SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE:

As Edmund Burke began to wind down his very long letter--that which would become 1790's Reflections on the Revolution in France--he returned to the question of first principles and right reason, especially in regard to the nature of the human person. At his best and most natural, Burke argued, men understood themselves as spirited and not as mere passive members of a republic. A safe republic relied upon the natural habits and goodness of a man's soul, as much as a man's soul found itself safe and secure in a well-ordered republic. Burke, unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau, did not believe man perfectable, but he did believe that through virtue and habit, a man could attenuate his darkest longings. Counter-Rousseau, Burke was an ancient as well as a Christian in his understanding of human nature, in private and in public. As Plato had so often argued, the order of the soul and the order of the commonwealth are inseparable one from the other. If the republic is disordered, man will attempt to live by whatever means necessary, even ill ones. If the soul is disordered, man cannot hope to govern himself or others, thus rendering a republic decrepit and corrupt.

As Burke looked across the English Channel, he saw the revolutionaries of France behaving in dangerously idiotic fashion.

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