Edmund Burke's Progeny: Recent Scholarship on Burke's Political Philosophy

Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British
Liberal Thought by Uday Singh Mehta (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1999). Cited in the text as LE.

The Useful Cobbler: Edmund Burke and the Politics of Progress
by James Conniff (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1994). Cited in the text as UC.

Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics by Stephen
K. White (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications,
1994). Cited in the text as EBM.

Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial
Sublime by Luke Gibbons (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2003). Cited in the text as EBI.

Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke by Seamus Deane
(Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2005). Cited in the text
as FA.
Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism: The Legacy of Burke &
Tocqueville by Bruce Frohnen (Lawrence, KS: University
Press of Kansas, 1993). Cited in the text as VPC.

The Political Economy of Edmund Burke by Francis Canavan
(New York: Fordham University Press, 1995). Cited in the
text as PE.

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke, ed.
and intro. by J. C. D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001). Cited in the text as Reflections.

The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Ed. Paul Langford
et al. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981-. Cited in the text as
Writings & Speeches.

The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Bohn’s
British Classics), 8 vols. London, 1854-89. Cited in the text
as Works.

The Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Ed. Thomas W. Copeland
et al., 10 vols. Cambridge and Chicago: Cambridge University
Press and University of Chicago Press, 1958-1978. Cited in
the text as Corr.

Introduction

Edmund Burke is recognized by most modern conservatives as
the founding father of conservative political philosophy. In
fact, it is practically inescapable for those who claim to be
conservatives that they recognize Burke as the fountainhead of
conservatism. For the most part the Reflections on the Revolution
in France is cited as the seminal text, with its emphasis upon
order, custom, just prejudice, historical precedent, and prescriptive
rights in the face of radical Jacobinism. Burke’s rage against
the French philosophes such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot
was in large part due to their rejection of religion, property, and
constitutional monarchy and their embrace of fanatical atheism,
as he regarded their ultimate foundation. Burke’s stance, based on
solid principles of justice and tradition, and also reflecting natural
sentiments of respect for the manners and habits of an ordered
society, seems to have a transparency that is clear to all.

Yet there is clamoring over who are the true progeny of Burke.
In international affairs Burke has been claimed for a robust
realism, perhaps most notably by the United States’ United
Nations Ambassador, John Bolton.¹ For others he is a master of
post-colonial thought. Burke has been linked by current expositors
of his thought with an array of recent and contemporary
thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger,
Foucault, Lyotard, Habermas, Levinas, and even Rawls and
Rorty. Is Burke becoming a captive of the “”left,”” with which
certain prominent scholars, such as Isaac Kramnick, minus
Burke’s account of the revolution in France, have specifically
identified him?²

For post-colonial thinkers, Burke’s critique of empire and
imperialism, especially as imperialism led to the oppression of
whole peoples such as in America, Ireland and India, while liberal
thinkers such as Bentham and the Mills justified empire particularly
in India, sets Burke apart from the major political philosophers
of his time among English-speaking thinkers. For postmodernists,
Burke’s critique of abstract reasoning and rightsbased
liberalism leading to exclusionary political praxis, gains for
the Irish-born British statesman an important force in their
pantheon of luminaries. It also provides the left with considerable
satisfaction to assert primacy over Burke’s thought in opposition
to conservatives.

In part this newfound zeal of the left for Burke (qualified as
it is) stems from its attempted linkage between his aesthetics and
his politics. After all, in Burke’s famed A Philosophical Inquiry
into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), it is claimed that he
puts forward what Luke Gibbons has referred to as Burke’s
“”colonial sublime,”” a phrase Burke never used. Here the “”sublime””
advances the “”feeling”” and emotive side of our nature, as the
sublime is characterized as our “”horror”” at the darkened abyss,
with its strange attraction-repulsion, such as evoked by our
contemplation of the boundless ocean with its almost mystical
mysteriousness, and its potential threat of the unknown and
oblivion. The sublime evokes within us a passion, and a sympathy
for the darkened, voiceless masses, who are oppressed, and yet
with their potential for rebellion. Thus, the “”colonial sublime””
unleashes our horror at the oppressed masses Burke found in
India and Ireland, and, by empathy and sympathy with the
unfamiliar and the strangeness of the “”other,”” can lead us to
identify with their violent oppression and subjugation, providing
a sympathetic response, leading to prudent action to assist in
removing the shackles placed on them by colonial powers.

To the credit of certain post-colonial thinkers, emphasizing
Burke’s avowed concern and labors on the part of the oppressed
peoples is laudable—but for the wrong reasons. And these
reasons, when turned to the turbulence of the French Revolution,
leave an untenable contradiction in Burke’s thought.

What is the missing dimension here? Not unlike Pope Benedict
XVI in his recent condemnation of “”relativism,”” Burke is firm in
his philosophical realism; a realism which avoids the reductionism
of cultural relativism via sympathetic identification with any
and all forms of culture such as resides as the cornerstone of
“”Rorty pragmatists,”” Wittgensteinian celebrations of “”life forms,””
Foucaultian knowledge/power syntheses in the service of whatever
status quos, and power politics. Neglected or disputed is the
natural law basis of Burke’s thought in the tradition of Cicero and
Aquinas, long ago cited by Russell Kirk, Peter Stanlis, and Francis
Canavan, who were at the time of their writings in confrontation
with the Anglo utilitarian/pragmatic interpretation of Burke’s
politics. If we are to call conservatives back to the avowed
“”foundationalism”” in confrontation with the anti-foundationalism
of post-modern thought, we should recall the authentic, unambiguous
natural law basis of Burke’s thought. What could be
clearer than Burke’s affirmation of the natural law in his prosecution
of Warren Hastings wherein Burke states “”We are all born in
subjection,—all born equally, high and low, governors and governed,
in subjection to one great immutable, pre-existent law?””
For Burke this “”pre-existent law”” precedes our expediency, convenience,
sensations, in fact precedes “”our very existence”” which
he holds connects and ties us to the “”eternal frame of the universe,
out of which we cannot stir.””³ While in Burke’s Tracts Relating to
the Laws Against Popery in Ireland (1765) he refers to a superior
law “”which it is not in the power of any community, or of the whole
race of man, to alter,—I mean the will of Him who gave us our
nature, and in giving impressed an invariable law upon it.””⁴ I hold
that it is irrefutable that Burke’s politics adheres to a natural law
foundation which permeates his thinking, not in the manner of a
natural law thinker such as Aquinas, but as a proponent of natural
law, the off-spring of his theistic stance, and his realist understanding
of human nature. With Francis Canavan, given Burke’s
own recorded words and speeches, it is practically impossible,
upon reflection, to deny that he indeed held to a “”metaphysics of
a created universe.””⁵ In the Reflections Burke addresses the
question of the legitimacy of the exercise of power by the people,
asserting that to be legitimate such power “”must be according to
that eternal immutable law, in which will and reason are the
same.”” (Reflections, 258) Burke is the pre-eminent philosopher/
statesman in renouncing all politics grounded in the arbitrary will,
whether of tyrants or a tyrannical majority or minority. Thus
Burke can proclaim in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
(1791), “”if no Supreme Ruler exists, wise to form, and potent to
enforce, the moral law”” then there can be no barrier “”against the
will of prevalent power.””⁶ Burke calls for a virtuous politics, and
indeed does condemn all abuses of power as forms of tyranny, but
this is underpinned by a condemnation of a relativism which
would plead a “”plan of geographical morality,”” a morality severing
man’s ties to the “”great Governor of the Universe,”” as he expresses
it in the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, then Governor-
General of the East India Company.⁷ Instead, he praises and
affirms “”those eternal laws of justice”” which are the same for all
mankind, citing as he does “”natural, immutable, and substantial
justice””⁸ prudently applied by the statesman who is, as Burke
famously declares, the “”philosopher in action.””⁹ Burke’s true
progeny reject “”geographical morality,”” and all forms of “”ethical
relativism”” that rejects natural justice, a justice which is grounded
in the reason of omnipotence itself. This is not to neglect the
crucial role of circumstances in Burke’s thought, and the necessity
of “”political reason”” or “”prudence”” to determine the proper
course of action in oftentimes-complex circumstances. It is my
belief that only those who embrace Burke’s natural law foundations
have a just claim to be Burke’s progeny.

