Cultural and Political History

2. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
AND THE CREATION
OF MODERN POLITICAL CULTURE
Volume 3
The Transformation of
Political Culture
1789-1848
Edited by
FRANÇOIS FURET
and
MONA OZOUF
INSTITUT RAYMOND ARON, PARIS
PERGAMON PRESS
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Copyright © 1989 Pergamon Press pic
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First edition 1989
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
(Revised for vol. 3)
The French Revolution and the creation of modern political culture.
English and French.
Vol. 2 edited by Colin Lucas.
Vol. 3 edited by François Furet.
Papers presented at a series of three colloquia. The first colloquium,
Conference on the Political Culture of the Old Regime, was held in
Chicago, Sept. 11-15, 1986. The second colloquium, Conference on
the Political Culture of the French Revolution, was held in Oxford,
Sept. 5-9, 1987. The third colloquium, Conference on the French
Revolution and Modern Political Culture, was held in Paris, Sept.
14-18, 1988.
Includes bibliographies and indexes.
Contents: v. 1. The political culture of the old regime — v. 2. The
political culture of the French Revolution — v. 3. The Transform-
ation of Political Culture, 1789-1848.
1. France—History—Revolution, 1789-1799—Influence—Con-
gresses. 2. France—Politics and government—18th century—Con-
gresses. 3. France—Politics and government—19th century—
Congresses. 4. Europe—Politics and government—1789-1900—
Congresses. 5. Political science—Europe—History—Congresses. 6.
Political culture—France—History—Congresses. I. Baker, Keith
Michael. II. Lucas, Colin. III. Furet, François, 1927- . IV. Confer-
ence on the Political Culture of the Old Regime (1986: Chicago, 111.)
V. Conference on the Political Culture of the French Revolution
(1987: Oxford, England) VI. Conference on the French Revolution
and Modern Political Culture (1988: Paris, France)
DC155.F74 1987 944.04 87-16080
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The French Revolution and the creation of modern political culture.
Vol. 3: The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789-1848.
1. France. Political events, 1789-1815
I. Furet, François, 1927—
944.04
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4. Preface
1989 MARKS the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Even after two hundred
years, scholars find themselves still confronted by the challenge of understanding
the extraordinary event that gave birth to modern political culture. To further
that endeavour, an international committee of scholars planned a series of three
colloquia to explore the general topic of "The French Revolution in the Creation
of Modern Political Culture." Papers presented to each colloquium form the
volumes of the present series.
The first colloquium, held in Chicago in September 1986, investigated the nature
of French political culture under the Old Regime, and the processes by which
revolutionary principles and practices were invented within the context of absolute
monarchy. These papers, edited by Keith Michael Baker under the title The Politi-
cal Culture of the Old Regime, were published by Pergamon Press in 1987 as the
first volume in the series. The second colloquium, held in Oxford in September
1987, analysed the political culture of the French Revolution itself, from the dec-
laration of the principle of national sovereignty by the National Assembly until
the creation of the Consulate. These papers, edited by Colin Lucas under the title
The Political Culture of the French Revolution, were published by Pergamon in
1988. The third colloquium, held in Paris in September 1988, explored the trans-
formation of European political culture in response to the French Revolution in
the period up to 1850 and is the basis of this the third and final volume of the
series.
The colloquia were planned by an organizing committee comprised of Bronislaw
Baczko (Université de Geneva), Keith Baker (University of Chicago), David Bien
(University of Michigan), Furio Diaz (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Pisa), François
Furet (Institut Raymond Aron, Paris), Colin Lucas (Oxford University), Mona
Ozouf (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris), Jean Starobinski
(Université de Geneva).
The Conference on the French Revolution and Modern Political Culture, held
in Paris on September 14-18,1988, was made possible by the institutional support
of the Institut Raymond Aron (EHESS) and the Musée dOrsay. On behalf of the
organizing committee, and of all the participants in the conference, we wish to
thank them for their generous support. We also wish to express our appreciation
V

5. vi PREFACE
to Pergamon Press for its commitment to publishing the substantial volumes that
are the result of the three conferences. Finally, particular thanks are due to
Geraldine Billingham for seeing the work through the Press.
KEITH BAKER
FRANÇOIS FURET
COLIN LUCAS
MONA OZOUF

6. Introduction
FRANÇOIS FURET ET MONA OZOUF
Le troisième colloque sur La Révolution française et la Culture politique moderne,
qui s'est tenu à Paris en septembre 1988, s'est donné pour objet d'étudier la ma-
nière dont la Révolution a été interprétée par la pensée européenne et dont son
héritage a pesé sur l'élaboration de la philosophie politique du X I X
e
siècle. Il
constituait comme naturellement le troisième volet de la vaste enquête inaugurée
en 1986 lors de la réunion de Chicago: l'aval de la Révolution, après avoir consi-
déré son amont, YAncien Régime, et son cours, de 1789 à l'Empire napoléonien.
Pour ne pas alourdir démesurément la matière traitée, il avait été décidé de ne
prendre en considération que le premier X I X
e
siècle, date commode puisque c'est
celle d'un ébranlement révolutionnaire général en Europe: à cette date, d'ailleurs,
les grandes questions de l'historiographie de la Révolution française ont été posées,
et l'observation de 1848 permet de comprendre comment elles travaillent le tissu
des nations et des pensées européennes. Tocqueville, Quinet, Marx, Michelet en
sont les inoubliables témoins: ils nous ont fourni le point d'orgue de ce colloque.
Quant à son point d'origine, il est contemporain de la Révolution elle-même.
Les Réflexions de Burke sont écrites et publiées dès 1790 et elles contiennent
la réfutation la plus intransigeante de l'entreprise française de 1789, réservoir
inépuisable d'arguments hostiles à la Révolution. Le livre, dont la portée n'est pas
seulement politique, mais aussi esthétique et, peut-être en son fond religieuse,
est si riche et si complexe qu'il alimentera des traditions très diverses: contre-
révolution, historicisme, ou libéralisme traditionaliste à l'anglaise. L'influence
séminale de Burke sur les interprétations de la Révolution française en fait ainsi le
premier grand auteur européen sur le sujet. Nous avons donc ouvert notre colloque
par sa lecture, sa discussion et la pesée de son autorité; de l'accueil sans vraie
compréhension que lui firent les milieux de l'émigration à une postérité intellec-
tuelle disparate: toujours un peu rétractée en France, immense en revanche en
Allemagne, où elle est toute mêlée à l'histoire de l'idéalisme et du romantisme.
Après Burke, le cours de la Révolution française ne cesse d'alimenter et même
d'obséder la réflexion politique: les événements de l'an II, la dictature de Salut
Public et la Terreur dissocient les principes de la Révolution française de son
déroulement, et font apparaître la difficulté à penser l'événement dans sa diversité,
ou encore à célébrer 1789 sans avaliser 1793. Pourquoi la Terreur? Immédiatement
xiii

7. xiv INTRODUCTION
posée par les conjurés du 9 Thermidor qui doivent comprendre leur histoire,
évaluer ou esquiver leurs responsabilités, très tôt problématisée dans les polé-
miques du Directoire, cette grande question ne cessera d'habiter la pensée des
libéraux français: chez Madame de Staël et Benjamin Constant, elle est même
l'âme de la réflexion, au point de leur inspirer une théorie de l'écriture et de la
parole publiques. C'est elle encore qui domine la réception et l'interprétation de
la Révolution française en Allemagne, des obscurs militants ou sympathisants
"jacobins" (qui soutiennent l'action des révolutionnaires français sans pour autant
en comprendre l'esprit ni en approuver les moyens) aux grandes figures de la
philosophie allemande: Kant, Humboldt, Fichte, Hegel. A des degrés inégaux et
avec des fortunes diverses, les uns et les autres sont aux prises avec la difficulté de
conjuguer l'admiration pour l'entreprise révolutionnaire, ou au moins l'accord
avec les principes de 1789, avec le recul que leur inspire la perversion de l'ordre
juridique, illustrée soit par le procès du roi, soit la Terreur. Ainsi s'ouvre un débat
qui domine toute la pensée politique du X I X
e
siècle.
Ce n'est pas lui qui risque d'embarrasser les Contre-révolutionnaires. Eux
englobent dans une même condamnation les principes et le déroulement de la
Révolution. Pour la terminer, avaient prêché Maistre et Bonald, il faut revenir à
contre-courant de ce qu'elle a voulu faire, opérer un retournement complet de ses
idées, réenraciner la société dans l'ordre divin et la soumission de l'individu. Cette
critique de l'individualisme moderne et de la souveraineté du peuple s'étend bien
au-delà des rangs réactionnaires et nourrit un courant bien différent de doctrine,
de Saint-Simon à Comte: l'ordre historique y est substitué au plan divin, mais il
s'agit toujours de préserver des conflits politiques de l'époque révolutionnaire,
source constante de divisions, l'intégrité organique de la société.
Terminer la Révolution, ce peut être aussi envisager de reprendre l'héritage
politique de 1789. "Enfants du siècle" en Italie, hégéliens de gauche en Allemagne,
radicaux anglais, tous cherchent à comprendre pourquoi la Révolution française
n'a pas produit de résultats durables, mais aussi quelles leçons le modèle français
ne cesse de leur proposer. Garder, en le remaniant, l'héritage de 1789, c'est encore
la tâche des libéraux: les Doctrinaires français, quand ils fondent la Monarchie de
Juillet, invoquent l'exemple anglais pour modérer la tradition d'où ils viennent.
Guizot cherche à réunir les deux histoires, mais il n'y parviendra pas longtemps.
Sa tentative est d'autant moins assurée du succès que, combattue sur sa droite,
elle se heurte aussi sur sa gauche au développement d'un mouvement qui s'enracine
une fois de plus dans la Révolution française, mais en espérant, lui, non la terminer
mais la refaire. A travers le socialisme et le communisme, dont Babeuf a signé
l'acte de naissance, la "question sociale" redonne à l'idée révolutionnaire une
fraîcheur intacte, puisqu'il s'agit de recommencer au nom du prolétariat ce que la
bourgeoisie a confisqué à son profit. Elle ramène le messianisme de 1789, la table
rase, le volontarisme politique, mais cette fois comme instruments du dépassement
de 1789. L'idée socialiste s'habille dans des costumes empruntés, néo-christia-
nisme, néo-robespierrisme, néo-utopie, jusqu'à ce que Marx lui donne son appel-
lation contrôlée, la science de l'histoire.
Ainsi, en montrant que l'ébranlement donné à la politique et à la philosophie
européennes par la Révolution française continue à travailler les nations, les
peuples et les esprits, les textes réunis par notre colloque permettent de mieux

