Edmund Burke and the American Nation

In his politics and in his works, Burke spoke for the concept of
the nation, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France¹ And rarely have his
views been more relevant than in present-day America. Fortunately,
Americans have never been subjected to a revolution as
terrible as that of the eighteenth century French. Unfortunately,
however, Americans have been victims of political ideas that have
been fully as revolutionary and superficial as those of the French
revolutionaries and that threaten to render American policy both
enfeebled and directionless. The consequences pose a direct
threat to the very idea of an American nation.

Burke understood full well the dangers in removing government
from its traditional moorings. The British in his view derived
their government and their politics “as an inheritance from our
forefathers.” (117) The French revolutionaries had deliberately,
and foolishly, rejected the proud past of their nation, and, instead,
engaged in a rampage of social experimentation. Infatuated with
the power of reason, they sought the total remaking of society.
The results were sometimes ludicrous and too often tragic.

Edmund Burke’s response to the French Revolution continues
to offer Americans useful insights into what constitutes a
nation. Burke’s Reflections confronted, at times in hyperbolic
fashion, a change of cataclysmic and historical proportions. With
uncanny prescience Burke identified the dangers posed by France’s
degeneration into the throes of absolute democracy. Today,
America and the western world face attacks on the nation-state of
a different sort but no less challenging or predictable.

For Americans, in particular, Burke’s admiration for the
British nation and his criticisms of what he saw as the destruction
of the French nation are especially apt. America, unlike either
Britain or France, is itself in many ways completely new and
remains in a process of continually reinventing itself. Composed
of peoples from many lands and of many customs and beliefs,
American society is more fractionated than ever before and in
some ways is poised on the precipice of losing a sense of national
unity and a national past.² Burke’s singular contributions to Americans
at this point in their history are his statements of the dangers
of radical change and of the importance of protecting the traditions
and institutions that constitute the vital core of nationhood.

In the Reflections, Burke begins his attack on the French
Revolution with a spirited defense of the British Revolution of
1688. He was determined to show that the British overthrow of
James II was fundamentally different from what the French were
undertaking. Radicals in England and France argued that because
of the Revolution of 1688 the British had accepted the principle
that “a popular election is the sole lawful source of authority.”
(111) Nothing, replied Burke, could be farther from the truth.
(97) The British upheaval of 1688 in fact continued the tradition
of hereditary monarch and the underlying laws of governance.
Nowhere in the acceptance of a new monarch or in the Declaration
of Right was the right of popular sovereignty assumed or
proposed.

Burke accepted that monarchs make mistakes and are not
above criticism, but he was wholly unwilling to discard the long
tradition of succession to the throne simply because of the passing
errors of an incumbent. A particular king may abdicate or flee “for
his own person,” (105) but he cannot thereby negate the fundamental
constitutional law of the nation or destroy the social
fabric. (106) “Otherwise…no law be left but the will of a prevailing
force.” (105) Foolishly, by destroying the monarchy, the French
had overthrown and renounced their traditions and the customs
and morality that had held their nation together. They had acted
on the basis of metaphysical reasoning disconnected from the
foundations of a secure and stable life and had plunged France
into chaos. The likelihood of such an outcome was why in Burke’s
view “a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and
the good.” (117) The British Revolution of 1688 had preserved
the foundations of the nation; the French Revolution was in the
process of destroying them.

Burke then focuses his attack on the newly constituted French
National Assembly, which had assumed total sovereignty over the
country. He was unimpressed with the quality and stature of the
delegates to the Assembly, describing them as comprised largely
“of obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local
jurisdictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of
the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomentors and conductors
of the petty war of village vexation.” These new rulers of the
French nation had in their rise to omnipotence become “intoxicated
with their unprepared greatness.” (130) To Burke’s mind
they were incapable of “a comprehensive connected view of the
various complicated external and internal interests which go to
the formation of that multifarious thing called a state.” (133)
Throughout his life, Burke never wavered from his belief that
elected representatives should espouse and protect national
interests.