Yet, as the following engagement with some of the recent most
notable scholarship on Burke attests, the debate over the proper
interpretation of Burke’s political philosophy continues unabated.
Even where there is disagreement, there is often advancement in
our understanding of Burke, or new approaches that serve to
further illuminate his thought are disclosed. As this reviewer has
staked out firmly and resolutely what he takes to be the authentic
basis of Burke’s political philosophy, it is hoped that this will serve
to highlight the intensity of the interpretive debate over Burke
from the 1990s to the present date. What follows is a selective
group of works on Burke, with a range of viewpoints examined. In
keeping with the policy of the Political Science Reviewer, this
article is indeed an engagement of fundamental principles at the
heart of Burke’s politics.

A Review of Burkean Scholarship

Uday Singh Mehta in Liberalism and Empire offers a stinging
critique of British liberalism in which John Stuart Mill emerges as
the villain and Edmund Burke the near-hero. The foundations, or,
for Mehta, the anti-foundationalism, upon which Burke’s heroic
status rests, is rather disconcerting and will be scrutinized in due
course. But first, as a prelude to Burke’s status as a critic of
Empire, it is necessary to determine the extent of Mehta’s animus
against liberalism.

Underlying Mehta’s critique is the paradoxical nature of
liberalism’s claim of individual rights, personal freedom, a universal
human nature, and yet the manner in which such liberals as
Bentham, the Mills, and Macaulay justify the extent of the British
Empire, in paternalistic and oppressive terms, denying the very
rights and freedoms at the base of their liberalism. Mehta
announces the aim of his study as seeking “”to understand how
universalistic doctrines sustained a status quo of unmistakable
political exclusion.”” (LE, 64)

What is this core of liberalism, which carries within itself the
potentiality, but not the necessity of political and social exclusion?
For this, Mehta turns to liberal anthropological considerations.
Indeed, he discovers therein the capacity for freedom,
equality, and all the liberal attributes, but in those peoples within
the gambit of the British Empire for 18^th and 19^th century British
liberals, they have not developed these attributes and thus they
are justified in their status subject to liberal imperialism. Mehta
does not reject liberalism’s core beliefs in the limits to political
authority, constitutional principles of “”representation,”” universal
suffrage, or claims of self-determination, including those of
minority groups.”” (LE, 48) Indeed, liberalism grounds these core
beliefs in an understanding of human nature that recognizes these
capacities universally in all human beings. The problem lies in the
suitable conditions, especially cultural conditions that permit a
people to in fact actualize these liberal capacities. Without the
flourishing of “”specific cultural and psychological conditions
…woven in as preconditions for the actualization of these [core]
capacities,”” we encounter liberal “”exclusions,”” not inclusions.
(LE, 49) There are civilizations that lack these “”preconditions,””
and in so lacking them, there is a place for justification of empire
within the context of liberalism. In fact, there is a virtual
imperative that liberalism seek to guide, direct, and rule those
who are as yet unable to actualize their capabilities, which lie
dormant within their human nature. There is a space between
the liberal conception of human nature and a civilization lacking
the necessary preconditions to actualize these capacities. It is
here that liberalism encounters the “”other”” as stranger, with no
familiarity, or sufficient basis for empathetic equality. Thus the
paradox of liberalism. It is universalist, in its rationalist teleology
towards self-determination via freedom and equality, and
yet there are backward peoples not yet ready to realize their
telos.

Herein enters Burke. It is Burke whose perspective is
tempered by an epistemological humility; a humility, for Mehta,
that turns to feelings, sentiments, and even passions to break
through boundaries between cultures, and to see the stranger as
another one like oneself, permitting a familiarity to emerge and
govern relations between cultures and the peoples therein. As our
concern is with Mehta’s interpretation of Burke’s political philosophy,
rather than his assessment of liberalism per se, and its
implicit embrace of empire, it is necessary to recognize, according
to Mehta, Burke’s “”profound humility in the face of a world that
he did not presume to understand simply on account of his being
rational, modern or British.”” (LE, 21) We may refer to this as
Burke’s epistemological “”humility,”” in that it is his “”openness”” to
the “”possible risks”” that accompany “”dialogue with the unfamiliar.””
(LE, 22) Still, as Mehta’s work seeks to explore this salient
feature in liberalism that would allow such thinkers as Bentham
and the two Mills to justify the subjugation of entire civilizations
for their own good, it is necessary to further our understanding of
Mehta’s account of liberalism in order to better exfoliate his
account of Burke. Thus, Mehta seeks to qualify somewhat his
account of liberalism, for he states, “”I do not claim that liberalism
must be imperialistic, only that the urge is internal to it.”” (LE, 20)
Now, if there is a thrust, or “”urge”” inherent within liberalism
towards imperialism, then not to draw within its orbit subject
peoples as part of an empire is to leave liberalism as truncated and
failing to realize its own telos, or so it would seem.