8. INTRODUCTION XV
comprendre l'extraordinaire complexité de l'événement. Vu du milieu du X I X
e
siècle, il s'est enrichi d'une formidable sédimentation de pensées. Au centre de ces
commentaires, comme au centre de notre colloque, figure l'immense problème des
rapports du Christianisme et de la Révolution. Soit qu'ils cherchent à apprécier la
réalité et la nature de la rupture survenue entre l'église catholique et la Révolution,
soit qu'ils examinent l'hypothèse d'une continuité entre la Réforme et la Révolu-
tion, soit encore qu'ils traitent la Révolution comme une religion nouvelle, les
interprètes du premier dix-neuvième siècle ont mis au coeur de leurs interrogations
la représentation religieuse du phénomène révolutionnaire. Le christianisme a-t-il
été une anticipation de la Révolution française? Celle-ci a-t-elle réalisé le message
évangélique? Et ne l'a-t-elle fait que dans la mesure où le religieux venait précisé-
ment d'être violemment séparé du politique? Aux retrouvailles avec ces questions
vertigineuses, qui ont été si longtemps enfouies, le colloque de Paris doit son
originalité. A elles, il doit aussi de figurer non un achèvement, mais un programme.

9. Introduction
FRANÇOIS FURET AND MONA OZOUF
The object of the third colloquium on The French Revolution and Modern Political
Culture, held at Paris in September 1988, was to study the way in which the French
Revolution has been portrayed in European thought and how its legacy influenced
the development of political philosophy in the nineteenth century. It constituted
the third part of a vast enquiry begun in 1986 during the Chicago gathering: the
legacy of the Revolution, after having considered its ancestry, the Ancien Régime,
and its development from 1789 to the Napoleonic Empire.
In order not to make the subject matter unwieldy, it was decided to take only
the first half of the nineteenth century into consideration, a convenient break
because it was a time of general revolutionary upheaval in Europe. Besides, by
that time the great historiographical questions about the French Revolution had
been posed, and observing 1848 permitted an understanding of how they shaped
national consciousness and European thought. Tocqueville, Quinet, Marx, and
Michelet are the unforgettable witnesses: they provided us with the end point for
this colloquium.
As for the starting point, it was contemporary to the Revolution itself. Burke's
Reflections were written and published in 1790 and contain the most intransigent
refutation of the French undertaking of 1789—an inexhaustible reservoir of argu-
ments hostile to the Revolution. This book, whose content is not only political,
but also aesthetic and maybe at base religious, is so rich and so complex that
it was able to feed very diverse traditions: counter-revolution, historicism, and
traditional English liberalism. Burke's seminal influence on interpretations of the
French Revolution made him the first great European author on the subject. There-
fore we began our colloquium by reading his work, discussing it and weighing its
authority; from the reception accorded him in émigrés circles—where he was not
really understood—to his varied intellectual posterity—always a bit limited in
France, but on the contrary, enormous in Germany where it mingled with idealism
and romanticism.
After Burke the developments of the French Revolution never stopped inspiring
and even obsessing political reflection. The events of year II, the dictatorship of
Public Safety and the Terror, disconnected the principles of the Revolution from
its development and made it difficult to reflect on the event in all its diversity, or
xvii

10. xviii INTRODUCTION
even celebrate 1789 without endorsing 1793. Why the Terror? This great question
was immediately asked by the conspirators of 9 Thermidor who had to understand
their history and evaluate or evade their responsibilities. It soon became a problem-
atic in the polemics of the Directory and never ceased to occupy the thoughts of
French liberals: with Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant it even became the
heart of reflection to the point of inspiring a theory of writing and public speech.
It continued to dominate the reception and interpretation of the French Revolution
in Germany: from obscure militants or "jacobin" sympathizers (who supported
the French revolutionaries' actions without understanding their spirit nor approv-
ing their methods) to the great figures of German philosophy, Kant, Humboldt,
Fichte and Hegel. To varying degrees and with unequal success, they all struggled
with the difficulty of combining admiration for the revolutionary undertaking (or
at least agreement with the principles of 1789) with their revulsion at the perver-
sion of legality, illustrated by the King's trial and the Terror. Thus opened a debate
which dominated all of nineteenth century political thought.
Counter-revolutionaries were in no danger of being encumbered by this. Their
condemnation included both the principles and the events of the Revolution.
Maistre and Bonald preached that to conclude the Revolution required going
directly against its aims by reestablishing society on the basis of individual sub-
mission and the divine order. This critique of modern individualism and the
people's sovereignty extended well beyond reactionary ranks and fed a very differ-
ent doctrinal stream, from Saint-Simon to Comte. Here the historical order was
substitued for the divine plan, but it was still a matter of preserving the organic
integrity of society from the political conflicts of the revolutionary period, a con-
stant source of divisions.
Concluding the Revolution could also mean contemplating a return to the politi-
cal heritage of 1789. "Enfants du siècle" in Italy, leftist hegelians in Germany
and English radicals all tried to understand why the French Revolution had not
produced lasting results, but also, what lessons the French model continued to
offer them. The liberals' task remained retaining and revising the heritage of 1789:
when the French Doctrinaires founded the July Monarchy, they invoked the Eng-
lish example in order to moderate their own tradition. Guizot tried to combine
the two histories but did not succeed for long. His attempt was all the more likely
to fail because, attacked on the Right, it also confronted the development of a
leftist movement, once again rooted in the French Revolution, that did not wish
to conclude it, but to redo it. Through socialism and communism, whose birth
certificate had been signed by Babeuf, the "social question" restored a complete
freshness to the revolutionary idea, since it meant restarting in the name of the
proletariat what the bourgeoisie had confiscated for its own benefit. It revived the
messianism of 1789, the tabula rasa and the political determination, but this time
as instruments for surpassing 1789. The social idea was clothed in borrowed
garment—neo-christianity, neo-robespierrism, neo-utopianism—until Marx gave
it its appellation contrôlée, the science of history.
Thus, by showing that the upheaval in European politics and philosophy caused
by the French Revolution continued to shape nations, peoples and thought, the
texts brought together by our colloquium permit a better understanding of the
event's extraordinary complexity. It is enriched by a great deposit of ideas when

11. INTRODUCTION xix
viewed from the mid-nineteenth century. The huge problem of the relationship
between Christianity and the Revolution was at the centre of these commentaries,
as it was at the centre of our colloquium. The early nineteenth-century analysts
put religious interpretation of the revolutionary phenomenon at the heart of their
investigations, either by trying to appreciate the reality and nature of the rupture
that took place between the Catholic Church and the Revolution, or by examining
a hypothesis of continuity between the Reformation and the Revolution, or even
by treating the Revolution as a new religion. Had Christianity been an anticipation
of the French Revolution? Had the Revolution realised the evangelical message
and had it only just done so to the extent that religion came to be violently separ-
ated from politics? The Paris colloquium owes its originality to the reunion of
these breathtaking questions which have been buried for so long.

12. Presentation
HARVEY MITCHELL
IT was by means of an existing context and language that the protean and mythic
power of the French Revolution was valued and devalued in its own time. It has
been probed and examined by successive generations that have altered the old
contexts, creating new ones, all the while incorporating the earlier ones. In this
connection, two points, both perspectival, must be made as we approach Edmund
Burke's ideas. The first and more obvious one is that, while there are differences
on how his ideas may be interpreted in their immediate context, those interpret-
ations also affect the ways in which his ideas may be assessed when they are
removed from it. Thus, if his ideas are seen as self-contained «n their original
context, then a consideration of what happened to them in other contexts may
take on the features of a conjuring act. In effect, such a perspective, if pursued too
literally, would tend to accord Burke's ideas very little power, making them in a
sense peripheral or inconsequential outside their immediate context. The second
point becomes evident when the perspective is shifted to the contexts shaping other
discourses. Then we are made aware that there exist a whole other set or sets of
linguistic conventions, which help to determine the reception to ideas outside
them.
1
The discernment of common strands of ideas that cut across and move beyond
their particular manifestations enables us to perceive Burke's "historicization" of
the Revolution in a new light. Though he was not alone in doing so, Burke lifted
the Revolution from its French context and introduced it into the realm of inter-
national political discourse with an éclat that no one else could match. He placed
it within the sphere of intercontextuality, but the detailed analysis of the reception
given his emotionally powerful jeremiads, the degree to which it was understood,
reinterpreted, or ignored, is a complex problem that the papers under the rubric
Pourquoi entrer en Révolution? only touch upon, addressing it, when they do,
with considerable reservation. What we can say with a kind of bland certainty is
that there existed a more or less common discourse on legitimacy and revolution,
as well as on political ideals and empirical practices, beginning fom the premises
underlying the discussion of political obligation, and leading to arguments on how
to ensure it and on how to avoid threats to it.
2
The cataclysmic and prolonged
nature of the French Revolution deeply affected and focused the discourse. It is
3

