Edmund Burke and the Case for Changing Things Slowly and Carefully

Liberals have called him a hypocrite for two centuries. Conservatives have called him their founder. Both are talking about the same man, who stood up in the British House of Commons in 1775 and pleaded with his colleagues to make peace with the American colonists, siding, in effect, with the rebels' grievances, and fifteen years later picked up his pen to write a furious book against a revolution across the Channel that much of Europe was applauding.

Was he a radical or a reactionary? Neither. He was a man who had one idea about how free societies work, and he applied it to both cases. His name was Edmund Burke, and if you want to understand why a conservative is wary of grand plans, you have to start with him.

I am going to take this the way a debater would. First the man and the record. Then his idea, in numbered form. Then the fair criticism, because there is one, and it is a good one. Then what it means for a family trying to judge the next big proposal out of Washington or the state capital.

The man and the record

Burke was born in Dublin in 1729 and died in 1797. He was Irish-born, a writer and a statesman, and he sat in the House of Commons for decades as a Whig, which in his day meant a defender of Parliament's limits on the Crown. He was no aristocrat by birth, which is worth remembering whenever someone tells you conservatism is the creed of the privileged. He rose by talent and by argument.

His career is easier to follow if you hold on to three episodes.

1. The American speeches. In April 1774 he spoke against the tax on tea, and on March 22, 1775, he gave his famous speech on conciliation with the colonies, a month before the fighting at Lexington and Concord. His argument was not a high-minded appeal to abstract rights. It was practical. The colonists were Englishmen with an English love of liberty, he said, they would not be governed by force, and trying to do so would cost more than it could ever gain. Government, he argued, should deal with the people as they actually are, not as a theory says they ought to be.
2. The Bristol speech. In November 1774, speaking to the voters of Bristol who had just elected him, Burke told them that a representative owes his constituents his judgment as well as his industry, and betrays them if he sacrifices his judgment to their opinion. He gave up that seat in 1780 rather than face the voters again. Say what you like about the man, he did not shape his views to the poll.
3. The French Revolution. Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, early in the upheaval, long before the Terror that began in 1793. He warned that a revolution which tore up everything at once, in the name of reason alone, would end in tyranny. History did not make him look foolish.

Notice what ties them together. On America, he said: do not destroy a working relationship by forcing a theory on a people who have grown up free. On France, he said: do not destroy a working society by forcing a theory on a people who have grown up in order. The target was the same both times, the confident planner with a blueprint.

The idea, in five premises

Burke never wrote a systematic treatise, which is why summaries of him vary. But I think the core of it fits in five propositions.

1. A society is older and wiser than any one generation. Its laws, manners and habits are the accumulated result of trial and error. We may not be able to explain why each inherited rule exists, but the fact that it survived is a kind of evidence.
2. Reason is limited. No single mind, and no single committee, can see the whole web of effects a big change will set off. Burke distrusted what he called abstract rights asserted against the facts of a particular country.
3. We are attached first to the small things. In a passage that has become famous, Burke says that to love the little platoon we belong to in society, the family, the neighbourhood, the church, the club, is the first principle of public affections. It is the beginning of our love of country and mankind. Destroy the platoons and you will not get a love of humanity, you will get a lonely crowd waiting for orders from the capital.
4. A nation is a partnership across time. Burke described society as a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. If you take that seriously, you do not treat the inheritance as your private property to spend. You hold it in trust.
5. Change is necessary, and it should be done carefully. This is the sentence people forget. Burke wrote that a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. He was no enemy of reform. He supported many reforms in his own career, easing the legal penalties on Catholics among them. He wanted reform that grows out of what exists, repairs it and keeps what works.

Put those together and you have a temperament rather than a program. It says: before you tear down a thing, find out why it was built.

The line he drew between reform and revolution

Here is where Burke becomes useful for ordinary Americans, who are told every election that the country is broken and requires a bold transformation.

Take two proposals. In the first, a town notices that its volunteer fire department is short of money, so it adds a small tax and a part-time paid chief. In the second, a state decides to abolish the volunteer department entirely and replace it with a central bureau that will do everything better. These are hypothetical, but you have heard both kinds of proposal in your life.

Burke would not reject either automatically. He would ask a sequence of questions. What does the existing arrangement do that we have not listed? Who relies on it? Can the new thing be tried on a small scale first? If it fails, can we go back? He would call the first an act of repair, and the second an act of demolition that has to carry the burden of proof.

That is not an excuse for doing nothing. It is a rule about where to put the burden. The innovator has to show the case, and the case must be stronger the more sweeping the change and the harder it is to reverse.

What he saw coming in France

It is worth being specific, because Burke is often caricatured as a man who simply did not like change. He wrote the Reflections in 1790, when the French Revolution looked to many observers like a triumph for liberty. In August 1789 the National Assembly had voted to end feudal privileges, and Burke did not defend the old abuses as such. What alarmed him was the method: a new assembly sweeping away the old institutions of the country in one stroke and rebuilding from first principles.

