Political Rationality and Reason of State
How Conservatism and Prudence Converged in Edmund Burke’s Political Thought
Abstract
Edmund Burke’s conservatism is rarely scrutinized in conjunction with his theory of reason of state. As David Armitage has successfully called attention to Burke’s contribution to the theory of reason of state in recent years, how Burke’s doctrine in that regard interrelates with his conservative political theory has become necessary to discuss. Taking issue with Armitage, this essay argues that Burke’s teaching on the principle of necessity, his contribution to the theory of reason of state, refers to the necessity of prudence in specific rather than extreme circumstances. In other words, his theory of reason of state is likewise about the everyday practice of reason of state. This will inevitably lead to the discussion of political reason in the everyday practice of reason of state. This discussion will not only elaborate Burke’s theory of political reason in connection with his theory of reason of state, but expound as well on how political reason is related to reason of state in the everyday practice as well as in emergency. This will hopefully demonstrate a more integrated view about Burke’s conservatism which is characterized by a gradualist reformism that incarnates Burkean political reason. Finally, in the concluding section, I will take stock of the limitations of Burke’s political thought as well as its contribution to the theory of political rationality.
Edmund Burke’s doctrine of necessity, as David Armitage has elaborated, is “based upon the vestiges of the Roman and neo-Roman theory of reason of state” (Armitage 2013, 163). Drawing on the just war theory revived by Hugo Grotius and revised by Emer de Vattel, Burke’s theory of reason of state, the principle of necessity, so to speak, was reckoned to have offered a just cause for ensuring security in extremity without destroying the social order (Armitage 2013, 169-170). Armitage’s understanding is, however, virtually equivocal in terms of whether the “compulsion of necessity,” in his own parlance, is justifiable only in extreme circumstances.
Can this principle also apply to the everyday practice of reason of state? Moreover, how can one assess the circumstances in which this principle should be employed? If necessity is not only justifiable in extreme circumstances, how can one distinguish, during the emergency and amid the everyday practice of reason of state, the prudence in specific circumstances from that out of conservativeness? Is prudence simply a form of conservativeness? What is the political rationality undergirding the judgements grounded on Burkean prudence?
This paper will attempt to provide insight into those questions. The central task of this essay is to investigate into how Burke’s theory of reason of state is intertwined with his theory of political reason in the sense that Burke’s doctrine of necessity demands a holistic approach to political reason amid the everyday practice of reason of state as well as in emergency. In an unprecedented way, Burke advanced the theory of reason of state by combining prudence with a gradualist conservatism. For Burke, necessity refers to the necessity of prudence in specific rather than extreme circumstances. This will be of crucial importance in presenting not just Burke’s advancement of the theory of reason of state but also a full-fledged theory of political rationality. This exploration will present the lineage of Burke’s conservatism by integrating these two branches of theory. As Burke’s theory of reason of state has long been overlooked, the rediscovery of Burke’s theory in this area will contribute to the construction of a slightly different “topography” of Burke’s conservative political theory.
In what follows, I wish to map Burke’s teaching on reason of state onto his theory of political rationality. First, I will argue that necessity implies prudence in specific circumstances amid the everyday practice of reason of state. Second, I will establish Burke’s conception of political reason embedded in the complexity of human nature and circumstances. Finally, I’m seeking to critique how Burke links reason of state with political rationality, the links which so far both historians of political thought and political theorists have rarely explored. This paper will shed light on the Burkean concept of conservatism which has long been misconstrued in a degree because of its isolation from his theory of reason of state.
