Hello and welcome back. You are listening to
The Deep Dive. I'm your host, and today we are
on a mission. A big one. A big one. We're taking
a stack of history books, biographies, political
treatises, and honestly, this stack is heavy
enough to be a safety hazard if it were to fall
off the desk. I can confirm that. It is a hefty
stack today. But, you know, absolutely necessary.
We're going to unpack it all, sift through the
noise, and find those absolute nuggets of insight
that you need to know. Because the subject demands
it. He really does. Today we are tackling a giant.
We're talking about Edmund Burke. Now, depending
on who you ask, he's either this profound genius
or a complete relic. Or both. Or both. You might
know him as the father of modern conservatism.
You may have walked past his statue in Washington,
D .C. or London and not given it a second glance.
But here's the hook, and this is what really
pulled me into the research this week. Burke
is a walking, talking paradox. He really is.
I mean, he's a figure of just massive contradictions.
Exactly. On the one hand, he's the icon of the
right. He's the guy who defended the monarchy,
the church, the aristocracy, all the established
institutions. The very image of a traditionalist.
But then you actually look at his record, his
speeches, his votes in parliament, and for the
vast majority of his life, he was fighting for
causes that look incredibly... Well, liberal.
Even radical for his time, you could say. Right.
I mean, he championed the American colonists
against the British crown. A huge deal. He fought
tooth and nail for the rights of Irish Catholics
against the Protestant ascendancy. A cause very
close to his heart for reasons we'll get into.
And he spent years, decades even, trying to impeach
a corporate governor for corruption and human
rights abuses in India. He hated the slave trade.
If you just looked at that list, you'd think,
OK, this guy is a classic bleeding heart reformer.
You'd put him squarely on the progressive side
of the ledger. No question. And yet when the
French Revolution comes along in 1789, a revolution
that was, you know, screaming liberty, equality,
fraternity, a revolution that literally overthrew
a King Burke. didn't just hesitate. No, he didn't
just critique it. He absolutely loathed it. He
recoiled in horror. He treated it like a plague,
like a virus that was going to destroy civilization.
And that right there is the core tension. That's
the riddle we have to solve today. How can the
same man be the best friend of the American Revolution
and the mortal enemy of the French Revolution?
Was he a hypocrite? Did he just get old and cranky?
Or is there actually a coherent philosophy underneath
all that noise that explains it? And I think
the answer is a firm yes to that last one. There's
absolutely a deeper thread. To understand Burke,
you can't just look at him as a politician who
flips a coin on issues. No. You have to see him
as a philosopher who is wrestling with the most
fundamental tension in human society, the tension
between liberty and order. Liberty and order.
Yeah. And I think by the end of this conversation,
we're going to see that his answer to that tension
is surprisingly and perhaps even uncomfortably
relevant to the world we're living in right now.
So our mission today is to decode Edmund Burke,
to move past the bronze statue and get to the
flesh and blood man. And as a little teaser for
later, we are also going to debunk the most famous
quote attributed to him. Ah, yes. The famous
one. You know the one, the only thing necessary
for the triumph of evil. Is for good men to do
nothing. Spoiler alert. He never actually said
it. But we will get to what he actually said,
which I think is arguably more powerful. a bit
later on. It's more specific and more challenging,
I'd say. Agreed. So let's start at the very beginning,
because, you know, when we talk about 18th century
British politicians, we picture a very specific
type of person. Born with a silver spoon, probably.
Wealthy, aristocratic, English, probably born
in a sprawling manor house. Burke. Not even close.
And honestly, I don't think you can understand
a single thing Edmund Burke did or wrote later
in life if you don't understand where he started.
He was from day one in London. An outsider. Let's
unpack that. He was born in Dublin, Ireland in
1729. Correct. And just being Irish in London
in the 1700s was already, you know, a bit of
a mark against you. There was a lot of prejudice.
Sure. But the real complexity, the real engine
of his thought comes from his family dynamic.
It sounds like the setup for a tense family drama.
How so? Well, his father, Richard Burke, was
a successful solicitor and, crucially, a member
of the established Church of Ireland. A Protestant.
Okay. Part of the establishment. Very much so.
But his mother, Mary Nagel, came from a respectable
but declining family of Catholic gentry, and
she was a devout Roman Catholic. A mixed marriage.
In today's world, that's barely a footnote. Right.
But in 18th century Ireland, that was everything,
wasn't it? It was absolutely massive. You have
to remember the context of the penal laws. These
were a brutal set of laws designed specifically
to suppress and disempower the Catholic majority
in Ireland. If you were a Catholic, you were
essentially a second class citizen. It was systemic.
Completely. Yeah. You couldn't vote. You couldn't
sit in parliament. You couldn't hold any public
office. You couldn't be a lawyer or a judge.
You couldn't even own a weapon for self -defense.
I read about one particular law that just, it
really stuck with me. The horse rule. Ah, yes,
the five -pound horse. If a Catholic owned a
horse, any horse, a Protestant could walk up
and offer him five pounds for it, and the Catholic
had to sell it. It didn't matter if it was a
prized stallion worth 100 pounds. Exactly. It
wasn't just about economics. It was a system
designed to humiliate, to constantly remind you
of your inferior status. It was designed to keep
the Catholic population impoverished and powerless.