13. 4 HARVEY MITCHELL
therefore not surprising that Burke did not call on a specific, if I may use a term
from the vocabulary of the pharmocopoeia of the early modern period, to cure a
non-specific illness, but instead looked to the universal remedy of violent extir-
pation—in brief, on an armed counterrevolutinary coalition of states against "the
great beast"—the several and collective offenders who harboured erroneous
beliefs about politics, propriety and possession. Therefore, while there is consid-
erable merit in working within the contextualizations which are required to trace
degrees of coherence in a single discourse and between discourses, it seems wise to
recognize that the constraints of context are not total, that inherited or traditional
discourse cannot always resist the impression of distinctive intellects, and that
there is no clear way of knowing in advance the range of possible outlooks in any
discourse.
When Burke laboured to make his contemporaries accept his vision of the Revo-
lution, he expanded and changed the language of the discourse to the point of
paradoxically endowing the Revolution with a significance that breached its
French context and permitted its home-grown supporters and opponents to invade
other discourses. Burke's thoughts on justice, rationality and liberty emerged, John
Pocock tells us,
3
from the lively debates in Britain on the nature of the English
Revolution, most importantly, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and in the years
following. Burke's intention was to impress everyone with the idea that there was
only one proper discourse on revolution, the one elaborated in Britain, in which
the Lockeans, and other less ambivalent dissidents as well, had been on the losing
side of a great debate, and, whose putative successors after 1789—and this is John
Pocock's point—misconceived their purposes by seeking to emulate the French
model instead of achieving an understanding of and coming to terms with the
parameters of their native discourse.
4
Pocock attempts to advance his argument
by calling Burke's explanation of the revolutionary upheaval a "meta-discourse"
in the sense that such a characterization may challenge the idea that the Revolution
is properly studied as the "assertion of the sovereignty of discourse". François
Furet's position that the Revolution produced a situation in which "the semiotic
circuit [became] the absolute master of politics"
5
is what, I believe, Pocock has in
mind in questioning the historical accuracy and utility of viewing the Revolution
as a triumph of discourse. Burke had the prescience, Pocock seems to be saying,
to foresee such a development as a radical and unwelcome turn in the study of the
history of ideas in general and in the study of context and discourse in particular.
To strengthen his case, Pocock moves away from Burke's thought as the embodi-
ment of a proleptic challenge to a twentieth-century articulation of how a revolu-
tion took place in discourse, or of how "a self-creating discourse" came into being,
to the eighteenth century itself when Burke took up his pen to combat a revolution
in which the notion that language may be deployed to make the word the world
was actually being translated into action. But Burke was above all a master of
rhetoric, to which he gave full scope in trying to make his word prevail; and in his
attempt his language became part of a changing discourse. It is also fair to be
reminded that François Furet, Mona Ozouf
6
and Jean Starobinski,
7
to whom
Pocock assigns chief responsibility for the ideas of a revolution in discourse, are
doing two things, and not one, as Pocock may be implying. They are saying that
the various makers and actors of the French Revolution could not but help, at

14. PRESENTATION 5
various levels of consciousness, work toward the creation of verbal and non-verbal
emblems and symbols to describe or to attach to new political models. At the same
time, they are claiming that these artifacts may be analysed to understand the
dynamics of the Revolution. John Pocock may be forgetting the first of their
intentions. In any case, he wishes to make the more important claim that what the
French revolutionaries were doing was not only deeply offensive to all notions of
legitimate political conduct, but that English political and historical rhetoric—the
structure of the English language encoded in the language itself—resisted the very
idea of a self-generating discourse imposing its meaning on the world.
Pocock takes us back to the tangled roots of the political and religious disputes
of the English Civil War and its afermath, most importantly, the events leading up
to the 1688 Revolution and the course that Britain took afterwards. It is in the
religious enthusiasm of the seventeenth century and the ideas disseminated about
liberty of religion in the following century that Burke discovered a kind of precur-
sor to and analogue with the openness, transparency and enthusiasm of belief in
a metaphysic of regeneration which he believed animated the French revolution-
aries and made them dangerous to themselves and to all civilized human beings.
Burke transferred his animus against the religious enthusiasm that pervaded the
previous century's English political disputes to French publicists and gens d'esprit,
who were unrestrained, he declaimed, in their speculations about virtually every-
thing. As well, he found that the Revolution's attempts to strip the church of its
privileged position and subordinate it to the state had a deep resonance in the
sermons and pamphlets of the dissenting groups of his own day—among them,
the Prices and the Priestleys, as well as numerous others—whose espousal of liberty
of religion really amounted to liberty of reason, which was another blow against
the mysteries of religion. Both "French" reason and enthusiasm for its pretended
benefits reverberated ominously through the English dissenting sermons, recalled
the disorder of the previous century, disturbed the foundations of the temperate
settlement of 1688-89, and threatened a fatal severance of the sacred ties between
the British monarchy and the Church of England. The French Revolution, Pocock
argues, was "primarily an event in the religious history of Europe".
Reliance on and surrender to reason elevated one part of the nature of human
beings and made them vulnerable to illusions and to the social disorder they gener-
ated. It removed all limits upon the will to make itself the final measure of morals
and politics. Abstractions carried men too far from the real and the concrete. At
the same time, an equally unscrupulous class of men, speculating in paper money,
was creating a complementary fictive world that would ultimately be shattered,
but not before destroying the real but fragile social fabric in its wake. Public credit
and credibility were both being put at risk by this double speculation; the money
jobbers in fiduciary and the intellectual jobbers who were attacking traditional
fidelities had come into the world together. Together they were wreaking havoc.
From this account of how Burke fashioned his case against the Revolution,
Pocock draws the conclusion that Burke's major complaint against the revolution-
aries was that they overthrew their own "contextuality of. . . speech and action"
and moved ineluctably to destruction. Similarly, Burke's domestic opponents, by
misunderstanding and therefore challenging what was becoming entrenched as the
dominant English political discourse, exposed themselves the more readily to the

15. 6 HARVEY MITCHELL
siren calls of the French revolutionary discourse: they became "fellow-travellers"
in Pocock's phrase, because of their disaffection from the dominant context of
English discourse, and because they also mistakenly saw in the Revolution echoes
and extensions of an understanding of politics and political economy developed
in critical counterpoint to orthodox English discourse. By denying that their cri-
tique was a realistic possibility in the prevailing English context, Pocock argues
that there would be no "transparence", that is, "no revolution of discourse, where
1688 and 1789 absorbed one another, and [that] French discourse, however deeply
it affected [the] British [discourse], could not substitute itself for it". The argument
seems to be that English political discourse possessed a kind of immune system that
sent out warning signals when it was under attack. This reading seems plausible if
we accept Pocock's depiction of the English language as deeply resistant to the
sovereignty of self-creating discourse, and that such resistance is "necessarily true
of language itself". The second part of Pocock's proposition is certainly well taken,
but can historical, linguistic, literary, or any other kind of criticism support the
first?
If I understand the climax of John Pocock's argument, he is saying three things.
First, Burke was moved by the French Revolution to reach back to an existing
political and religious discourse or paradigm to look for familiar reference points
to distinguish between the legitimacy of the English Revolution and the illegit-
imacy of the French; second, that, in thus looking back, Burke's reading was
superior to the interpretations of his opponents who saw 1688 and its aftermath
in quite another, and in his view, a mistaken perspective; and third that, had the
French metaphysicians understood their own prevailing discourse, e.g., their own
constitutional system rightly, including its natural but reparable defects, they
would have avoided the perilous descent into chaos. Unless I miss undertones of
an ironic mode in Pocock's paper, I conceive him to be saying that the most
important conclusion to be drawn from reading Burke on the Revolution and the
Revolution itself is that revolution is the consequence of the decontextualization
of discourse; that to break the boundaries of context is a species of madness, which
is itself inexplicable, and that therefore revolution is ultimately either not subject
to rational analysis, or preferably should be bracketed from intellectual scrutiny
for fear of normalizing it, or both; and, by using the example of Auschwitz, Pocock
further raises the spectre that the dissection of its irrational nature might induce
persons to find a place for it in human experience and make it acceptable.
But is Pocock doing more than this? He seems to be placing responsibility for
the horrors of the Revolution on human beings who he argues were blinded and
led into error by notions of transparence, bequeathed to them by the gens de lettres.
He is arguing, by extension, that modern revolutionaries, following a similar path,
became apparatchiks and inquisitors in one part of the globe, while in another
part they constructed the railway tracks to and found enthusiastic custodians for
places like Auschwitz. Whether legislators or terrorists of a more innocent age, or
cynical manipulators of a post-lapsarian age, they owe their appearance on the
world stage of history because of their denial of history. Some thirty years ago
Jacob Talmon tried to trace the totalitarianism of the left to Jacobinism.
8
Is Pocock
encompassing the totalitarianism of two political hues in a fuller condemnation?
It seems odd, given Pocock's respect for context, to perform a leap so great as to

