Burke and conservatives after him turned to a partnership of generations that transcended individual egos. The state involves a contract serving nobler ends. It is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the yet unborn in all of life’s dimensions: art, sciences, virtue, and perfection. Individuals, then, can never be free and autonomous for yet another reason. They always bear with them the constraints of the past. They have duties and responsibilities to the past as well as to the future.

Rationalists, the skeptic Burke holds, have too exalted a view of man and of his rational capacities. The restlessness of mind that has produced the tumult of ideological politics is seen as symptomatic of a general malady that besets modern man: his prideful belief in his own superiority. Burke’s is the most developed and articulate of all indictments of ideology and of what the skeptic perceives as the prideful quest for perfect schemes and ideal politics. Burke saw the stock of reason in man as small. Despite this, men still fled their basic limitations in flights of ideological fancy. They recognized no barrier to their powers and sought in politics to make reality match their speculative visions. Burke devotedly wished that men would appreciate the weakness of their own minds, what he called in the Vindication of Natural Society their “subordinate rank in the creation.” The cosmology embodied in the medieval concept of the chain of being was revived in all its glory by Burke to remind man of his lowly place in God’s divine scheme; for Burke “assumes that the awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence.” In doing this, God has “subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned to us.” And that place is to know the limits of one’s rational and speculative faculties.26

III.

Woodrow Wilson, writing just before the centenary of Burke’s death, noted that Burke’s every sentence was “stamped in the colors of his extraordinary imagination. The movement takes your breath and quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the matter rejuvenates your faculties.”27 Wilson was right. For generations, pulses have been quickened and breath taken away by Burke’s words; more often than not, the pulses and breath belonged to conservatives.

People have even learned to write good English by reading Burke. In the late nineteenth century his Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies was made a part of the basic school English curriculum. Generations of Americans deep into the twentieth century learned how to construct topic sentences and write extended outlines of prose on the model of Edmund Burke’s works. It was no accident, of course, that of the master’s works this particular piece was chosen. Until the cold war of the 1950s it was as an opponent of the “American War” that Burke was primarily known in America.And this older identification still lingers. The week of March 22, 1975, found the Christian Science Monitor and the Philadelphia Bulletin using Burke in their editorials on the bicentenary of his great speech. On the twenty-second itself the CBS television network chose Ronald Reagan (a subtle and all too clever choice) to read Burke’s words on its nightly “200 Years Ago Today.”

Burke’s contemporaries on the left were generally enraged by the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Their reactions capture what would be the dominant response from liberals and radicals to this day. The radical novelist Robert Bage mocked the very passage in the Reflections that so moved Burke and many of his readers. The knight-errant becomes modern man striking blows at the chains of chivalry and at such as Burke who glory in that servitude:

Ten thousand pens must start from their inkstands, to punish the man who dares attempt to restore the empire of prejudice and passion. The age of chivalry, heaven be praised, is gone. The age of truth and reason is commenced, and will advance to maturity in spite of cant and bishops. Law—active, invincible, avenging law, is here the knight-errant that redresses wrongs, protects damsels, and punishes the base miscreants who oppress them....All this is happily changed. Philosophy and commerce have transformed that generous loyalty to rank, into attachment to peace, to law, to the general happiness of mankind; that proud submission and dignified obedience into an unassuming consciousness of natural equality; and that subordination of the heart into an honest veneration of superior talents, conjoined with superior benevolence.28

Joseph Priestley, in responding to the Reflections, dealt metaphor for metaphor. His concern was Burke’s discussion of the clothes and the drapery of life that cover naked, shivering man. Priestley replied with the characteristic radical metaphor of a new day dawning:

Cherish them [prejudices], then, sir, as much as you please.