So Burke grows up in this house where his father
represents the system, the Anglican legal official
world. And his mother represents the oppressed
majority. He's living that contradiction every
single day. He was raised Anglican. He had to
be. For his career prospects. For any kind of
career at all. His father was pragmatic, but
his sister, Giuliano, was raised in her mother's
faith as a Catholic. And he spent his childhood
summers with his mother's family in County Cork,
the Nagels, who were Catholic gentry living under
these suffocating restrictions. So he wasn't
just reading about oppression in a book. Not
at all. He was seeing it happen to his uncles,
his cousins. He was feeling the injustice in
his own family. It gave him this lifelong sympathy
for the underdog, for the outsider, that most
of his English colleagues in Parliament just
couldn't comprehend it was in his bones. But
that same background also put a target on his
back for his entire career, didn't it? A huge
target. His enemies used it against him relentlessly.
The rumors. I saw some of the political cartoons
from the time. They're vicious. They drew him
in Jesuit robes. They called him Edmund the Jesuit,
the Irish papist. It was the standard ugly smear
of the day. The accusation was that he was a
secret Catholic, a sleeper agent for the Pope,
sent to destroy the Protestant constitution of
England from the inside. And they threw around
this claim that he was educated at St. Omer.
What was that? Saint -Omer was a famous Jesuit
seminary in France. It was a shorthand way of
saying he was a foreign -trained subversive.
Was there any truth to it at all? Absolutely
none. He went to Trinity College, Dublin, which
was a bastion of Protestant learning. But the
mud stuck because he did sympathize with Catholics.
He did fight to repeal the penal laws. And his
enemies couldn't imagine any reason for that
other than secret allegiance. They couldn't grasp
that he was acting on principle. Exactly. They
couldn't grasp that he had seen firsthand that
sometimes the law and justice are two very different
things. The penal laws were legal, but they weren't
just. And that distinction would shape his entire
worldview. That distinction, legal versus just.
That seems to be a theme we're going to see over
and over again. It's central to understanding
him. So he finishes university. And like every
ambitious young man with a demanding father,
he goes to London to study law at the Middle
Temple. His dad must have been thrilled. My son,
the barrister. Oh, absolutely. This was the plan.
But then, like so many ambitious young men with
demanding fathers. He promptly disappointed him.
He hated the law. He found it dry, technical,
what he called the narrow and contracted practice
of the law. He wanted to deal with big ideas,
with literature, with philosophy, with the great
questions of human nature. So he just dropped
out. He started traveling and writing. And his
dad's reaction. He cut him off, cut off his allowance
completely. It caused a rift between them that
lasted for years. But this period of, you know,
being a struggling writer in London is absolutely
crucial because this is where we meet Burke.
The philosopher. Long before he ever gave a speech
in Parliament, he wrote a book on aesthetics.
Right. A philosophical inquiry into the origin
of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. Published
in 1757. Now, I have to be honest, when I hear
aesthetics, my mind goes to, you know, interior
design or art critics. Why does a book about
art theory matter for a political deep dive?
It matters immensely because it's a window into
his soul. It explains how he viewed the world
and, more importantly, how he viewed the state.
He divides our powerful emotional experiences
into two big categories, the beautiful and the
sublime. Okay, let's define them. What is the
beautiful, according to Burke? The beautiful
is all about things that are small, smooth, polished.
Pleasant. Think of a perfectly formed flower,
a delicate piece of music, a well -manicured
garden. So things that are pleasing and safe.
Yes. Safe is a good word. They evoke feelings
of love and affection. They make you feel relaxed.
And the sublime. The sublime is the polar opposite.
It is vast. It's rugged. It's dark. It's powerful.
It's obscure. So what's an example of that? Think
of a violent storm at sea with massive waves
crashing over your ship. Think of standing at
the edge of the Grand Canyon and feeling that
dizzying sense of scale. Think of a dark forest
at night or a towering cathedral. So it's not
scary like a horror movie, but it's overwhelming.
It makes you feel small. It produces awe. And
a key part of awe for Burke is a sort of delightful
terror. It commands your respect because it is
so much bigger and more powerful than you are.
OK, I think I get the distinction. But what's
the political connection? Here it is. Burke believed
that the state, the government. society itself
should be sublime wait the government should
be a storm at sea that sounds terrible not literally
but in the sense that it should be ancient mysterious
and powerful it should command our reverence
our awe he believed that if you look at the state
as just a simple machine like a toaster that
you can take apart and put back together whenever
you want you lose that reverend we'll lose the
authority you lose the very thing that holds
society together for burke society needs its
mysteries its traditions its grandeur we need
to look at our institutions with a sense of awe,
not just as a matter of cold calculation. That
is fascinating. So he's basically an anti -technocrat
before technocrats even existed. He doesn't want
people just poking the state with a stick to
see how it works because that demystifies it.
Precisely. He thinks if you strip away the mystery
and the tradition, what he later calls the drapery
of life, you strip away the stability. And he
doubled down on this exact fear with a satire
he wrote around the same time called A Vindication
of Natural Society. This story is hilarious.
