Edmund Burke, the passionate defender of the “ancient
principles” of his forebears, might be surprised to discover
that he originated a new school of political thought.1 By all
accounts, however, Burke is the “modern founder of political
conservatism,” and generations of conservative thinkers have
found his life and work a rich source of philosophical and practical
wisdom.2 Edmund Burke was a statesman and not a political
philosopher, and he never produced anything that may be regarded
as a systematic political treatise. Nevertheless, he embraced
a consistent political creed that governed his actions
throughout his life. The aim of this essay is to show that Burke’s
implicit political creed is, in all essential respects, the doctrine
elaborated in the twentieth-century by the social philosopher
F.A. Hayek. Hayek’s aim, he said, was to restate or systematize
those basic principles whose observance generated and sustain
Western constitutional government and the free society. As we’ll
see, the “classical liberal” or “Old Whig” principles articulated by
Hayek were also those that inspired and guided Burke.

To show this, I will elaborate Burke’s substantive political
philosophy, his views regarding the nature of society, the role of
reason in human affairs, the proper tasks of government, and the
nature of moral and legal rules. The heart of the matter is that
Burke, like Hayek, remained an “unrepentant Old Whig” to the
end.3

The Whig Roots of Burkean Philosophy

The political creed to which Burke subscribed—the doctrine of
what he called the “ancient, constitutional” or “Old” Whigs—was
an offshoot of the conflict that culminated in the so-called
Glorious Revolution of 1688.4 The Whigs were united by a
common passion—the hatred of arbitrary power—and the prevention
of arbitrary action by government ever remained the
guiding aim of their political practice. The basic issue around
which Whig opinion formed had been identified as early as 1610.
As The Petition of Grievances of that year put the issue: “There
is no[thing] which [we] account…more dear and precious than
this, to be guided and governed by the certain rule of law…and not
by any uncertain and arbitrary form of government,” that is,
government “not in accordance with received general laws.”5
According to John Locke’s account, what the Whigs fought for
was

[f]reedom…to have a standing rule to live by, common to every
one of that society,…a liberty to follow [one’s] own will in all
things, where that rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to
the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man…
[W]hoever has the legislative or supreme power of any commonwealth
is bound to govern by established standing laws promulgated
and known to the people and not by extemporary
decrees…[Even the legislature has no] absolute arbitrary power,
…but is bound to dispense justice,…[while the] supreme executor
of the law…has no will, no power, but that of the law…[The]
ultimate aim is to…limit the power and moderate the dominion
of every part and member of that society.6

Although the translation of Whig ideals into law and public policy
was inevitably a slow and imperfect process, by the time Burke
appeared on the scene “the principles themselves [had] ceased to
be a matter of dispute.”7 Moreover, Burke himself lent considerable
energy to institutionalizing Whig ideals; he spent much of his
political life endeavoring to reform British law in their spirit.8

The modern interpreter, then, cannot understand Burke’s
political philosophy unless he is acquainted with the Whig conceptions
of liberty and law. Liberty, to the Whig mind, had a
precise and definite meaning: freedom from arbitrary (that is,
“ruleless”) coercion, whether emanating from the crown, the
parliament, or the people. On the Whig view, such freedom was
gained by strict adherence to the rule of law, that is to say, to
“something permanent, uniform, and universal [and]…not a transient
sudden order from a superior or concerning a particular
person.”9 We should note that the conception of liberty-underlaw
to which Burke subscribed has nothing to do with what he
regarded as the “French” conception of liberty—”political freedom”
in the sense of participation in the determination of law or
policy.10 Nor, we might add, has it anything to do with “inner
freedom” or the conception of freedom as power or ability to act.
For Whigs such as Burke, the only kind of freedom that can be
secured by a political order is freedom-under-law in the sense of
freedom from arbitrary coercion.