1. Necessity, Circumstances, and Prudence
Taken at face value, Burke seems highly incompatible with Machiavelli and Machiavellianism insofar as “reason of state represented the doctrine that political expediency should supersede moral law” (Armitage 2013, 155-156), whereas Burke sought assiduously to put an end to the Machiavellian schism between politics and morality by grounding politics on the “recognition of the universal law of reason and justice ordained by God as the foundation of a good community” (Armitage 2013, 156; see Burke 1949, xv). Yet as Armitage put it, though counterposing the Machiavellian expediency, Burke reiterated the Ciceronian necessity of considerations in accordance with circumstances (Armitage 2013, 157). This was considered to have fallen within the tradition of theories of reason of state. Armitage argued that reason of state acknowledged the “compulsion of necessity,” with a particular theoretical concern over “the contingent, the extraordinary and the unforeseeable” (Armitage 2013, 157). Reason of state alone, nonetheless, “could not determine which circumstances were truly cases of extreme necessity, and hence which precise occasions could permit the overriding of custom and law,” but only lay down norms from which such “exceptions” could be derived, and provide “a consequentialist means of applying the norms of natural law” (Armitage 2013, 158). The applications of the principle of necessity seemed to be only “exceptions” in extremity, but Armitage added that the “compulsion of necessity” was assumed to be “universally recognisable, but under particular circumstances by specific, usually sovereign agents” (Armitage 2013, 158). However, Armitage’s statements were vague insofar as he had not distinguished exceptional situations from specific circumstances. That is because exceptions are always specific, but the specific is not necessarily exceptional. By “specific” I mean the quality of being concrete and particular at the same time. Exceptions are particular but should be assessed in concrete circumstances, hence are specific. Extremity is exceptional, everyday practice is concrete, yet both are specific.
Worse, Armitage’s discussions revolving around necessity were actually either inconclusive or erroneous insomuch as he misconstrued Burke’s doctrine on necessity. Despite the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution taken as “cases of extreme emergency” (Burke 1889b, 258), Burke has placed greater emphasis on the crucial importance of circumstances which are “what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind” (Burke 1889b, 240). That is to say, to justify or to delegitimize a political event will rest upon the specific circumstances that give each political principle actual meaning and significance. Conversely, the necessity to deviate from positive law or moral obligation in extremity is but an expediency under specific circumstances. To be more precise, the range of the applications of the principle of necessity has been fully covered by or included in the range of circumstances. The extreme circumstances for the applications of the principle of necessity are not only exceptional but also specific cases. This is because “what render every civil or political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind” take place not only in exceptional cases, but also in everyday practice. Otherwise, the judgement on “beneficial” and “noxious” schemes in everyday practice would be suspended.
The “first and supreme necessity,” according to Burke, which is “paramount to deliberation” and which is “not chosen but chooses,” is “no exception to the rule,” since this necessity itself is a part of the “moral and physical disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by consent or force” (Burke 1889b, 359-360). This shows not only necessity is no “exception” to the everyday practice of the rule, but also that necessity as a part of the “moral and physical disposition of things” demands obedience either by consent or by force. The obedience by consent or force implies the routine practice of a political order as well. Then how is the “compulsion of necessity” employed in specific circumstances?
First, Burke’s exaltation of circumstances is premised on his skepticism of “metaphysical,” “abstract,” essentially “individual” speculations and rationality. “The world of contingency and political combination is much larger than we are apt to imagine. We never can say what may, or may not happen, without a view to all the actual circumstances” (Burke 1889d, 349), wrote Burke. For Burke, necessity refers primarily to the necessity of taking into consideration all the specificity, rather than the extremity, of circumstances. This is clearly beyond the limits of private reason, since only by virtue of customs and traditions can “the collective wisdom of the human species” achieve that goal (Canavan 1960, 77). By contrast, political ideas and ideals as the manifestations of private, individual rationality and abstraction are always bounded and therefore unlikely to apprehend the entirety of circumstances.
