Review of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Edmund Burke (writer).
Read in 2025.
This book, a kind of open letter, sold well when it came out. That was before the Revolution had taken its course. After the execution of the French king in 1793, La Terreur later that year, and the French Revolutionary Wars, Napoleon put an end to directly elected representative government. He restored the monarchy, after a fashion. The French Revolution, though it continued to reverberate endlessly in European thought, was a mixed success at best. That seemed to validate old Burke’s opinions. Burke himself died in 1797, two years before the Brumaire coup. His Reflections on the Revolution in France is a foundational text in the development of political conservatism. That is partly because it is surprisingly weird, coming from a man who defended constitutional limits on British monarchy, supported the independence of its American colonies, had a real taste for philosophy, served in parliament as a Whig, and did not think of himself as a conservative; that term only came about in the 1810s. The French Revolution was truly new, in a specific way that Burke hated.
At times, Burke is simply näive. He jokes that the revolutionaries “forgot” to form a senate, but as of 2025, about 60% of national parliaments have chosen to forget the same. Unicameralism is not what doomed the revolution. Similarly, Burke criticizes the paper money of “Jew brokers” and rejects nationalism as too weak a force, which is anything but prescient.
Burke’s contempt for paper money is part of a larger, less stupid argument for fiscal responsibility, though he does not use the term. In many conservative movements, such as the US Tea Party of the Obama years, “fiscal responsibility” is a dogwhistle for spending on one’s in-group instead of one’s out-group, but Burke actually seems to understand classical political economics well enough for the time. He declares that “those who attempt to level never equalize”, arguing from what is today called economic class:
In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things: they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.
Burke knows that it’s working people who keep the country going, not the parliament’s assignats. He mentions the country’s tailors, carpenters, hair-dressers, tallow-chandlers, etc. Without them, the French economy would collapse before you had your breakfast croissant, because nobody would bake it. Burke just cannot stomach the idea that the true power of working people should be reflected in politics. Here he is on the concept of private property as it relates to political power:
Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not represent its ability, as well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never can be safe from the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant in the representation. It must be represented, too, in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. The great masses, therefore, which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about the lesser properties in all their gradations. The same quantity of property which is by the natural course of things divided among many has not the same operation. Its defensive power is weakened as it is diffused. In this diffusion each man’s portion is less than what, in the eagerness of his desires, he may flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the accumulations of others. The plunder of the few would, indeed, give but a share inconceivably small in the distribution to the many. But the many are not capable of making this calculation; and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.
Let me translate that whole paragraph into 21st-century English:
Only two groups of people should have political representation: The smart and the rich. The rich should have almost all the seats at the table because, if they didn’t, the smart would outmaneuver them. To further protect the rich, they must be so rich and so powerful that poor people’s hopes of sharing their wealth are crushed. Then the privileges of the rich will also protect the smaller wealth of the middle class. After all, if the money went to the poor, it wouldn’t last. The poor can’t understand that, and they’re the only ones who want equality.
To achieve his goal of upholding inequality, Burke says, doing work “cannot be a matter of honor to any person”. That’s the normative “cannot”: He thinks working should not be honourable. The “servile employments”, although they directly enable the lifestyle of the rich through the “yoke of luxury and the despotism of fancy”, are especially shameful in his eyes. Burke does not state openly that culture should be engineered, as in Plato’s Republic (ca. 375 BCE), to value the traditional elite instead of the economically productive caste, but a hierarchical justice like Plato’s is what he wants, and that is why the French Revolution bothers him.
It’s personal. Burke associates political power with the gain and glory he has achieved, with “the prizes of honor and virtue, all the rewards, all the distinctions”. Now, in 1790, somebody with power prefers equality. The French Revolution is “the most important of all revolutions”, according to Burke, not because it is geographically close or bloody or sudden or big or connected to Enlightenment philosophy and intellectualism (“metaphysics”), but because it is “a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions”. After the abolition of slavery, the French Revolution is the most serious threat in history to the ancient world’s acceptance of inequality.
Despite his support for the American Revolution, Burke does not mention the relevant US Constitution as a point of comparison. He prefers to compare the French Revolution to the 1688 Glorious Revolution. I think that is because the latter was controlled by transnational elites, not because it was relatively peaceful. As a long-time political insider himself, he does not try to overcome his in-group bias. In this way, he is exactly like the monarchists in his own parliment. The only difference is that he, like the American rebels, wants to include non-workers without “blood and names and titles” in the elite. Burke’s refusal to mention the USA gets weird when he concludes that French legislators “are the very first who have founded a commonwealth upon gaming”. That distinction clearly belongs to the Americans, who laboured so long on their gamist separation of powers.
Burke has a dim grasp of game theory and, more surprisingly, of power politics. He substitutes a somewhat mad and legalistic concept of tradition. With Sir Edward Coke, he imagines that the Magna Charta—and the charter of Henry I a century earlier—did not really change anything but merely reaffirmed “the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom”. He writes of the Glorious Revolution that, although it happened more than a century before his writing, it set a negative precedent that rules out British democracy forever:
If ever there was a time favorable for establishing the principle that a king of popular choice was the only legal king, without all doubt it was at the Revolution. Its not being done at that time is a proof that the nation was of opinion it ought not to be done at any time.
Burke is capable of arguing against specific bad ideas in the untested idealism of the new French state. He predicts the military takeover that Napoleon would achieve. On a deeper level, Burke is perpetually shocked at the idea that the French could and dared to implement real change without pretending to argue from tradition or Platonic lies. His is the imagination of Parmenides, where nothing really changes. The philosophy of Parmenides is embedded in the tradition of British common law, which filtered into the American Revolution, where the legislative branch was for a long time dominated by lawyers. However, what Burke says about the facts of history, he says in ignorance. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the writings of Bede the Venerable describe how the kings of England were once elected by acclaim, not primogeniture. Burke pictures a socially organic, therefore heritable and stable power, but that is a Norman lie.
The aristocratic author subscribes to a number of other backward-looking ideas with the same conveniently selfish instinct and the same ignorance, but that’s not so interesting. He’s obviously antisemitic. He describes French clergymen he’s met as being of noble birth and fit “for the exercise of their authority”. In his delusion, it is the non-religious, not the religious, who are fanatical and proselytizing. Consistently, like every political writer going back to Leviathan (1651), he appeals to a fixed human nature that is whatever he wants it to be without examination or evidence.
Before the French Revolution, the children of the elite were taught that political power should be used against equality. After the French Revolution, in the age of utopians like Henri de Saint-Simon, equality and democracy seemed possible. The inequality that had served the elite was being undermined so effectively that it had to be defended in print, in this pamphlet for adult readers. That is why Burke took the time to articulate his worldview. He did this pretty well, even though he could barely believe that French voices for equality were sincere. The result is readable. As the ideas of the French Revolution continue to reverberate, Burke’s self-serving resistance echoes with it.
References here: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905).