On The Nature of Society

Burke’s more exclusively political views are intimately related to
his understanding of the nature of society, an understanding
informed by the thought of the Scottish Enlightenment. Philosophers
such as Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Adam Smith had
conceived society and its complex webwork of institutions—law,
“manners,” morals, customs—as the outcome of a prolonged
“process of cumulative growth” whereby man had advanced from
a level of primitive savagery to high culture and civilization.11 On
such a view, social order appears as a product of the interplay of
historically evolved institutions, habit and custom, objective law,
and impersonal social forces. In the words of one of their
contemporaries, what the Scottish philosophers had done was
successfully to “resolve almost all that ha[d formerly] been
ascribed to positive institution into the spontaneous and irresistible
development of certain obvious principles,—and…[to] show
with how little contrivance of political wisdom the most complicated
and apparently artificial schemes of policy might have been
erected.”12

Burke’s thought was fully informed by such views. He, too,
understood social institutions to be the product of a complex
historical process characterized by trial-and-error experimentation.
He, too, emphasized that the conditions of human flourishing
must be cultivated through comprehension of the forces that
sustain social order. To Burke’s mind, such cultivation demanded
fine judgment, “prudence,” respect for the given and the grown.
Through his eyes, civilized society appeared as a fragile growth;
arrogant and presumptuous “meddling” inspired by
“visionary…speculation” threatened to disturb the delicate social
webwork and undo the work of ages, erode the historically
transmitted “prejudices” that upheld civilized society against the
vulgar and the barbaric.13 Burke was leery of the untutored and
unsocial impulses that lie beneath man’s acquired civility; and he
endeavored to refute all doctrines that undermined the authority
of those “repressive or inhibitory” social rules—those “thou shalt
nots”—that alone enable men to live together in any degree of
freedom or peace.14

Thus Burke’s conservatism, his profound regard, even reverence,
for the intricate evolved pattern that was the British
constitution. He revered that constitution because he perceived
in it the foundation of the Englishman’s “ancient, indisputable
laws and liberties;” he knew that the “treasure of…liberty” was the
hard-won product of history and evolution. Burke’s reverential
attitude toward human society was further deepened by his
religious convictions. Particular historical societies were, for
him, spiritual phenomena, as he said, “clause[s] in the great
primeval contract of eternal society;” they were not things to be
manipulated and controlled in accordance with fabulous schemes
wrought by restless metaphysicians puffed up with self-importance
and intellectual pretension.15 Burke believed that the institutions
of freedom he cherished emerged from an undesigned and
spontaneous evolutionary process utterly dependent upon the
distilled knowledge embedded within inherited traditions and
institutions. He seems to have been captivated by the wondrous
order-within-complexity generated by this suprarational social
process and wished to defend it against that rationalistic mentality
which refuses to comprehend the significance of tradition and
custom.

One of Burke’s central insights, then, is that, as he said, “the
individual is foolish…but the species is wise.” He recognized that
inherited rules and institutions embody the cumulative knowledge
and experience of preceding generations. Thus, for him, the
process of cultural advance is utterly dependent upon the absorption
and transmission of the cultural inheritance over time.
Received tradition is not only the foundation of civilized society,
but of all the learned rules whose observance distinguishes the
human from the animal. For Burke, the contemptuous dismissal
of “irrational” tradition, the desire to “wipe the slate clean” and
design society anew, merely testifies to a profound ignorance
regarding the nature of social reality.16

On the Role of Reason in Human Affairs

One of Burke’s greatest contributions, then, involves his understanding
of the role of reason in human affairs. His most crucial
insights may be summarized as follows: 1) the priority of social
experience (or “tradition”) over reason; 2) the notion that inherited
social institutions embody a “superindividual wisdom” which
may transcend that available to the conscious reasoning mind;17
and 3) the impotence of reason to design or construct a viable
social order. Burke, in short, understood that civilization is not
the creation of the reasoning mind, but the unintended outcome
of the spontaneous play of innumerable minds within a matrix of
nonrational or suprarational values, beliefs, and traditions.

Burke’s enemy, accordingly, was Enlightenment rationalism.
For perhaps the most characteristic attribute of Enlightenment
thought was its cavalier dismissal of tradition as mere superstition
and prejudice. Through Enlightened eyes, inherited values, institutions,
and customs appeared as the very embodiment of ignorance,
“reason” as the tool that would liberate man from the ancient
fetters of oppression. Indeed, individual “reason” was endowed
with a most profound and exclusive constructive authority.