The French legislative assembly had proceeded, not on the
principles by which mature, deliberate statesmen are guided, but
on an allegiance to abstract concepts of equality and the rights of
man. No doctrine, declared Burke, could be more insidious to the
preservation of a nation or the protection of human liberty. (142)
“Those,” he declared, “who attempt to level never equalize.” (138)
In taking up theories of the rights of man, the revolutionaries had
“totally forgot his nature.” (156) In their hands the policies and
organization of government have deteriorated to matters of
“convenience.” (151) They had quickly become a grasping, greedy
body of men who recognized neither the practical necessities of
good government nor the need for limits on their avarice.

While the church, monarchy, aristocracy, and a mediated
form of democracy were important to the British system, each of
these had been perverted by the French in their revolutionary
ardor. Popular democracy had become the agent for destroying
the institutions of the past, but, without these, it could provide no
stable foundations for the future.

Throughout his essay Burke emphasized the importance of
the church and religion. He asserted that “religion is the basis for
civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort.” (186)
He was enraged by French treatment of high-ranking clergy and
the seizure of church property. He traced much of this to the
belief that pure democracy must proceed on rationalistic, amoral
lines. This philosophy had unleashed “an insolent irreligion in
opinions and practices.” (125) Burke decried such hubris because
“we are men of untaught feelings.” (183) The stock of individual
reason, despite the claims of the new rationalists, was pitifully
small. The “spirit of atheistical fanaticism” (262) permeating
revolutionary France should not be allowed to replace the basic
principle that citizens, whatever their commonwealth, do not
determine the “standard of right and wrong.” (191)

As for the monarchy and the nobility, Burke acknowledged
the personal flaws of the former and praised the latter as a barrier
to social leveling. Despite the personal limitations of the French
monarch, not all fault lay with the him, for “Kings will be tyrants
from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.” (172)
Moreover, Burke argued, the French nation had gained in both
wealth and population under its recent monarchs. The nobility,
for Burke, seemed to serve as a bridge between the commercial
and common classes and the monarch. They filled “a social void”
and in that manner provided an important balance within the
nation.

Burke saved his most purple prose and incisive analysis for the
concept of pure democracy and the revolutionaries’ floundering
efforts in that direction. Noting that he knew of no examples of
large democracies, Burke further declared that he was unable in
history to identify a direct democracy of worth. (228) His primary
concern about such a political system, and one that has echoed
throughout the ages, was the depredations that it wreaks on
minorities. Based on abstract principles of rationality and equality,
the French system had no safeguards for those not among the
majority. (230) Even more ominous was the looming knowledge
that those in the majority themselves had no assurance that they
could remain in that position for long. The majority of the
moment was continually in danger of becoming the persecuted
minority of the future. Having rejected the protections provided
by traditional practices and by the maxims of the church, the
popularly elected delegates to the National Assembly were easily
guided by their greed and the opportunities of the moment. The
result, predicted Burke, was sure to be catastrophic confusion.

In contrast to the French, nations with statesmen as leaders
could both provide guidance in international endeavors and
command international respect. Among the current French leaders
there was no concern for promoting a stable foreign policy
because these public figures lacked the intellectual underpinnings
to provide predictability and cooperation in the international
community. A statesman, in Burke’s mind, works to preserve the
valuable institutions and practices of the past and at the same time
to improve on them. A true politician “always considers how he
shall make the most of the existing materials of his country.” (267)
The revolutionary leaders were not products of a careful schooling
in the exercise of such statecraft. They were instead a loose
association of men “who have availed themselves of circumstances,
to seize upon the power of the state.” (275) In short, they
were illegitimate opportunists, of whom little could be expected
in terms of wise and deliberate policies. (276)

One institution that Burke clearly believed essential for
preserving a nation and guiding its leaders was a constitution
rooted in the fundamental beliefs and practices of the people. The
authors of the French constitution saw such beliefs and practices
as “mere rubbish” to be cleared away for their experiment in the
application of abstract principles to society. (285) Based on
unworkable geometrical, arithmetical, and financial calculations,
the document formulated by the revolutionaries lacked any moral
or political references. (296-97) It was, in short, totally disconnected
from the needs and behavior of the real people whom it was
to govern. Its cornerstone was a sovereign Assembly that brooked
no independence on the part of the monarch, the courts, or
private institutions. This was a “body without fundamental laws,
without established maxims, without respected rules of proceeding”
producing policies almost by chance. (315-16) With “this
monster of a constitution” and its accompanying sovereign assembly
“all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and
rights of men” will be “absorbed, sunk, and lost for ever.” (313)