He wrote it to mock a specific person, right?
A Lord Bolingbroke. Yes. Bolingbroke was a famous
deist and rationalist. He had written these essays
arguing for a natural religion. He basically
said, hey, let's use our pure reason to strip
away all the superstition and revealed truth
and all the historical baggage of organized religion
and just keep the parts that make logical sense.
But kind of religious minimalism. Exactly. And
Burke thought this was a profoundly dangerous
and arrogant idea. So he wrote this pamphlet
pretending to be Bolingbroke or a disciple of
Bolingbroke. And what was his argument in the
pamphlet? He took Bolingbroke's logic and applied
it to society. He argued, OK, if we're going
to use pure reason to destroy the artificial
construct of the church, why not use it to destroy
the artificial construct of the state, too? Let's
get rid of government laws, marriage, property,
social classes, because if you look at them with
cold, abstract logic, they are all unnatural
and oppressive. He was trying to show that this
line of thinking, if you take it to its logical
conclusion, leads to. total anarchy. It's a classic
reductio ad absurdum. He was trying to demonstrate
that society is not a simple logic puzzle, but
he did such a brilliant job mimicking Bolingbroke's
grand rationalist style that people missed the
joke. Laughs. So people thought it was serious.
Completely. Radical thinkers and early anarchists
started reading it and saying, yes, this Bolingbroke
fellow gets it down with the government. That
is the ultimate danger of good satire. It is.
Burke actually had to write a new preface for
the second edition saying, everybody, please
calm down. I'm joking. This is irony. But it
shows us that even in his 20s, Burke was deeply,
deeply afraid of what happens when you apply
abstract, disembodied reason to complex living
human things like a church or a state. So we
have the philosopher, the satirist, the Irishman.
But eventually the man needs a paycheck. He has
to enter the political arena for real. He does.
And he gets his big break when he lands a job
as the private secretary to the Marcos of Rockingham.
And Rockingham was a big deal. A very big deal.
He was a major Whig grandee. And for a time,
the... prime minister. This was Burke's ticket
into the inner circle. And in 1765, through Rockingham's
patronage, he enters the House of Commons representing
a place called Wendover. Now, Wendover was what
they called a pocket borough. For those of us
who aren't experts in 18th century electoral
peculiarities, what does that mean? It means
the election was basically a sham. Wendover was
a tiny depopulated district that was essentially
in the pocket of a wealthy patron, in this case,
a Lord Verney. So Verney owned the land. And
there's where he controlled the handful of voters.
He literally just pointed at Burke and said,
he is your MP, and that was that. No campaigning,
no debates, no real voting. It's just incredibly
ironic, isn't it, that one of the greatest thinkers
on the nature of representation entered Parliament
through a completely undemocratic loophole. It
is. But Burke would have defended it. He would
have argued that the system of rotten boroughs,
as they were called, had a hidden benefit. It
allowed men of immense talent, but no personal
wealth like him, to get into Parliament based
on the judgment of an experienced patron. That's
an interesting counter argument. He's saying
if every seat was a modern, expensive popularity
contest, only the independently wealthy could
afford to run. That's his point. It allowed for
merit to find a way in. And once he was in, he
made a splash almost immediately. A huge splash
from what I've read. William Pitt the Elder,
who was like the Zeus of British politics at
the time. A towering figure. Pitt said, Burke's
maiden speech stopped the mouths of all Europe.
He was an orator of the highest order. He had
this incredible command of language and history
and philosophy. And he brings a new and at the
time controversial idea to the table, the legitimacy
of the political party. Right. Which is strange
to think about because today we tend to hate
parties. We see them as divisive, toxic, tribal.
But Burke argued they were absolutely essential
for a free government. Why? You have to look
at what he was up against. King George III was
actively trying to reclaim power that the monarchy
had lost over the previous century. He did this
by creating an informal group in parliament called
the King's Friends. A kind of shadow government.
Exactly. They weren't the official ministers
of the government, but they operated behind the
scenes. They had the king's ear, they controlled
royal patronage, and they pulled the strings
to undermine the official government if it displeased
the king. Burke called it a double cabinet. So
the official government was just a front and
the king was really running things from the shadows.
That was Burke's great fear. He saw it as a slide
back toward absolute monarchy. He argued that
a single independent MP acting alone was powerless
against this kind of coordinated secret influence.
The king could just buy him off or intimidate
him or crush him. So what was his solution? Association.
Organization he wrote a famous pamphlet on this
thoughts on the cause of the present discontents
and in it He says when bad men combine the good
must associate That's the origin of the good
men idea, even if it's not the famous misquote.
This is the real quote. He defined a political
party not as a cynical group of people just trying
to get power, but as a body of men united for
promoting by their joint endeavors the national
interest upon some particular principle in which
they are all agreed. So principled opposition.
Principled organized opposition was the only
way to keep a government honest and to check
the power of the crown. For him, party divisions,
as he said, are inseparable from free government.
They are the immune system of democracy. That's
a powerful idea. And it brings us to 1774. Burke
levels up. He gets elected to represent Bristol.