Burke regarded the Enlightenment, as J.G.A. Pocock put it, as
a “destructive movement of the human intellect…[an intellect]
free from all social restraints,…[convinced it can] remodel
society” in any image it chooses.18 As such, it posed a grave threat
to the preservation of civilized order. For Burke apprehended
that the preservation of free government and civilized society
depends upon man’s willingness to be governed by certain inherited
rules of individual and collective conduct whose origin,
function, and rationale he may not fully comprehend. The rationalist
contempt for tradition, by contrast, is typically accompanied
by the demand for the radical reconstruction of traditional
moral and legal rules; from Rousseau through Rawls, the construction
of new moralities and legal systems has been a major
preoccupation of social theorists. Perhaps no other thought is as
uncongenial to the modern rationalist temper as the idea that man
is not free rationally to determine or choose his ethical or legal
framework; modern thought bears little trace of that “strong
impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind” that long
served to suppress rationalistic hubris.19 Burke warned, however,
that the endeavor to destroy inherited customs, morals, and
prejudices must also destroy the humanistic liberal society engendered
and sustained by such phenomena.

Thus, we may have good reason, as Burke recognized, to be
“afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock
of reason” and to honor the fact that “individuals do better,” as he
put it, “to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of
nations and of ages.”20 Burke would undoubtedly agree that
reason “is like a dangerous explosive which, handled cautiously,
may be most beneficial, but if handled incautiously may blow up
a civilization.”21

On Economics

Burke’s economic prescriptions are, not surprisingly, of a piece
with his social theory. He emphasized the dangers that flow, as he
put it, from “meddling on the part of authority” in the intricate
web of economic relations. Burke, in short, was an emphatic
defender of the free-enterprise system: “the moment that government
appears at market,” he cautioned, “the principles of the
market will be subverted.”22 Burke objected to governmental
manipulation of the market process on Whig grounds: not only do
such “interpositions” violate the “laws of commerce”—what
Burke called the “rules and principles of contending interests and
compromised advantages”—but, perhaps even more importantly,
they are necessarily arbitrary and thus corrosive of liberty and
justice. “Free trade,” he exhorted, “is not based on utility but on
justice.”23

One may conjecture, then, that Burke would be disturbed by
the contemporary politics of redistribution. “Compulsory equalizations,”
he said, could only mean “equal want, equal wretchedness,
equal beggary.” And he would surely resist what he called
the “officious universal interference” of modern government.24
As he said, “It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, leaving
much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to
attempt to make men machines and instruments of a political
benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty without
which virtue cannot exist.”25

Curiously, in light of the often qualified if not begrudging
respect some contemporary conservatives grant to the market
process, Burke, the “father of conservatism,” adopted a far more
laissez-faire” attitude toward the role of government in economic
affairs than many of his descendents.26 Burke, for instance,
believed efforts to ameliorate poverty should be undertaken
exclusively by private charity—the Christian’s second duty, he
said, behind the “payment of debts.”27

My opinion is against any overdoing of any sort of administration
and, more especially, against this most monstrous of all
meddling on the part of authority: the meddling with the
subsistence of its people…. [One must] manfully…resist the
very first idea, speculative or practical, that it is within the
competence of government…to supply the poor with necessaries….
To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power
of government. It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to
think they can do it. The people maintain them and not they the
people. It is in the power of government to prevent much evil;
it can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything
else.28

Burke was further concerned to insure that governmental activity
serve to maintain a “consistent whole”—a coherent social order
“whose parts…do not clash.” This, he believed, required a politics
of principle, for such an integrity can only be generated and
sustained by the steady application of certain fixed principles over
time. As Burke put it, “the best legislators have been often
satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling
principle in government…and having fixed the principle, they
have left it afterwards to its own operation.”29 Modern market
theorists could not express it better themselves. For they are
similarly concerned to draw attention to the fact that the simultaneous
application of irreconcilable principles—the “principle”
of economic “intervention” and the principle of the market—can
never produce a coherent social order.30