In light of France’s history following the revolutionary period,
Burke’s discussion of the corrosive effects of claims for
equality and the rights of man on the military was especially clearsighted.
These beliefs had penetrated the ranks of the army and
undermined both its discipline and its proper role. The military,
Burke emphasized, must be an instrument of policy; it is not a
deliberative part of the democratic process. (332-33) France,
however, was moving in the latter direction, and Burke feared the
rise of a military democracy because it simply would not be
possible to hold “in obedience an anarchic people by an anarchic
army.” (350)

Although Burke’s Reflections are rightly viewed as an attack
on Enlightenment philosophy gone wild, his work provides as
well, and perhaps today more importantly, an exposition of the
components of nationhood. Burke’s oft-quoted statement on the
nature of the social contract depicted social bonds that are
independent of government. This statement illustrates conclusively
Burke’s grasp of the concept of a nation.

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of
mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the
state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a
partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or
tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a
little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the
parties…. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art;
a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends
of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations,
it becomes 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. (194–95)

For Burke, the well ordered state encompassed a social unity that
drew upon all human endeavors and that provided both stability
and enhancement of the human condition.

Burke understood the necessity of a strong government for
the protection of individual liberty. In his words, “Nothing turns
out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.” (355)
He called for a “manly, moral, regulated liberty.” (89) Most
important, powerful, legitimate government requires first and
foremost an underlying moral direction—”a sure, solid, and
ruling principle”—that defines and guides a nation. (104, 282)
Here Burke turned to his nation’s inheritance of histories, records,
acts of parliament, and journals of parliament. (117) “[B]y this
means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity
of its parts.” (119) These traditions and laws are the glue that
holds a nation together and in a real sense, for Burke, constitute
an essential part of the social contract. Tragically, by rejecting
any appeal to such institutions, the leaders of the French
Revolution had viciously and abruptly ripped apart the social
fabric that make a nation possible. Their narrow reliance on
abstract formulations left them without the means for effective
government.

That Burke believed in the tangible existence of a nation and
a national interest is again demonstrated convincingly by his views
on representation. In his mind, government served as the trustee
for the entire nation, and it was the role of the elected representatives
to discover and articulate the national interest. Political
leaders betrayed their trust when they behaved like bidders in a
popularity contest. (374) Responding to the public whim of the
moment and imbued with abstract notions of right and wrong, the
members of the National Assembly had abandoned the public
interest “wholly to chance.” (277) Burke argued that “government
is a trustee for the whole,” (303) and in his speech to the electors
of Bristol he followed through on this position.

In this famous speech, Burke stated clearly his belief that
there is such a thing as the national interest, and that he as an
elected representative was honor bound to represent that interest.
In particular he bridled against the suggestion that his
constituency could impose instructions on him that required him
as a member of Parliament to support their particular interests.
This practice, Burke argued, misconstrued the proper role of the
member of Parliament and, more important, the character of the
nation. In his words, it arose “from a fundamental mistake of the
whole order and tenor of our Constitution,” for “Parliament is a
deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the
whole—where not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to
guide, but the general good, resulting from reason of the whole.”
Thus, Burke argued that he was morally obligated to act for the
interests of the nation, which in the long run were also those of his
constituents. In his famous words, “Your representative owes
you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays,
instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”³

Burke’s statement has often been cited as an able defense of
the idea of virtual representation, but there is something more to
be gleaned from his position. Burke recognized the pivotal role of
elected representatives in setting the framework for policy discussions.
If the people’s leaders spoke and acted in terms of the public
interest—rather than as delegates for particular selfish interests—
then the citizenry would tend also to frame their views in
those terms. The ability for government to act for the good of the
whole, then, results from the reciprocal relationship initiated by
elected leaders. Where this has fallen short in the modern era has
been the injection of “objective” social science analysis into the
policy process. Within this framework, positivism has too easily
trampled the concept of the public interest, leaving students of
politics championing narrow self-interest as the essence of a
democratic system.⁴

The continuing virtue of Burke’s critique of the French
Revolution rests on his understanding of the devastating effects
that the assumptions and projects of the revolutionaries had on
the true foundations of nationhood. For them government policy
had become a response to whims of the moment and to the pleas
of self interest demanding immediate satisfaction. But for Burke
government was an integral part of the nation, both past and
present. The refusal of the French revolutionary reformers to
countenance the merits of the past and to respect the components
of the social fabric undermined the nation as a whole. The
consequences were a lack of direction and a pervasive sense of
insecurity and doubt, with political advantage going to those most
adept at manipulation and exploitation of their fellow men.