Look at what the revolutionaries did in the following months. The Assembly took over the property of the Church in late 1789. It then redrew the map of the country into new administrative departments, deliberately cutting across the old provinces and the loyalties attached to them. Burke's complaint was that a nation's habits, ranks and local attachments are the working parts of its freedom, and that when you smash them all you leave nothing between the individual and the central power. His prediction was that the power would end up in the hands of someone with an army.

The Terror came in 1793 and 1794. In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte took power in a coup. I will not pretend Burke foresaw every detail, and he was wrong about some things, as every prophet is. But the broad shape of his warning, that a revolution against every inherited institution tends to finish in a stronger despotism than the one it replaced, is the part history confirmed. It is also the part that separates his view from the American founding, which kept the common law, the colonial legislatures and the habits of self-government and built on them. That is one reason Burke admired the American cause and feared the French one.

The fair criticism

Now the other side's best argument, and I want to give it its full weight, because pretending it does not exist would be bad conservatism and bad debating.

"Burke's method defends whatever exists. Every unjust arrangement in history had inherited custom on its side. Slavery was old and entrenched. So were the legal disabilities placed on women, religious minorities and the poor. If you demand that every reformer prove his case against the accumulated wisdom of the ages, you will always lose the argument for justice, because injustice is also old. And 'go slowly' is easy advice for someone who is not the one suffering."

That is a serious objection and history has examples that fit it. The great moral causes, abolition and the extension of the vote among them, had to confront defenders who spoke in the language of prudence and caution. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, did not arrive by gradual adjustment. It took a war.

Here is how a Burkean answers, and I think the answer holds up:

1. Burke himself was not a defender of every status quo. He took up unpopular causes: relief for Catholics, the colonists in 1775, and a long campaign against the abuses of the East India Company that included the impeachment of Warren Hastings. A man who spent years pursuing a powerful official's abuses was not simply defending the established order.
2. Prescription is a presumption, not a proof. Age counts as evidence in favour of an institution only when the institution has been tested by the people who live under it and has served them. A system that survives by force and silence has not been tested. It has been imposed.
3. The burden can be met. A reformer who shows an actual injury, a workable remedy and an honest accounting of the costs has done what Burke asks. The cause of ending slavery met that burden, and the moral argument was made with evidence, with law and with testimony.
4. The alternative has a worse record. The reformers who treated all inherited institutions as obstacles, in France after 1789 and in other countries after that, produced bloodshed and then new tyrants. The hard lesson is that a moral cause pursued with no respect for law, habit and institutions can be captured by the worst people in the movement.

I do not claim this closes the argument. Caution really can become an alibi. The honest conservative has to admit that sometimes the right answer is to move faster than your instincts want. What Burke gives us is not a ban on change. It is a discipline for deciding when the time has come.

Putting Burke to work

Let me turn this into something you can use at the dinner table or at the school board meeting. Five questions, borrowed from his habit of mind.

• What is this thing for, and who depends on it? Before you vote to scrap a rule, a program or a local custom, find the people who use it and ask them.
• What will happen the day after? Sweeping laws have effects nobody wrote down. Thomas Sowell Asks What Happens After the Policy Passes builds a whole way of thinking out of that question.
• Can it be tried small? The Constitution's design leaves room for states to experiment, so one state's mistake is not the whole country's. That is the case made in Three Towns, Three Rule Books and the Case for Letting States Differ and Brandeis Called the States Laboratories and Conservatives Took Him at His Word.
• Is there a fence here that I do not understand? G.K. Chesterton gave this advice a memorable form, and Chesterton's Fence Is the Best Argument Against Rushed Reform tells it.
• Can we undo it? The more permanent the change, the more proof it needs.

If you want to see where Burke sits in the larger family tree, read Russell Kirk's Ten Principles Are the Best Short Course in Conservatism, because Kirk built a whole book around the lineage that begins here. And if you want the case for why the people closest to the problem should be trusted first, Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible is a cousin of Burke's little platoons.

The verdict

So was Burke a radical in 1775 and a reactionary in 1790? No. He was a consistent man who thought that free societies are fragile and inherited, and that the people who run them should treat them like a farm passed down through the family: improve it, never gamble the whole thing on a theory.

I think he was right about that. Not right about every vote or every speech, and not right to wave off every urgency. But a country that forgets his lesson is a country that will, sooner or later, hand the keys to someone who is certain, and the people who are certain are the ones to watch.

The bottom line

• Conservatism starts with a question, not a slogan. Before you change something, find out why it exists and who depends on it.
• Reform and demolition are different things. Repair what is broken, try the new idea small, and demand a stronger case for anything sweeping or irreversible.
• Admit the honest weakness. Caution can become an excuse for injustice. Meet that by asking whether the reformer has shown a real injury and a workable remedy, not by dismissing him.
• Your little platoon matters. The family, the congregation, the team and the neighbourhood are where public spirit is learned. Protect them from the proposals that treat them as obstacles.
• Read him yourself. The speech on conciliation with America and the Reflections are both in the public domain. Start with the speech, which is shorter and more friendly.