Burke’s commitment to market principles was indeed profound,
for he regarded these as an expression of God’s will. As he
put it, “the laws of commerce…are the laws of nature, and
consequently the laws of God.” He regarded the laws of economics
as a manifestation of the Divine Law whereby the “benign and
wise Dispenser of all…obliges men, whether they will or not, in
pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good
with their own individual success.” Adam Smith would express a
similar idea through his famous metaphor of “the invisible hand.”
To violate the laws of economics was, then, for Burke, to violate
the will of God. Indeed, he suggests that endeavors to override the
results of the spontaneous market process are sacrilegious;
economic scarcity seemed to him one manner in which God
revealed his will, and the “attempt to soften…the Divine displeasure”
by man-made contrivances, presumptuous.31

On Religion and Politics

Burke was an orthodox Christian. Although he recognized that
civil society is the outcome of a complex historical process, he also
regarded that process as itself the handiwork of God, a “Divine
tactick,” said Burke, whereby God works his will in human
history.32 Burke, then, believed in a natural yet providential
order, in the existence of a Divine Plan that manifests itself
through the historical evolution of concrete and particular societies.
He also regarded the state as a God-given means of human
fulfillment. As Burke put it, “He who gave our nature to be
perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its
perfection. He willed therefore the State.”33

For Burke, then, the ultimate foundation of civil society was
a religious one. He believed that God had placed each person in
his “appointed place,” that only acquiescence to his Plan could
induce peace and contentment among the constitutionally and
irremediably unequal members of any social order, and that only
a people who feared God was capable of sustaining the morality
indispensable to the maintenance of free government.34 Public
officials, he counseled, should regard their office as a trust, even
a “holy function,” for which they are ultimately accountable to
God. “All persons,” Burke said, “possessing any portion of
power…ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with the idea
that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct
in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of
society.”35 Burke was convinced, moreover, that a highly developed
religious consciousness was indispensable to the continuity
and endurance of the political order over time, that such a
consciousness was necessary to forge the sacred bond among
generations without which it must dissolve into the “dust and
powder of individuality and at length [be] dispersed to all the
winds of heaven.”36 In a word, it seemed to Burke that faith in the
political order was best secured if “the whole great drama of
national life” was “reverently received as ordered by a Power to
which past, present, and future are organically knit stages in one
Divine plan.”37

On Rights

Burke is famous for his critical attack on the newfound “Rights of
Man” demanded by the French Jacobins and fellow travelers.
Although he sometimes distinguished what he considered the
“real rights of men” from the “pretended rights” asserted by the
Jacobins,38 Burke’s chief purpose was to defend what he called
“prescriptive rights”—time-honored expectations whose legal
validity and philosophical justification derive from custom and
long usage. “If civil society be the offspring of convention,” says
Burke, “that convention must be its law.”39 Although he never
argued from a priori assumptions to principles of right, we’ll see
that Burke did regard the prescriptive rights that emerged throughout
the course of historical evolution as the mundane manifestation
of the transcendent natural law.

On Law and Morals

As discussed, Burke regarded the manners, morals, law, and
customs which constitute the foundation of social order as
“grown” phenomena, products of historical evolution and not of
abstract speculation or conscious contrivance. The Christianhumanist
Burke, however, also believed in the existence of the
moral natural law; that is, he assumed “a moral code to have
existed prior to government and in independence of it,”40 a code
ultimately attributable to God, the “original Archetype” of law,
morals, and government.41 For Burke, the natural law was the
ultimate standard by which human law was to be measured, and
he emphatically rejected the positivism of Hobbes and indeed any
conception of law as the product of human will. As he put it, “All
human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they have no
power over the substance of original justice.”42 Nevertheless, the
law he advocated on a practical basis was the law embodied in the
British constitution and common law, which, as said, he interpreted
as a mundane manifestation of the transcendent natural
law. The law Burke revered was, to his mind, at once God-given
and historically evolved.