16. PRESENTATION 7
make no reference to the particular contexts and discourses from which Nazism
and Stalinism emerged. Is the Enlightenment responsible for everything abhorrent
in the twentieth century? Surely only serious loss of memory could overlook the
complex and varied sources of the death camp and the gulag. Should we dismiss in
particular the passions of the anti-Enlightenment itself? Pocock is right to question
Burke's credentials as a political philosopher, but the mantle of prophet which he
gently places on his shoulders is hard to accept.
Basing his own judgements on a theory of aesthetics, distinguishing the sublime
and the beautiful,
9
which he worked out more than thirty years before the Revolu-
tion, Burke judged the Revolution by using his great powers of rhetoric to attack
it on the grounds, some have argued, that it came to embody for him the false
sublime.
10
The Revolution assumed for him fiendish terror, and it is fair to say
that Burke did advance at one point neo-Hobbist principles against, as he put it,
the Revolution's creation through a fusion of terror and virtue of a false sublime.
11
By 1795, the Revolution took on for him the total aspect of a civil war, justifying
in his mind a coherent ideological offensive to stifle every vestige of the Revolution
on behalf of the ancient authority. He saw himself as spokesman, as he said some
years earlier, of the English system of liberty—"A Constitution of things in which
the liberty of no one Man, and no body of Men and no Number of Men can find
Means to trespass on the liberty of any Person or any description of Persons in the
Society"
1 2
—against the Revolution's presumed adulation of an unlimited liberty.
It may be said that he saw the latter as the embodiment of modern tyranny rep-
resented by the Revolution. It may also be that he was disingenuously distorting
Rousseau's Contrat social. In his paper on Burke and the Germans, Philippe Ray-
naud suggests that Burke indeed played off certain Hobbist ideas against Rous-
seau.
13
Since Burke's time, some people have read Rousseau as an unwitting
Hobbist on the grounds that there is in the volonté générale an implicit tyranny—
even an explicit one warranted by Rousseau himself—that no degree of voluntar-
ism can erase. Such a reading would be credible only if we failed to take seriously
Rousseau's belief that there was no realistic middle point between "la plus austère
démocratie et le hobbisme le plus parfait".
14
Following Roger Ayrault,
15
Raynaud
suggests that Burke's mystification of the state was intended to undermine indi-
vidualistic principles of modern natural law in that he conceived of the state as a
body mediating between private interests and a natural and supernatural order
hierarchically organized. This is consonant with the primacy Burke gave to the
interconnectedness of society, religion and politics, and of the risks to all by sun-
dering it. He had no difficulty in urging the destruction of a polity constructed, he
believed, on the premises of Rousseau's Contrat social, for him a travesty of a
valid contract the wisdom of which found its sanction in God: "He who gave our
nature to be perfected by our virtue, [who] willed also the necessary means of its
perfection. . . the state."
16
Behind so much of Burke's defence of the existing order and his thrust into the
historical past to support it lurked the question of legitimacy. In his perfervid
linguistic assaults against the home-grown critics of the English constitution, he
came to see the Revolution in France, not simply as parading its gifts under the
banners of a false political legitimacy, but as an event that called into question the
idea of political legitimacy itself, thereby raising the thought that legitimacy had

17. 8 HARVEY MITCHELL
no foundation at all other than force, sanctioned, as David Hume concluded before
him by time and habit.
17
Indeed, like Hume, he spoke about the constitution as
prescriptive—as having arisen in a timeless past, but nonetheless legitimate for all
that,
18
a question that Hume had preferred to remove from the realm of morals.
By contrast, Burke was foremost a politician, orator and polemicist. When he
spoke of the prejudices, manners and customs that he reverenced as emblematic
of the movement from primitive to civilized society, he deeply felt the truth of
what he was saying. The weight of prejudice was another name for the illusions
human beings required to protect themselves from one another. But Burke would
not have found it easy to surrender to a naked Hobbism, for it would have necessi-
tated a significant emendation of his religious beliefs, as well as have rendered the
embellishments essential to social intercourse superfluous. He found himself, as I
earlier suggested, using crypto-Hobbist arguments to urge all-out war to restore
the fragile balance of society so close to disintegration, so needful of its "natural"
rulers to preserve it. In the end, he never pursued the question of legitimacy to its
outer limits. Instead, it lay undisturbed at the bottom of his defence of the unique
evolution of the English constitution according to a divine plan but interpreted
by the legal instruments of the day. It is true that he did not omit to pay due
acknowledgement, nor did he bestow inferior status, to custom and manners. He
saw the latter as the warp and weft of civilized life, so much so that commerce and
manners might be seen as having been woven together tightly within the same
frame.
19
But this advance of civilization by the amplification of polite intercourse,
fostered by commerce, helped Burke to avoid the broader question of how to
comprehend the legitimacy of organized politics. It was a question he ultimately
shied away from. In this respect, to find an authentic basis for authority, he shakily
relied on legalism to support his undemonstrable case for English political legit-
imacy. Society could not do without laws; Montesquieu from whom Burke may
have borrowed the concept that all societies were the work of moeurs, manières,
lois did not attribute primacy to one. The "mechanic philosophy" had replaced
this truth, and was eating away at natural affections, and at public affections as
well, which, when "combined with manners, are required sometimes as sup-
plements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law".
2 0
The empty formalism
of republican legality, which François Furet says became a feature of post-Ther-
midorian France,
21
may be what Burke perceived earlier than most of his contem-
poraries, and it may be of some moment that he was enable to do so, because he
never felt at ease with notions of rights that sought their sanction on the basis of
law alone.
John Pocock's treatment of the notion of transparence around which Burke and
Rousseau both circled, the first man denouncing it, the second man hoping to
achieve it, reminds us that Burke brought their languages of antagonistic dis-
courses together. This comment may serve as a transition point to James Chan-
dler's paper.
22
He deploys the notions of representation and imitation to bring us
closer to Burke's literary strategies. I have already pointed out that Burke violently
protested against the English dissenters for preferring the errors of the French
political model, for wishing to imitate the French in reconstituting their political
culture. According to Chandler, Burke intended his antipathy for French political
experimentation to cut more deeply, since behind what were ostensibly political

18. PRESENTATION 9
matters there lay the elements of culture itself, made manifest in its manners. On
this account, Chandler agrees with Pocock. So in Burke's reportage, some facsimile
of the horrible spectacle of the Queen's disarray at Versailles, in ways yet unim-
aginable but surely no less destructive of order, awaited Englishmen ready to be
deceived by the English apologists of the French Revolution. Burke cleverly tried
to turn the tables on both his domestic opponents and the revolutionaries by
claiming that chivalric manners were French in origin. But if this was meant to
drive home the point that the degradation of manners followed hard on the heels
of unwarranted political change, Burke intended his attempt to force an acknowl-
edgement from the dissenters that the French revolutionaries had imitated the
English model of constitutionality to be taken as an ironic comment. The fact
is that the English model was indeed looked upon favourably by some of the
revolutionaries. He was not, however, set on correcting the historical record. His
purpose was to remind both sets of his opponents that they were misconceiving and
misconstruing the nature of constitutionality. In a broader sense, James Chandler's
insight into what we may learn from Burke's serious play with the notion of
imitation as generating and nurturing particular political modes is related to the
question of the transferability of the premises of one political discourse to another
without regard to the divergent developments of each.
Representation may be associated with the idea of transparence. Burke scorn-
fully dismissed Rousseau's literary and autobiographical efforts as naive and
dangerous expressions of deep narcissism, not only as reflecting an incipient
deterioration of Old Regime morals and manners, as exemplified in the profitable
literary market for such a literature, but as an anticipation of the descent into their
utter reversal in the earliest stages of the Revolution. For Burke, the private and
public Rousseau were cut from the same cloth. Burke cleverly questioned the
political wisdom of the French Assembly's study of Rousseau, since he was "a
moralist or he is nothing", with nothing useful to impart to makers of consti-
tutions. How could a "philosopher of vanity", a man who blended "metaphysical
speculations" and "the coarsest sensuality" be a trusted guide?
23
Rousseau, Burke
saw, wanted to make transparence the basis of a social and political vision in
which a perfect correspondence between words and things would be forged. It is
important to be reminded of Rousseau's agenda, since it adds to Chandler's argu-
ment that, as in the case of imitation, though differently, the "constitutive" dimen-
sion of representation plays an important role in Burke's understanding of its
aesthetic and legislative modes. A well-constituted polity, Burke argued, possesses
the power to "enact", that is, to make laws but also to act on behalf of others, hence
to represent them. He had after all been the chief advocate of virtual representation
years before. Representation was essential not only to Burke's politics; it rested
on his metaphysics and his aesthetics.
Chandler discusses Burke's rejection of Platonizing politics. As a littérateur and
journalist, who once had a close affinity for Rousseau's ideas, Mallet du Pan,
who was also a conservative, but not in the Burkean vein, did in fact signify
the revolutionaries as "Platonic legislators".
24
Burke was indeed determined to
demolish a metaphysics that supposed a radical divergence between object and
image. To that distinctive aspect of Burke's agenda may be added his notion of
politics as a human endeavour necessitating the cultivation of practical wisdom

19. 10 HARVEY MITCHELL
or prudence. On his side he had no less a figure than Adam Smith, who in his last
revision of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which appeared in 1790, took special
care to denounce revolutionary change in the name of untried principles or the
"spirit of system [which] is often confused with the public spirit. Its advocates
make all sorts of promises. . . and propose new models for the constitution," and
end up believing in "their own sophistries".
25
Smith, it should be added, never
wavered in his elevation of prudence as the most useful means of achieving appro-
bation and ensuring sociability. Burke spoke about prudence as "the first of Virtues
[in politics which] will lead us rather to acquiesce in some qualified plan that does
not come up to the full perfection of the abstract Idea, than to push for the more
perfect, which cannot be attain'd without tearing to pieces the whole contexture
of the Commonwealth. . , "
2 6
This was also central to Cicero's idea of how virtue
might be attained in the realm of politics,
27
but it does not mean that Burke did
not have Aristotle in mind as well.
28
He would have applauded Aristotle's repudi-
ation of Plato's ideal republic and found congenial the idea that politics is con-
cerned with action and deliberation about things that are particular. It is just as
likely that Burke would have been somewhat uneasy with the Aristotelian prop-
osition that good action is itself an end, but not with the idea that human beings
pursue practical wisdom in the state to become just, noble and good—to perfect
virtue, as he put it, because of his nature endowed to him by God.
2 9
Most of all
he would have approved the Aristotelian idea that theoretical wisdom could shed
no immediate useful light on politics. On the question of "theoretick and practical
Perfection," he said that "an object pure and absolute may not be so good as one
lower'd, mixed, and qualified".
30
Burke may be seen as an anti-Platonist in yet another way. Burke's power as a
rhetorician constituted the whole of his intellect. Plato's Socrates in The Republic
reviles the poets and elevates philosophers in their place. On the other hand, if
Plato believed that knowledge could only be achieved by the movement towards
philosophy and away from the belief that there are mysterious forces at work in a
universe in which the natural and social orders are as one and can only be under-
stood through myth and image, he did not entirely free himself from them.
31
The
irony may be that Burke was a Platonist in one sense, in that, like Plato, he invoked
myth and image, as his mystification of the roots of the English constitution and
his belief in the need for the presence of theatre in life prove. In another sense, he
was, in his uses of rhetoric and eloquence and in his suspicion of the rational
principle, a confirmed anti-Platonist. He combined his unremitting insistence on
the politics of experience and of the particular, with, as Chandler phrases it, a
"poeticization" of power relations. Indeed, Burke may have been trying in his
characteristically unsystematic manner to reclaim politics and morals from all the
philosophers, Aristotle as well as Plato, using his great powers as orator and writer
to make aesthetics the bearer of morals in a revolutionary world. In this respect,
Chandler believes that Burke's true legacy may, after more study, be traced for-
ward in time through some of the literary movements between 1789 and 1832,
including the work of Shelley, a very unconservative poet, who was not the first
nor the last to assert the privileged vision of the poet.
Chandler's discussion of imitation in tandem with representation reveals just
how much Burke wished to set aside as unthinkable the idea of a society without