And this is the big leagues. Bristol wasn't a
pocket borough. It was the second city of England
at the time. A massive, bustling... trading port
with a huge, engaged, and very opinionated electorate.
This was a real election. And this leads to one
of the most famous, I think most controversial
moments of his entire career, the speech to the
electors of Bristol. Yes. This is where he lays
out his theory of representation, what we now
call the trustee model. I want to push back on
this because when I first read it, it sounded
incredibly arrogant. It usually does to modern
ears. There's no getting around that. So set
the scene. He gets elected. His colleague, the
other newly elected MP for Bristol, stands up
and gives a speech. And he basically promises,
I will do whatever you, the voters, tell me to
do. I will be your voice. I will follow your
instructions. He takes the delegate approach.
The common sense approach, most people would
say. Right. And then Burke stands up and he says,
essentially, no. I'm not going to do that. He
tells them flat out, I am not your messenger.
I am not a weathercock on a steeple to show you
which way the wind blows. But isn't that the
whole point of democracy? If I vote for you,
I expect you to represent my interests, my voice.
If my community wants lower taxes and you go
to London and vote to raise them because you
think you know better, haven't you betrayed me?
Burke would say no. He would say he betrayed
you if he didn't use his own judgment. Here's
the key quote, and it's a stunner. Your representative
owes you not his industry only, but his judgment.
And he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices
it to your opinion. He betrays you. That is incredibly
strong language. Think of it this way. If you
have a serious heart condition and you hire the
best surgeon in the country, you don't stand
over his shoulder in their operating room and
vote on where he should make the cut. Of course
not. You don't want him to ask the audience,
should I cut the artery or the vein? You hired
him precisely because he has spent his life studying
anatomy and you haven't. You're trusting his
judgment. OK, so the MP is the expert surgeon
of the state. That's Burke's view. He's in London.
He's reading the secret intelligence reports
from the colonies. He's debating the nuances
of international trade with Ireland. He's seeing
the big national picture. The merchant in Bristol,
as important as he is, is primarily worried about
his own ledger book. Burke. argued that parliament
is not a congress of ambassadors from different
and hostile interests it's a deliberative assembly
of one nation with one interest that of the whole
and if an mp just follows the local polls he
isn't governing he's just pandering logically
i can see the argument but politically that sounds
like absolute suicide do the people of bristol
buy it Absolutely not. They hated it. Of course
they did. Especially because Burke immediately
proceeded to use his judgment to do things they
despised. He voted to relax trade restrictions
with Ireland, which the Bristol merchants saw
as a direct threat to their monopoly and their
profits. So he voted against the direct financial
interests of his constituents. He did. He also
supported a measure of relief for Catholics.
And Bristol was a hotbed of anti -Catholic sentiment.
He was completely out of step with public opinion
back home. So he actually walked the walk. He
wasn't just theorizing. He voted his conscience
against his own voters' wishes because he thought
it was right for the empire as a whole. He absolutely
did. And in 1780, he paid the price. He lost
his seat. He actually withdrew from the race
before the final vote because he knew he was
going to get crushed. He sacrificed his career
for his principles. And that integrity brings
us to the first major. liberal chapter of his
legacy, the American crisis. Burke is often cited
as a hero by Americans for his stance, but he
wasn't calling for independence, was he? No,
and that's a common misconception we need to
clear up. Burke was an imperialist through and
through. He believed in the British Empire. He
wanted to keep it together. But he looked at
how the British government under Lord North was
treating the American colonies, and he thought
it was sheer self -destructive madness. What
was the core of his disagreement? The British
government was obsessed with the principle of
the thing, the right to tax. Yes. They were stuck
on this abstract legalistic point. We are the
sovereign power. Parliament has the right to
tax anyone, anywhere in the empire. And Burke's
response to that was? He basically screams, I
don't care about your abstract right. In his
great speech on American taxation in 1774, he
says, I hate the very sound of metaphysical distinctions.
He says the question is not whether you have
a right to make your people miserable, but whether
it is not your interest to make them happy. So
he's a pragmatist. A profound pragmatist, he's
saying. Stop arguing about what is true in theory
and look at what is happening in reality. He
says, sure, maybe you have the technical legal
right to tax them, but is it wise? Is it prudent?
Is it worth blowing up the entire empire over
a few pence of tax on tea? He wanted to turn
back the clock, essentially. Yes. To a time when
things worked. He wasn't proposing some radical
new system. He was looking to the past for a
solution. His answer was to return to the policy
of salutary neglect. Basically, leave the Americans
alone to tax themselves through their own assemblies,
let them prosper, and Britain would prosper from
the trade. His plea was leave the Americans as
they anciently stood. Then in 1775, it's the
11th hour. It's just weeks before the first shots
are fired at Lexington and Concord. And he makes
this one last massive, desperate effort for peace.
The speech is called Conciliation with America.
And it is one of the greatest speeches ever delivered
in the English language. The imagery he uses
here is just, it's breathtaking. This is the
ties argument, right? It is. He stands up in
Parliament and tries to convince them that you
cannot hold an empire together by force alone.
You can't just send armies and tax collectors.
