[This is Chapter Five of Murphey’s book Modern Social and Political Philosophies: Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism.]
Chapter 5
BURKEAN THOUGHT: SOCIAL
The preceding chapters have given the more general views of Burkean conservatism about religion, man and.history. With them as a backdrop, we can better understand the Burkean views on social and political issues.
1. Because of its belief in the “depravity of man,” it is not surprising that Burkean social and political thought centers on authority. The individual is subordinated within an organic society. The alignment of Burkeans with classical liberals within twentieth century American “conservatism” makes this surprising to many when they first read Burkean thought. American “conservatism” is assumed to champion individualism. Aris stated the matter accurately, though, when he observed that “while the conservative thinker and the socialist thinker proceeds from the concept of authority, the liberal thinker proceeds from the concept of autonomy.”1 Individualism has always been one of the prime targets of Burkean thought. Weaver distinguished between a life of shared belief and communal activity, on the one hand, and life “when the goal becomes self-realization,” on the other. He spoke of "the severance which is individualism.” He went on to refer to the irresponsibility of individualism, and summed up his book with a sweeping denunciation: "All that this treatise has censured can be traced in some way to individualist mentality.”2 This is seconded by Russell Kirk when he writes about "the vague attitude that one is entitled to do as one likes, so long as it doesn’t injure somebody else,” which he says produces people “devoid of spiritual and intellectual discipline.”3
Cobban
says that it was Burke's view that "each man finds value and immortality
only in the whole.”4 He quotes Burke as having said that
“individuals pass like shadows, but the commonwealth is fixed and stable."
The same organic view is apparent in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy's
commentary that "Ruskin's opposition to individualism as a social
principle and to competition as a method of political economy was based on his
idea of function, the fulfillment of each man's part in the general design of
creation.”5
This perspective is quite similar to socialism's. When the British Fabian socialist R. H. Tawney expressed the collectivist critique of individualism, it could just as well have been written by a Burkean: "To say that the end of social institutions is happiness is to say that they have no common end at all. For happiness is individual, and to make happiness the object of society is to resolve society itself into the ambitions of numberless individuals, each directed towards the attainment of some personal purpose."6
2. Because of this, Burkean thought has usually supported a strong state
(despite its most recent role as an opponent of the Welfare State in the
Stefan T. Possony is a contemporary Burkean who favors the attitudes of “the European conservative,” who “does not want an oversized state, but (who) wants an effective and strong state. He desires the highest efficiency of the state within the spheres of its responsibility. He opposes the anti-state notions of liberalism and anarchism and considers the state not only to be indispensable, but by its very nature – which is to care for the community as a whole – the most significant of all social and political institutions.”10
3. The Burkean
characteristically supports a hierarchical social order. The best quotations I
have found to illustrate this view are the ones I have already given from
Samuel Johnson praising “subordination.” For his part, Burke was careful to
qualify his support for hierarchy by emphasizing that wealth should qualify an
individual for inclusion in the elite along with its hereditary members. He was
critical of
Johnson’s principle of "exalted subordination” found an echo in Weaver, who wrote that "where men feel that society means station, the highest and the lowest see their endeavors contributing to a common end, and they are in harmony rather than in competition." He argued.that "society in the true sense must have exclusive minorities of the wise and good who will bear responsibility and enjoy prestige. Otherwise either it will be leaderless or its leadership will rest on forces of darkness.” A similar point, although made in a more coercive tone, was expressed by Carlyle: "When a world, not yet doomed for death, is rushing down to ever deeper Baseness and Confusion, it is a dire necessity of Nature's to bring in her Aristocracies, her Best, even by forcible methods." He said that "I daily pray Heaven" for a "new Hierarchy and Aristocracy, acknowledged veritably as such." And yet he was often quite critical of the aristocracy of his own day, which he considered an idle rather than a working aristocracy. John MacCunn explains the dichotomy by pointing out that "Carlyle was all his life a believer in aristocracy, but, as happens sometimes with other believers in aristocracy, like Plato, Burke and Coleridge, his tributes to the natural aristocracies of insight and of worth are the bitterest of satires upon the aristocracy of titles, pedigrees, broad acres, sport and luxury."12
4. A century ago, Sir Henry Maine wrote that the movement of progressive society had been from status to contract. Ironically, the tendency has been back toward status ever since he wrote those lines. And it is consistent with rest of their philosophy that the Burkeans should throw themselves onto the side of status. They have always supported it, except to the extent they have adopted classical liberal and bourgeois patterns during the past century. Their support for a status society is another link in the relationship between the organic medievalism of the Burkean view and the later socialist thought.
