Man is free from competition. His exalted freedom is the serenity and peace of mind that comes from knowing and loving his place. Man is free who has ambition neither to lift himself above his platoon nor to topple and replace those set above him like the queen.

What has passed is a social order characterized by what Burke calls “a noble equality”—a far cry from liberal notions of equality. Noble equality recognizes rank and “the gradations of social life.” It is the principle of “love, veneration, admiration, or attachment” to persons. It is the “old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty.” The mechanistic and abstract philosophy of the rights of man, of individual freedom, has no respect for this nobler equality that unites in personal bonds people who are fundamentally unequal. Radical man levels all such noble distinctions; he dissolves all that softened private society with “the new conquering empire of light and reason.”

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded, as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.20

The theme of man’s inadequacy, his basic limitation, is here reintroduced. In his essence man is defective and imperfect. He requires “the pleasing illusions,” the myths and superstitions that make life livable and tolerable. The radical who seeks to free man from the past, from tradition, myth, and religion, and who sets him to live by his own light and reason, is unaware of man’s intrinsic weakness and fallibility. The rationalism and utopianism of the radicals is rejected here, as is the basic Enlightenment assumption of the unbounded horizons of the empire of reason. It is the eighteenth century itself that Burke repudiates in his proud admission that

we are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, (and they seldom fail,) they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason.21

It is all here, the cornerstone of Burke’s counterrevolution, and with it a great deal of the future conservative creed. The most basic Enlightenment assumptions are written off with the stroke of a pen. Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy. But he is free, as the radicals construe freedom. This is indeed where their freedom leads, and why virtuous men pull about them their cloaks of unfreedom. In this wardrobe there are, according to Burke, two basic outfits: the “spirit of a gentleman” and the “spirit of religion,” of “nobility and the clergy.”22 It is the prescription of aristocracy—the ancient and received institutions of hierarchy—and the prejudice of religion—the ancient and received ideas of God and his mercy—that rescue man from his shivering fearful self. They ennoble life; they rescue the individual by submerging his individuality in the “general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Who is man, then, to question his social institutions, to envy his betters, to seek perfection in this world? He is puny and ineffectual, Burke answers, meaningless and irrelevant on his own. He is someone only when guided by “ancient opinions and rules of life.” Freed from the wisdom and experience of the ages, ungoverned by prescription and prejudice, men are no more than a “swinish multitude,” or “little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.”23

The liberal sees the state as a mere contractual arrangement, a voluntaristic creation of self-seeking and autonomous individuals concerned primarily with the secure enjoyment of their property rights. But the state is more to Burke, much more than the joint stock company arrangement of liberal theory, which he ridicules as the paltry vision of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” The state is, he wrote, “better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties,”24 Men ought to look to the state with more reverence than to the East India Company. Political and social life involves more than the scramble of mortal individuals for wealth and profit, for self-fulfillment, oblivious to those who have lived before or who will live hereafter. Whatever the liberal touches becomes, in Burke’s mind, a matter of economics and commercial calculation. “Let us not,” he pleaded in the House of Commons, “turn our everything, the love of our country, our honour, our virtue, our religion, and our security to traffic—and estimate them by the scale of pecuniary or commercial reckoning. The nation that goes to that calculation destroys itself.”25

Calculating and reckoning man is irrevocably and misguidedly mired in the present. Focused on the individual and his rights, he has no sense of continuity, of roots in the past, or of obligations to the future.