Burke’s fundamental intention, contended Frank Turner in the editor’s ‘Introduction’ of Reflections on the Revolution in France (2003), was “the defense and preservation of liberal political institutions” against those who would radically transform them on the basis of theory, philosophical ideas, or ideology (Burke 2003, xiv). The specificity of circumstances implies consequently a special realm of intellect, which is too intricate rather than too extreme for private reason. The extremity is anything but an exception to the specificity, whereas the latter is always bound up with the entirety of circumstances. To put it differently, the preservation of liberal political institutions against radicalism involves not only emergency (or extremity) but also the everyday practice responding to potential or emerging challenges, inasmuch as both emergency and everyday practice are already subsumed within the specificity of circumstances. That amounts to saying that the principle of necessity as reason of state is obligated to cope with both emergency and the everyday practice in specific circumstances insofar as a particular realm of intellect is demanded for navigating through the turbulence between “invariable general principles and constantly varying circumstances”—according to Francis Canavan, this realm is the realm of prudence (Canavan 1960, 23). That is to say, the determination of necessity in given circumstances depends on the use of prudence not only in emergency but also in everyday practice.
Then the second aspect of necessity is concerned with prudence. Giovanni Botero famously declares that prudence serves as one of the two pillars of governments: it is analogous to the eyes of princes; it perceives the difficulties of an enterprise; it draws up plans; it refines the judgement; its function is to seek and recover suitable means to reach the goal, while in the choice of means it seeks the honorable more than the useful (Botero 2017, 34, 48). In a similar vein, Burke exalted prudence as “the first of all the virtues” as well as “the supreme director of them all” (Burke 1889g, 49; 1889b, 313). For both Botero and Burke prudence is embodied in the flexibility of translating purposes into reality. The crucial difference lies in the fact that Burke’s conception is situation-oriented in the sense that for him the prudent flexibility should tally with circumstances. To quote Canavan, the rules of prudence are “practical rules intended for the guidance of action and adjustable to the demands of particular situations,” but not “premises from which conclusions applicable to all situations can be drawn with strict logic” (Canavan 1960, 15; emphasis mine). Yet such flexibility to Burke’s mind implies that, in Canavan’s terms, the function of prudence is to supply the deficiencies of moral principles in meeting the demands of practice (Canavan 1960, 25).
However, the Burkean prudence will not be fully specified until the teleological structure of Burkean political society is revealed. In my view, neither Canavan nor Ferenc Hörcher (2020) fully noticed this connection. As Canavan pointed out, affected by John Locke’s social contract theory, Burke’s notion of society is teleological by nature (Canavan 1960, 87-88). Given that, political problems, Burke wrote, “do not primarily concern with truth or falsehood,” but “relate to good or evil,” while what “in the result is likely to produce evil is political false; that which is productive of good, politically true” (Burke 1889c, 169), the political society in Burke’s sense presumably has an end which pursues the supreme good of civil society. What is then, if any, the supreme good in Burke’s eyes? It is, in Turner’s terms, the preservation of “liberal political institutions” (Burke 2003, xiv), or of the “ordered liberty” in which order was primary whereas liberty was secondary and functional (Canavan 1960, 92-93). Then prudence in this case should serve the purpose of preserving the liberal order.
Third, Burke has a very different conception of social contract theory. Social contract is considered to be “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” (Burke 1889b, 359). Necessity “admits no discussion” and “demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy” (Burke 1889b, 360). That is, necessity rejects isolated challenge to the social contract. This is because “that which is only submission to necessity” is no “object of choice” (Burke 1889b, 360), not subject to the will of individuals or of the multitudes, as the universal law is not subject to their will but subjugates their will to itself (Burke 1889b, 359). Necessity is thus arguably the necessity of preserving the social contract by avoiding submitting to the will of individuals or of the multitudes. Yet as is argued above, the prudent flexibility supplies the deficiencies of moral principles in meeting the demands of practice in a gradualist way. In this sense, the necessity for change is “not chosen” by the will of individuals or of the multitudes, but necessity “chooses” change in the natural course of social contract.