More than anyone else, Carlyle emphasized his feeling that a "cash-nexus” among people was radically insufficient. He yearned for something more permanent, more humanly meaningful. He compared business with soldiering, and asked "How would mere red-coated regiments, to say nothing of chivalries, fight for you, if you could discharge them on the evening of the battle, on payment of the stipulated shillings, -- and they discharge you on the morning of it!” He spoke of “one widest universal principle, as the basis from which all organization hitherto has grown up among men, and all henceforth will have to grow: The principle of Permanent Contract instead of Temporary." This sentiment was seconded by Ruskin when he said that "in his office as governor of the men employed by him the merchant or manufacturer is invested with a distinctly paternal authority and responsibility." This is in keeping with Ruskin's view of the custodial functions of the merchant, which is a view that is again similar to one held by British socialist R. H. Tawney. The function is not mainly to be a self-interested one, but one of public service or professonialism: "Observe, the merchant's function (or manufacturer's, for in the broad sense in which it is here used the word must be understood to include both) is to provide for the nation. It is no more his function," Ruskin wrote, "to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman's function to get his stipend."13
Here we see a distinct clash with classical liberalism, which instead of denigrating individual self-interest raises it to a high value. And yet, even as a classical liberal I have thought that a purely temporary contractual relationship among people who are associated together in the main endeavors of' their lives -- their work -- should be deepened by a personal and ethical commitment to something more. Contract by itself without mutual concern for each other is too barren to maintain itself for long. The voluntaristic principle is better served if it is augmented by a customary sense of certain "'civilized decencies" that will consider the full personality of the human actors. At least to this extent, Burkean conservatism emphasized something that possesses an important part of the truth.
5. Since they believe in an
organic, hierarchical, status-oriented society and since they have not welcomed
the individualism that challenged such an order, the Burkeans
are not surprisingly the persons most likely to support restraints on the
expression of opinion. The medieval period was characterized most by its mental
hegemony, its insistence on authority. Samuel Johnson articulated its viewpoint
forcefully in the passage I quoted earlier about the magistrate's duty to
enforce established opinion. And when he was talking about the American South
as it existed before the Civil War, Richard Weaver described the cultural
underpinnings of a collective mentality: "
T. S. Eliot again related it to religion, although it by no means stops there. Eliot agreed with Weaver: "The Liberal notion that religion was a matter of private belief and of conduct in private life, and that there is no reason why Christians should not be able to accommodate themselves to any world which treats them good-naturedly, is becoming less and less tenable." This sentence encapsulates the tension between metaphysical Truth and tolerance that was fought out during the eighteenth century. In their assertion of the needed primacy of Truth, Eliot, Johnson and Weaver are not acquiescing in the loss of that fight.
Their Truth is theistic and aristocratically organic. In my book on the Left we will see that the Left has continued this insistence, although on a secularized basis, on the collective's demand for assent. Through revolutionary movements and the state, the Left has continued the old tension that classical liberalism thought it won when it achieved a separation ot Church and State.
6. At this point, it hardly seems necessary to mention that Burkean thought stresses the value of tradition. “All.great peoples are conservative," I earlier quoted Carlyle as having said. "Parliament and the Courts of Westminster are venerable to me; how venerable? gray with a thousand years of honourable age! For a thousand years, this English Nation has found them useful or supportable." Kirk writes in the same tone that "man lives by prescription -- that is, by ancient custom and usage, and the rights which usage and custom have established."
Parry gives tradition a place as the ordering principle of a society based on his concept of the “compact experience.” "A civilization exists in the first instance when a multitude of natures are open to each other for communication on the level of moral perception. Where natures are closed to each other, there is no civilization. It has fallen out of existence, even though the massive exoskeleton of buildings and technology still exists. A tradition exists as the ordering principle of a multitude precisely when it exists in the soul of each member and constitutes thereby the opening from each to every other soul. If there is no such opening, there is no tradition, even though the symbols of the tradition continue to exist and receive a formalized recognition . . . The motivating compact experience, then, is the root of tradition. Through it the tradition communicates itself by authoritative means."