20. PRESENTATION 11
the continuous power to act as a source of social continuity and order. Burke
wanted to impose closure on any discussion threatening to expose the roots of
power or unclothe figures of authority. For Burke, the illusions, including his
notion of the nature of true representation, had to be preserved. Thus Rousseau,
he intuited, was rightfully to be feared as a kind of non-illusionist—an image-
breaker intent on stripping bare all the simulacra of civilized intercourse. Bringing
these matters to the surface of British politics did not endear Burke to the power
brokers in Whitehall who preferred to keep them undisturbed.
The revolutionary assemblies doubtless believed that in some measure they were
living up to Rousseau's ideal. They gave Burke some warrant for his denunciation
of an assembly of men who were "grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negli-
gent of their duty,"
32
or were still juvenile enough to think in terms of "high-bred
republicanism]," the last locution being Burke's way of indicting the ancient
Utopias.
33
The evidence is complex, but revolutionary and non-revolutionary poli-
ticians alike who debated the several parts of the 1791 Constitution and issues of
representation were of several minds and believed themselves to be consistently
faithful to or were fearful of departing from Rousseau's original principles.
I must now move on to a more specific examination of Philippe Raynaud's paper
on Burke and the Germans, but I will confine most of my remarks to those figures
who are not as well known as Herder and Kant. He sets out the background for
Burke's reception in Germany by reminding us of the quarrels between Men-
delssohn and Jacobi on the rationalism of the Aufklärung. August Wilhelm
Rehberg resumed the argument and gave it greater dramatic resonance, eliciting
replies from Kant and Fichte in 1793. By then Rehberg did not have to face insuper-
able obstacles in taking part in a discourse that was not entirely bounded by his
own and his contemporaries' political and social contexts. The Aufklärung had
entered into the realm of politics; and the spectre of theory had to be faced, since,
if left unchallenged in its French manifestions, it could weight the scales against
the questioners of pure reason. Even before Rehberg, Jacobi utterly dismissed what
he regarded as the utilitarian and rational foundations of the Declaration of the
Rights of Man. Justus Moser attacked it on other grounds as well. Rights are
concrete, not abstract; history is a more certain guide to human needs than is
reason; customary law is more enduring and ultimately a more stable source of
order; and the idea of a Contrat social among equals is a fantasy, since a legal social
order could not tolerate a challenge from supposed equally willing individuals. The
parallels with Burke are striking.
Rehberg's critique of the Declaration of Rights followed. By deftly designating
the respective but differing rights of the citizenry, dividing them into passive and
active ranks, including the right to full or lesser representation, the participants in
the debates following the acceptance of the Declaration inadvertently revealed the
gap between theory and practice. Rehberg did not say whether the revolutionary
debators comprehended the chasm's more subtle meaning; he adverted chiefly to
their inexperience. This places Rehberg alongside Burke. But Burke's tirades
against the practical inexperience of the revolutionaries showed scant respect for
theory. As far as he was concerned, as we have seen, theoretical speculation of the
kind with which French littérateurs appeased their own hunger for recognition,

21. 12 HARVEY MITCHELL
and the literary and popular world's demands for the sensational and for innov-
ative schemes, no matter how bizarre, led straight to death.
Rehberg did not rely only upon the argument that practical experience was a
desirable and necessary neutralizer of the tendency to abstract politicizing. He
was as convinced as Burke that "political reason" was necessarily composed of
irrational and empirical elements. He differed from Burke in his appreciation of
the distortions that Rousseau and the physiocrats had suffered at the hands of the
Constituent Assembly, and how, for example, Mably vulgarized Rousseau. Thus
Rehberg did not draw an uninterrupted trajectory between the gens d'esprit and
the Revolution, but saw more clearly that one of the questions that Burke merely
touched on demanded further thought, namely, that the theory and practice of
politics could not be ruled out as an illegitimate epistemological problem, and
could not be relegated, as Burke would have preferred, to a netherworld, or
because of his paranoia, wished to dismiss as the ravings of madmen. The points
of similarity between Rehberg and Burke, as well as their differences, cannot be
grasped unless, following Raynaud, we reconstruct the ways in which the German
and the Anglo-Irishman may be compared. In the first place, the Kantian distinc-
tion between Verstand, entendement, understanding, on the one hand, and Ver-
nunft, raison, or reason, on the other—the first, not the second, being applicable
to questions of politics, was indeed bred in a non-Burkean context. But it had
affinities with Burke's idea that an intellectual system that had no place for empiri-
cal observation and ignored cultural traditions was not trustworthy. If I may recall
my earlier references to Aristotle's elaboration of the meaning of practical wisdom
or phronësis, it seems to me that what appalled Burke was the distance between
political and moral truths and metaphysical ones. For Burke, the first error was to
seek positive connections between them;
34
the second error committed by the
French theorists was that they were confusedly positing a political community
whose power should subsist on defining theoretical political rights for all, when
in his view power and rights not only need not be related, but were, in the Britain
and among the British thinkers he esteemed, in fact not linked; and that such a
condition was not detrimental to rights and liberties.
35
Most important was his
resolute opposition to any kind of fruitful relationship between theory and practice
in politics. For all of Rehberg's agreement with Burke on the need for long experi-
ence in practical politics, he brought theory back into the picture by suggesting
that the monarchy was in the best position—preferably but not necessarily acting
in the framework of an English-type constitution—to express the volonté générale,
since the prince, together with his councillors, alone had the political experience
to act as mediator between theory and practice. Was this a cynical strategy or a
genuine interest in dealing with the theory and practice of politics?
Raynaud's paper shows the German predisposition to philosophy in which there
was a considerable intellectual preparation for the great events leading to the
Revolution and the Revolution itself. That preparation included, for example,
the way in which German thinkers, including Jacobi, anticipated the difficulty of
reconciling Spinoza's rationalism and his concept of conatus with its assumptions
of the equality of all conatuses, including those of non-human beings, with the
Declaration's assumptions that all humans were equal. We saw how that equality
was rendered problematic by the distinctions introduced between active and pass-

22. PRESENTATION 13
ive citizens. German critics of the Revolution thus came to see the Declaration as
an illustration of the fallibility of Spinoza's rationalism, inadequate to the task of
defining the criteria for what is recognizably human.
When Colin Lucas
36
turns to the relations between Burke and the émigrés, he
takes up elliptically and cautiously the theme of context as well, showing that the
welcome some of the leading theoreticians of the French counterrevolution gave
Burke was prompted more by a need for political support than by any shock of
seeing themselves reflected in Burke's book. Seminal though it was, it did not act
as an Archimedean point for all of its admirers, whether polite or passionate. They
in fact believed that their analysis of the coming of the Revolution and the route
it was taking was not only superior to Burke's, but that Burke did not fully under-
stand the nature of French political institutions. Not only that. Lucas reminds us
that the counterrevolution was not a single bloc. It was in fact made up of warring
factions. They ranged from the monarchiens, the constitutionnels, and the purs
who came closest to Burke's views inasmuch as they, as he, believed in a historic
French constitution that gave a crucial, almost mystic, place to the aristocracy,
while giving a functional and hence lesser role to the monarch. "Je suis Royaliste,"
he said in a tone and spirit that would have found an echo in the effusions of the
comte d'Antraigues, "mais Royaliste raisonné. Je ne suis pas fanatique pour les
Rois. Je mesure mon attachement par l'utilité de leurs fonctions à jamais augustes
et sacrées. . . . De garder le peuple contre les entreprises des grands et les grands
contre les invasions des peuples, de tenir tout dans sa place et dans son ordre
habituel . . , "
3 7
Burke professed not to understand, though his own words should have told him
otherwise, why the various anti-revolutionary factions engaged in deadly combat
among themselves. He ruthlessly condemned those monarchists who had taken
part in the Revolution's early stages under the illusion that power was in their
grasp. Their main fault in his eyes was their uncritical acceptance of the most
dubious theoretical premises of a literary cabal who managed to trick public
opinion to the point of reversing the real and the ideal. Many of them, Colin
Lucas demonstrates, owed their factionalism to the political discourse of pre-
revolutionary France. They were imbued with its terms; in brief, the counterrevo-
lutionaries may be said to have shared with the revolutionaries the roots of a
common discourse, but it was only after the Revolution that they realized that
they had to reckon with the consequences of the claims of the leading philosophes,
and they did so without thrusting aside, as Burke did, all consideration of theory.
The abbé Maury granted that Burke was a great orator and statesman, who was
nevertheless unable to detect the truth of French political culture, either before or
after the Revolution. It is not surprising that Burke failed. His correspondence
shows that he could expand his sympathies for émigrés and clergy who landed on
British shores, and that he worried about the fate of the survivors of the ill-fated
1795 Quiberon expedition, who were to be branded as traitors and executed by
the bleus. Yet his concerns were shaped as much, if not more, by rage against his
own government that, he charged, failed to understand that the war in Europe
could not be treated in terms of a traditional calculus of power, but must be
invested with the energy of a crusade against the newest species of barbarians. The
war for which he had clamoured almost from the start was a war to be fought for