To further characterize liberalism for Mehta, as context and
background for comprehending his claim of epistemological
“”humility”” for Burke, it is necessary to explore his account of
liberalism as governed by what Mehta terms the “”cosmopolitanism
of reason,”” and the “”cosmopolitanism of sentiments.””¹⁰ (LE,
20-22)

Mehta launches a withering critique of the concept of reason
as it manifests itself not only in the 19^th century liberal thought of
both the Mills, but as it characterizes most of “”Western thought,””
including Socrates, the Stoics, Saint Augustine, Descartes, Hobbes,
Kant, Hegel, Rawls and Habermas. What characterizes the liberal
idea of reason is its universality, its “”abstract ideals of rationality,
individuality, the morally sanguine, the imperative of politics, and
most generally, to the requirements of progress.”” (LE, 25) The
problematic which liberal reason falls prey to, is the reduction of
the “”stranger,”” the “”unfamiliar,”” the individual, to the “”abstract
ideal of rationality,”” expressed in what Mehta terms the “”cosmopolitanism
of reason.”” It is not only the universalizing of reason
that sublimates the individual into the universal itself, but it is the
ideal of progress that leads liberal thought to render a moral
judgment upon the stranger as needing the guidance and direction
of the liberal, progressive imperialist into enlightenment, itself a
long range, historical process. Thus, it is not only the “”abstract
ideal of reason,”” that prevails, but the inclusion in that ideal of a
telos, or an end, which requires “”progress”” to realize a progressive
state more or less already realized in liberal democracies and
lacking in the backward unfamiliarity of the unenlightened civilizations.
And what is missing for liberalism is the “”singularity,
individuality, social and political identity”” which belongs to
Mehta’s category of the “”stranger.”” (LE, 25) Borrowing from
Oakeshott, whom Mehta claims as a primary influence, it is the
“”very ‘modes of experience'”” which render the strangers’ “”lives
meaningful to themselves.”” (LE, 25)

Apart from the broad sweep of Mehta’s characterization of
much of Western thought, a sweep that gathers up philosophical
realists, rationalists, empiricists, conceptualists, idealists, liberal
pragmatists, and Kantian liberals—apart from all this is the place
of Burke’s epistemological humility that Mehta asserts in his
critique of liberalism’s justificatory enterprise for Empire. It is
hard to find flaws in Mehta’s schematic of liberal thought when it
ranges from the purely epistemological, which is then applied to
the social and political realm. In Aristotelian terms this constitutes
an unstated move from speculative to practical reason. But
it is not without success on Mehta’s part, for it is certainly the case
that Burke’s thought constitutes a full-fledged assault on abstract
reason as applied to the spatial-temporal realm of politics.

Yet Burke himself refuses to exclude universals from his
thought as he claims in his “”Speech on the Petition of the
Unitarian Society”” (1792) that “”I never govern myself, no rational
man ever did govern himself, by abstractions and universals.””
Burke continues in the very next sentence, claiming that “”I do not
put abstract ideas wholly out of any question; because I well know
that under that name I should dismiss principles, and that without
the guide and light of sound, well-understood principles, all
reasonings in politics, as in everything else, would be only a
confused jumble of particular facts and details, without the means
of drawing out any sort of theoretical or practical conclusion.””¹¹
For Burke, while principles are necessary for practical matters,
they are “”to be guided by circumstances,”” for to judge “”contrary
to the exigencies of the moment he may ruin his country for
ever.””¹² In commenting on this passage, Francis Canavan correctly
points out that principles are necessary in making concrete
moral judgments, but that principles must work in tandem with
“”prudence,”” which Burke held to be the first of the moral virtues,
as did Thomas Aquinas, as prudence takes into consideration
principles while regarding circumstances.¹³

Against the familiar structures of generality that limns the
epistemology of liberalism Mehta casts the epistemological “”humility””
of Burke, a humility that does not presume to understand
or comprehend the lived-experiences, the life-forms of the unfamiliarity
of the Indians. It is Burke’s strength, contends Mehta, to
be able to recognize the unrecognizability of the experiences,
sentiments, and feelings, spread over the space and time of
history, a history not fully gathered up and teleologically expressed
in a translatable philosophy. One must be open to the
singularity of the individuality and the opacity of the lived-world
of the unfamiliar—so argues Mehta in a highly generalized
fashion. Rather, the almost irresistible “”urge”” inherent in liberalism
to subjugate, to dominate, and to assimilate the other into the
“”familiar structure of generality”” renders liberalism incapable of
extending one of its basic tenets, that is the one of “”tolerance”” to
the unfamiliar. (LE, 21) To be tolerated and tolerable is to
assimilate the other into the liberal framework, which espouses
the “”cosmopolitanism of reason,”” the telos of progress towards an
ideal of self-realization that requires a starting point that backward
peoples have yet to achieve, and the result is hegemony,
domination, and an imperialism that denies the unfamiliar the
very freedom, equality, and tolerance liberalism so fundamentally
espouses.

But it is someone such as Burke who through his emphasis
upon sentiments, feelings—in effect, the unsaid and untranslatable
of the other’s parlance into a western mode of understanding—
that leads Burke to realize what he cannot fully realize, and
this is the comprehension of the other through conceptualization.
This at least allows him to achieve a certain solidarity with the
stranger through the unconceptualizable narrative of sentiments.
Mehta denies that Burke possesses a “”‘realist’ epistemology”” that
permits a more exact correspondence between the “”‘nature of
language'”” and the “”‘nature of things,'”” giving him access, somehow,
to the true, authentic “”nature of Indians.”” Rather, Mehta
maintains that Burke’s “”thought is pitched at a level that takes
seriously the sentiments, feelings, and attachments through which
peoples are, and aspire to be, “”at home.”” Mehta refers to this as
a “”‘posture of thought'”” on Burke’s part that allows him to
recognize that “”the integrity of experience is tied to its locality and
finitude.”” In fascinating fashion he aligns this “”posture of thought””
to “”what Gadamer calls ‘prejudice.'”” (LE, 21)

One must marvel at this point at Mehta’s own flowing narrative,
permeated by metaphor, analogy and conjecture which
glides over what for Burke might in fact turn out to be significant
ontological matter. For one, why should Mehta require the
clarification of Burke’s “”posture of thought”” by recourse to
Gadamer’s reference to “”prejudice””? The historical roots for this
use of the term “”prejudice”” as a positive mode of understanding
rather than a purely pejorative appellation, is Burke himself.
Mehta is not ignorant of Burke’s use of the term “”prejudice”” as he
quotes Burke’s condemnation of the East India Company and
the Jacobins who destroy and dislocate in order to survive,
thereby putting an “”end of that narrow scheme of relations
called our country, with all its pride, its prejudices, and its
partial affections.”” (LE, 138n42, for Mehta’s quotation of
Burke’s Letter on a Regicide Peace.) Indeed, Mehta notes the
Enlightenment’s consideration as a history and “”record of our
prejudices.”” Mehta considers it to be a distinct “”Burkean contribution
to the Enlightenment [that] these prejudices also give us
a sense of continuity and hence a sense of ourselves.”” (LE, 177)