Unfortunately, Americans, too, in the twentieth century
experienced the depredations of reformist zeal and of the hubris
of reason. Among indigenous American intellectual reformers,
few have been more salient than John Dewey, who in his The
Public and Its Problems reduced the American political culture to
a gathering of groups, of which government is simply the most
extensive. Urging that rational analysis be applied to an understanding
of the state, Dewey called for a “steady and systematic
effort to develop that effective intelligence named scientific
method in the case of human transactions.”⁵ The social consequences
of its transactions would determine an association’s
status within the community. For Dewey what brought the state
into being was the existence of social relationships requiring
broad action and direction through organized efforts.⁶ The state,
then, is nothing more than an expanded public, or association.
“Thus the state represents an important although distinctive and
restricted social interest. From this point of view there is nothing
extraordinary in the preeminence of the claims of the organized
public over other interests.”⁷

Dewey saw democratic government’s primary function as the
facilitation of communication and experimentation among the
interests in society. It serves merely as a means for change. “[A]s
far as political arrangements are concerned, government institutions
are but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of
effective operation.”⁸ In clear contrast to Burke, Dewey had little
use for established institutions. He criticized the

truly religious idealization of, and reverence for, established
institutions; for example in our own politics, the Constitution,
the Supreme Court, private property, free contract, and so on.
The words ‘sacred’ and ‘sanctity’ come readily to our lips when
such things come under discussion. They testify to the religious
aureole which protects the institutions…. [T]he actuality of
religious taboos has more and more gathered about secular
institutions, especially those connected with the nationalistic
state…. There is a social pathology which works powerfully
against effective inquiry into social institutions and conditions.⁹

The importance of associations to Americans had been noted
at least as early as Tocqueville’s famous 19^th century study,¹⁰ but
it was only in the 20^th century that reformers emboldened by
Dewey’s claims of science and imbued with the need to refashion
society turned to the many groups engendered by American
pluralism as the tools for progressive change. It is my contention
that these endeavors have ignored the basic truths of nationhood
articulated so well by Burke and in doing so have, instead of
constructive, directed reform, wrought a national condition that
threatens the foundations of American unity and governmental
authority.

The modern era of Americans’ attachment to groups as the
dynamic, and essential, elements of politics might be dated from
David B. Truman’s The Governmental Process.¹¹ Truman described
American politics as pervasively group politics, depicting
even the branches of government as forms of group interest.
However, his account of American politics had a sociological
depth and objectivity that those of later pluralist scholars often
lacked. Most important Truman clearly recognized that the dayto-
day group struggle in and of itself fell short of encompassing
national values. As groups competed for advantage in the political
system, Truman portrayed them as accountable to fundamental
norms of fair play held dear by Americans generally. These norms
are “interests or expectations that are so widely held in the society
and are so reflected in the behavior of almost all citizens that they
are, so to speak, taken for granted.”¹² They are, in Truman’s
words, “the rules of the game.”¹³ Maintaining his interpretive
framework, Truman contended that these values are protected by
potential groups that become activated if the group struggle
transgresses them.

To his credit Truman understood the dire implications of a
failure of the underlying consensus in the American polity. At the
conclusion of his seminal work on group politics he cautioned
against condoning any rejection of the “rules of the game.” “The
great political task now as in the past is to perpetuate a viable
system by maintaining the conditions under which such widespread
understanding and appreciation can exist…. In the loss of
such meanings lie the seeds of the whirlwind.”¹⁴ With its traditional
values under continual attack, the American nation may
now be poised on the brink of just such a whirlwind.