By refuting theoretical, ideological, or abstract politics, of which the French Revolution was a catastrophic example in the sense of its “drive toward political abstraction” (Burke 2003, xxxiii, xxxvii), the prudent flexibility seeks a gradualist approach to social change and reform (see Canavan 1960, 171-174). Burke acknowledged the importance of social change and reform, arguing that without proper means of some change, even the conservation of constitution might be risked (Burke 1889b, 259). In a nutshell, the compulsion of necessity is to be assessed in the gradualism of social change in which, to preserve the liberal social order and the social contract, prudence shows flexibility in meeting the demands of practice. To put it another way, for Burke, necessity in given circumstances denotes a gradualist form of prudent flexibility which is not subject to the will of individuals or of the multitudes. What renders necessity necessary is in fact the conservation of the liberal social order and the social contract, not just during the rise of emergency but amid the everyday practice as well.
How can one distinguish, during the emergency and amid the everyday practice of reason of state, the prudence in specific circumstances from that out of Burkean conservativeness then? And what is the political rationality that undergirds the prudence in specific circumstances?
2. Political Rationality and Prejudice
Burke’s often-quoted claim that political reason is “a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally, and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations” (Burke 1889b, 313), is belied by a perplexing hybrid of instrumental rationality, value rationality, and economic rationality. To distinguish this “political reason” from Kantian “pure reason” or “practical reason,” hereafter the concept will be replaced by “political rationality.” Although the terms such as “reason,” “political reason,” “human reasonings” were often confusingly used, Burke was one of the very few thinkers who have taken notice of the particularity of political rationality. Burke’s definition cited here cannot be taken at face value, yet he was indeed aware of the importance to distinguish political rationality from the reason as a faculty of individuals and from the collective reason of the multitudes.
Canavan approached Burke’s notion of political rationality through the lens of its object (i.e., political good) and the mode of operation (i.e., experience), but he circumvented an ontological construal. In spite of the fact that Burke denounced speculation and metaphysics and accorded paramount importance to a “principled pragmatism” (Canavan 1960, 26), his political philosophy was grounded on a particular “rational metaphysics,” so to speak. Meanwhile, his conviction about concrete politics did not rule out the abstraction of a conception of political rationality. This Burkean construct is characterized indeed by an ontological structure.
First, we need to clarify the role of reason in politics. Burke stated emphatically that “politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part” (Burke 1889a, 280). Given statements such as those abundant in Burke’s writings, which gave a false, or at least confusing, impression that reason was cashiered from Burke’s rational universe, scholars often tended to downplay its role. For example, Michael Freeman adhered to the view that Burke identified reason with pragmatism (Freeman 1980, 46), whereas David Dwan contended that Burke had elevated sentiment to a higher status, considering it as both the condition and the outward limit of reason (Dwan 2011, 593). By contrast, Hörcher argued that Burke levelled criticism at reason, but not at the use of reason as such (Hörcher 2020, 27). Burke had developed, however, a new conception of rationality through his empiricist criticism of the Enlightenment rationalism, a conception that was more eclectic than critical.
What Burke deeply distrusted was in fact the “individual logical reason,” or the “immediate logical deductions of individuals,” in contrast to the “complex, historical, corporate revelations of the whole human race, as embodied in historical continuity and prescriptive artificial institutions” (Stanlis 1958, 162). As Charles Vaughan remarked, to Burke, reason was no longer “the purely passive and analytic faculty of Locke and his disciples” (Vaughan 1923, 134). Burke’s notion of reason, Peter Stanlis believed, was revolutionary in his time (Stanlis 1958, 160). To quote Basil Willey, for Burke man is no more “a blank sheet at birth,” for he “is born with a mass of predispositions inherited from an incalculable past, and these vary according to place and time” (Willey 1950, 249). In Burke’s own words: “man is a most unwise and a most wise being. The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species, it almost always acts right” (Burke 1889f, 95). For this reason, it should be noted that Burke’s skepticism of “human reasonings” in politics referred not only to the reason as a faculty of individuals, but to the aggregate reason of the multitudes in the case of misuse. It follows that the Burkean conception of political rationality serves as the historicity of human race in specific circumstances, as if the political rationalist ideal is grafted onto the totality of concrete experience and eventually becomes the totality per se.