What is remarkable is the range of philosophers Mehta finds
compatible, at least to some extent, with Burke, including
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Freud, and particularly
Richard Rorty. (LE, 28n49) In reference to Heidegger, Mehta
finds a link with, in effect, a similar “”‘social ontology’ especially in
relationship to Heidegger’s notion of Being-With and Being a
Self,”” as well as the “”aroundness of the surrounding world and the
spatiality of Da-sein.”” (LE, 34n65) Mehta also points to Heidegger’s
“”Building Dwelling Thinking,”” which, he claims, “”abounds in
philological examples that strike me as deeply Burkean in their
sensibility.”” (LE, 132n34) In this respect Mehta particularly
focuses on the Heideggerian notions of “”boundary”” and “”space.””
The specific quotation from Heidegger referenced by Mehta is his
statement that “”a boundary is not that at which something stops
but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which
something begins its presencing…. Space is in essence that for
which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds.””
(LE, 132n34)¹⁴ Mehta correctly remarks that “”Burke’s understanding
of place, as both territorial and social”” contrasts with
those “”conception(s) of experience as something not shared with
others.”” (LE, 133) Mehta explores a crucial aspect of Burke’s
thought, often neglected in scholarship, obliquely considered,
or treated in a manner failing to seek further illuminations of
Burke’s thought through the sometimes perilous lens of recent
philosophical thought. Yet the connection between “”place”” and
“”identity”” as one of a shared experience with others is put in the
context of the “”logic of the psychological or cognitive operations,””
instead of their more fundamental ontological foundations, which
I maintain is crucial to an understanding of Burke. To say this is
problematic for Mehta’s understanding of Burke is indeed an
understatement; not because he fails to recognize any Burkean
ontology, for he does, but only in passing. Rather, any reference
to “”foundations”” for many contemporary thinkers only conjures
up a “”visual”” or “”representational”” epistemology rooted in
Platonism, manifested in any correspondence-theory of knowledge,
and Mehta clearly and correctly rejects such epistemology
for Burke and as such.

Mehta does indeed note a Burkean ontology, but only in a
footnote; in, no less, a note that contains one of his three
references to Heidegger in conjunction with Burke. In this note,
which receives no further elaboration in Mehta’s volume, he
claims that “”In his ontology Burke both draws on an ancient
tradition in which the metaphysics of Christian natural law have
a special poignancy and anticipates Heidegger’s understanding,””
an understanding replete with such notions as the “”world,””
“”spatiality,”” and “”Da-sein”” as “”Being-With.”” (LE, 34n65) Now if
Mehta can acknowledge a Burkean ontology, drawing on the
ancient, classical tradition in which the “”metaphysics of Christian
natural law”” has a resplendent place, why is there no further
exfoliation of this ontology, of this ancient tradition, by Mehta?
Instead, one wonders if this reference to ontology, perhaps, is
simply absorbed by Mehta into the ontic realm of Heidegger’s
notion of Dasein as Being-With? But then how does Mehta justify
the following moves: he places Burke’s epistemology within the
metaphoric realm of “”eighteenth-century poetics”” and aesthetics
(LE, 43); these poetics and aesthetics become infused with the
psychological and cognitive functions which are shaped by territory,
place, and collective experiences gathering up the historical
memory of a people congealed into a transitory, fleeting presencing
of Being. (Cf. LE, 132-33) And yet this is not all, because
epistemological matters for Burke are more akin to a Rortyian
“”pragmatism,”” a pragmatism that recognizes a “”capacious version””
of reason and that recognizes no constraints save those of
conversation with others and collective inquiry.¹⁵ (LE, 43 & 217)#page#
Are we now spread out all over the conceptual horizon from “”the
ancient tradition”” of Christian natural law, through the fabrication
of concepts reflecting a Nietzschean Will to Power, to
Heidegger’s Dasein analysis, to the skepticism of Oakeshottian
modes of experience, to Rorty’s conversational expansive pragmatism,
not to overlook Wittgensteinian “”life-forms?”” The main
thing is to exclude any remnant of Plato; Platonism is the bete noir
underlying the force of Mehta’s critique. Drawing on Rorty,
whom Mehta claims “”Burke prefigures,”” there are no constraints
in terms of “”‘the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of
language.'”” (LE, 43)¹⁶ Through “”conversation”” between others,
all space is denied power, and hence “”empire becomes impossibility.””
(LE, 217)

There are multiple points here that deserve some attention.
They are, 1- Mehta’s brief reference to a Burkean ontology and
the “”metaphysics of Christian natural law””; 2- rooting Burke’s
epistemology in aesthetics, poetics, life-forms, modes of experience,
conversational pragmatism, the house of language, and
social reason imbued with history; 3- the claim of place and
territory as grounded in psychological and cognitive functions.

First, it is difficult to understand Mehta’s reference to a
Burkean ontology and Christian natural law when there is no
follow-up or examination of this claim, even if it is to be ultimately
refuted, which it is by implication throughout Mehta’s entire
work. It is refuted by Mehta’s attribution of a “”constructivist””
view of knowledge, gleaned from historical, psychological,
aesthetical experience in which the objects of nature are not fixed
in timeless Platonic essences. How does Mehta slip into his work
this reference, which is simply asserted, then, in the same reference,
glides into a Heideggerian view of the life-world?