He says, my hold of the colonies is in the close
affection which grows from common names, from
kindred blood, from similar privileges and equal
protection. These are ties which, though light
as air, are as strong as links of iron. Light
as air are as strong as links of iron. That is
just pure poetry. It's profound political psychology.
He's saying that a shared culture, a shared language,
a shared history of liberty, these are stronger
bonds than any army you can send across the Atlantic.
And then he makes a prophecy, a chillingly accurate
one. What does he predict? He warns them. He
says, remember who these people are. The Americans
are descendants of Englishmen. They inherited
that fierce Protestant English spirit of liberty.
If you try to force your abstract concept of
sovereignty on them, they will cast your sovereignty
in your face. And that is exactly what happened.
They threw the tea in the harbor and the sovereignty
right back at them. It is. And he made another
really uncomfortable but astute point about slavery.
He noted that in the southern colonies where
slavery was most prevalent, the white population
was even more. fiercely attached to their freedom
than in the North. Why was that? Because, as
Burke put it, freedom is to them not only an
enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.
They saw the stark alternative every single day.
They knew exactly what it looked like to be a
subject, a slave. So they were hypersensitive
to any attempt by Britain to, in their eyes,
enslave them. He told Parliament flat out, you
cannot argue a whole people into slavery. But
they didn't listen. His resolutions for peace
were ignored. The war started. And Burke was.
He was despondent. He was heartbroken. He saw
it as a civil war. He couldn't even bring himself
to celebrate British victories over the Americans.
He felt that the British public who were cheering
for the war were showing signs of a deep moral
rot. He wrote that the English national character
was changing, that people were becoming less
fiery and jealous of their own liberty and more
authoritarian. So on America, he's the clear
champion of liberty against overbearing power.
Now, let's pivot halfway around the world to
the East, because if America was about the abuse
of legislative power, India was about the abuse
of corporate power. This is a huge, and I mean
huge, part of his life's work that often gets
skipped over in the textbooks, but it consumed
him for the better part of two decades. Burke
was obsessed with bringing justice to India.
And we're talking specifically about the East
India Company. The company, yes. And we have
to be clear, they weren't just a business selling
tea and spices anymore. By this point... They
were a de facto government. They controlled the
entire province of Bengal. They had a massive
private army. And Burke saw them as a rogue state,
a vehicle for what he called Indianism, which
was his term for unchecked corporate tyranny.
And in this story, he found his ultimate villain
in one man, Warren Hastings. Warren Hastings,
the governor general of Bengal. For Burke, Hastings
personified everything that was wrong with British
rule in India, and Burke spearheaded the impeachment
of Hastings. The trial began in 1788 in Westminster
Hall, and it was the trial of the century, a
massive public spectacle. And Burke was the lead
prosecutor. From what I've read, he did not hold
back with his language. Oh, not at all. Burke
was never one for subtle language when he was
morally outraged. I have some of the insults
he threw at Hastings here. He called him a Captain
General of Iniquity. Wow. He called him a spider
of hell, a ravenous vulture devouring the carcasses
of the dead. A spider of hell. You don't hear
that in parliamentary debates anymore. You do
not. But the anger was genuine. He wasn't just
performing. He had spent years studying the reports
coming out of India. He gave this incredible
speech on a subject called the Nabob of Arquette's
debts, where he described in horrifying detail
the devastation of the Indian infrastructure.
He talked about how the company's greed had led
to the ruin of ancient reservoirs and water systems,
causing famine and death on a massive scale.
So he's painting this picture of a sophisticated
ancient civilization being plundered and destroyed
by a bunch of young, greedy British upstarts.
That's exactly it. And this brings us to one
of his most important and enduring philosophical
contributions, his attack on what he called Geographical
morality. Geographical morality. That's a key
term. What does he mean by that? Well, the defense
team for Hastings and the company basically argued
this. Look, you can't judge us by the gentle
standards of British society. This is India.
Things are different over there. Despotism is
the normal way of doing things in the East. We
are just playing by the local rules to survive.
So it's a kind of when in Rome, do as the Romans
do. but applied to tyranny and corruption. Right.
It's the idea that what's immoral in London can
be perfectly acceptable in Calcutta. And Burke
just erupts at this idea. He says rubbish. He
argues that morality is universal. He says the
laws of morality are the same everywhere. If
it is wrong to rob and starve and torture people
in London, it is just as wrong to rob and starve
and torture them in India. That is a surprisingly
modern take. He's basically arguing for a concept
of universal human rights before that was really
a codified thing. He is. He viewed the British
Empire as a trust. He believed Britain had a
sacred moral duty to govern for the benefit of
the subject people. And if the empire wasn't
benefiting the Indians, he said it had no right
to exist. So he wasn't an anti -imperialist in
the modern sense. He wasn't saying, and the empire,
but he was saying the empire must be moral. Correct.
It must be accountable to a higher law. And he
applied this thinking to slavery, too. He detested
the slave trade. He called it a diabolical practice,
a weed that grows in every soil. And he actually
tried to do something about it. He did. He drafted
a detailed plan for the gradual abolition of
slavery. Now, we have to be honest here. He was
a gradualist. His plan included things like having
inspectors and protectors. But it was based on
the paternalistic 18th century view that slaves
needed to be civilized and prepared for freedom.