23. 14 HARVEY MITCHELL
the preservation of England's "Laws and Liberties". He dismissed as impractical
the argument that "an abstract principle of public law" prevented intervention in
the affairs of France. For him the "public Law of Europe" was formed by the
treaties guaranteeing the Protestant succession in England; as he saw it, the secur-
ity of the latter was being seriously threatened by the combined efforts of English
and French Jacobins and justified a war against both.
38
Jacobinism was the natural
offspring of dissent; dissent was being fanned by Revolution; and unless
unchecked, the English Jacobins would avenge themselves for the prostration of
their radical progenitors by the victors of 1688.
He had, as I suggested earlier, preferences for some of the émigrés rather than
for others. But I have time for only one example—I think a revealing one—for I
believe it sums up Burke's abiding aversion for the "success of those who have been
educated and hardned in the Shallow, contemptible and mischievous philosophy,
oeconomy, and politicks of this Age, which make them indisposed and unqualified
for any great work in the restoration of so great and so undone a Kingdom as
France".
39
Just as many of the French émigré theorists regarded Burke a superficial
observer of French politics, so Burke in 1792 accused Lally-Tollendal of being
ignorant of the workings both of the British constitution and of ancient French
constitutional practices. Politicians of Lally's stripe were not fit to be entrusted
with the sacred mission of restoring France to its ancient state. Burke was not
afraid to make himself the authoritative interpreter, if not the master of a single
political and moral narrative. He was responding in part to the fact that many
émigrés regarded him as a superficial observer of French politics.
Again and again we come back to Burke's defence of property and the justifi-
cation of continuing the war against revolutionary France on the grounds that a
nation is a "moral essence", which he unabashedly and immediately identified
with a nation's proprietors against the despoilers of property. There was to be no
suspicion that he meant his metaphor to be taken in any metaphysical sense. He
spoke this way in 1796, when it looked as if Britain might withdraw from the war.
Four years had elapsed since he lavished Lally with insults because of his rationale
for the nationalization of clerical property. For Burke, property was the principal
if not the sole justification of political power. In his Letters on a Regicide Peace,
Burke looked to those who wielded it as the "natural representative of the people",
thereby reiterating his old notion of virtual representation; but by adding that "on
this body [the 400,000 men of sound substance in England and Scotland], more
than on the legal constituent, the artificial representative depends,"
40
he not only
revealed how much the idea of discontinuity between things and their represen-
tation was, on his account of it, of no practical consequence, but was nevertheless
a sound political principle. If history and its prescriptions hallowed by age were a
more reliable guide to human affairs than "speculatism," so was artifice desirable
and necessary as a mark of civilization and a bastion against democracy.
In his interpretation of three groups of French thinkers, and their response to
Burke, Franciszek Draus
41
tells us that not until the mid-point of the nineteenth
century was Burke accorded serious attention, and then only in the works of
Charles de Rémusat and Tocqueville. The former found Burke's Reflections an
occasion to celebrate English liberties and a quasi-pietistic attack on the French
for lacking the good fortune to share them. Tocqueville regarded Burke's disdain

24. PRESENTATION 15
for the Revolution as a failure of historical insight and imagination: Burke saw it
wholly in Manichean terms, withholding from it any positive universal sig-
nificance. His characterization of the gens d'esprit was not routinely dismissive; it
comes from his very bowels. If Tocqueville's own assessment of their role is flawed,
he wanted desperately to know how they mobilized their intellectual energies on
the eve of the Revolution, even if in the end his way proved to be limited.
42
Before Rémusat and Tocqueville, the monarchiens (e.g., Mounier and Lally-
Tollendal), the theocrats (Maistre and Bonald), and the early liberals (Madame de
Staël and Benjamin Constant), gave Burke no extended treatment. But we may
infer that they found the terms in which he thought it best to set out his political
beliefs of no practical consequence. Indeed, what Draus's survey demonstrates is
that they were probably put off by Burke, who in claiming to speak of history's
larger goals, was actually thinking of the unfolding of English history, to which
he gave a sacred and unique character. He found it hard to envision a practical
and a fair politics in any other setting. Burke had a basic distaste for the monar-
chiens who, either in a moment of forgetfulness (this would be that side of Burke
at his most generous), or because of a lack of political wisdom (this would be that
side of Burke who was asserting his most profund beliefs), had taken the fatal
steps toward French ruin. It was as if Burke were saying that, however much the
monarchiens and other groups of politicians who entered the dangerous game of
revolutionary politics, separated themselves in succession from their more radical
successors, they were all tainted with the original sin of kicking the props of a
genuinely reformable situation from under the monarchy and the privileged
orders, including themselves. Their major sin was their elevation of reason and
theory at their most useless. Their second was that they had convinced themselves
that they could undertake the regeneration of France without compromising their
self-interest as custodians of an ancient patrimony, their own and the monarchy's.
Once Burke condemned the men of letters and their presumed revolutionary imi-
tators in such an outright manner, it was impossible to discover any one in France,
except the princes and their allies, highly placed or simple peasants, for whom an
exception could be made from his condemnation of coteries of subverters held
together by invisible ties.
But we must shift the focus back to the French critics of the Revolution. The
theocrats saw no point in approaching Burke to support their views. They looked
more to God than to history, and used reason to advance their arguments. Maistre
was Christian in a way that Burke was not; and he could also produce a theological
politics in which God could figure both as a punitive and protective father. Burke
could not allow a role to Providence that would erase the movement of history.
The early liberals found his crusading zeal totally at odds with their own readiness
to salvage some enduring goods from the Revolution. It was the absence, they said,
of reason that led to the errors of the Revolution. Madame de Staël, Draus tells
us, spoke about finding the way to end the Revolution and to establish the Republic
on durable foundations by plumbing the depths of pure republican theory. This
was de Staël's answer to Jacobinism. Burke saw Jacobinism as the ultimate
expression of the Revolution and cast down its progenitors and its apologists, who
looked to cure it with the poison that had brought both into the world together.
Such opposed views explain a good deal about the eclipse of Burke's thought from

25. 16 HARVEY MITCHELL
Madame de Staël's considerations on how to terminate the Revolution. But we
have to rely on an argument based on the absence of any direct confrontation with
Burke's ideas. Constant's relationship to Burke's ideas would probably benefit
from closer inspection. He tended to treat Burke's anti-theoretical stance ironi-
cally. But this may have been less important than the different ways in which each
came to see the art of political oratory. Long after Burke was dead, Constant
placed much hope in eloquence as a means of advancing political understanding.
Burke had enthusiastically embraced rhetoric as an instrument of political violence
that he justified as a strategy in a life and death struggle. Constant thought that
parliamentary debate could become the normal mode of political communication
ensuring reasonable and peaceable resolution of political differences.
In his reaction to the theoretical propensities of Englishmen outside the Estab-
lishment, who were animated by traditions of religious dissent with strong political
elements derived from theories of human nature, the place of property, and not
least legitimacy, Burke was participating in a political discourse that could not but
bear on theory, even as he claimed to reject its cogency or centrality. The papers
in this section expand our notions of contexts and discourses. These were not only
plural, but crossed boundaries, and drew thinkers from diverse cultures into what
may be called a common discourse. Thus we are entitled to speak of distinctive
intellectual contexts, and, for want of a better term, a shared vocabulary, which
served as a common reference pool, from which thinkers drew at will, and shaped
to their individual purposes and within their particular social and political experi-
ence. The Revolution brought about a "transformation of European political cul-
ture" by straining the intellectual resources of particular discourses. It made more
evident and took further the notion, held in the leading centres of European intel-
lectual life, that the active participants in the intellectual movement, which they
consciously acknowledged as an "Enlightenment," had been a discourse with
diverse manifestations. If Burke did intend, as John Pocock says, to destroy the
premises of his adversaries by inventing a "meta-discourse," he did not succeed.
In large part, he failed, because while he claimed to be speaking in the name of
universal principles, he prided himself in resolutely defending the primacy of the
English discourse that he asserted shaped the limits of the proper and improper
practice of politics. Just as he saw himself as privileged interpreter of English
political wisdom and did all he could to resist political conceptions alien to it,
others assumed custodial roles for their own ways of receiving the French Revolu-
tion. The Enlightenment had generated widespread debate on politics, morals and
power almost everywhere in Europe; the Revolution converted that debate into
life and death questions and widened it; Burke's considerable intellectual energies
helped to shape, albeit unsystematically and indecisively, Europe's post-revolu-
tionary vision.
Notes
1. See John G.A. Pocock, "The Concept of a Language and the métier d'historien-. Some Consider-
ations on Practice," in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern
Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 19-38 and Roy Porter and Mikulâs Teich, eds., The Englighten-
ment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981).