The arguments for a natural law interpretation of Burke’s
politics have long since been marshaled, often noted in subsequent
Burkean scholarship, but almost never explored in depth
and refuted; rather more likely simply pushed aside. Instead,
Mehta acknowledges Burke’s “”metaphysics of Christian natural
law”” without identifying what he specifically means by this notion.
Is Mehta referring to the tradition of Thomistic natural law, a law
that for Aquinas is accessible by the natural light of reason?
Mehta then proceeds to ignore this claim, without even pointing
to the evidence of its existence in Burke himself, even when it
bears directly on vital points of concern for Mehta’s study
regarding Burke’s refutation of British imperialism. While noting
from Burke’s “”Speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings””
that “”Burke is dismissive of Hastings’s ‘geographical morality,'””
Mehta goes on to characterize this notion in grandiloquent style
as “”a weighty index of who they [i.e., the people of the Carnatic]
were, a dwelling cemented by the changing though never wholly
voluntary alloy of history and sentiments.”” (LE, 185) Such a
characterization by Mehta is so charged with metaphor as to
render it practically unintelligible; in fact, it borders on an
historicist account of “”geographical morality,”” the seemingly very
opposite of Burke’s intention. In this context one would do well to
note Frederick Whelan’s conclusion, in his work Edmund Burke
and India, that Burke “”adamantly rejected ‘geographical morality’
of the sort that might accompany historicist doctrine, and his
writings correspondingly contain many references to a common
human nature or humanity.””¹⁷

While there is no further reference to a “”Burkean ontology””
by Mehta, there is another reference to Burke and natural law,
albeit a puzzling reference that is qualified in a manner that only
makes Mehta’s attempt to unfold Burke’s epistemology more
convoluted. Mehta does refer to Burke’s recourse to the “”abstract
natural law of Christianity,”” at the same time separating Burke’s
epistemology from the cosmopolitanism [the universalism] of
reason utilized by liberals, instead categorizing his thought as a
“”cosmopolitanism of sentiments.”” (LE, 139)

Perhaps there is a distinction between a “”metaphysics of
Christian natural law””—perhaps that of Thomists, connected to
a considerable extent with Aristotelian realism—and Mehta’s
reference to the “”abstract natural law of Christianity.”” One
decidedly cannot refer to Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysics of Natural
Law as the “”abstract natural law of Christianity.”” Rather than
an “”abstract natural law,”” Aquinas gives priority to “”esse,”” or the
“”act of existence,”” over “”essentia,”” or essence in the philosophy of
Aquinas. The primacy of “”esse“” over “”essentia“” in Aquinas’
metaphysics is in marked opposition to any type of Platonic
essentialism. Grounding the natural law philosophy of Aquinas as
his metaphysical existentialism does, insures that his conception
of the natural law is not that of an abstraction. Human nature
itself, for Aquinas, has its essential structure founded on its “”act
of existence,”” itself flowing from its causal connection to the First
Cause of all existence, the Supreme Being, whose essence it is to
exist.

Now the only possible reconciliation between Mehta’s conjunction
of a Burkean utilization of a “”metaphysics of Christian
natural law”” and an “”abstract natural law of Christianity”” with
Burke’s social epistemology, denoted as a “”cosmopolitanism of
sentiments,”” prioritizing feelings, experience, poetics, conversational
pragmatism, and the prejudices and habitudes of a people,
would be to acknowledge his recourse to a natural moral law
rooted in a Christian metaphysics, and consider it to be a
rhetorical device calculated to conceal Burke’s authentic epistemology
from a culture still imbued with a tradition of Christian
theology, in order to further his real designs, which for Mehta
is to lodge our understanding of the stranger and the other in the
open-ended encounter due the mutual respect owed to the
cultures of the non-European. But Mehta doesn’t make this
distinction explicit, and we are simply left to our own devices to,
dare I say it, deconstruct Mehta’s own text, to illuminate the
unsaid within the said as context to stated text? Yet this is to
plunge us into conjecture. Still, some comprehension of Mehta’s
Burkean ontology and some sort of Christian natural law is
incumbent upon our examination. For it is Mehta himself who
has placed these notions before us through his presentation of the
moral basis of Burke’s condemnation of the British Empire’s
imperialistic tyranny over India through the East India Company.
And here we turn to Mehta’s citation of Burke’s critique
of Hastings as making illicit use of “”geographical morality”” when
it comes to his justification of the autocratic rule of the East
India Company. Mehta rapidly acknowledges the divergent
application of liberal values in England as opposed to the
authoritarian, arbitrary rule in India, as this is part of Mehta’s
ultimate critique of liberal thought’s inconsistency as applied to
empire, an inconsistency that rationalizes the domination of
subject peoples. An examination of Burke’s own Speech wherein
the passage containing the phrase “”geographical morality”” is
utilized requires attention.

Mehta quotes Burke directly from his opening “”Speech on the
Impeachment of Warren Hastings,”” 15 February, 1788, in which
Burke decries any “”plan of geographical morality, by which the
duties of men, in public and in private situations, are not to be
governed by their relation to the great Governor of the Universe,
or by their relation to mankind, but by climates, degrees of
longitude, parallels, not of life, but of latitudes.””

This denial of “”geographical morality,”” and Burke’s connection
of the same with “”the duties of men”” incumbent upon
everyone, everywhere, is grounded by Burke on man’s relation to
the great “”Governor of the Universe”” as well as his “”relation to
mankind”” apart from any demarcation by geography. This reference
by Burke requires the diligent Burke scholar to seek out the
obvious connection between moral duties incumbent upon all
mankind with their source, the “”great Governor of the Universe.””
Who is this Governor—He is not the absconded God of Aristotelian
metaphysics but the God who governs by providential design.
Burke’s emphasis on God’s “”Providence”” is of vital importance to
his political philosophy; indeed, no adequate examination of his
thought is complete without such an examination, for Burke’s
reference to Divine Providence spans his entire career. In his
Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, concerning
the Providence of God, Burke exclaims that God’s “”wisdom
is not our wisdom, nor our ways his ways.””¹⁸ In the Reflections
he cites Providence’s “”dispensation of a mysterious wisdom.””
(Reflections, 184) While shrouded in mystery and requiring
the submission of faith, the actions of Providence do not imply
for Burke caprice on God’s part. While God’s Providence transcends
our own human comprehension, requiring faith, nonetheless
Christian metaphysics, is not irrational; as he notes in his
Correspondence, “”faith is not contrary to reason, but above it.””
(Corr. VI, 228)

Returning to the passage on “”geographical morality”” once
again, it is necessary to consider the remainder of this reference
not included by Mehta. Burke writes, “”This geometrical morality
we do protest against; Mr. Hastings shall not screen himself under
it.”” And why is this the case for Burke? Burke provides the reason,
as he continues, contending that “”the laws of morality are the
same everywhere, and…there is no action which would pass for an
act of extortion, or peculation, or bribery and of oppression in
England, that is not an act of extortion, or peculation, of bribery,
and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the world over.””¹⁹ But
Mehta does not include this crucial second, supporting, explanatory
part of the “”geographical morality”” passage. Having previously
examined my understanding of Burke’s metaphysics regarding
both the meaning and place of Natural Law in his philosophy,
I do not here intend to elaborate this matter at length. Additionally,
the pioneering work on this topic has long been acknowledged
in the writings of Peter Stanlis, Francis Canavan, B. T.
Wilkins, and more recently, Bruce Frohnen.²⁰ Nonetheless, it is
incumbent on an examination of the grounds of Burke’s critique
of Empire as presented by Mehta to address the place of Natural
Law as Mehta mentions it and then summarily drops it.