Truman wrote shortly before the “behavioral revolution”
occurred in American political science, and his work contains
explicit recognition of the social prerequisites, latent though they
may be, for a national interest. However, American students of
politics in their search for status as a separate and legitimate
discipline in the social sciences were soon to jettison the idea of
a national, or public, interest in their efforts to attain scientific
rigor. In the late 1950s and the 1960s these endeavors were
labeled the “behavioral” orientation in political science. Glendon
Schubert, a leading behavioralist of that era, summed up the
position of many of his colleagues in his article “Is There a Public
Interest?” published in 1962. In his examination of several
theories of the public interest, Schubert concluded that there
really was little of value in the idea for students of politics. “It may
be difficult for some persons to accept the conclusion that there
is no public-interest theory worthy of the name and that the
concept itself is significant primarily as a datum of politics.”¹⁵
Schubert suggested that it was time for political scientists to get
on with the real work of science. “[I]f the public interest concept
makes no operational sense…then political scientists might better
spend their time nurturing concepts that offer greater promise of
becoming useful tools in the scientific study of political responsibility.”
¹⁶

Among the leaders in the movement for a more rigorous
approach to political analysis were Robert Dahl, Charles Lindblom,
and their pluralist brethren at Yale University. As Richard M.
Merelman points out, from 1955 to 1970, by any reasonable
measure “the Yale University Department of Political Science was
a national leader in the study of American politics,”¹⁷ and the
explanatory paradigm promoted there was pluralism. For the
pluralists, as with Truman, American politics, and especially the
policy process, is composed of organized interests that negotiate
and compete to achieve their goals. Unlike Truman, however, the
Yale pluralists concentrated almost solely on the policy process
and the outcomes engendered by the interaction of diverse
interests. For pluralists, American politics features incremental
and unpredictable change. They accepted the pursuit of narrow
self-interest as the basic attribute of American politics and as the
primary force driving such change.

This focus received widespread attention with Charles
Lindblom’s often cited article “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,'”
published in 1959.¹⁸ Noting that the “incremental character of
political change in the United States has often been remarked,”¹⁹
Lindblom argued that administrators should be wary of broadly
conceived goals in implementing programs. They should not
apologize for an incremental approach that relies on negotiations
among various groups. Such an orientation “often can assure a
more comprehensive regard for the values of the whole society
than any attempt at intellectual comprehensiveness.”²⁰ The idea
of a useful tradition or of an historically based normative framework
was foreign to the pluralists, as it was to behavioralists
generally. The pluralists’ focus was on what Burke would have
seen as the transient elements of politics. In the words of
Lindblom, “it is not irrational for an administrator to defend a
policy as good without being able to specify what it is good for.”²¹

Although Lindblom has been an important spokesman for
pluralism, his colleague Robert Dahl has for several decades been
the preeminent representative of this perspective. In fact,
Merelman dates the beginnings of the pluralist adventure to
Dahl’s A Preface to Democratic Theory, a widely read and highly
influential work published in 1956. This early work illustrates the
basic parameters of what Dahl touted as rigorous political analysis.
In it Dahl argued that “as political science rather than as
ideology the Madisonian system is clearly inadequate.”²² What
Dahl meant was that applying the rules of strict logical analysis to
Madison’s writings reveals inconsistencies. He was concerned
that the compromises that Madison fashioned to explain American
democracy contain logical flaws. He was, however, noticeably
unwilling to delve into the social and cultural assumptions within
which Madison worked and which may have explained away much
of what Dahl, the latter day logician, saw as contradictions.

By the end of the book, Dahl had turned to his signature
contribution to political ideas—the concept of polyarchy as the
most accurate description of American politics. Typical of the
pluralists, polyarchy stresses the importance of groups and of
process. For Dahl “specific policies tend to be products of
‘minorities rule.'”²³ Again, “the making of government decisions…is
the steady appeasement of relatively small groups.”²⁴ Thus,
“[d]ecisions are made by endless bargaining.”²⁵ What A Preface to
Democratic Theory demonstrates, admittedly in retrospect, is
the superficiality of the pluralist understanding of American
politics. Burke’s admonition that, divorced from the foundations
of tradition and historical practice, national policy becomes
subject to the vicissitudes of a “gaming table” seems especially apt
as a description of the “endless bargaining” championed by Dahl.