This indicates from one side Burke’s inclination towards historically institutionalized rather than aggregate human reason. As is quoted above, Burke’s social contract theory is premised on a “partnership” amongst people from the past to the future. Hence, historicity, to the extent that it is institutionalized by a “social contract,” carries the sheer weight, because rationality belongs to the human species as a whole.
Then how important is rationality in politics? That hinges on what “human nature” means to Burke. Worth noting is Stanlis’s view that Burke had a very different idea of “natural man.” “Burke believed that social institutions such as the family, Church, and State, such things as race and nationality…made Locke’s isolated ‘natural’ man a purely hypothetical being” (Stanlis 1958, 163), wrote Stanlis. From this perspective, natural man is a priori embedded in all sorts of social relations. To some extent the embeddedness in social relations revealed the actual state of human nature. For this reason, Burke’s doctrine of human nature, Stanlis maintained, was grounded on a hypothesis that man was by nature a rational corporate being and that the authority of his corporate nature and historical inheritance transcended his private reason (Stanlis 1958, 164).
Stanlis also noted Burke’s frequent recourse to “the common feelings of nature,” “natural sentiment,” “natural affections,” and “natural feeling,” as a right approach to man’s right reason. Taking issue with the tendency to interpret Burke’s teaching by separating reason from emotion as many Burke scholars had done, Stanlis proposed, however, a change of perspective from that to a “fusion of corporate emotion and reason” (Stanlis 1958, 168-169). Stanlis’s proposition was pertinent insofar as Burke did criticize emotion as much as (private) reason. “Leave a man to his passions,” for instance, “and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature…But when the principle founded on solid reason, which ought to restrain passion, is perverted from its proper end, the false principle will be substituted for it, and then man becomes ten times worse than a wild beast” (Burke 1889h, 237).
Emotion embedded in customs and habits was integral to human nature and natural man was already intertwined with all social relations; emotion needed not only restraint but also proper guidance by reason (according to specific circumstances) which was “embodied in historical continuity and prescriptive artificial institutions” (Canavan 1960, 62-63). Reason mattered indeed to the governance of emotion, while emotion furnished reason with a criterion of the soundness of its moral and political judgment (Canavan 1960, 62-63). Just as Canavan remarked, Burke’s conception of human nature is both teleological and dynamic to the extent that “man’s nature is not initially perfect but needs to develop and to be perfected by virtuous action” (Canavan 1960, 60-61). Burke’s particular conception of human nature provided him with the link between morals and politics: the state had a moral function derived from the dynamic and teleological core of human nature and civil society represented the highest development of human nature (Canavan 1960, 61). In Burke’s political universe, the isolation of either emotion or reason is a perversion, because a rational state should neither contravene human nature nor indulge the arbitrariness of abstraction. Or, to quote Canavan, “political reason operates within a tradition” (Canavan 1960, 79). Tradition is trustworthy to Burke because it evolves from human nature and curbs the arbitrariness of abstraction. More significantly, the perfection of human nature is embodied in the evolution of tradition.
This was the basis of Burke’s conception of political rationality. It embodied the “principled pragmaticism” Canavan had proposed. To put it otherwise, political rationality was invariably entangled in the intricacy of social relations and historical continuity, and institutionalized as per traditions and customs and in the same vein irreversibly moralized. The “fusion of corporate emotion and reason” was like a Leibnizian monad: while it sought to preserve itself, it produced the state; for a state to realize itself, it was to be incarnated in the monad. It was the anomaly of political rationality, the disintegration of the monad, that had passions unbridled and the state submitted to private reason, political abstraction, or abstract politics, consequently rendering the French Revolution catastrophic. Thus, it can be argued that there is an “empirical monadism” in the core of Burke’s thought on political rationality. For this “empirical monadism,” specific experience or experience in specific circumstances fuses with tradition and social relations to make sure of a “fusion of corporate emotion and reason” in political judgement.
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