Returning to Burke’s “”Speech on Opening of Impeachment,””
he puts forward the most compelling and clear grounding of the
“”law of morality.”” In this passage Burke is arguing against the
tyrannical rule of the East India Company, denying the exercise
of “”arbitrary power”” or the sheer exercise of the will, claiming that
“”no man can govern himself by his own will.”” Neither “”can he be
governed by the will of another.””²¹ Burke aligns the unbridled
exercise of the will unrestrained by “”wisdom and justice”” with the
irrational side of human nature. (Reflections, 203) Burke writes
in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, (1791), that
“”Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their
disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”” In fact,
it is as much a “”real right of mankind”” to have restraints upon his
appetites, mainly through one’s own self-control, reflecting the
habits, customs and manners animating society, as it is to exercise
freedom itself. Freedom entails restraint and without it, it is
license, caprice and arbitrary will. Continuing, Burke concludes,
“”Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and
appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the
more must be without.””²² The question remains, though, why
restrain the will? Since Mehta finds parallels between Burke and
Nietzsche, one might ask, why not elevate the Will as a method of
transcending the slave morality, itself the heritage of the meek and
mild Christian ethics? Why should one not assert one’s “”aristocratic
will”” by positing one’s own values in creative fashion, as
Nietzsche would have it? Instead, Burke claims, in his opening
speech of the Hastings trial, that “”We are all born in subjection—
all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in
subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law.””²³ For
Burke, we are indeed born equally; in subjection; to a pre-existent
law; surpassing all temporality, all climates, transcending all
history. This “”pre-existent law”” is “”prior to all our devices, and
prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our very being
itself, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of
the universe, out of which we cannot stir.””²⁴ Could this be a
reference to the classical tradition of Natural Law? Further, who
is it, or what is it that does the knitting? There is no answer from
Mehta.

But there is an answer of a kind from David P. Fidler and
Jennifer M. Welsh in their “”Introduction”” to Empire and Community:
Edmund Burke’s Writings and Speeches on International
Relations.²⁵ Fidler and Welsh cite the portion of the passage in
which Burke refers to the “”one great, immutable, pre-existent
law,”” and proceed to explain away its apparent natural law
content, or, more specifically, put forward a re-constructed
content. For Fidler and Welsh this passage merely “”suggests
Burke’s adherence to an idea of natural law,”” but they deem it
necessary to clarify the “”specific nature of his appeals to that law.””
First, they claim that “”too much”” is read into Burke’s writings by
“”neoconservative interpretations of Burke as a disciple of Thomas
Aquinas,”” with Peter Stanlis given as an example of such a
“”neoconservative.””²⁶ The use of the label “”neoconservative”” is one
that Stanlis rejects wholesale.²⁷ Stanlis does indeed compare
favorably Burke’s position on Natural Law with Aquinas, while
claiming that “”Burke took his stand on the ground of Aristotle,
Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the traditional conception of the
Natural Law.””²⁸ The interpretation that Fidler and Welsh give to
Burke’s utilization of “”natural law vocabulary,”” is that it is a
contribution to the “”secularization of the term.”” In almost begrudging
fashion Fidler and Welsh acknowledge that “”Though
[Burke] maintained that natural law was binding because it
ultimately reflected God’s will””—one wonders what could be
more compelling than a law that does indeed reflect “”God’s
Will””—but they claim that Burke “”discovered [the natural law’s]
content through human custom and precedent—the ‘wisdom of
the species.'””²⁹

Now assuredly the role of “”custom and precedent”” are crucial
aspects of Burke’s thought reflected in the manners and habits of
a people; all of this points to the vital part of tradition in Burke’s
politics. Further, “”custom and precedent”” are congealed into
Burke’s doctrine of “”prescription.”” But this fundamental tenet of
Burke’s political philosophy is virtually ignored by Mehta.

Returning to Mehta, we find a pivotal emphasis given to
personal identity forged on the twin anvil of “”history and place,””
constituting a “”psychological account”” that “”undergirds”” Burke’s
political and moral theory. (LE, 161) It is this psychological
account of personal identity, which Mehta claims justifies a
favorable, even compelling, comparison with Freud. This is
another example of Mehta’s sudden irruptions of comparative
insights linking Burke with a fantastic array of disparate thinkers.
One can readily recognize the importance of “”history and place””
in understanding the psychological and emotional aspects of a
people who make up a political social order. But Mehta’s founding
of Burke’s political theory almost entirely on history and place is
too reductionist, and ignores almost entirely any Burkean recourse
to notions of justice and prescription, together with an
understanding of human nature that, while giving vital importance
to habits, customs, and manners, is grounded on an “”ontological
density,”” that is the essential constituent of human nature.³⁰

Mehta is certainly correct in focusing upon the role of history
and place as vital in shaping a “”sense of ourselves”” for Burke, and
his emphasis upon traditions and prejudices as providing the
“”preconceived channels in which human actions are at home.””
(LE, 176) Mehta claims that by history “”Burke clearly means
social order in an extensive form.”” It is history that “”can ameliorate
and guide the effects of our passions.”” (LE, 178) Mehta
specifically considers history as equivalent to society guiding our
passions in shaping Burke’s notion of freedom. In a somewhat
perplexing fashion, he holds that the “”desire for liberty”” is a
constituent of our nature, but he claims this is not to be seen as
a biological datum, but as an inheritance. For both Locke and
Burke, Mehta holds, reason places a check on our exercise of
freedom which itself is “”related to our ability to understand the
limits that natural law puts on our freedom.”” (LE, 179) And what
is this natural law as Mehta regards it? There is virtually no
elaboration provided, other than to characterize it as we have
already pointed out in reference to Burke as holding to an
“”abstract natural law of Christianity.”” As Mehta strains to link
Burke with Locke in part, then we also find no elaboration of
natural law, or law of nature for Locke, other than a formal
consideration revealing that it is part of Locke’s “”minimalist
anthropology,”” universal in import, but rather barren of content,
thus permitting restraints provided by conventions, legitimized
through consent, and, almost as an aside, ultimately the result of
God’s causal efficacy. (LE, 55) The reference to natural law, or
law of nature, by Mehta as it obtains in both Locke and Burke is
more of a conceptual notion needing the mediation of history and
society, which particularizes it in different cultures but maintains
a sort of foundationalism in a “”minimalist anthropology.””