Dahl’s more recent work demonstrates his continued obliviousness
to the deeper forces of politics. His book On Democracy,
²⁶ for example, is offered as a brief historical and theoretical
treatment of democracy. Dahl begins with a survey of the origins
and evolution of democracy and then moves to explaining what
he sees as the essential elements of viable democracy. Political
equality dominates his formulation of proper democratic practice,
and he returns again to the importance of polyarchy as an
accurate depiction of what modern democracy, in America at
least, is. The reader is struck by the superficial and formalistic
character of Dahl’s understanding of democracy. In particular, he
makes no mention of the role of religious strife or of religious
practice in the evolution of western democratic ideas and practice,
a force which Dewey specifically recognized in his brief
treatment of democracy’s heritage in The Public and Its Problems.
²⁷

There exists in Dahl’s approach no sense whatsoever of the
importance of the underlying traditions and norms that Burke saw
as so essential to stable government and to nationhood. In a
review of Dahl’s book Kenneth Minogue makes this point with
emphasis. He concludes that Dahl “profoundly misunderstands
the world we live in.” In his view the “simplicities” in Dahl’s
presentation of democracy “reveal…a complete rejection of historical
evolution in favour of a preference for engineering State
and society to fit an abstract ideal.”²⁸

Although many of their studies of the policy process remain
useful, the pluralists possessed a tin ear for the resonating cultural
and social melodies of American democracy. Specifically they
have been roundly criticized for ignoring the importance of the
emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and the increasing
public opposition to the Viet Nam war. Merelman, in fact, argues
that Dahl became more removed from fundamental social changes
as they emerged, with the result that his pluralism became even
more distant from American politics. It remained, however, for
Theodore J. Lowi to show that the pluralists’ paradigm itself
worked serious harm in the policy process that they so ardently
studied.

In Lowi’s view “[p]luralism became the model and the jurisprudence
of the good society.”²⁹ He was especially concerned that
pluralist-influenced discussions of politics no longer considered
the goals of good government. Issues of morality and authority
were melded into process. “The ends of government and the
justification of one policy or procedure over another are not to be
discussed. The process of formulation is justified in itself.”³⁰
Government becomes a mere “epiphenomenon” of politics. This
approach Lowi labeled “interest-group liberalism,” a philosophy
that “has sought to solve the problems of public authority in a
large modern state by defining them away.”³¹

Moving to perhaps the most fundamental issue in politics,
Lowi charged that interest-group liberalism destroyed the legitimacy
of the state. For pluralists, government was simply another
group competing for status and power. No sphere of authoritative
legitimacy remained. In opposition to this view, Lowi argued
strongly that the state is more than another group. It has the
ultimate power, for example, of life and death over its citizens. To
be effective it must have formal authority. It cannot be simply
another part of the group equilibriums seen by the pluralists as
defining public policy at any given moment. Without authoritative
government, society is without the wherewithal to protect and
advance the public interest. “Planning requires the authoritative
use of authority. Planning requires law, choice, priorities, moralities.
Liberalism replaces planning with bargaining. Yet at bottom,
power is unacceptable without planning.”³² Thus, the very
philosophical position taken by Dewey and the later pluralists as
a route to greater public good had eroded the only dependable
mechanism for defining and protecting that good, for “ultimately
the modern, interest-group variant of liberalism is selfdefeating.”
³³

More clearly than anyone, Lowi showed that the shallowness
of pluralist thought threatened the authoritative position of
government. However, Burke, in some respects, captured more
comprehensively the deleterious effects of the lack of government
legitimacy. Government, Burke asserted, “is a trustee of the
whole, and not for the parts.” (303) The French revolutionaries
had turned the country into “one great play-table,” at which all are
forced to play even though “few can understand the game.” (310)
Those who cannot access the play, either because of lack of
material resources or knowledge, are left to the mercies of those
who can and do. In these conditions government defaults to those
pursuing their self-interest, and the nation as a whole suffers
grievously. When the traditions of the nation’s past are dissolved
into the depredations of individual self-interest, “[f]rom that
moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know
distinctly to what port we steer.” (172–73)

Although perceptive and penetrating, few of the critics of the
pluralist paradigm have achieved the level of interpretive acumen
that Burke’s rejection of the French Revolution provides us yet
today. What American critics have failed to realize is that the
pluralists’ approach to American politics has contained the seeds
of destruction for the national framework within which their view
of politics has played so well. It remained but a matter of time until
groups formed for the specific purpose of manipulating the basic
social norms of the nation. In other words, in the competition
among interests that was so highly prized by the pluralists,
interests emerged that recognized the possibilities of gaining
greater advantage by manipulating the rules of the game themselves.
Their target became the norms that composed the underlying
consensus allowing American democracy to function in
stable fashion. These attacks have made the foundations of
American nationhood highly vulnerable.

