Burke and Smith on the Morality of Revolution and Social Change: How Societies Evolve

One of the primary distinctions Edmund Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France draws is between the purely theoretical speculations of thinkers and the practical problems of government.  Adam Smith provides in his Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments an excellent counterpoint to Burke’s arguments, since Smith, though an superb thinker, could hardly be accused of being either impractical or a radical reformer.  Since Burke mobilises Enlightenment thought to serve a political end, it is legitimate to ask whether and to what extent Burke’s claims about the fundamental and inalienable place of property the role of the elite are supportable in the thought of someone like Smith.  It is not to be expected that even Smith would have thought to the final conclusions his approach suggests.  Smith does not so much demand action as report his findings, but his findings have practical bearing on the issues raised by the French Revolution to which Burke is responding. 


Though Burke’s impassioned defence of property and the entailment of rights would not stand comparison with Smith’s more realistic and humane analysis of power dynamics, Smith’s approval of natural mechanisms of social change would not extend to revolution.  What Smith can provide are the tools to effectively critique the civic morality of protecting inherited right regardless of circumstance.


"It has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity- as an estate especially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right." - Edmund Burke.  Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. J. Pocock. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 29.


Edmund Burke uses this notion of entailment to underpin his discussion of the place of landed aristocracy in the framework of inherited rights.  What Burke does not investigate, as Adam Smith does, are the origins and development of this system in which great proprietors are the anchor of the ship of state.  Perpetuation of property, Burke asserts, not only tends to family virtue, but “tends most to the perpetuation of society itself.”   Statements like this are difficult to reconcile with Adam Smith’s constructions, which suggest the very nature of this system is to inhibit the growth of society.
Burke, lamenting the destructive influence of reason, says “All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal... are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason... On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.”  


The “mixed system of opinion and sentiment”  which Burke claims arose from “chivalry,” is in Smith’s conception the operation of the natural tendency of the people to follow the great, and of the training an aristocrat receives from birth to play up to it.  Since Burke is in effect mobilising something like Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments to argue that the natural operation of the passions creates a system superior to that which reason tries to artificially construct, Smith’s thoughts on the operation of these natural tendencies are important. 


“Upon this disposition of mankind, to go along with all the passions of the rich and powerful,” says Smith, “is founded the distinction of ranks, and the order of society.”  (Adam Smith.  Theory of Moral Sentiments.  Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie.  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976))   This natural inclination is all that Smith can find to distinguish the nobility from ordinary persons.  “By what other great accomplishments is the young nobleman instructed to support the dignity of his rank, and to render himself worthy of that superiority over his fellow-citizens, to which virtue his ancestors had raised them?  Is it by knowledge, by industry, by patience, by self-denial, or by virtue of any kind?”  The only attainment of a nobleman, on the contrary, is the “graceful sense of his own superiority... These arts, supported by rank and preheminence, are, upon ordinary occasions, sufficient to govern the world.”   In other words, Smith does not see that noble birth confers nobility of character, or any other useful thing except this one illusion that allows a set of otherwise useless men to lead humanity by the nose. 


This strange natural inclination of human passions arises from the perception of the ideal life of the powerful.  “We are eager to assist them in completing a system of happiness that approaches so near to perfection.”   The skills to run the state, however, do not come packaged with the aristocratic aura.  Burke, on the one hand, asserts that “The state suffers oppression” if “servile” tradesmen “are permitted to rule.  In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”   Smith does not precisely contradict him, and certainly would concede that nature favours the station of the powerful.  However, Smith does not, unlike Burke, infer that governance by propertied interest is therefore desirable or even fully possible.  “These virtues are hardly ever to be met with in men who are born to those highest stations.  In all governments accordingly, even in monarchies, the highest offices are generally possessed, and the whole detail of the administration conducted, by men who were educated in the middle and inferior ranks of life, who have been carried forward by their own industry and abilities.”   The nobleman tends to form a character, Smith argues, that is better suited to the social scene than the crises of state.  Although Burke appears to take a great deal of his construction from Smith, the superficial similarity of their ideas conceals a fundamental difference of inclination as far as the aristocracy are concerned. 


Both Smith and Burke make significant arguments for the power of gradual and unplanned social change.  Smith points out, for instance that the division of labour did not arise from “any human wisdom,” but was “the gradual consequence of... the human propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.”   (Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations. Vol. 1 ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner.  (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1976)) 


The same principle applied to the process whereby the wealth of the land holders was communicated to the mercantile classes.  Of the aristocrats and artificers, Smith says, “Neither of them had either knowledge or foresight of that great revolution which the folly of the one, and the industry of the other, was gradually bringing about.”   Burke uses the metaphors of familial real estate security to describe the entailment of rights; they are a “family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain,”  “adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections.”   England has “chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.”   These liberties are the result of “wisdom without reflection, and above it.”   Both Smith and Burke, therefore, would far more readily support a measured and natural course of change than the wholesale demolition French society faced during the Revolution.  Yet Smith also wrote that “Laws frequently continue in force long after the circumstances, which first gave occasion to them, and which could alone render them reasonable, are no more.”  


“I cannot stand forward,” Burke argues, “and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.”   This opposition between stratospheric reason as practiced by enlightenment thinkers and the practical reality of running a society is another reason why the inherited structure must, in Burke’s view, remain intact.  This is the difference, he says, between an “geometrical and arithmetical constitution,”  the one being a compound of all the inherited wisdom of historical statecraft and the other absolutist declarations of right which unbalance the basis of many, limited freedoms in favour of a few absolute ones.  “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or medicine?  The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them.”   The question of what happens when neither is being attended to does not arise, but one is tempted in this age of stratospheric ideology to sympathise with Burke's relativism.