Whether or not Locke escapes the implication of an unrestrained
natural freedom which qualifies man in the state of
nature, and its extreme potential for radical individualism, and
even anarchism, is problematic for Mehta’s interpretation, especially
as he is arguing by way of Locke’s Thoughts Concerning
Education for the place of “”custom and the processes of education””
whereby “”rationality must get inculcated.”” In other words,
despite the reading of Locke in the Treatises which points towards
the natural reach of human reason to give us “”a preconventional
access to the precepts of natural law,”” the Locke of the Thoughts,
as distilled by Mehta, points to the pivotal role in education, and
hence reasoning, of social strata, subordinations, “”time, place,
and social status,”” instead of “”giving expression to capacities that
are universal.”” (LE, 62) Mehta’s success or lack thereof in
rescuing Locke from the “”cosmopolitanism of reason”” which
Mehta deplores, with its abstractive universalism, is of little
concern to us save that Mehta wishes to draw a favorable
comparison between Locke and Burke, even so far as asserting
that “”Burke always claimed to be a ‘follower of Locke.'”” (LE, 179)
Strangely, almost enigmatically, Mehta provides no citation of
what appears to be a direct quotation from Burke. Still, in turning
to Burke, Mehta finds the mediating function of “”history or
society”” as much easier to establish than in Locke, despite the
former’s recourse to the “”abstract natural law of Christianity.””

In Mehta’s account, Burke’s notion of liberty is a “”social
freedom.”” He extends this to “”reason”” holding that reason is
“”social reason and knowledge.”” Is the reference to a practical
reason, or to the personal knowledge of Michael Polyani, whereby
social knowledge emerges from the encounter with the other?
After all, Mehta both cites Buber’s “”I-Thou”” claim, and incorporates
the priority of ethics in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.
(LE, 105) And the connection with Burke? For Mehta, as it is the
nature of knowledge to be social, knowledge must be open to the
encounter with the other as stranger, and as the “”unfamiliar,””
realizing, at the same time, that the boundaries of spatiality, of
temporality, and the accretions of history as they contribute to
the stranger’s very existence, is ultimately impenetrable, but not
entirely impregnable. (LE, 214-16) But it is impregnable when
cast into the category of the necessity of progress in civilization,
or risk the fall into deadening backwardness, which is replete in
the concept of Empire in J. S. Mill, but rejected by Burke. For
Mill, the necessity of progress when confronted with the backwardness
of India justifies British paternalism manifested in
imperialism, justified by the logic of aiding the backward from
their backwardness into the arena of the progressive.

While admirably and significantly focusing on Burke’s surpassing
understanding of the “”Stranger,”” and the severe and
necessary restrictions Burke places on the actions of the Imperial
power of Britain, there remains exaggerated emphasis upon
history insofar as it altogether replaces human nature, hence
echoing Rousseauian anthropology. And this is the distortion of
Burke’s political philosophy, which demands a response. Indeed,
Mehta does find a favorable comparison with Burke and Rousseau.
He notes Burke’s critique of Rousseau, yet “”in another sense
[Burke] illuminates an essential preoccupation of Rousseau’s
social thought.”” (LE, 177) The connection, although not elaborated
on by Mehta, is drawn from Mehta’s recognition that
“”Burke’s work is replete with attention to human feelings, sensibilities,
and prejudices.”” (Ibid.) And as these “”sensibilities and
prejudices”” are the repositories of history within society one is left
with the conclusion that feelings and sentiments supplant reason,
in somewhat Humean fashion, for Burke, and that human nature
is by nature historical. Burke becomes, in effect, Rousseau. How
can this not be the case in Mehta’s interpretation? Recalling,
“”reason…for Burke [is] thoroughly social, including the social
understood as something ineradicably historical.”” (LE, 179) Is it
not the case that for Rousseau there is no human nature having a
telos or end, but instead one of possibilities, and, as Leo Strauss
concludes in Natural Right and History, for Rousseau “”man’s
humanity is the product of the historical process””?³¹ But if this is
the case then Burke’s protest against the rationale of Hastings in
the oppression of the Indians, then the critique of Hastings based
on Burke’s rejection of “”geographical morality,”” is rendered mute.

James Conniff in his work The Useful Cobbler: Edmund
Burke and the Politics of Progress determines Burke to be “”a
Humean philosopher in action.”” The isolated difference in Burke
and Hume lies in the latter being “”largely content to debate
political issues, [while] Burke acted on a very similar appreciation
of the situation.”” (UC, 51) And how does Conniff arrive at this
conclusion? In part he draws on Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry
and concludes that in this work Burke initially focuses on the
source of human behavior residing in the psychology of
associationism, derived from Lockean sensationalism. He cites
Burke’s limitation on human reason, finding in Burke the inability
of reason to rise above the senses and ascend to the transcendent
realm, hence our inability to reason our way to the existence
of God.

But Burke later abandons the psychological account as too
restrictive, and, instead, he turns to an historical account. For
latent in history is the emergence of certain standards of morality
suitable for the relatively efficient functioning of society. These
standards are subject to change, but the change, which is essential
for the stability of society, is one that is gradual, more readily
assimilable by individuals, conducive to good order. At the same
time, Conniff’s Burke is concerned with achieving progress, the
progress achieved by the statesman qua reformer. It is the action
of the reformer and Burke’s consideration of representative
government that especially interests Conniff. In this regard,
Burke is a mitigated success, even failing to achieve the progress
for which he predicates his politics. And why is this? It is due to
his aristocratic elitism, one that aims to represent the true
interests of society, but one that fails to do so because in the effort
to reform Burke’s politics fails to be radical and populist enough.
As a member of the Rockingham Whigs, Burke embraced the
Glorious Revolution, raising the stature of parliament, but,
ultimately, the “”efforts failed because the Whigs were willing to
act for the people but not with them or their more radical leaders.””
In Conniff’s view, “”this refusal deprived the Whigs of the popular
support which would have been necessary to counterbalance the
power of the Crown and its allies.”” (LE, 16)

Apparently, for Conniff, Burke was tactically wrong, or even
inept, and his ineptness manifested itself with devastating effects
in Burke’s response to the revolution in France. Here, the Whigs
themselves were divided into both “”radical and conservative
elements,”” facing the “”indecisiveness of the Pitt Administration,
and the efforts of demagogues like Paine.”” The result was that the
country was indeed “”unified, but in a common resistance to all
reform.”” The political leaders failed to advance the case for
reform in opposition to the growing threat of the revolutionary
cataclysm in France, looming on the entire European horizon.
For whatever reason, the Whigs, by Conniff’s account, were not
sufficiently pragmatic and insightful to overcome their divisions,
reflected in the Foxites’ embrace of the regicidal zeal of France,
and countered by the conservative reaction by Burke.

