Edmund Burke’s Constitutional Arguments

Burke’s first constitutional principle is that a good constitution grows out of the common experience of a people over a considerable elapse of time. It is not possible to create an improved constitution out of whole cloth.

A truth that Burke emphasizes almost equally with the preceding “organic” concept of constitutions is the necessity of religious faith to a constitutional order. “We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good, and of all comfort,” he writes in Reflections on the Revolution in France. “We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long.”

A third point in Burke’s constitutional principles which needs to be noted here is his emphasis upon the function of a natural aristocracy, in which mingle both “men of actual virtue” (the “new” men of enterprising talents) and “men of presumptive virtue” (gentlemen of old families and adequate means).

Fourth, Burke contends that the good constitution maintains a balance or tension between the claims of freedom and the claims of order. Natural law is a reality, and from natural law flow certain natural rights. But government does not exist merely to defend claims of personal liberty. The Rights of Man claimed by the French revolutionaries are impossible to realize, unlimited, in any civil social order. “By having a right to everything they want everything,” Burke writes in his Reflections:

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. . . . In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.

Source: “Edmund Burke: A Revolution of Theoretic Dogma.” The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays (2006) edited by George A. Panichas.