So not a radical abolitionist like Wilberforce
would later be. No. But compared to the vast
majority of his peers, who saw slaves as nothing
more than property, he was miles ahead. He saw
their humanity. Okay, let's look at the scoreboard
so far. It's 1788. He has defended the American
rebels against the crown. He's defended Irish
Catholics against the Protestant elite. He's
attacked corporate corruption in India. He hates
slavery. If you stop the biography right there,
you see Edmund Burke, the great liberal hero.
Full stop. He absolutely would. And the Whigs,
the liberal reformist party of the day, they
loved him. He was their intellectual heavyweight,
their conscience. And then comes July 14th, 1789.
The Bastille is stormed in Paris. The French
Revolution begins. The king is stripped of his
power. The Declaration of the Rights of Man is
published. And the Whigs in London, his friends
and colleagues, are popping champagne. They're
ecstatic. They think this is Act II of the American
Revolution or maybe a French version of Britain's
own glorious revolution of 1688. They think,
finally, the French are throwing off their tyrant
and becoming like us. But Burke looks at the
exact same events, the same speeches, the same
riots, the same declarations, and he sees a horror
movie. He doesn't cheer. He recoils. Why? What
did he see that everyone else missed? He saw
the triumph of abstract theory over concrete
reality. And this leads to his most famous and
influential work, his masterpiece, Reflections
on the Revolution in France, which he published
in 1790. This book just exploded the political
landscape, didn't it? It broke everything. It
split his party. It ended his closest friendships.
And it laid the foundation for modern conservatism.
And the core argument comes down to the difference
between abstract rights and what he would call
prescriptive or inherited rights. This is probably
the hardest Burkine concept to grasp, but it's
the most important. It is the absolute T. So
let's break it down very carefully. What is an
abstract right? Okay. An abstract right is a
right that you deduce from pure reason. Imagine
you sit down in a coffee shop today with a blank
piece of paper and you write a list of things
every human being should have just by virtue
of being human. Every human has a right to happiness.
Every human has a right to property. Every human
has a right to a say in their government. That's
the rights of man. That's the French Declaration
of the Rights of Man. It comes from pure theory.
It sounds wonderful. It sounds self -evident.
Who could possibly argue with that? Burke would.
He'd say, that's lovely. It's a nice theory.
But what does it mean in practice, he'd ask.
OK, you have a theoretical right to property.
But is there a law in your country that actually
protects it? Is there a court that will enforce
that law? Is there a police force that will arrest
the person who violates it? Burke argued that
a right doesn't exist just because you can imagine
it or write it on a piece of paper. It only exists
if it's real, if it's enforceable. Yes, if it
has been woven into the actual fabric of a specific
society over a long period of time, which is
why he preferred what he called the rights of
Englishmen. So rights as an inheritance, not
a theory. Precisely. Think of your rights like
a house. You don't just conjure a beautiful house
out of thin air based on a perfect architectural
drawing. You inherit a real house from your grandfather
who built the solid foundation. Your father added
a new room. You come along and you fix the leaky
roof. You have the right to trial by jury in
England, not because all humans have it in the
abstract, but because Englishmen fought and died
for it in the Magna Carta and defended it in
1688. And it was handed down to you as a specific
concrete inheritance. It's an heirloom, not just
an idea. It's a precious heirloom. And because
it's an heirloom, you treat it with respect.
You don't take a sledgehammer to the whole house
just because the floorboards squeak. You carefully
fix the floorboards. Burke saw the French revolutionaries
taking a slave hammer to their entire history,
the church, the calendar, the monarchy, the nobility,
thinking they could just design a better country
from scratch on a blank piece of paper. And that
terrified him. It terrified him because he believed
that human society is infinitely more complex
than any one generation can possibly understand.
This leads to his most profound statement on
the nature of society. He wrote that society
is a partnership. Oh, this quote is incredible.
A partnership not only between those who are
living, but between those who are living, those
who are dead and those who are to be born. That
is such a heavy concept. It's a contract across
time. If you destroy your institutions, you are
stealing from your ancestors and you are cheating
your descendants. Yes. You're breaking the chain.
This is why he defended these institutions, the
pleasing illusions and the drapery of life. He
admitted that logically, a king is just a man.
A queen is just a woman. But if you strip away
all the pomp, the ceremony, the traditions that
make power gentle and legitimate, you are left
with nothing but naked, brutal power. And naked
power is ugly. This leads us to that famous and
very controversial Marie Antoinette passage.
oh this is the part of the book that drew the
most fire then and now he recounts seeing the
queen of france years before as a young princess
and he describes her as a delightful vision like
a morning star and he laments her fall from grace
her humiliation by the mob and then he writes
that iconic line He writes, but the age of chivalry
is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators
has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished
forever. Sophisters, economists and calculators.