Burke, in short, like his Whig forebears, believed in the
existence of a higher moral law to which all valid positive law must
conform,43 a universal law which manifests itself in diverse
concrete forms, in the great variety of legal codes and customs
that constitute particular cultural traditions. His belief in the
moral natural law enabled Burke to condemn Warren Hastings as
easily as the Protestant Ascendency and the slave-traders. Although
he recognized that circumstances and the temper of public
opinion set limits to the rate and extent of reform at any given
time, he was ever a champion of universal justice.

While Burke denies, then, that moral precepts are the product
of historical evolution (“history,” he said, “is a preceptor of
prudence, not of principles”44), he also believed that inherited
moral precepts embody the distilled essence of the cumulative
experience of preceding generations. He further believed that the
moral and legal principles embodied in the traditional British
constitution are the only rules compatible with free government,
and this fact too he regarded as an element of the Divine Plan.

Burke’s central point is that moral or legal rules are not the
product of human invention and most emphatically not of “arbitrary
legislative [or, we might add, judicial] will.”45 Nothing,
Burke wrote, is “more truly subversive of all the order and beauty,
of all the peace and happiness, of human society than the position
that any body of men have a right to make what laws they please,
or that laws can derive any authority from their institution merely
and independent of the quality of the subject-matter.”46

On the Whig view to which Burke subscribed, the validity of
law is independent of its source; who makes a rule, whether the
people or a tyrant, is irrelevant. The Old-Whig Burke denied that
the exercise of will, whether arbitrary or rational, has anything to
do with the determination of law.47 He would undoubtedly concur
with the view that lawmaking entails the ongoing articulation of
the rules that maintain a working social order, rules that must
cohere with the body of established moral and legal rules (explicit
and implicit) that generated and sustain that order.48 As such, it
is a pointed intellectual task that must be undertaken by persons
well versed in both jurisprudence and social theory and well
attuned, moreover, to the tacit dimension of their society. The
exercise of will is irrelevant to such a task; the appropriate rules
are discerned and found, not proclaimed.49

Burke believed that man carries the imprint of moral (and
thus civil) law within his being, imprinted, he said, by the “will of
Him who gave us our nature and in giving impressed an invariable
law upon it.”50 He thus believed in the existence of an objective
body of obligatory moral and legal rules, rules that have shaped
and sustain constitutional government and that constitute their
irreplaceable foundation. Inherited rules and values are thus
binding on those who would preserve constitutional government—
the political expression of those values and rules. Those
who would preserve the liberal order are not free to “revalue all
values,” as Nietzsche exhorted, or to abandon traditional Judeo-
Christian morality merely because they may not comprehend its
significance or appreciate the restraints it imposes; for such
action would entail the destruction of the kind of free and civilized
society engendered and sustained by that morality.

In an age when the religious truths that guided Burke’s
unhesitating step no longer inform the dominant worldview,
rational comprehension of the function served by moral traditions
and inherited rules may thus be indispensable to the
preservation of civilized values and free government. For Western
society presently stands at a curious juncture. The authority
of the moral and political traditions whose observance generated
the liberal order has eroded in many quarters, and it has been
suggested that we are living on the “moral capital” of an earlier
era. One may hope that rational insight into the function served
by inherited moral and political traditions in regard to the
maintenance of civilized society may supply the want of traditional
authority—religion and custom—increasingly characteristic
of our time.

Despite Burke’s valiant resistance, the “French” doctrines he
feared and despised have proved more congenial to the modern
temper than the English ideals Burke himself championed. The
past several centuries have witnessed the triumph of “political
freedom” over liberty-under-law; the fondness for techniques of
conscious organization over spontaneous coordination; positivistic
jurisprudence and scientistic social science; Comte, Marx, and
“managed competition;” the war against traditional morality; the
demand for rational justification of values; democratic despotism
and radical equality; centralization of political power; “officious
universal interference”—each and every one a derivative of the
“armed doctrine” Burke dreaded.

