His monumental achievement was in denouncing the Revolution while all about him political and intellectual sentiment in Britain celebrated it.

For Burke’s contemporaries the Revolution was testimony to the imminence of the millennium. It was, as Shelley saw it, “the master theme of the epoch in which we live.”7 On this master theme Blake, the young Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey wrote poems of revolution. Looking back on those years, Southey, by then respectable and Tory, wrote that “few persons but those who have lived [through the 1790s] can conceive or comprehend ... what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.”8 All the poets echoed these sentiments. For Wordsworth, “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” For Blake, the friend of Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, “the times are ended ... the morning ‘gins to break.”9 For William Hazlitt it was “that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed. opening in the same gay career with our own.”10

The radical Protestant minister Richard Price preached sermons on the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven. He informed his prosperous bourgeois audience that a heavenly city would be realized in this world. They were witness to “a progressive improvement in human affairs which will terminate in greater degrees of light and virtue and happiness than have yet been known.” There was no doubt, he noted, that the “present day world is unspeakably different from what it was.” Superstition was giving ground, “the world outgrowing its evils ... anti-Christ falling and the millennium hastening.”11 Price echoed what Hazlitt called “the spirit of the age.” “We live in happier times than our forefathers.” The “shades of night are departing,” Price noted characteristically; “the day dawns.”12

Joseph Priestley, the great scientist and also radical Protestant minister, was ecstatic about the prospects for millennial regeneration. The French and American Revolutions were, according to Priestley, “unparalleled in all history.” They opened a new and wonderful era in the history of mankind. They moved the world “from darkness to light, from superstition to sound knowledge and from a most debasing servitude to a state of the most exalted freedom.”13

It was against this vision of secular perfection, of the absolute elimination of evil and misery that Burke reacted in the late eighteenth century. It is because he rejected this optimism and, in turn, insisted on the inevitability of sin, suffering, and imperfection, and did it in a prose style of compelling grandeur, that he has attracted to his name the legions of disciples who spread his teachings to this day.

The principal source of these teachings is Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In it his basic tactic is to contrast the virtuous English and the radical French, which at the same time is to contrast virtuous English and radical millenarian English. Priestley and Price had abandoned the English past, and this disrespect led ultimately to the crimes of the Jacobins. The English in 1688 had no “idea of the fabrication of a new government.” Even in 1790, Burke suggests, such thoughts “fill us with disgust and horror.”

Inferior men governed France and pushed their claims in England. “Are all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded?” Burke asks. This would “pervert” the natural order of things, would “set up on high in the air what is required to be on the ground.” The radicals (French and English) are guilty of “selfish and mischievous ambition,” an ambition that is undermining the age of chivalry and its corporate-feudal worldview. Ambitious man would not find his self-fulfillment outside himself in guild, church, city, or in the secure knowledge that he kept to God’s assigned place. Ambitious man is the individualist of liberal ideology who would experience his individual dignity not as an expression of some ascribed role but as a personal achievement reflecting his own intrinsic talent and merit. Before such ambitious men the corporate medieval world would fall, and from it would grow the individualism of the new age. Burke sees all of this, and he rejects the ideology of these sinful radicals. To be virtuous for Burke is “to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society.”14 As the old order crumbles, the acceptance of one’s place in it is transformed by Burke into the love for the particular link in the chain of being that one occupies.

Burke takes the very vocabulary of the radicals and translates it back into the preliberal ethos of chivalry. Equality and happiness are transposed. They exist only in the old order where each one knows his place. Many twentieth-century disciples of Burke have drunk deep at this particular Burkean fountain.

You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognise the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove; and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid but not more happy.15

Having rejected the Lockean liberal ideal of equality, the elimination of ascribed distinctions, Burke moves on to Locke’s theory of government. In the liberal scheme of things government is a neutral arbiter, an umpire over the race for wealth. It is a necessary evil because autonomous self-directed individuals occasionally bump into each other. Usually well-meaning and rational, individuals sometimes forget themselves and interfere with one another’s natural rights. On these occasions government is called in to protect the right of the aggrieved party.