From Burke’s perspective, as portrayed by Conniff, why
would this be the case since he embraces a utilitarian pragmatism?
Perhaps he was insufficiently pragmatic. For Conniff, Burke’s
politics indeed embraced a flexibility lacking in Locke, but failed
to be sufficiently populist in order to envelop the radical populism
proliferating in England. Where Burke did succeed, compatible
with both Locke and Hume, is that he “”accepted that neither
reason nor experience is capable of providing us with clear and
objective truth.”” (UC, 50) Strangely, almost paradoxically, Conniff
recognizes that for Burke “”on some few occasions, the guidance
of reason and natural law”” can be utilized. In contrast, and more
frequently, it is necessary to “”rely on [our] own accumulated
experience and the considerations of utility.””³² (Ibid.) Conniff
concludes that Burke, although not a relativist, approached
“”Hume’s greater skepticism about the possibility of objective
knowledge and the absoluteness of social values.”” Conniff concurs
with Leslie Stephen’s assessment regarding Hume and
considers it “”equally true of Burke,”” namely that there is no
“”absolute substratum”” somehow apart from the world of our
experience and observation that is foundational to all of reality.
³³ (Ibid.)

It is quite a stretch to rely on a conclusion from Stephen
regarding Hume and then attributed to Burke, all in the context
of the further assumption denying an “”absolute substratum,”” a
denial predicated on a Lockean epistemology requiring that no
metaphysical status can be assigned to objects or substrata that
escapes all sensory experience and reflection upon such experience.
All of this reflects Conniff’s conclusion regarding Burke
that “”neither moral sense philosophy nor natural law provided a
satisfactory solution to Burke’s quest for a firm grounding of
morality.”” (UC, 48)

Conniff’s denial of a natural law interpretation of Burke’s
politics rests on inferential arguments of exclusion. Those who
regard Burke as a natural law thinker, reasons Conniff, also affirm
that abstract theory can be applied to the contingency of political
affairs. Thus, for Conniff, the only recourse is to regard natural
law as immanent within the historical process and social institutions.
In this respect, Conniff is not very far removed from Mehta
who regards the basis of knowledge for Burke to be social,
recognizing an amalgamation of history and society. But, as
Conniff concludes, this would be to deny the transcendent
character of natural law, existing as an “”external standard”” by
which to judge practical matters of moral and political import.
(UC, 45-46) Now since the natural law interpretation denies that
Burke is a rationalist, then it must be the case that “”natural law is
embedded in existing institutions,”” Conniff concludes. But this
cannot be the case for the tradition of natural law, he maintains,
which stretches from Cicero to Aquinas and Locke, all of whom
“”saw natural law as providing an external standard for judging
worldly law and practice.”” (UC, 46) In support of Conniff’s
understanding of the essential “”externality of natural law, in
contrast to natural law as embedded within “”existing institutions,””
he advances this quotation from Aquinas: “”human law ‘in so far as
it deviates from reason, it is called an unjust law and has the
nature, not of law, but of violence.'”” (Ibid.)

Where to begin in response to Conniff? If it is the condition
of natural law that it be accessible to reason, and, as such, reside
in a realm “”external”” to this world of contingency, where does it
reside for Conniff? Further, must we consider Aquinas to be a
rationalist because he argues for the natural law, especially
considering a rationalist to hold to a priori, innate ideas, and
deductive reasoning? Do we conflate the realism of Aquinas with
the rationalism of Descartes? This is not a claim made by Conniff,
as he does not spell out for us whether a natural law philosopher
must be a rationalist within the framework of the Enlightenment,
nor does he explain in what sense the natural law which he affirms
rather indiscriminately of Cicero, Aquinas and Locke, is external
to the world in order to provide a standard by which to judge
worldly affairs. It may well be that while Conniff cites the
triumvirate of Cicero, Aquinas and Locke, he himself does not
embrace their natural law positions. Still, in what sense do these
natural law philosophers regard the natural law as external; is it
externalized in a transcendent, meta-empirical realm? If we
exercise reason in order to recognize the transcendent realm of
the natural law, how is it that Locke can regard the law of nature
as enshrined in the decidedly incarnational realm entailing the
mandate of self-preservation? And how is it that Aquinas regards
the precept of natural law as self-evident to practical reason, with
its governing principle that we “”do good and avoid evil?”” Here we
surely must differentiate Aquinas from Locke, as the latter speaks
of substance or substrate as unknown and unknowable according
to empiricist epistemology. True, Locke does not declare essences
as totally unreal, but he does claim that “”natural things…have
a real but unknown constitution of their insensible parts.”” As this
“”constitution [of] natural things”” is unknown, it cannot, obviously,
be abstracted by the intellect. Thus, we are left with
nominal essences. While Aquinas discovers the natural moral law
as the metaphysical constituent of human nature, for a human
action to be moral it must conform to human nature, a nature
which is purely contingent, given Aquinas’ existential metaphysics,
which regards form and matter as a natural composite of a
human being. And if it is the case that human nature, the essence
of human beings, is capable of being apprehended by the discursive
capacity of human reason, apprehended by abstraction
subsequent to necessary sensory experience, then it follows that
Aquinas and Locke are fundamentally incompatible. Further,
natural law is metaphysically grounded for Aquinas in the essence
of man, itself resulting from divine creation.

Now this recourse to elements of Thomistic metaphysics is
not intended to render Burke a systematic scholastic by comparison,
but it is necessary to differentiate a rationalism that would
treat all natural law philosophers as considering the natural law as
external to the world, and requiring that one who embraces
natural law is really, and necessarily, consigned to the abstractive,
rigid metaphysics that Burke in fact condemns and applies to the
French philosophes, and their abstract conception of the “”rights
of man.”” One can indeed be a natural law philosopher and not prey
to the charge of being an ethereal metaphysician. In terms of
“”externality,”” as the natural law is disclosed through participation
of human reason in the eternal law of God, then it is more correct
to say that this participation constitutes a transcendence in
immanence. The eternal law does indeed transcend man, as God
is its source, yet through participation and grounded ontologically
in man’s nature, the natural law is immanent to humans.

The failure of Conniff’s understanding of natural law in the
main lies in its either/or character as he portrays it. Either it is
lodged within a world external to that of our historically instantiated
temporal existence, knowable only by a removal from this
concrete world, or it resides in this realm of contingency which we
inhabit, and therefore is no natural law at all, but a certain
recognition of a regularity to human actions, more or less
pertinent to a particular society, and permeable by the on-going
unfolding of history.

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