7. The medieval sources of Burkean thought and this reverence for tradition do not, however, cause its thinkers to oppose social change altogether. On several occasions, Burke wrote of the need for an adaptability informed by tradition. Earlier I quoted his comments about the twin principles of conservatism and correction and about how proper change should “proceed upon the principle of reference to antiguity" by being carefully formed "upon analogical precedent, authority, and example." Even a traditionalist as firm as Russell Kirk agrees with Burke about this: "Prescription and tradition cannot stand forever if the living do not sustain them by vigorous application and prudent reform." Stefan Possony applied this to contemporary American when he wrote that “the central contention of conservatism has been that, before building something new, the values that have been created must be conserved. I take it that in the United States the foremost conservative commitment is to defend -- and improve -- our constitutional government, our laws and our system of order . . . The conservative is not committed to preserving our morality, institutions, laws and procedures precisely as they now are, let alone to upholding their abuses, but he is committed to the notion that reforms must be accomplished by Americans through constitutional process."
Carlyle could write conservatively that “all goes by approximation in this world; with any not insupportable approximation we must be patient,” but he could also exclaim: "The thing which is unjust, which is not according to God's law, will you, in a God's Universe, try to conserve that? It is so old say you? Yes, and the hotter haste ought you, of all others, to let it grow no older!" It was on this basis that he joined the classical liberals Richard Cobden and John Bright in opposing the Corn (grain) tariff.
I have already commented that the Burkean faces an increasingly difficult problem of adapting to the world as it moves further and further away from medievalist underpinnings. It is no longer just a matter of whether social changes are prudent or analogical to ancient experience. The Burkean view assumes the role of being a completely different metaphysic. As such, it is transformed into a competing rationalist philosophy, with all the problems of model-building and of methods of transition.
8. Burkean thought, oddly enough, bears a close relationship to historicism. This can be seen in the culture-oriented relativism of so many Burkean expressions about.the rights of men and the forms of government. Although from a point of view transcendant to society they hold to an absolutist position affirming religious Truth, they deny the efficacy of speculative theory pursued by others. They have often denied "the abstract Rights of Man" or the validity of proposed social models. Alfred Cobban says that "Burke takes away the natural rights of the abstract man and is in consequence left with only the positive constitutional rights of political man." But he adds that Burke didn't support the positivism of mere fiat; instead, he supported a positivism based on prescription.
Relativism appeals in Garry Wills' observation that "the ideal state -- of a justice or a freedom defined outside any particular human context -- is as meaningless as some uniform ideal of individual fulfillment. Is monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy the best form of government? Such a question simply breeds further questions: Best for what society? And what kind of monarchy, or democracy?" These questions are, of course, some that even classical liberals will have to ask, since every social model is based on assumptions about the human base for it. But the emphasis is different. What Wills underscores is a denial of rationalist abstractions as a polar star for social change. Wills' thinking may be less naďve than Johnson's two hundred years ago (after all, we have seen what Hitler, Stalin and Mao can do), but there is a common root of thought. Johnson showed both relativism and naivete when he said that "when I say that all governments are alike, I consider that in no government power can be abused long . . . I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man.”14
Coleridge was an English Romantic. He made the relativistic point when he said that "every institution of national origin needs no other justification than a proof, that under the particular circumstances it is expedient.”15 Reinhold Aris commented on the cultural relativism of Romanticism in his history of German thought: "A strong desire developed in Germany to find a refuge in the historic past and a belief that Germany could only be saved if it trusted to tradition and the law of historical continuity rather than to rational experiments." He said that “Herder turned with determination against the concept of history as it had been put forward by the thinkers of the Enlightenment . . . He demanded above all that every epoch should be interpreted according to its own particular spirit." Because of this sequence of thought, Aris spoke of Burke as having been "the spiritual father of the Romantic and the Historic schools." One consequence was that the Romantics denied Natural Law because it was revolutionary, and "substituted for it a system of law which had grown historically and organically in a national environment." In economics they denied the universal validity of the "laws" of classical economics. In the great methodological argument known as the Methodenstreit the thinkers of the Historicist school argued that all such uniformities of behavior are only rooted in the historic situation of a given culture at a certain time and place. Here again, we see an important bridge intellectually between Burkean and socialist thought. (I have pointed to this connection several times, but that should not be taken to mean that I endorse any general theory that socialism arises out of Burkean conservatism, except in part. They are at odds in many important ways.)