26. PRESENTATION 17
2. See the fundamental study by Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2
vols. (Cambridge, 1978).
3. "Edmund Burke and the Redefinition of Enthusiasm; the Context as Counter-Revolution."
4. Richard L. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton,
1985), esp. pp. 5 7 2 - 8 9 .
5. François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978), pp. 71-72. [François Furet, Interpre-
ting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981)].
6. Mona Ozouf, La Fête révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris, 1976). [Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the
French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, 1988)].
7. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l'obstacle (Paris, 1971). [Jean Starobin-
ski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago
and London, 1988)].
8. Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952).
9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,
ed. J.T. Boulton (London, 1958).
10. See Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven and London, 1983);
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London, 1986). I consider these
themes in a forthcoming article, "Edmund Burke's Language of Politics and His Audience."
11. F. and C. Rivington, eds., The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 8 vols. (London,
1803) 7: 3 6 4 - 6 8 . Hereafter cited as Works. Cf. Burke's remarks to Earl Fitzwilliam, 30 November
1796 on the situation in Ireland which he believed was "perpetuat[ing the] dilemma between
Tyranny and Jacobinism; the Jacobinism too tasting of Tyranny, and the Tyranny rankly savouring
of Jacobinism". See Thomas W. Copeland, et al, eds., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10
vols. (Cambridge and London, 1958-78), 8: 139. Hereafter cited as Correspondence.
12. Burke to Depont, November 1789, Correspondence, 6: 42.
13. "Burke et les Allemands."
14. Lettre à M. le marquis de Mirabeau, 26 July 1767. The relevant passage reads in whole: "En un
mot, je ne vois point le milieu supportable entre la plus austère démocratie et le hobbisme le plus
parfait: car le conflit des hommes et des lois qui met dans l'Etat une guerre intestine continuelle,
est le pire de tous les états politiques." See C E . Vaughan, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques
Rousseau, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1915), 2: 161.
15. See Roger Ayrault, La genèse du romantisme allemand (Paris, 1961-76), 1: 120-27.
16. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmonds-
worth, 1968), p. 196. Hereafter cited as Reflections.
17. See A Treatise of Human Nature, L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed. (Oxford, 1896), Book III, part 2, chapters
7-8.
18. On Hume, see Paul Lucas, "Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription; or an Appeal from the New
to the Old Lawyers," Historical Journal 11 (1968), pp. 6 0 - 6 3 . Also consult, J.G.A. Pocock,
"Burke and the Ancient Constitution—a Problem in the History of Ideas," Historical Journal 3
(1960), pp. 125-43.
19. Cf. J.G.A. Pocock, "The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution," in
Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 193-214, for the view that Burke traced
the rise of commerce to the cultivation of manners.
20. Reflections, p. 172.
21. Penser la Révolution française, pp. 103-4.
22. "Poetical Liberties: Burke and the 'Adequate Representation' of the English."
23. Works, 4: 3 0 - 4 0 .
24. André Michel, ed., Correspondance inédite de Mallet du Pan avec la cour de Vienne (1794-1798),
2 vols. (Paris, 1884), 1: 125.
25. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D.D. Raphael and Alec L. Macfie (Oxford, 1976), VI. ii.
2.10-17 (Part VI, section ii, chapter 2, paragraphs 10-17).
26. Burke to Depont, Correspondence, 6: 4 8 - 4 9 .
27. See Reed Browning, "The Origins of Burke's Ideas Revisited," Eighteenth-Century Studies 18
(1984), pp. 5 7 - 7 1 .
28. See the section on Burke in Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago and London, 1950).
Strauss thinks of Cicero as Burke's spiritual ancestor, but does not discount Aristotle's importance.
See also, Gerald W. Chapman, Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.,
1967).
29. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York, 1962), 1 1 4 1 b 2 8 - 2 9 , 1 1 4 1 b 8 , 1 1 4 1 b l 5 ,
1140b6,1143b28. Cf. the passage in the Reflections, p. 196, in which Burke talks about virtue as
being the way for human beings to perfect their nature.
30. Burke to Depont, Correspondence, 6: 4 8 - 4 9 .

27. 18 HARVEY MITCHELL
31. See Alasdair Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, 1988), pp. 14, 88-89.
32. Reflections, p. 153.
33. Ibid., p. 154.
34. Ibid., p. 153.
35. Ibid.
36. "Edmund Burke and the Émigrés.'*
37. Burke to Sandouville, post 13 October 1792, Correspondence, 7: 263.
38. Burke to Grenville, 18 August 1792, Correspondence, 7: 176.
39. Burke to the abbé de la Bintinaye, 3 August 1792, Correspondence, 7: 166-67.
40. Colin Lucas, "Edmund Burke and the Émigrés", p. 101.
41. "Burke et les Français."
42. Harvey Mitchell, "Tocqueville's Mirage or Reality? Political Freedom from Old Regime to Revolu-
tion," Journal of Modern History 60 (1988), pp. 2 8 - 5 4 .

28. CHAPTER 1
Edmund Burke and the
Redefinition of Enthusiasm:
the Context as Counter-Revolution
j . G. A. POCOCK
THIS colloquium is "devoted to an assessment of the transformation of European
political culture in response to the French Revolution in the period up to 1850,"
and is mainly concerned with the Revolution's role in the historical memory of the
first half of the nineteenth century. Burke is in some ways a strange choice to
introduce such an enquiry; he died in 1797, a surviving witness to a somewhat
imaginary Whig regime which had been upset by George III in 1783-84, and the
restatement of his anti-Revolutionary writings, so that they became part of the
liberal conservatism of late Georgian and early Victorian Britain, is a complex
subject which has been strangely little studied. The decades from 1790 to 1830
from the true Sattelzeit in the history of English-British political discourse, and
though Burke's texts form part of what was going on in that period, he did not
himself belong to it. Many changes in the vocabulary, content and style of anglo-
phone discourse occurred in the course of that Sattelzeit, and the response to
the French Revolution was only one major factor in occasioning them; and that
response moreover, was often hostile and still more often uncomprehending. Of
even the warmest English sympathizers with what was going forward in France it
could be said, as the Parisian authorities said of Thomas Paine when they had him
in gaol in 1794, that their "genius had never truly comprehended the principles of
the Revolution".
Britain is therefore a strange place at which to begin "assessing the transform-
ation of European political culture in response to the French Revolution," and
Burke, though powerful, is an idiosyncratic figure with whom to begin assessing
the British response. But the theme of "Burke" is in large measure co-terminous
with the problématique expressed by the words "Pourquoi entrer en Revolution?,"
and that certainly is a question to which Burke presented a number of answers.
1
These are not normative in character; he saw no good reason why the French or
anyone else should enter upon a revolution, but he gave a number of arresting
reasons why they had so entered, and why others might find themselves in the
19

29. 20 J. G. A. POCOCK
same predicament. Burke's explanations of the process are interesting in them-
selves; they help us understand the peculiar character of the British response to
the Revolution; and I hope to show also that they constitute a discourse, a counter-
discourse, or perhaps even a meta-discourse, which penetrates deeply, if at an
angle obtuse rather than acute, into currently fashionable explanations of the
Revolution as discourse, which our colleagues have been putting forward.
Let me state, necessarily somewhat coarsely—since I am not a specialist in the
history of the Revolution—those explanations as I understand them.
2
They present
the Revolution as a sudden and explosive assertion of the sovereignty of discourse;
more, therefore, than as an event which can be studied as discourse. The serial
collapse of the ancient governing institutions produced a situation in which all
persons seemed free and at the same time necessitated in reshaping their political
universe, and in so doing to reshape themselves. There was already available a
rhetoric, based on a cult of republican rhetoric in the ancient world, according to
which the political animal was what he—rarely she—affirmed himself to be by the
exercise of public speech in a public place. The institutions of political life existed
as they were declared, in speech, writing or marmoreal inscription; even the Rights
of Man took on actuality in virtue of a Declaration. There was a terrifying and
intoxicating freedom to say, to be, and to become what one said one was; com-
munities of speech appeared everywhere, in which legislation, as the ancient world
understood the term, took the form of a kind of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a
creation or re-creation of identity in the immediate encounter of speaker with
respondent. But in this multiplication of Adamic moments, when every word was
the creation of a world, there was no room for contradiction, ambiguity, irony or
implication. All must be transparence^ the word must incarnate itself immediately,
like the sun shining through glass in the simile of medieval Christology. The coun-
ter-statement must be the enemy of speech itself, and therefore of liberty and
virtue; every debate came to be à l'outrance^ and the self-intoxication of speech
was terror. It was difficult to kill Saint-Just without falling back into hypocrisy,
but it seemed to some worth it. There was a certain honesty about the very dis-
honesty of some leading Thermidoreans.
It is not my intention to produce a polemic against the revolution of discourse,
but it is difficult not to do so once one begins articulating the encoded structures
of English political and historical rhetoric. To write a radical language one must
today spend most of one's time deconstructing the speech of others, which was
only part of how they spoke in the cruel innocence of the revolutionary dawn. If
they were legislators and terrorists (it was still a pre-modern world), we, if we
become revolutionaries, are likely to be apparatchiks and inquisitors. My point,
however, is that an antipathy to the sovereignty of self-creating discourse is deeply
encoded in the English language, which contains many effective ways of saying
that the same is necessarily true of language itself. This was already the case in the
time of Burke, and his indictment of revolution is an indictment of the freedom of
discourse to create the world unilaterally; it is the image of the Revolution I
endeavoured to summarize which Burke was attacking when he denounced the
"metaphysician" as legislator. Though he powerfully developed this capacity lat-
ent in English political discourse, he did not place it there. To understand the
British response to the French Revolution, we must study not Burke's response

30. EDMUND BURKE AND THE REDEFINITION OF ENTHUSIASM 21
alone but the context in which it came to be formulated; some English answers to
the question "pourquoi entrer en Révolution?" will appear in the course of our
doing so.
Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
3
was occasioned largely by
Richard Price's sermon On the Love of Our Country, delivered to the Revolution
Society of London in celebration of the one hundred and first anniversary of Wil-
liam of Orange's landing in England, three hundred years ago. If we consider these
facts and study the two texts involved, one thing becomes clear. To these English
disputants, the news of the French Revolution necessitated a renewed discussion
of the English Revolution a century before; they debated whether the revolution
in France was legitimated by the revolution which had occurred in England, and
whether the revolution in England should be interpreted in such a way as would
render it a precursor of the revolution in France. These theses and anti-theses for
interpreting what had happened in 1688 were well in place by the time of the
events of 1789, and even when it was agreed—as it was on all sides—that the
revolution in France was an event of a different order of magnitude from any
which had occurred in modern history, these arguments furnished the norms, the
parameters and the contexts in and by which such a statement could be made.
What this means is that the French Revolution was capable of generating radical
renewals and even innovations in the conduct of English political discourse, but
not of generating a revolution of discourse itself, such as the model I have summa-
rized attributes to France. There was not going to be a moment at which the
English looked at each other with new eyes and spoke to each other in new words,
reconstituting their country in the utterances of liberated speech. If any English
men or women desired such an experience—and it is important that some did—
they must go like the young Wordsworth to France for it, as their descendants in
the 1930s went to Moscow or Barcelona in search of the dawn in which it was
bliss to be alive. Richard Price shows us, no less certainly though much less richly
than his antagonist Edmund Burke, that the English of 1789 discussed the Revolu-
tion in France in terms of their own Revolution of 1688. To do so might in principle
transform the terms in which they discussed 1688, but could not render them
transparent; there might be radical changes in discourse, but there would not be
revolution. The greatest English exponent of the perception that the Revolution
had altered the nature of language itself was William Blake, and he spoke from
under ground. Where his predecessors in the Civil War sects had spoken with
tongues in the midst of their congregations, Blake was driven to invent his own
mythology, engrave his own visions and design his own everlasting gospel in the
solitude of his craftsman's workshop. He has been called "a man without a
mask,"
4
but transparence is too public and too republican a term to be applicable
to him; he was a prophet but never a citizen.
Our contemporaries display the Revolution as a text, or rather as the writing of
one; with France as the text to be rewritten. What I am saying is that the English
translated the text as it reached them into terms of their own which were already
well established, and thereby contextualized it, subjecting it to the discipline of a
discourse externally existing; as perhaps the Dutch or the Swiss might have done
if the revolutionary word had not reached them in the wagons of a revolutionary
army, and as of course the Prussians did even under those conditions. But by the