Those who would champion Burke’s cause several centuries
later, do so, then, under the most unfortunate circumstances, for
the contemporary mind has been profoundly shaped by Enlightenment
doctrines; the more “modest and…humble creed” of Burke
and his Whig forebears has long been on the defensive.51 The
English ideal, the ideal of a “free government…that…temper[s]
the…opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent
work,” doesn’t seem to set the modern heart on fire.52

Perhaps, however, it’s still possible to hope that Burke’s
heroic “exertions…[in the] struggle for the liberty of others” may
yet prove not to have been in vain.53 Be that as it may, the integrity
and wisdom of this great thinker constitute a steady beacon to
inspire and guide those who may be disheartened by the current
course of events.

Linda C. Raeder
Palm Beach Atlantic University

NOTES

  1. Edmund Burke, Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs in
    The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 7th ed., Vol. IV
    (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1881) 143.
  2. Peter J. Stanlis, “Edmund Burke in the Twentieth Century,”
    in Peter J. Stanlis, ed. The Relevance of Edmund Burke (New York:
    P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1964) 45.
  3. Friedrich. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago:
    University of Chicago Press, 1960) 3.
  4. Burke, Appeal, 188.
  5. “The Petition of Grievances of 1610,” cited in Hayek,
    Constitution, 168, 163.
  6. John Locke, cited in Hayek, Constitution, 170.
  7. Hayek, Constitution, 172.
  8. The following are representative of Burke’s Whig outlook:
    “Arbitrary power…is a subversion of natural justice, a violation
    of the inherent rights of mankind.” (Thoughts and Details on
    Scarcity, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke,
    Volume VI [London: Oxford University Press, 1907] 27)
    “[T]he judicature…ought to [be] ma[d]e, as it were, something
    exterior to the state,…radical[ly] independent,…constituted to
    resist arbitrary innovation…and calculated to afford both certainty
    and stability to the laws.” (Edmund Burke, Reflections on
    the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock [Indianapolis: Hackett
    Publishing Company, 1987] 181)
    “The vice of the ancient democracies…was that they ruled…by
    occasional decrees…. This practice…broke in upon the tenor and
    consistency of the laws; it abated the respect of the people toward
    them, and totally destroyed them in the end.” (Reflections, 182)
    “Indeed, arbitrary power is so much to the depraved taste of
    the vulgar…that almost all the discussions which lacerate the
    commonwealth are not concerning the manner in which it is to be
    exercised, but concerning the hands in which it is to be placed.”
    (Appeal, 163)
  9. Blackstone’s Commentaries, cited in Hayek, Constitution,
    173.
  10. Burke, Appeal, 97. Burke understood the extent of political
    participation to be a matter of convention and not of principle.
  11. Hayek, Constitution, 57.
  12. Francis Jeffrey, cited in Hayek, Constitution, 57.
  13. Burke, Appeal, 81.
  14. F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of
    Chicago Press, 1988) 18.
  15. Burke, Reflections, 27, 47, 85.
  16. F.A. Hayek has argued that those institutions and practices
    that were observed long enough to form a “tradition” did so
    because they contributed to the survival and flourishing of the
    groups who observed them; those most adapted to the circumstances
    of human existence progressively displaced less “successful”
    practices. For Hayek, tradition is precious because it embodies
    the collective experience of our forebears and thus, as Burke
    also stressed, more knowledge than any person or group could
    possibly gain in one lifetime. Enduring traditions, Hayek argues,
    were transmitted for a reason, however inaccessible it may be to
    the individual intellect. Burke, for all his emphasis on the spirituality
    of social life, would not be offended by Hayek’s survival
    criterion: “I never will suppose that fabric of a State to be the
    worst if it contains a principle favorable (however latent) to the
    increase of mankind.” (Burke, Reflections, 113) And, “[n]o country
    in which population flourishes and is in progressive improvement