As has often been the case, the path to the current chaos began
with good intentions. The initial assault on American values was
for a worthy cause—that of black emancipation from legal, social,
and cultural oppression. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century
African-American leaders through the use of organization, primarily
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, and the courts whittled away at legal discrimination
against their people. What was significantly different about the
Black Civil Rights Movement, and was to have continuing repercussions
for a wide variety of later group efforts, was the deliberate
efforts of its leaders to change American beliefs. Black leaders
recognized that legal victories would be hollow without accompanying
social and cultural acceptance. Thus they promoted group
consciousness and pride, direct action, the use of particular forms
of language, and revised versions of American history to rework
basic American attitudes and beliefs. The result has been a, largely
peaceful, revolution in American norms and an integration of
African Americans into all walks of American life.

Following in the wake of the Black Civil Rights Movement,
other interests have seen the potential for group action aimed at
reworking the fundamental norms of American society and culture.
In this respect group activity has moved beyond the economic
and political bargaining envisioned by Dewey, Truman,
Dahl, and Lindblom to the conscious refashioning of basic norms.
Because of these scholars’ inability to think comprehensively in
terms of nationhood, their thought contains no means for parrying
these attacks. Without normative foundations their theoretical
positions are bereft of effective defensive tactics. To paraphrase
Burke, their focus on the politics of process ignores “the
whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth…. No one
generation…link[s] with the other. Men…become little better
than the flies of a summer.” (193) This failing has now spilled over
into the policy process.

Burke’s concerns about the emergence of a French military
class with influence on democratic policy have also begun to have
relevance for Americans. In his study of contemporary American
foreign policy, Andrew J. Bacevich points out that the military has
divided the world into regions with military commanders in chief
(CINCs) heading each region. He attributes the appearance of
this “new class of military viceroys” to the perceived “ineffectiveness
of civilian agencies charged with making policy.”³⁴ Thus,
these military leaders are engaging in diplomatic negotiations,
formulation of drug interdiction policy, and nation building
among other activities formerly conducted solely by the State
Department and civilian agencies presumably more sensitive to
the values of a democratic public.³⁵ Moreover, the military has
delved as well into the enunciation of moral standards for their
conduct. Michael Walzer, a scholar who has written extensively
on the issues of just and unjust wars, contends that in recent years
the categories of just war rationales have been appropriated by
the military. “For many years, we have used the theory of just war
to criticize American military actions, and now it has been taken
over by the generals and is being used to explain and justify those
actions.”³⁶ When the substance of the American moral tradition
is open to continual reinterpretation and definition, those better
organized and more powerful will certainly not hesitate to define
the standards by which Americans will live and also those by which
they will die.

Recently, some scholars have begun to share their premonitions
that there is something seriously amiss in the American
polity. In their book Downsizing Democracy Matthew A. Crenson
and Benjamin Ginsberg, political scientists at Johns Hopkins
University, conclude that the era of the citizen has passed in the
United States. They contend that politics and the policy process
have evolved into a personalized form of democracy that is
dominated by advocacy groups within the Beltway. In their words:
“We are witnessing a radical divergence between the moral
conception of citizenship and the political conduct of citizens.”³⁷
The public, qua public, has been marginalized by special interest
groups increasingly dependent on government largesse. In their
view, pluralist scholars such as Lindblom and Dahl have promoted
“social techniques” to the detriment of an ideologically
informed citizenry.³⁸ Pluralist models have neglected the politically
active citizen, who is now rapidly being moved to the margins
of both politics and policy. After surveying the condition of
democracy around the world today, Fareed Zakaria, editor of
Newsweek International, concludes that most successful developing
democracies have been liberal authoritarian.³⁹ He argues
that in the United States, as well, those policy leaders who are able
to move beyond “short-term political and electoral considerations”
are those who are insulated from the continuing, insatiable
demands of those interests touted by the proponents of
pluralism.⁴⁰

