their mentor, their guide, their founder, is to reveal themselves for what they are—defenders of the rich, proponents of supply-side/trickle-down economics, advocators of a hierarchical system that protects itself from intrusion by the middle and lower classes, with no concern for the welfare of those beneath the top cats.

One final thought. Conservatism is pessimistic. It assumes that people are basically bad and that without stern laws and punishments and powerful leaders our world would dissolve into chaos. Liberals are basically optimistic and see human nature as good and think that The System must be changed to benefit the most people possible.

I am glad to have been of service to you, Dear Reader, in the matter of Edmund Burke. It was great fun cracking open that old philosophy book. It reactivated old synapses and let me look one more time upon the sweet and gentle face of Dr. Pritchard and think about Edmund Burke.

That son-of-a-bitch.

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