    can be too bad a government.” (Ibid., 112)
  17. Hayek, Constitution, 110.
  18. Pocock, in Reflections, xxxiii-xxxviii.
  19. Burke, Reflections, 218.
  20. Ibid., 76.
  21. Hayek, Constitution, 94.
  22. Burke, Scarcity, 32, 20. Burke’s discussion of the market
    suggests that he was aware of what Hayek was later to emphasize
    so emphatically, namely, the knowledge problem to which the
    market is the solution. “It is better,” Burke says, “to leave all
    [contractual] dealing…entirely to the persons mutually concerned
    in the matter contracted for than to put this contract into
    the hands of those who can have none, or a very remote interest
    in it, and little or no knowledge of the subject.” (Ibid., 11, 9) And,
    the “[m]arket is the meeting and conference of the consumer and
    producer, when they mutually discover each other’s wants.”
    (Ibid., 18) The correspondence to Hayek’s understanding of the
    market as a discovery process is noteworthy.
  23. Burke, Scarcity, 10, 22, 15, 32, 27. See also Ibid., 11, 13.
  24. Ibid., 11, 32.
  25. Burke, Reflections, 91.
  26. We should note, however, that neither Burke nor any of
    the eighteenth-century British economists did in fact advocate
    any sort of laissez-faire policy. They knew that the market process
    is dependent upon a particular institutional structure and that
    government has certain indispensable functions to perform in
    regard to the economic sphere. The concept of “laissez-faire,” as
    Hayek points out, was foreign to the British tradition that he and
    Burke represent; the very term reveals its roots in the “French”
    or Continental rationalist tradition. (Constitution, 60)
  27. Burke, Scarcity, 13.
  28. Ibid., 32, 22, 2.
  29. Burke, Reflections, 149. Speaking of the new French
    “constitution,” Burke wrote: “I do not see a variety of objects
    reconciled in one consistent whole, but several contradictory
    principles reluctantly and irreconcilably brought and held together
    by your philosophers, like wild beasts shut up in a cage to
    claw and bite each other to their mutual destruction.” (Reflections,
    159-160)
  30. F.A. Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University
    of Chicago Press, 1976) 128-129.
  31. Burke, Scarcity, 22, 9.
  32. Burke, cited in John MacCunn, “Religion and Politics,” in
    Daniel E. Ritchie, ed. Edmund Burke: Appraisals and Applications
    (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1990) 191.
  33. Burke, Reflections, 86.
  34. Ibid., 85.
  35. Ibid., 83, 81.
  36. Burke, cited in MacCunn, “Religion and Politics,” 183.
  37. Ibid., 186.
  38. Burke, Reflections, 51, 54.
  39. Ibid., 52.
  40. Stanlis, Burke and the Enlightenment.
  41. Burke, Reflections, 86.
  42. Burke, “Tract on the Popery Laws,” cited in Stanlis, Burke
    and the Enlightenment, 18.
  43. “[T]he notion of a higher law above municipal codes and
    constitutions, with which Whiggism began…is the supreme achievement
    of Englishmen and their bequest to the nations.” (Lord
    Acton, Lectures on Modern History [London: Macmillan and Co.,
    Limited, 1930], 217-218)
  44. Burke, cited in Stanlis, “Edmund Burke in the Twentieth
    century,” 23.
  45. Adam Ferguson, cited in Hayek, Constitution, 57.
  46. Burke, “Popery Laws,” cited in Stanlis, Burke and the
    Enlightenment, 16.
  47. “The people at large…should not be suffered to imagine
    that their will, any more than that of kings, is the standard of right
    and wrong…. [T]hey ought to be persuaded that they are…[not]
    entitled…to use any arbitrary power whatsoever…or to exact from
    [public officials]…an abject submission to their occasional will.”
    (Burke, Reflections, 82) And “[n]either the few nor the many have
    a right to act merely by their will, in any matter connected with
    duty, trust, engagement, or obligation.” (Burke, New to Old, 162)
  48. Burke’s view was similar to that of Hayek: any proposed
    statute, said Burke, must be “reconciled to all established, recognized
    morals, and to the general, ancient, known policy of the laws
    of England.” (Burke, New to Old, 134)
  49. See F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago:
    University of Chicago Press, 1973-1976).
  50. Burke, “Popery Laws,” cited in Stanlis, Burke and the
    Enlightenment, 17.
  51. Hayek, Constitution, 8.
  52. Burke, Reflections, 216.
  53. Ibid., 218.