31. 22 J. G. A. POCOCK
standards which the model of revolution by discourse presents, contextualization
is an action necessarily conservative; the freedom to create is moderated by a
structure of givens. If there had already existed an English radical discourse cap-
able of reformulating the text of Hanoverian politics, it would have possessed its
own structure and subtexts, and must have striven to contextualize and assimilate
any discourse reaching it from France. Freedom is necessarily imperialist once it
looks to the frontiers of its own dialectic. It is in fact a matter of debate among
historians of England whether such a radical discourse existed, and I incline to the
view that there was none with enough revolutionary potential. If there was a
radical discourse it was an inheritance from the English past—this is true even of
Thomas Paine—and one is left repeating the received wisdom that because England
had undergone a revolutionary experience in the seventeenth century (and a revo-
lutionary experience is not the same thing as a revolution), England was a deeply
anti-revolutionary society in the eighteenth and nineteenth.
5
In English politics the
revolution was over and done with; I am of the opinion that it had failed; but even
if it had been still going on, or if in the 1780s it had broken out again, it would
not have been the revolution which the discourse model attributes to France, and
would have striven to contextualize it.
Let us now return to Burke and to "pourquoi entrer en Révolution?" We see
that we are committed to some exercises in double encoding. The English and the
French Revolutions were being stated and re-stated in one another's light; there
existed two modes of interpreting 1688, the one conducive to hostility and the
other to sympathy towards what was happening in the France of 1789. Burke
expounded the former interpretation of the English Revolution; he was concerned
also to state why exponents of the latter interpretation were sympathizers with
the revolution in France, and why it was dangerous that they should be. This led
him to take the further step of considering why the Revolution had happened in
France, and to give answers to the question "pourquoi entrer en Révolution?" on
the basis that the Revolution was a French event with a French history. He was,
further still, concerned with the Revolution as a European event, occurring in the
history of Europe as the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment understood and presented
it; and in his later writings—above all in the Letters on a Regicide Peace with
which his life closed—he exerted himself to depict it as a process subverting all
Europe, and to depict Europe as the structure undergoing this subversion. But his
eye did not cease to be on the Revolution's English sympathizers, and the question
"pourquoi entrer en Révolution?" is addressed to them to the point where it
becomes a question of their involvement in revolutionary processes which can be
imagined if not encompassed in Britain.
Two problems must now be considered. How far was Burke's interpretation of
the Revolution as a French and as a European event achieved by application of
arguments and perceptions framed in the interpretation of British history since
1688? How far did he see the Revolution's English sympathizers as involved, and
how far shall we see them as involved, in the revolutionary processes occurring in
France and Europe? To rephrase the latter question: were those styled "English
jacobins" revolutionaries operating as such in an English context, or were they
the first fellow-travellers, fascinated by the spectacle of a revolution occurring
abroad but unable to translate it effectively into words or actions of a revolution-

32. EDMUND BURKE AND THE REDEFINITION OF ENTHUSIASM 23
ary character in their own sociopolitical system? How effectively did the two
texts—French and English—interact with one another? Was "pourquoi entrer en
Révolution?" a question that could be asked in English?
The Revolution of 1688 had occurred in two interwoven contexts, which may
be separated as civil and ecclesiastical. In the former setting, there had from the
outset existed a repressed, which we take to be a minority, opinion that the fabric
of government had, or should have, been momentarily liquefied and re-created at
or after the flight of James II: that there had or ought to have occurred a dissolution
of government and a reversion of power to the people. John Locke, who had
written a programme for such a revolution in the early 1680s, published it in 1689
with the hope that the Convention Parliament then sitting, which had assembled
as an emergency measure in the last days of James's reign, would remain in being
as a convention constitutionnelle instead of declaring itself a parliament, which
would imply that the structure of the constitution remained unaltered and con-
stricted its sovereignty.
6
But Locke's hopes had been disappointed; and by declar-
ing itself a parliament, the Convention had proclaimed that history was still
sovereign in England, in the form of historic or "ancient" constitution. Nothing
could be more anti-revolutionary by the standards of the Tiers Etat one hundred
years later; and Burke's polemic against the French Revolution begins as a polemic
against what he saw as Price's attempt to maintain the myth that the English
Revolution had entailed a dissolution of government, after which the crown had
been re-conferred by the people on revocable terms. Burke had the statutes on his
side; there was no doubt that this had not occurred in law, or in the facts as the
law constituted them. We might wish to add that he had the great renown of
Locke against him, were it not for the fact that neither Burke, nor Macaulay two
generations later, thought it worth mentioning Locke even in refutation. We might
then suppose that Locke was not after all the received exponent of the revolution-
ary reading of 1688, were it not for the fact that in 1781 Josiah Tucker had
published an attack on the American Revolution, and on Price's support of it, as
founded on a Lockean heresy of government.
7
Since Burke had at that time been
in a marginally pro-American posture, he had found himself one of Tucker's tar-
gets, and perhaps this helps explain his silence about Locke nine years later.
1688 is therefore the source of Burke's insistence on the primacy of history: on
the affirmation that every act is performed in a context of previously given facts
and norms, over which it does not possess absolute or revolutionary power. This
does not mean that every act must be the perpetuation of a legal or customary
precedent; on the contrary, Burke insists that the English Revolution was an emer-
gency measure, justified by necessity rather than by right, and even that it was an
act of just, because necessary, civil war. But this action was undertaken not to
create a constitution but to preserve one; it was not the author of its own legitimat-
ing conditions, but was justified and controlled by the authority of a history which
had come into being without it. The text may rewrite the context, but does not
inscribe it on a tabula rasa; does this mean that in civil history there is more to be
said for Golden Calves than for Decalogues? But the Revolution of 1688 had been
enacted in ecclesiastical history as well as in civil, and without understanding this
we shall never understand what Price was saying in 1789, what Burke was saying
about him, or what either was saying about the Revolution in France.

33. 24 J. G. A. POCOCK
The English Revolution had been a crisis in the history of the Church of England,
or to be more accurate in that of the Anglican church-state.
8
It had been undertaken
because James II had made a bid for Dissenting support in his programme of
protecting and promoting Catholics, and had therefore been in part a preemptive
strike aimed at keeping the Dissenters on the Protestant side as the Church of
England defined it.
9
Since the Dissenters were Protestants, this had succeeded,
though narrowly, at the cost of leaving the Church threatened with reduction to
a mere department of a state which had been reconstructed with a minimum of
reference to it. A detail of this reconstruction had been the Toleration Act of 1689,
in which the church-state had reluctantly agreed to cease regarding Dissenting
worship as itself unlawful, while continuing to insist that those who engaged in
it should do so at the price of exclusion from crown office or membership in
corporations. This amount of toleration had been conceded only to certain cat-
egories of Dissenters; Catholics had been excluded from it, and so had those
more radical Protestants who denied the Trinity or the full divinity of Christ, and
therefore denied that the Church possessed authority as an extension of the divine
body. It was Dissenters of this strain of opinion who had been campaigning
through the 1770s and 1780s against the implications of toleration, and in
demanding that full civil rights should be conceded irrespective of religious pro-
fession had approached the demand for a complete separation of church and
state—a demand on the point of being granted in the revolutionary United States.
Richard Price was among the leaders of this campaign, who it is important to note
were recruited both from Socinianized Presbyterians and other Dissenters, and
from Anglicans no longer able to subscribe to the more Nicene or Athanasian of
the Thirty-Nine Articles.
John Locke re-enters the scene here. His religion, though he never left the Church
of England, was a strongly Socinian kind,
10
and it is probable that the Rational
Dissenters—as those of Price's stripe came to be called—knew this. He had been
an outspoken enemy of all kinds of clerical magistracy, and his concern to see
Parliament become a Convention may have been connected with that fact; what
the status of the Church would have been in an England where the constitution had
been dissolved and reconstructed we vainly guess. But the Rational, and mainly
Unitarian, Dissenters were interested in stating that in 1688 the constitution had
been re-affirmed by nothing but an act of the people's will precisely because doing
so reinforced their claim to civil liberties irrespective of church membership. A
Revolution which had disregarded the historic constitution in church as well as
state would have claimed civil rights on civil grounds alone and made no commit-
ment to either the church apostolic or the church as by law established. But this
does not mean that Unitarian thinking was ceasing to be either apostolic or eras-
tian. A consequence of their steady erosion of incarnationist theology was that
religion in their minds was coming to be identified with enquiry with reason's
search after beliefs in which it could rest satisfied; so that—as Burke had remarked
of their American brethren in 1775—liberty of religion was coming to be identified
with religion itself. Those who followed "the dissidence of dissent and the prote-
stantism of the protestant religion," in Burke's phrase, and in Tucker's would
protest against their own religion if they could find nothing else to protest
against,
11
were apostolic in the sense that they identified Christ with the entire