9. As I read Burkean writing, I am impressed by the extent to which it either idealizes or takes the best from the medieval period. There are frequent references to “civility and culture” (which is set off by Weaver against the "gods of mass and speed"), piety, chivalry, honor, heroism and "generous feelings." We have seen how Burke decried the passing of the age of chivalry. Richard Weaver expressed the Burkean perspective quite well when he wrote that "the sentiments of a culture may indeed be 'delicate arabesques of convention,' the appreciation of which demands a state of grace. Their value will lie in their nonutility, in their remoteness from practical concerns, which keeps us from immersion in the material world." He said that it was on this basis that the Southern captains in the Civil War saw themselves as a chivalric Christian soldiery. In another connection, Weaver argued that Western civilization has gone astray since it abandoned "the ethic of Plato for that of Aristotle." He praised "the conception of Plato -- expressed certainly, too, by Christianity -- of pursuing virtue until worldly consequence becomes a matter of indifference.” When it shifted to St. Thomas Aquinas' outlook, Christianity turned to the "rational prudence" of Aristotle, and hence "turned away from the asceticism and the rigorous morality of the patristic fathers." Likewise, Robert Southey cried out against the shift to commercial values and selfishness from "the kindly and generous feelings of human nature" and “the spirit of Christianity” that he saw as having typified the medieval period.
10. Burkean philosophy reflects the worldview of the traditional aristocrat as it has been carried down from Roman and medieval attitudes. The economic base of aristocracy has been landed property, and this has involved hostility toward commercial property. Cobban says that Burke was a believer "in government by the landed aristocracy." Burke wrote of the need for protecting property and for recognizing the value of inheritance. "The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself." I have already quoted Carlyle's comment about land being the proper basis for aristocracy. Later he added: "No right Aristocracy but a Land one." And Weaver said that in the antebellum South men without land were thought to lack dignity.
But the Burkeans' has not usually been the type of support for property that overlaps with the classical liberal attitude on the same subject. There is again considerable similarity between the views of Weaver and the British socialist R. H. Tawney when Weaver talks about "that kind of property brought into being by finance capitalism” and says that "such property is a violation of the very notion of proprietas. This amendment of the institution to suit the uses of commerce and technology has done more to threaten property than anything else yet conceived. For the abstract property of stocks and bonds, the legal ownership of enterprises never seen, actually destroy the connection between man and his substance without which metaphysical right becomes meaningless."
11. Because Burkeans and classical liberals stand together in the twentieth century American “conservative” movement, they might be assumed to share fundamental loyalties. But this assumption is incorrect. I was quite surprised when I first read the Burkean literature at length. I had not realized how thoroughly anti-bourgeois and anti-classical liberal their literature has been. Both of these attributes become clear, however, to anyone who studies Burkean philosophy enough to identify its historic role.
Richard Weaver joined wholeheartedly in the anti-bourgeois alienation that has been felt so passionately by modern liberalism and socialism. He spoke of "the age of tired and unromantic businessmen . . . the Babbitts of the later era, whom Vachel Lindsay has caustically described, 'with their neat little safety vault boxes, with their faces like geese and like foxes.’” He denigrated the "thrift, sobriety, patience, and the kind of plodding industry which creates bourgeois security.” In a great many passages Weaver declared the bourgeoisie warped in its values, materialistic, and even pathologically alienated from reality.
Aris tells of the Romantics’ distrust for capitalism. Coleridge wrote of "our pestilent commerce.” Matthew Arnold criticized "the mechanical middle-class passion for making money."
12. This means that their view of nineteenth century economic history overlaps substantially with the view taken by socialist thought. Both point to the supposed misery of the average man and to capitalism as the cause of that misery. The way modern economic history is perceived is important ideologically as one of the ways the different philosophies apply their understanding of cause and effect. It also forms the basis for their interpretation of later events, since the past is seen as prologue.
More perhaps than others, Carlyle bore down heavily on the "conditions" under the Factory System. “I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us . . . Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the 'Liberty to die by starvation' is not so divine.” In the Introduction to the present book, I quoted at length from Macaulay’s rebuttal of Robert Southey’s outcry on the same subject. And Ruskin's interpretation of the industrial system is spelled out in Peter Quennell's summary: "A deep sense of social wrong little by little began to colour all writings. Horrified by the evidence of social injustice - by the degradation of the London poor and the squalor of the new industrial towns - he decided nobly but perhaps unwisely, that he must seek to combat them."