On an amusing note, Burke asserts that the English “have never dreamt that parliaments had any right whatever to violate property, to overrule prescription.”   For what else were the first parliaments constituted than to legislate taxes?  The Glorious Revolution, for that matter, for all its comely trappings of succession, did overrule prescription, even if the extent of the deviation was self-limited.  Burke made many of his points concerning the actual procedure of land confiscation and the mismanagement thereof, and these points must be conceded by history.  The more interesting question is the moral basis for such an action.  Did Burke, in light of Smith’s philosophy, proceed to these well-founded practical insights from a defensible civic morality?


Burke’s argument was against not only the specific reordering of the French Revolution, but any radical reordering of society, while Smith may or may not have entirely agreed.  Yet the moral basis for this formative appeal to tradition rests on shaky ground.  Burke’s famous rhapsody on the fate of Marie Antoinette laments the demise of “that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exulted freedom...The unbought grace of life... under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.”   The obvious question arising from any comparison with the works of Smith is whether the social cohesion wrought by this illusory yet natural good was enough to counterbalance the real faults of the system.  Burke appeals throughout the Reflections to the example of English liberties as the solution to the French situation.  Yet it is from analysis of this ameliorated nation that Smith draws his best criticisms of the landed aristocracy.


Burke raises the issue of the body involved in carrying out the confiscation of property, criticising its lack of propertied representation.  The British House of Commons Burke extols for being “by the sure operation of adequate causes, filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and politic distinction.”   By contrast, the Revolutionary Assembly had little regard “to the general security of property” because its deputies were “immersed in hopeless poverty” and thus “could regard all property, whether secular or ecclesiastical, with no other eye than that of envy.”  “For the smallest hope of the meanest dividend in plunder,” they “would readily join in any attempts upon a body of wealth in which they could hardly look to have any share except in a general scramble.”   While Burke could write this with a straight face, thinking that the graceless greed of the poor ought not to overcome the gracious wealth of their betters, a modern reader must have rather a different approach, even if the philosophy of Adam Smith were the only reference point. 


Burke holds it to be a “profaneness, to talk of the use, as affecting the title to the property.”   This is the main difference between Burke’s regard for property and Smith’s.  Smith’s view is pragmatic and pays more attention to history.   “This original engrossing of uncultivated lands, though a great, might have been but a transitory evil.  They might soon have been divided again, and broke into small parcels either by succession or alienation.”  The primacy of property as a source of power resulted in the exclusion of small proprietors, as the aristocracy introduced measures to prevent the alienation of land.  “The law of primogeniture hindered [the estates] from being divided by succession; the introduction of entails prevented their being broke into small parcels by alienation.”   This situation only changed with the arrival of a luxury market, operated by the emerging middle class and perfectly arranged to part the aristocrats from at least their money and retainers, and sometimes their land.  “As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.”


The continuity of entails in Eighteenth century Europe comes, in the opinion of Smith, from “the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago.”   The improvement of agriculture depends on long-term land security to induce small holders to improve their lots.  “A small proprietor, however, who knows every part of his little territory, who views it with all the affection which... small property, naturally inspires... is generally of all improvers...the most successful.”   The inherited veneer of grace and aura of chivalric power that surrounded the aristocracy and to which Burke appeals can be seen in this light as injustice and illusion, an accident which history was in the process of revisiting.


This subtle, unplanned revolution had Smith’s total approval.  But what are the implications of forcing the pace of change, for the good of the people?  Smith sits, at best, on a fence.  As an empiricist observing the evidence, he sees both the flaws of the current order, and the moral and practical problems of changing it.  “That kings are the servants of the people, to be obeyed, resisted, deposed or punished, as the public conveniency may require, is the doctrine of reason and philosophy; but it is not the doctrine of Nature.”   This personified Nature to whom Burke and Smith both appeal is not, in this case, the fundamental nature of the savage or “the state of nature,” nor is it precisely equivalent to Providence.  Deference to the powerful is not, Smith observes, “founded chiefly, or altogether, upon a regard for the utility of such submission, and to the order of society, which is best supported by it.  Even when the order of society seems to require that we should oppose them, we can hardly bring ourselves to it.”   With the ambivalence of someone assimilating a cognitive dissonance he sees but cannot resolve, Smith reports his empirical finding that Nature is against reason:


 "A stranger to human nature, who saw the indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors, and the regret and indignation they feel for the misfortunes and suffering of those above them, would be apt to imagine, that pain must be more agonising, and the convulsions of death more terrible to persons of higher rank, than to those of meaner stations."


Smith as an observer reports the “natural” order of government, but sees the propertied aristocracy as an immoral, inert mass suffocating better men beneath the weight of their privilege.


Edmund Burke’s political project in the Reflections employed the idea, found in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, that a natural ordering of human passions had resulted over time in a system best fitted for the ordering of society, beyond the capacity of narrow human reason to address.   Although Edmund Burke’s practical criticisms of the program of the French Revolution are effectively conceded by Smith’s gradualist approach to social change, neither the moral authority of entailed right within society nor the indiscriminate conservation of property above and against the needs of the people are ultimately supportable given Smith’s specific criticisms of the origin, nature and effects of landed aristocracy.