On Reflections on the Revolution in France

Edmund Burke is the founder of modern conservatism, and the strange thing about him is that he defended the American Revolution and condemned the French one, and thought he was being perfectly consistent both times. Reflections on the Revolution in France, written in 1790 while the Revolution was still young and most of Europe's reformers were cheering it, is his warning that the French were not reforming their society but tearing it up by the roots, and that the result would be not liberty but chaos and, eventually, tyranny. He was, to a remarkable degree, right.

Burke's central argument is a defense of what he called prescription and prejudice, words that have shifted meaning since but that he used to honor the accumulated, tested wisdom embedded in a society's institutions, customs, and inherited arrangements. A constitution, for Burke, is not a document drawn up by clever men on a clean sheet but a living inheritance, the product of generations of trial and adjustment, carrying more practical wisdom than any individual reasoner could supply. To sweep all that away in the name of abstract principles, the rights of man reasoned out from first premises, is to discard the hard-won knowledge of the past in favor of untested theory.

This is why he could bless the Americans and damn the French. The Americans, as he saw it, were defending their inherited rights as Englishmen against a crown that had violated them, conserving an existing order. The French were demolishing theirs and rebuilding from scratch on a philosophical blueprint, and Burke believed that abstract blueprints, applied to the infinite complexity of an actual society, would fail catastrophically.

It would be easy to file Burke as the reactionary foil to Paine, whose Rights of Man was written as a direct answer to this book. That is too simple. Burke is the indispensable counterweight to the revolutionary confidence that runs through much of this library, the voice insisting that change should be gradual, that institutions deserve a presumption of respect, that the reformer should approach an inherited order with humility and a sense of how much could be lost. A republic needs people who will conserve as well as people who will reform, and Burke is the most eloquent statement of why.

His prophecy that the French Revolution would end in military dictatorship, made when almost no one foresaw it, gave his caution enormous authority, and conservatism has drawn on him ever since. Read him against Paine, both are in this library, and you have the permanent argument between those who would change quickly and those who would change slowly, stated by its two greatest voices.

The full text is public domain and freely available. It is rhetorical and long, but the core argument about inherited wisdom and the danger of abstraction is unmistakable, and it is one a thoughtful citizen should be able to weigh.