Burke's Historicism

Abstract

Much of the enduring influence of the political theory of Edmund Burke is derived from his impressive combination of moral principle and historical sensibility. Yet that achievement is the source of a critical interpretive difficulty. How is a moral order characterized by permanence related to this temporal scene of constant change? Burke's stress on the immutability of the moral standard runs through his thought with such force that many recent students have been misled into associating him with the classical Stoic and Christian theorists of the natural law. Yet another of his prominent themes is the claim that our knowledge of the moral law depends upon a careful consideration of the lessons of concrete, mundane existence. If in some decisive our knowledge of right and wrong depends upon the instructiveness of historical life, it would seem that Burke opened up the to a relativized and historicized conception of ethics. The problem in rightly interpreting Burke is to determine how, in his view, unchanging moral truth is to be derived from the ever-changing world of contingent temporal events. The thesis to be developed here is that, while Burke's references and appeals to the will of God cannot be dismissed and must be taken seriously, his emphasis on the role of historical understanding did open the to a radical relativization of the standard of political morality. Because his assumptions about the nature of knowing were shaped by the Scottish Common Sense interpretation of the Lockean way of ideas, with its attendant skepticism about the power of rational reflection, he was unable to anchor his ethics in the operation of some form of right reason. As will be shown below, Burke thus held that men must learn the will of God by examining the nature of man and of the state as they are exhibited in the temporal order of things. The most important political lesson derived from such a study is the moral primacy of prudence, a principle reflecting God's ordinary of directing the affairs of man. When the revolutionaries in France cast prudence aside, Burke quickly denounced them for defying the dictates of human nature, the moral order of things, and the will of God. Yet he acknowledged that the Revolution might succeed, and he was ready to accept its success as a manifestation of the will of God. Success in the contingent world of history, supported by public feeling and opinion,