He is basically predicting the rise of the cold,
rational, technocratic mindset. But this passage
got him absolutely roasted, didn't it? Massive,
massive backlash. Thomas Paine wrote his book
Rights of Man specifically as a blistering rebuttal
to Burke. And Mary Wollstonecraft, the great
feminist thinker, wrote A Vindication of the
Rights of Men. And Paine had that absolutely
biting line about Burke. He did. He said Burke
pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird.
Ouch. The meaning being that Burke is crying
over the queen's fancy clothes and her lost dignity
while completely ignoring the French peasants
who were starving to death under the old regime.
And it was a fair critique in some ways. Burke
was romanticizing a deeply flawed and unjust
system. But Burke's deeper point wasn't that
the old regime was perfect. His point was that
if you tear down the plumage, the culture, the
manners, the religion, the traditions that soften
power, You don't get a healthy free bird. You
get a vulture. You get the guillotine. And he
was right about the violence. He predicted the
reign of terror years before it happened. He
was. He saw that once you destroy traditional
authority, the things people obey out of habit,
affection, and respect, the only thing left to
make people obey is naked force. Terror. And
this issue, this book. It just split the Whig
Party in two. It destroyed his closest friendships,
most famously his friendship with Charles James
Fox. That moment is one of the great tragedies
of British political history. Fox and Burke were
the closest of friends and political allies for
decades. But Fox was a romantic, and he loved
the French Revolution. And this led to a final
public break in Parliament. It did. In a debate
in 1791, Fox gave a speech praising the new French
Constitution. Burke then stood up and delivered
a furious condemnation of it. As he spoke, Fox,
who was sitting next to him, leaned over and
whispered, There is no loss of friendship. And
Burke's reply. Burke replied, loud enough for
the whole House of Commons to hear. I regret
to say there is. I have done my duty, though
I have lost my friend. There is a loss of friends.
I know the price of my conduct. Fox actually
wept in his seat. He did. Tears were seen rolling
down his cheeks. It was the end of an era, the
end of a great political partnership. But Burke
felt he had no choice. He was convinced that
French ideas were a contagion that would destroy
Britain if they weren't stopped. He became almost
a man possessed by this idea, which leads. to
the dramatic dagger scene. Oh, yes. This is pure
political theater. In 1792, Burke is giving a
speech on the dangers of French agents in Britain.
He claims that thousands of daggers have been
ordered from the city of Birmingham to be used
by French revolutionaries. And to prove his point,
he reaches into his coat. whips out a real dagger
and throws it onto the floor of the House of
Commons. A literal mic drop, but with a weapon.
It clattered on the floorboards and he shouted,
This is what you are to gain by an alliance with
France. This is the fraternity they offer you.
That is just intense. Some of his old friends
thought he was going mad, right? That he'd lost
his mind. They did. They thought he'd become
a paranoid, unhinged reactionary. But his predictions
just kept coming true. He didn't just predict
the guillotine. He predicted... Napoleon. How
did he do that? In the Reflections, he wrote
that as the revolution descended into chaos,
the French Assembly would eventually lose control
to its own army. And he said that some popular
general who understands the art of conciliating
the soldiery shall become the master of your
whole republic. Which is exactly what happened
with Napoleon Bonaparte a few years later. And
even deeper than that, you could argue that Burke
was the first person to describe the modern totalitarian
state. How so? He saw that the new French state
wasn't just changing the government. It was trying
to change everything. They changed the calendar.
They abolished the old provinces. They tried
to create a new state religion. They changed
the names of the months. They policed the way
people spoke. He wrote in his later letters that
this new state had dominion and conquest for
its sole object's dominion over minds by proselytism,
over bodies by arms. He saw that a state based
on a pure, abstract ideology recognizes no limits.
It has to control your mind. That sounds terrifyingly
like the 20th century. It connects directly to
the horrors of the 20th century. That's why Burke
is still read. He warned us 200 years in advance
about what happens when you try to create a perfect
utopia by tearing up all the roots of an existing
society. So Burke spends his final years as this
sort of prophet of doom, shouting about the dangers
from France. But his personal life was crumbling
at the same time. It was incredibly tragic. He
retired from Parliament in 1794, right after
the Hastings trial finally ended. He had hoped
that his son, Richard, would take his seat in
Parliament and carry on his work. Richard was
his pride and joy, the center of his universe.
But it wasn't to be. No. Richard died suddenly
of tuberculosis that same year, and Burke was...
utterly devastated he's broken by it completely
broken he described himself as an old oak torn
up by the roots he said the world was now a blank
to him without his son he felt he had no future
to leave behind but even in his grief he could
still fight he wrote one last great piece the
letter to a noble lord In 1796, this was a ferocious
clapback, wasn't it? A massive, righteous clapback.
The Duke of Bedford, a young, super -rich aristocrat
who sympathized with the French Revolution, had
attacked Burke in the House of Lords for accepting
a government pension. He basically said, why
is this old commoner getting money from the taxpayers?
Which is pretty rich, coming from a duke whose
entire fortune was inherited. Exactly. And Burke
just tears him apart. He contrasts his own life
of hard work and public service, his earned pension,
with the Duke's unearned inherited privilege.