Critics of the failings of American democracy have proffered
suggestions that may offer some protection for both government
and the nation. Lowi urges a return to “juridical democracy,” a
form of politics in which formal legal standards are observed by
government institutions and enforced by the courts. Echoing
Burke’s concerns about the depredations of the French revolutionaries
against the disadvantaged, Lowi declares that: “The
juridical principle is the only dependable defense the powerless
have against the powerful.”⁴¹ Crenson and Ginsberg want to see
more robust political parties,⁴² and Zakaria seems to believe that
some distancing from the continuous demands of interest groups
is necessary for agencies if they are to be able to act in the longterm
interests of the nation.⁴³ While useful, these suggestions all
fall short of confronting the depths of the current crisis in that
they fail to enunciate the fundamental importance of normative
social forces supporting both authoritative government and the
concept of an American nation.

No rational person would deny that the United States in the
modern era must inevitably face tremendous centrifugal forces
stemming from its attractiveness to those from other nations and
its heritage of diversity. What seems incontrovertible is that
important scholars in the field of American politics—those who
are looked to for guidance in understanding the political dynamics
of the nation—have failed miserably and, perhaps, tragically both
to articulate the importance of political nationhood and to
identify threats to that nationhood. Few expect these intellectuals
personally to take up the cudgels of practical politics as Burke did,
but it would seem incumbent on them at least to provide theoretical
footholds for protecting the nation, as a nation, for those who
must engage in political battle and policy debate. The future of the
nation depends on the willingness of American scholars to return
to constructive and comprehensive political analysis, and, in this
endeavor, Burke must surely be an important guide.

Robert A. Heineman
Alfred University

NOTES

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France,
   Conor Cruise O’Brien, ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969
   [1790]). Subsequent references to the Reflections will be cited in
   parentheticals.
2. See, for example, Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?
   (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
3. Edmund Burke, “Speech at Mr. Burke’s Arrival in Bristol,”
   in Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Edmund Burke (New York:
   Penguin Books, 1999) 156.
4. See, for example, Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets
   What, When, and How? (Cleveland: Meridan Books, 1951). This
   book has often been seen as describing a “realistic” approach to
   politics because its title sums up what many political scientists
   regard to be the essential elements of democratic politics.
5. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Gateway
   Books, 1946 [1927]) x, 174.
6. Ibid., 54.
7. Ibid., 28.
8. Ibid., 143.
9. Ibid., 169–170.
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York:
    Vintage Books, 1961 [1835]).
11. David B. Truman, The Governmental Process (New York:
    Alfred A. Knopf, 1960 [1951]).
12. Ibid., 512.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 524.
15. Glendon Schubert, “Is There a Public Interest,” in Carl J.
    Friedrich, ed., The Public Interest (New York: Atherton Press,
    1962) 175. See also, Glendon Schubert, The Public Interest
    (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960).
16. Ibid., 176.
17. Richard M. Merelman, Pluralism at Yale (Madison, WI:
    University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) 12.
18. Charles E. Lindblom, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,'”
    in Jay M. Shafritz and Albert C. Hyde, eds., Classics of Public
    Administration, 2nd edition (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1987) 263–75.
19. Ibid., 270.
20. Ibid., 271.
21. Ibid., 269.
22. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago:
    University of Chicago Press, 1956) 31.
23. Ibid., 133.
24. Ibid., 146.
25. Ibid., 150.
26. Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University
    Press, 1998).
27. Dewey, The Public and its Problems, 85–86.
28. Kenneth Minogue, “Creed for democrats,” Times Literary
    Supplement (June 18, 1999) p. 18.
29. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 2nd edition
    (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979) xvi.
30. Ibid., 50.
31. Ibid., 44.
32. Ibid., 67.
33. Ibid., 272.
34. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
    University Press, 2002) 173.
35. Ibid., 167–197.
36. Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven: Yale
    University Press, 2004) 13.
37. Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing
    Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
    10.
38. Ibid., 198–199.
39. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (New York: W. W.
    Norton, 2003) 251.
40. Ibid., 248–249.
41. Lowi, End of Liberalism, 298.
42. Crenson and Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy, 240.
43. Zakaria, Future of Freedom, 250.