OPPOSING FREEDOM/DEFENDING LIBERTY:

The pages of the Everyman Burke show our protagonist developing policy for his allies in parliament, the Whigs. His activities in this capacity ranged from his development of the idea of party to plans for the conciliation of the American colonies. We also find Burke the theorist of political representation and of the duties of members of parliament toward their constituents. His thoughts on this subject were mostly formulated during his time as a member of parliament for the bustling port city of Bristol; at the end of that period Burke turned his hand to more practical matters. His principal domestic project was achieving "economical reform", which meant curtailing the means of patronage available to the crown.

Besides his work for parliament, we also find Burke defending causes about which he simply felt deeply. He was a lifelong opponent of slavery, which he campaigned to abolish. (Before that looked like practical politics, he drafted proposals to humanise the slave trade.) Britain's abuse of the merchant inhabitants of the Dutch Caribbean island of St Eustatius also stirred Burke into action, resulting in his searing criticism of the naval officer responsible. The inclusion of speeches of this kind displays the intensity of Burke's passion. They also show his meticulous, calculating judgment.

Burke's enemies in the 19th century tried to paint him as an opportunist -- the hired hand of complacent magnates, combining obeisance with aspiration. In fact we know his public service cost him repeatedly. Lending support to Irish Catholics was never a popular cause in Britain; it certainly offered no assistance to parliamentary advancement. Yet Burke returned to the issue at intervals throughout the decades as conditions in British high politics shifted, first arguing in support of religious toleration and later in support of political rights.

There was even less to be gained from fighting for the cause of India. It is true that the early stages of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India from 1773 to 1785, gave Burke's allies under Whig statesman Charles James Fox a chance to expose the government of William Pitt. But when the prosecution lost its political value and Fox quietly abandoned the enterprise, Burke struggled to keep the case alive. As his great speech opening the trial of Hastings shows, the plight of India absorbed tremendous quantities of Burke's energy. It impeded his career and almost drove him to despair. His moral determination was overwhelming and exacting.

That moral fervor reached new levels in the 1790s, when Burke deployed his rhetorical and intellectual skills to censure the Revolution in France. Proponents of the abstract "rights of man" were made to appear little better than conspirators against society with no commitment to the hard-won liberties of the people. At the same time, as Burke argued in Reflections on the Revolution in France, noble supporters of insurrection could be easily unmasked as opportunists and hypocrites: "Almost all the high-bred republicans of my time have, after a short space, become the most decided, thorough-paced courtiers; they soon left the business of a tedious, moderate, but practical resistance to those of us whom, in the pride and intoxication of their theories, they have slighted, as not much better than tories." 

Burke's vitriol against the Revolution led to his separation from Fox and ultimately sparked a painful division among the Whigs. Did the Revolutionaries truly mean what they said in promising the dawn of freedom, or was their crusade an incoherent and desperate push for power? Fox believed that the disasters that accompanied rebellion in France were "accidental" products of an essentially benign process. Burke, by contrast, believed the calamities were the inevitable result of a campaign to ruin religion and sabotage property. The Whigs were divided not over competing values but over opposing assessments of whether their principles could coexist with the Revolution.

Among the array of captivating materials available in this collection is its selection of private correspondence. One letter written to Captain Thomas Mercer, an Irish acquaintance who had spent time in India, captures something essential about Burke's hostility to the Revolution. It is commonly believed that his antagonism was driven by the desire to secure custom against liberty and thus to champion "tradition" against the rights of man. In fact Burke saw his position as one of resistance against an illegitimate force that sought to undermine universal principles of justice. As he put it to Mercer on February 26, 1790, his aim was to lend support to "the first principles of law and natural justice". Careful reading confirms that this commitment remained constant throughout Burke's career. Equally, a dispassionate appraisal of thinkers and publicists in the period illustrates the extent of shared fundamental values: neither Rousseau, nor Paine, nor Fox, denied the existence of natural justice rooted in the right to property. Yet Paine and Fox did not believe that this right would be overturned if it were sacrificed in powerfully symbolic cases. What did it matter if the opulent -- above all the pampered clergy and aristocrats -- were summarily expropriated? Burke disagreed. For him, looking back over the unhappy course of the conflicts of the 17th century, confiscation was an exercise in malicious persecution that would undermine the security of the established rights of man. Having set about expropriating the Gallican Church, and having signaled their disregard for accumulated wealth, prominent deputies in the National Assembly had undercut prescriptive right, and with it the institution of property altogether. Burke believed that neither Fox's affluence nor Paine's more modest means would survive a fundamental challenge to the rules of property.

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