History Spotlight, 1/12

Irish politician and spiritual founder of modern Western Conservatism, Edmund Burke was born today in 1729. Burke is best known for his support of the American Revolution and for his opposition to the French Revolution.

In the lead up to the American Revolution, Burk saw that the Colonists had a just disagreement over taxes. In a speech before Parliament, he said, "...leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself."

One of the big disagreements the Americans had with the Crown was that they were doing business with all these companies that operated out of Britain and also paying taxes back to the Crown and not really seeing much of a return on all that money. Burke's feeling was that, if American was forced to do business with Britain and also forced to pay taxes on that business then they should also be able to reap the benefits of that business or else it would be nothing more than slavery in all but name. A smug modern like me would point out that the Americans did have the benefit of having one of the finest armies in the world protecting their frontier from the French and Indians without having to invest the manpower or industrial capacity, but I don't think they saw it that way and, in any event, I've always been a bit of a Royalist.

Burke also noted that the rebelling American colonists were still Englishmen (Protestant Englishmen) the same people who had, less than 100 years before, thrown off the yoke of a Catholic monarchy in the Glorious Revolution on 1688. Now, these same people were trying to simply assert some degree of autonomy in their economic dealings (this being March 1775, the colonies weren't yet in open rebellion until the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April, 1775)

With the French Revolution of 1789, Burke was appalled by the violence, especially when a mob of enraged Parisians marched on the palace at Versailles to force King Louis XVI to return to Paris. As the brutality escalated, Burke became more and more horrified. By 1790, he had escalated into openly denouncing the Revolution. The problem he had is that he was always dogged by rumors that he was a closet Catholic. His father was Protestant (his family had emigrated from England during the reign of Henry II back in 1172) but his mother was Catholic and, although he had been raised Anglican and taken an oath against the supremacy of the Pope and against the doctrine of transubstantiation, tongues still wagged. His point was that just getting rid of the monarchy didn't automatically mean that freedom flowed into the vacuum.

Burke was the obverse side of a coin shared with the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rosseau. Where Rosseau believed that mankind's natural inclination in the absence of governmental or societal influences is to freedom. Burke believed, if not the exact opposite, then that freedom wasn't a given in the absence of government. This argument about human nature is still being waged today, and probably will be for the foreseeable future.