It is significant that Richard Weaver endorsed a theory of exploitation. He spoke of "the kind of exploitation, financial and political, which accompanies industrialism." The exploitation theories are basic to the Left's critique of capitalism and to its concepts of freedom, environmental (i.e., circumstantial) entrapment and the role of the state.
13. The South made this antipathy toward the condition of the average man under the commercial system a part of its defense of slavery. George Fitzhugh used Burkean arguments effectively in presenting the case for slavery and against the Northern "wage system." In Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin the Southern characters are frequently made to express the thought that a commercial economy's exploitation of the worker is "just as bad as" slavery. Consider one passage: "He says, and I think quite sensibly, that the American planter is 'only doing in another form, what the English aristocracy and capitalists are doing by the lower classes;' that is, I take it, appropriating them, body and bone, soul and spirit, to their use and convenience . . . The slave-owner can whip his refractory slave to death, - the capitalist can starve him to death.”16
Boswell, but not Johnson, supported Negro slavery. Boswell felt it was "a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued." He felt it an improvement over the Negro's condition in Africa.
14. An interesting and important aspect of the semantics of ideology is that each position sincerely claims for itself the most appropriate definition of the major social concepts - such as freedom, equality and justice. The Burkean has usually thought himself to be a truer protector of genuine liberty than the individualist.
The Burkean concept of liberty has undergone some modification over the centuries. It was one thing under the hegemony of the Middle Ages. It has been something much more compatible with individualism's own idea of freedom under Burke and later thinkers.
Carlyle represented the older attitude when he spoke of the need for a "just despotism." This leaves little room for individual volition, but the citizen is considered well off because of the benign principle upon which the society is based. (Such a definition of freedom is also claimed by every totalitarian system, with each such advocate arguing that his is the just totalitarianism.)
There is, though, a different emphasis when we read Burke. Cobban says that Burke "begins with Locke's thesis that liberty for an individual consists in freedom from restraint or violent treatment by others, and that this is only to be attained by operation of a known law with definite sanctions and an impartial judge. Burke goes further: his argument is that both liberty and social life are necessary to man, in fact that real liberty can only exist in an organized community, and that to enable an aggregate of individuals to act as such they must be in a state of 'habitual social discipline.' Liberty, in other words, is freedom, but it is a social freedom secured by an 'equality of restraint,' a liberty to do those things which society considers desirable. That society has the duty of suppressing any undue interference with the individual by his neighbours is orthodox Lockian and liberal doctrine. Burke says that society has also another duty towards the individual, that of exerting its pressure to free him from the despotism of his own blind and brutal passions.” We should note from this that Burke was concerned about personal freedom, but that he put considerably more stress on the organic setting than classical liberals have and that he was less worried about how a government exercising such a paternal role could be kept from abusing the power it would be given. Burke thought that any emphasis on the problem of the abuse of power would actually misconstrue the “middle ground” that he thought possible. We recall his asking: "Have these gentlemen never heard, in the whole circle of the worlds of theory and practice, of any thing between the despotism of the monarch and the despotism of the multitude?" The solution was in a balance of powers and the Rule of Law.
Other Burkeans have also shown a concern for liberty. Ruskin said he favored an “effectual, not merely theoretic, liberty” (and in this he was again bringing out the desire for concreteness rather than abstraction). Russell Kirk points to the difference between "genuinely ordered freedom" and an "anarchic freedom." Both M. Stanton Evans and Garry Wills interpret Christianity as libertarian on the ground that it stresses the worth of the individual soul. (This is an interpretation of Christianity that I have considered selective and unduly favorable. There is as much in the history of Christianity that points to the abasement of the individual. Christianity has been so diverse that it is virtually impossible to speak of it generically with any meaning. As some Burkeans point out, there has been a considerable gulf between the other-worldly Platonic Christianity of St. Augustine and the more secular worldview of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.) Tonsor argues that religion is an essential check against the modern state.
15. However much he may have had such a concern for liberty, the Burkean ordinarily has not favored the classical liberal formulation of bourgeois individualism. Russell Kirk referred to Voegelin's writing and concluded about it that "this is repudiation of liberalism root and branch.” Kirk later added on his own that "from its beginnings, the liberal movement of the nineteenth century had within it this fatuous yearning for the destruction of all authority . . . Abolish the old Authorities, and sweetness and light must reign. Yet the triumph of liberalism endured little more than half a century."