And he reminds the Duke with devastating historical
detail that the vast wealth of the Bedford family
came directly from King Henry VIII looting the
Catholic Church during the Reformation. So he's
saying, don't you dare talk to me about where
money comes from. Your entire fortune is founded
on an act of revolutionary plunder. And then
he delivers the killer blow. He warns the Duke,
the French revolutionaries you are flirting with,
they don't care about your liberal ideas. They
will treat you and your property just like they
treated the French nobility. They will shop you
up. He calls the revolutionaries the minters
of coin who will happily melt down the Duke's
coronet without a second thought. Burke, the
commoner, defending his own merit against an
aristocrat. It shows again that he wasn't a blind
defender of the rich. He was a defender of order,
but he believed in earned worth. And he believed
in free markets, too. We haven't touched on that
much, but it's an important part of his thought.
Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism,
apparently said that Burke was the only man he
knew who thought exactly as he did on economics
without any prior communication. And Burke wrote
a piece on this, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity,
in 1795. Yes, during a terrible famine. And while
others were calling for government price controls
and wage fixing, Burke argued against it. He
believed in the natural price of the market and
that government interference would only make
the scarcity worse. So economically, you could
call him a classical liberal. Okay, before we
get to the end of his life and sum it all up,
we have to do the debunking, the quote. The only
thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good men to do nothing. It's a fantastic quote.
It's powerful. It's memorable. It's on mugs,
t -shirts, inspirational posters. But Edmund
Burke never wrote it. He did not. It appears
nowhere in his collected works. So where does
it come from? How did it get attached to him?
It's a mutation. It's an evolution of an idea
he did express. The closest thing he actually
wrote was way back in thoughts on the cause of
the present discontents back in 1770 when he
was arguing for political parties. He wrote,
When bad men combine, the good must associate,
else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice
and a contemptible struggle. When bad men combine,
the good must associate. It carries the same
core meaning that you need collective action
to stop evil. But the phrasing is different.
It's more specific. It is. It's about organization,
not just individual inaction. And the good men
do nothing version probably evolved over the
19th and 20th centuries, getting punchier and
more memorable with every misquotation until
it stuck to Burke, who seemed like the most likely
author. But the sentiment is pure Burke. Evil
is organized. Therefore, good must be organized,
too. Burke died in 1797, likely of stomach cancer.
And he was buried in Beaconsfield in an unmarked
grave at his own request. Which is a telling
detail. He did that to avoid his grave being
desecrated by French Jacobins if they ever invaded
England. He was genuinely terrified right up
to the end that the revolution was coming for
him. He died fearing the world he knew was ending.
He didn't live to see that his ideas would eventually
help steal Britain's resolve against Napoleon
and stabilize Europe for a century. He died in
the dark not knowing his own legacy. So let's
bring it all home. We started with the paradox.
The liberal conservative. the man who supported
one revolution and condemned another. How do
we sum this up? How do we solve the riddle? I
think the key, the one consistent thread through
his entire life is this. Burke hated the abuse
of power. Simple as that. Whether that abuse
came from a king and his government in America,
a powerful corporation in India, or a revolutionary
mob in France. That's a great way to frame it.
The source of the threat changed, but his principle
didn't. Exactly. In America and India, he defended
liberty because established power was crushing
it. In France, he defended order and tradition
because a new ideological power was crushing
them. He believed that liberty is only possible
when it is rooted in tradition, order and self
-restraint. If you have liberty without order,
you just have chaos. And chaos, for Burke, always,
always leads to tyranny. He's the guy who's constantly
saying, be careful, don't tear down the fence
until you know exactly why it was put up in the
first place. That is the absolute essence of
Burkean conservatism. It's not about never changing.
He believed a state that cannot change cannot
preserve itself. It's about changing carefully,
reforming in order to preserve, not innovating
in order to destroy. I want to leave our listeners
with a final thought, one that struck me while
reading his defense of prejudice. Now, our modern
world, prejudice is one of the worst words we
can use. It means bigotry. Right. It has a purely
negative connotation for us. But Burke used it
in its original literal sense as a prejudgment.
He saw it as the wisdom inherent in our habits,
our gut feelings, our traditions. Yes. He has
this amazing line, prejudice renders a man's
virtue his habit. It means you don't have to
wake up every morning and calculate every moral
decision from scratch using pure reason. You
rely on the bank and capital of nations and of
ages. You rely on the stored wisdom of your culture.
And that's the provocative question for us today,
isn't it? We live in a world that loves to deconstruct
everything. We question every tradition, every
institution, every norm. We're encouraged to
start from first principles on everything from
gender to government to economics. And Burke's
ghost is standing over our shoulder asking a
very unsettling question. Are you smart enough
for that? Do we as individuals really have enough
intellectual capital to run an entire civilization
on our own private stock of reason? Or do we
need the store of wisdom of the past, even the
parts we don't fully understand or can't logically
justify, to keep us from falling off the cliff?
It's a deep and challenging question. Are we
standing on the shoulders of giants or are we
busy chopping them down at the knees? Burke would
have had a very clear answer. A question worth
chewing on. Thank you for listening to this deep
dive into Edmund Burke. We hope you view those
statues a little differently now. And maybe read
the reflections. It's difficult, but it's worth
the effort. Until next time, keep diving deep.