Yuval Levin on Freedom Isn’t Enough

I was delighted to see Edmund Burke on your list, but surprised by the choice, Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. I’d never even heard of this book…

I chose this one in part because it’s a lot less known than Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, but in part also because it shows a different side of Burke, which I think is more representative. Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs was published in 1791. In a way it’s not a book, but a kind of pamphlet, though quite long, and it was a response to critics. It’s a response that denies all the charges of the critics, but nonetheless takes them seriously. I think the criticism that Burke took most seriously was that Reflections was just too angry.

This book is much less so – it has a very different tone. The chief critic he responds to, though he actually never names him, is Thomas Paine, who wrote a really extraordinary response to the Reflections called The Rights of Man. Because of the nature of that response, Burke’s reaction in this book is deeper; it gets more into his world view. It’s a book that lays out his conservative disposition and shows that the origin of it is a kind of humility, or at least a rejection of the idea of choice at the centre of his idea of politics.

One of the things that Burke’s critics made clear to him is that there was a less radical version of the kind of view that he was criticising in the Reflections. That less radical version said politics ought to be about letting people do as they choose. What Burke lays out in this book is a view of political and social life that denies the proposition that it’s all about choice. He has this one incredibly beautiful passage, where he describes the ways in which human relationships roll out of unchosen obligations – beginning with those between parents and children, flowing into those between the citizen and his society. He argues that the most important connections we have are not connections that we choose, and the most important obligations we have are not obligations that we choose. But they nonetheless define our lives. And a political philosophy that ignores that can’t be realistic, it can’t be functional.

A touch of background for our readers: Burke is in many opinions the founding father of conservatism. By the time he wrote Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, he was 62 years old. He’d watched the French Revolution, which he was horrified by, and he’d watched the American Revolution, which he was sympathetic with. That’s because he viewed it as an orderly revolution in some sense, not a dangerous one. Burke is most famous for his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which is a manifesto against utopianism. Does he go beyond his anti-utopianism here?

Yes he goes beyond it, or I would say he goes deeper than his anti-utopianism, to show a little bit more of what a positive Burkean teaching would be.

Is it anti-Jeffersonian?

I think it’s fair to say that, at the very least because it’s a response to Thomas Paine who is very much a Jeffersonian. Burke actually never mentions Thomas Jefferson, not just in this piece but anywhere. Which is quite amazing.

Why is it called Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs? Isn’t he an old Whig?

The people that he calls the old Whigs are the Whigs of the Glorious Revolution. It’s an appeal, from his present day, to the people he considers the true Whigs, of the prior century.

There’s a lot of Whiggishness in your book list. Is it, to some extent, a rediscovery of what used to be called Whig conservatism?

I think that’s fair. It’s a more humble conservatism. It’s a conservatism that begins from a limited view of human nature and of the possibilities of politics.

Your next book is by Alexis de Tocqueville. The problem with putting de Tocqueville on a book list is that everyone thinks they’ve read it, heard about it, know about it. Apart from the obvious fact that everyone should read it, why do you include it?

Certainly everyone should read it. I think the way Democracy in America is relevant to understanding conservatism is that it lays out, especially in the second volume, in a really wonderful way, how ideas are translated into political institutions, and even more so into mores and habits and practices of everyday life. De Tocqueville saw people living their lives, but behind it he could see the ideal of equality acting on American society. I think it’s very important to a Whiggish kind of conservatism, to see how ideas translate into practice. They don’t translate in a simple way. They don’t just affect the words of the constitution and the structure of institutions; they affect every part of life.

So here’s a man who sees the notion of equality in America shaping mores all the way down through society

Exactly – changing family life, changing friendship, changing relationships between business partners, between renters and owners, in ways that would not be obvious. These changes were not an intentional function of the people who laid out the American ideals.

And he’s not altogether comfortable with that?

He’s not altogether comfortable with it. De Tocqueville is very worried that the spread of equality will flatten social life and put people to sleep in ways that make sustaining democracy very difficult. And some of his worries are very relevant to conservatives today. He worries that all of this would open a space that would end up being filled by a large and centralised government. Some of his other worries would, in some ways, educate conservatives even more because they’re a little less familiar.