We should recall Samuel Johnson's perpetual disagreement with the classical liberals of his own day. T. S. Eliot expressed the usual Burkean viewpoint when he said that "by destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos." Douglas Jerrold says of Carlyle that "he poured contempt on the liberal doctrines, most of all on laissez-faire." And Edward Alexander says that Matthew Arnold’s father "described the doctrine (of laissez-faire) as ‘one of the falsest maxims which ever pandered to human selfishness.’”
16. As a person who upholds tradition and faith, the Burkean has a perspective that causes him to see classical liberalism and socialism as two branches off of the same rationalist, secularist tree. Voegelin sees each as a type of gnosticism. Weaver speaks of socialism as "itself the materialistic offspring of bourgeois capitalism." He continues by saying that ‘it clarifies much to see that socialism is in origin a middle-class and not a proletarian concept. The middle class owes to its social location an especial fondness for security and complacency." (For my part, I am very critical of this interpretation. I see socialism as primarily the product of the alliance of the intellectual with the have-not against the bourgeoisie. The great modern thrust toward socialism comes from the alienated intellectual, who in turn has substantial roots in Burkean thought. As a separate point, it is worth noting that in different ways both a Burkean and a classical liberal society encourage complacency and security: the Burkean because of its status features; the classical liberal because of the affluence it brings. I would normally expect more complacency and security in a Burkean society, however, than in a competitive capitalistic society.) Weaver indicates his attitude on this subject when he says that "the bourgeoisie first betrayed society through capitalism and finance." He assigns excesses of organized labor to the attitudes labor has developed from the bourgeoisie.
17. The classical liberal interprets American history as mainly a history of individual freedom, although he believes the history of since the 1930s has largely had to do with the movement away from such freedom. The modern liberal views American society as having been improved through reform, but as still harboring many injustices and warped values. The Burkean has still a third interpretation: he sees the best in American history as having come from prescriptive roots. Russell Kirk writes that "nominally, we Americans created our Federal Constitution by deliberate action, within the space of a few months. But in actuality that formal constitution, and our state constitutions, chiefly put down on paper what already existed and was accepted in public opinion: beliefs and institutions long established in the colonies, and drawn from centuries of English experience with parliaments, the common law, and the balancing of orders and interests in a realm.” He also writes that the American political tradition "is rooted in two bodies of belief and custom: first, the Christian religion; second, the English and colonial experience."
18. I have already commented on the problems the Burkean faces in adapting his philosophy to a world that now provides no hereditary aristocracy, no landed class and no established Church. If it remains over time, it will do so more as a set of values than as a defender of existing realities. It could be argued that its values could serve as a bridge between classical liberalism and socialism, since it involves a non-egalitarian and yet organic model. But I am doubtful whether it can do this. Its perspective is deeply rooted in its particular theology, and its future lies there. Unless the world turns away from empiricism and secularism, the predominant philosophies will probably come from views compatible with them. And yet, I wouldn't have us leave the Burkean philosophy without realizing that it has much that is instructive and that will serve as part of the world's permanent wisdom.
NOTES
1. Reinhold Aris, History of Political Thought in
Germany (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.,
1936), pp. 156, 219, 238, 239, 251, 285.
2. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1948), pp. 92, 115, 181, 43, 119, 132, 94, 37, 75.
3. Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969), pp. 44, 282, 256, 284, 177-178.
4. Alfred Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt Against the Eighteenth Century (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1960), pp. 88, 57, 79, 265-266, 59, 56.
5. Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan Company and the Free Press, 1967), entry on Ruskin.
6. R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1920), p. 29.
7. Richard Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1968, pp. l38, 139, 36, 100, 103, 41, 208, 57, 251.
8. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1962), pp. 271, 207, 209, 171, 263, 266, 9, 11, 158-159, 236, 203, 204, 271, ix.
9. Edward Alexander, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 243, 194, 94.
10. Frank S. Meyer, What is Conservatism? (New York: Holt, Rinehard and Wlnston, 1964), pp. 191, 116, 118, 32, 190, 168, 24, 150, 37.
11. Ray B. Browne, The Burke-Paine Controversy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), pp. 46, 204, 21, 42, 202.
12. John MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 143.
13. Peter Quennell, Selected Writings of John Ruskin (London: The Falcon Press, 1952), pp. 80, 79, xii, 182.
14. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Modern Library, 1952), pp. 188, 365.
15. I. A. Richards (ed.), The Portable Coleridge (New York: Viking Press, 1970), pp. 332, 274-275.
16. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1963), pp. 234-235.