Burke was passionately worshiped and with equal passion hated. With puffy cheeks, fiery red hair, and excessive emotion, he held forth in the senate forum that was the unreformed House of Commons until three years before his death, in 1797. Some would be moved by the fount of republican wisdom, and others would rush for the exits. Perhaps this lay behind his ultimate failure to achieve the heights of political success: his intensity and passionate involvement were not the style appropriate for the pragmatic world of political management and leadership. But this is Burke the statesman; there is also Burke the enduring philosopher of conservatism.

II.

Burke’s conservatism is grounded in skepticism. He stands in revolt against the eighteenth century and, as he saw it, the “smugness of adulterated metaphysics.” The “faith in the dogmatism of philosophers” had led Enlightenment thinkers to place faith in reason and abstract ideas, in speculation and a priori principles of natural right, freedom, and equality, as the basis on which to reform existing government. The English had no such illusions, he argued; they understood the complexity and fragility of human nature and human institutions; they were not “the converts of Rousseau ... the disciples ofVoltaire; Helvetius [had] made no progress amongst [them].” The English, according to Burke, regarded the rampant rationalism of the French philosophers and their quest for an ideal and perfect political order with sluggish skepticism. They understood that since the nature of man was intricate and society complex, “simple governments are fundamentally defective.”1

Burke’s political skepticism was, however, by no means simply a reaction to the trauma of the French Revolution. His opposition to abstract reasoning in philosophy and social matters appeared as early as his undergraduate years at Trinity College, Dublin, during the late 1740s. It also appeared in the religious and philosophical essays he produced between his graduation and the publication, in 1756, of his attack on Lord Bolingbroke’s religious rationalism as politically extrapolated. We know, for example, that in these years Burke attacked “great subtleties and refinements of reasoning,” which, he felt, produced disorders of the brain. “Custom is to be regarded with great deference” as “a more sure guide than our theories.”2 The conservative thrust of the skepticism found in the Reflections on the Revolution in France is also seen writ large in Burke’s response to radical demands in England for democratic reform of Parliament in the early 1780s. The agitation, he declared, approached the Constitution totally oblivious to the fact that the “House of Commons is a legislative body, corporate by prescription, not made upon any given theory.” The English radicals assumed that legislators could remake governments when all wise men knew that “a prescriptive government never was made upon any foregone theory.” How ridiculous, then, to put governments on procrustean beds and make them fit “the theories which learned and speculative men have made.”3 Such speculators, with their ideal blueprints, were political magicians cutting up the Constitution into pieces “in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigor.”4

But this is by no means the full measure of Burke’s skepticism. It can be seen even more completely in his conception of the art of governing, and in his views on the limited rational capacity of mankind. The conservative skeptic like Burke is deeply interested in the character and style of those who govern. He is convinced that pursuit of policies, of preconceived speculative plans—in short, of what we might today call ideology—is inappropriate behavior for political leadership. The major function of a magistrate is seen as prudential manager. Stable government must eschew ideology. What matters most is not the pursuit of policy but the quality of leadership. In Burke’s writings, this theme of the importance of wise management is carefully developed.

Government for Burke was not a science with exact and precise methods and conclusions; it was an art, practiced by artists skilled in prudence. Governors had to approach political issues according to their peculiar circumstances, not in light of abstract ideas or general theories of government. In his speeches on America and the taxation issue, Burke repeatedly insisted that “metaphysical distinctions” of abstract right be kept out of the deliberation and that prudence and virtuous discretion rule the day. Good political leadership was informed by principle, not ruled by it; and, more importantly, it was guided by circumstances. The wise magistrate, Burke argued, ought to respect the temper and opinions of a particular people, the spirit of their age; and, particularly, ought to respect and not tamper with the manners of the people, which in many ways formed the basis of their laws.

However distinguished his own public career in Parliament was, Burke knew that the likes of himself were not those rightly destined to be in the front ranks of England’s rulers. No matter how much he might proclaim himself not a friend to aristocracy, the overwhelming thrust of his writings insists that only men of breeding possess this quality of prudence so fundamental to the art of governing. This, after all, was the ultimate sin of the French: their failure to recognize the prescriptive role of aristocracy and its production of qualified governors. Governors ought “to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy,” ought to stand upon “elevated ground,” “to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse.”5 Before the great families, Burke humbly denies his capacity to possess the quality of character and skills of learning required to make a prudential magistrate; thus he writes to the duke of Richmond:

Persons in your station of life ought to have long views. You people of great families in hereditary trusts and fortunes, are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be, by the rapidity of our growth, and even by the fruit we bear, and flatter ourselves that while we creep on the ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavor, yet still are but annual plants, that perish without season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation.6

No greater threat existed to the likes of the duke of Richmond than the French Revolution and its ideals, in Burke’s estimation.