But liberal government is out to do no more, neither to dictate beliefs nor to lead citizens to a just or virtuous life. Government for Burke, however, has much more to do than this passive policing function. It is a positive tool of repressing, in the real sense of the term. Burke rejects, as have generations of conservatives after him, the optimism and rationalism of the liberal theory of human nature. Deep reservoirs of evil and sin lurk in human nature, according to Burke, and government is necessary not as an occasional umpire but as an indispensable external authority to thwart and repress the antisocial inclinations of individuals. To govern is to restrain man.

The source of Burke’s ideal is, of course, religion. As the liberal optimism of the Enlightenment had been premised on the denial of original sin (about the only thing all the philosophes, including Rousseau, agreed upon), so Burke revives the staple of the chivalric worldview. Government’s function, he writes, is not to protect natural rights but to provide authority, constraint, and domination.

Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will be controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves. 16

That power is government. The focus has shifted away from the liberal’s preoccupation with freedom from government and his voluntaristic manipulation, based on the power within him, of his social environment and institutions.

Since government is not a mechanical umpire merely called upon when rights need protection, but a positive agency constraining the evil tendencies inherent in human nature, it follows that government is much more than the simple, efficient, and cheap policeman envisioned by radical theorists. Its proper functioning requires a deep understanding of human nature, rare skills acquired only with long experience. Governing, according to Burke, is “a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill.” One can’t simply renovate it, or reform it from some preconceived idea. To govern requires “more experience than any person can gain in his whole life.” Cheap, simple, limited government is illusory, as is the notion of simple, swift, and radical social surgery.

The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suited either to man’s nature or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them.17

Radical man knows no limits, no boundaries to his excesses, which is well illustrated by the Jacobin attack on, and humiliation of, the queen of France on October 6, 1789. Burke’s Reflections reach their literary, emotional, and theoretical crescendo in the passages he devotes to the queen. All his literary genius, all the frenzy of his fury, is in the service of his consummate artistry as he manipulates the reader with this poignant and unforgettable tale of radical savagery. Roused from her peaceful sleep, this gentle soul, “glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendor and joy,” is forced to flee her palace “almost naked.” Her guards are butchered, and her rooms in that “most splendid palace in the world” are left “swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.” The queen and her husband flee Versailles, and have their subjects avenged this humiliation? They have not. It is this which prompts Burke to lament the demise of the ancien régime, its institutions and its values.

Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.18

Burke moves immediately from this condemnation of the failure to respect the exalted rank of the queen to a basic repudiation of the liberal notion of freedom. What he had begun by giving government a positive role in repressing the evil inclinations of unbridled individualism, he completes now by a redefinition of freedom. In liberal theory, freedom is the simple and empirical experience of the lack of constraint. It consists in the independence and autonomy of the self-willing ego. Burke sees this very freedom as the death blow to the old order, and rightly so. It is this new notion of freedom that accounts for no one rising to champion the queen. What it has replaced is what freedom means for Burke, whose definition differs profoundly

Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom!19

The corporate-feudal world of hierarchy where everyone knows and loves his “little platoon” is thus revived in Burke’s assault on the new age of sophistry, economists, and calculators. Burke’s notion of freedom denies the very basis of the new liberal ideal. The exalted freedom of a hierarchical social structure is in reality the absence of “selfish and mischievous ambition.” Man is free in his little platoon, .subordinate and obedient to those above him, in the sense that he is free of striving, free from ambition, free from the restless anxiety associated with ambition.