The conservative reaction to radical natural-rights theory

The conservative reaction to radical natural-rights theory

In the latter part of the eighteenth century the three primary principles of conservative political thinking were challenged by the deployment of natural-rights theory for avowedly radical, reconstructive ends. The salience of such language in the revolutionary turmoil that wracked France, Italy and parts of Germany in the 1790s ensured that a critical reaction against natural-rights theory played a significant role in later conservative political thinking. This reaction continued long after natural rights had ceased to be a staple of radical politics, a delayed effect that reflected a widespread and persistent belief among conservative thinkers that appeals to natural rights epitomized perspectives on the nature and source of political authority that were anathema to those who looked to the past to legitimize the present.

Natural-rights theory played a challenging and radical role in Anglo-American political thinking in the 1770s and was resisted by those who supported the British government in the conflict with its North American colonies. The conservative reaction against natural rights theory came to a head in the 1790s when it was associated closely with the later writings of EDMUND BURKE, particularly Reflections on the Revolution in France, Letter to a Noble Lord and Letters on a Regicide Peace. Burke argued that while claims concerning natural rights might account for the origins of government, they could not generate valid criticisms of prevailing ideas, institutions or practices, or justify alternatives to them. This argument was grounded in a religiously motivated scepticism that played a significant role in eighteenth-century Anglican thought. (Hampsher-Monk 1987:33–4) It also brought fashionable ideas about the role of association in human cognition to bear on the distinctive experience of particular communities. Seen from this perspective, the past appeared as a virtually infinite number of associations that provided the cumulative substance of the mind of the community and its members. The products of this process were likened to a ‘second nature’, a non-voluntaristic basis of habit and thought that displaced any ideas or interests ascribed to ‘natural’ human beings. Claims based upon natural rights were thus held to be irrelevant to the evaluation of

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contemporary political institutions, or to attempts to specify the duties of rulers or the rights of subjects.

In place of what he took to be an intellectually flawed and dangerous appeal to natural rights, Burke extolled a system of government that was the finely wrought outcome of a tradition of human interaction, not a conscious product of human legislation. This conception of British government had strong parallels with the language and frame of mind identified with the common law. In both cases, custom and precedent were endowed with legal and symbolic privilege. They were ‘coterminous’ with the community and the longevity of the institutions ascribed to them was due to their proven capacity to meet its needs by addressing an infinite range of problems that had arisen in the course of its history. Burke likened the transmission of rights and institutions through the stable medium of the traditional constitution to a process of inheritance. This perspective at once evoked the reality of a constitutional structure in which political rights were closely related to property holding, the hereditary transmission of monarchical office and hereditary title, fundamental biological processes and familial relationships. The fact that inheritance was seen as entailed meant that all its advantages would be jeopardized if its disposal or alteration was left to the passing whim of a single generation.

When communities sought to dispense with the entail attached to their inheritance, they lost the protection afforded by what Burke called the ‘cloak of custom’, leaving themselves exposed to the vicissitudes of aggregated private judgements. The hazards of such a rash move were increased immeasurably when the least rational, most passionate and most economically desperate sections of the community played a determining role in political deliberations. Indeed, such a state of affairs contradicted the very idea of government: coercive agencies were necessary for productive human life precisely because of the intellectual and moral shortcomings of the lower classes, and the pressing need for them to be subject to forms of regulation that they were incapable of framing for, or of applying to, themselves.

Burke’s traditional constitution was essentially that of the Revolutionary Settlement of 1688–9. In opposition to radical accounts that treated this event as a revolutionary act of recreation, Burke argued that it was significant because it restored the nation to a trajectory from which it had been deflected by the misconduct.of James II. In Burke’s writings from the 1790s increasing stress was laid on the civilizing role of an independent Church of England, an institution that was contrasted with the dependent body resulting from the seizure of Church property in France and the creation of a state-salaried clergy.

As in all appeals to tradition, Burke’s was partial and to some degree prescriptive of tradition itself. Thus while he was sympathetic to Roman Catholicism in Ireland on the grounds that it was capable of playing the same role there as Anglicanism did in England,

he was strongly antagonistic towards what he saw as the insolently assertive and independent tendencies in English dissent epitomized by the Reverend Richard Price, the preliminary target of the Reflections. Similarly, while Burke celebrated the capacity of the English constitution to absorb and utilize ‘men of talent’, he was dismissive of the underemployed doctors, barristers and ‘political’ men of letters who dominated the French Constituent Assembly. This attitude to elite recruitment reflected an insistence that an appeal to tradition was not a prescription for intransigent resistance to change. Rather, beneficial change took place, as it had in 1688–9, within a framework supplied by

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precedent and ancient institutions. One of the cardinal sins of the revolutionaries in France was that they had wilfully destroyed a structure that was capable of appropriate reform and had, indeed, shown encouraging signs of this over the course of the eighteenth century. In Burke’s view, however, France was merely the first victim of a distemper that threatened a traditional European order made up of a community of nation-states.

Burke’s Reflections was translated into German soon after publication and attracted considerable attention in the German states. While some of this notice was sharply critical, reminiscent of the response of radicals in Britain, much of it was strongly positive. To some degree the ground had been prepared for Burke in Germany by Justus Möser’s defence of the historically evolved political and social structure of the principality of Osnabrück. However, the timing of Burke’s Reflections, and the fact that it focused on a large and powerful European state rather than a petty principality (Aris 1936:255), lent additional force to his argument. Certainly, in the 1790s and well into the nineteenth century, Burke’s writings were a common reference point for conventional conservatives in Germany and for their less conventional, Romantically inclined, compatriots. These thinkers invoked an image of ‘Europe’ as a coherent moral and political order, although Romantics such as Novalis (Frederick von Hardenberg), Joseph Görres and FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL did not think that this ideal had been realized in early modern Europe. Novalis’s ‘Europa’ looked back to a medieval world where moral leadership was provided by the papacy. Both Görres and Schlegel thought that Protestantism had had a harmful impact on the tradition of universal authority that they identified with Roman Catholicism. For these writers, the idea of an order of European states under the moral direction of the Pope was an alternative to republican cosmopolitanism that erroneously privileged the universal over the particular and local. By contrast, the conservative order was made up of discrete national communities with their own traditions and their own distinctive political and social structures. These structures were integrated in a historically derived network of relationships and dependencies that constrained and moderated the interactions of its members.