Rousseau (Jean-Jacques) and Burke

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Burke Ian Harris Those who thought about the social and political order directed their attention to a new centre of interest towards the end of the seventeenth century. It was not that speculation about political authority was forgotten, but rather that it came to be complemented with a concern for the social order. This concern was primarily political, in the sense that it focused on how people might live well in groups. Sometimes this addressed their morals (the french term moeurs1 captures this meaning) and sometimes their prosperity. To put the matter generally, where the political theorists of the preceding century had looked at politics with an eye chiefly to preserving the citizen and his interests, their successors in the eighteenth century looked much more at how people might live well. Public morals, civic culture, social justice, education (including aesthetic education), ‘improvement’ in its manifold forms and political economy were their preoccupations. The change may be read not least in theorists’ use of reason. Reason was supposed more versatile then than some think it is now. It was supposed to disclose ethical truths and to be instrumental in governing conduct. It is easy to see how the former doctrine took hold: those who thought about morals in terms of natural faculties (as opposed to the information provided by revelation) tended to make use of natural law thinking. Natural law, being concerned in part with the benefits of acting in certain ways, focused on the correlation of means and ends. Hence good and evil would tend to be conceived in terms of reason. By the same measure it was easy to think of reason selecting courses of action, which the will then executed. Of course, not all thinkers were ethical rationalists: but it was true, too, that sentimentalists (not least Hutcheson) supposed that reason, if not the source, was a central element in moral thought and practice.2 The point appeared clearly in Locke, who indicated that God ‘having given Man an Understanding to direct his Actions, has allowed him a freedom of Will, and liberty of Acting, as properly belonging thereunto’.3 This implies that the understanding was a means of virtue. Where reason in politics had been directed primarily towards matters of preservation it was now directed also towards virtue. Robert Wallace illustrated this when he remarked that the more clear and extensive Views Men have of the exact Regularity…that obtains in all the Works of Nature, they must be more sensible of the Excellency, Beauty and Advantages of that Order, that reigns…they must admire it in general more highly, and be less disposed to transgress the Laws of Order in any particular Case. It was not only nature that would stand approved, but the human world too, for ‘the Order of the natural will lead them to love and admire the Order of the moral World, and the Laws which regulate Society and human Commerce’.4 Thus knowledge and virtue were taken to be correlated. Burke began as a representative of this cast of mind. If that had been his destination as well as his beginning, he would not have been a very remarkable thinker. But even initially there was more to him than that and, in the course of his speculations he encountered a thinker who held diametrically opposed views. That was Rousseau. It was the way in which Burke developed his special views, including his response to Rousseau, and the way in which Rousseau developed his own line of speculation that marked them as important thinkers. I Edmund Burke was born in 1729 or 1730, the a son of an Irish attorney. After education at Trinity College, Dublin he crossed St George’s Channel and thereafter rose rapidly in English society, first obtaining a considerable reputation as a writer and then as a politician, becoming a member of the House of Commons, a privy counsellor and, on two occasions, a minister just below cabinet level. He is best known to posterity for his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), but this work was the product not least of his thought over the preceding forty years, especially that of the 1740s and 1750s. What sort of thinker was he? His mind was equal to a wide range of concerns—theology, aesthetics, moral philosophy, history and political theory. These interests were intimately connected. Burke’s theoretical writings suggested that the world was patterned unequally. When Burke was an undergraduate at Trinity, he and his friends founded a society devoted to improving themselves and the world. We discover from the club’s minute book and from the writings which Burke published at the same period that he concerned himself especially about three matters: the revealed word and its effectiveness; aesthetics and virtue; and the possibilities of power and wealth for the good of society. The first concern was expressed in ‘an extempore commonplace of the Sermon of Our Saviour on the Mount’ and was amplified when Burke asserted ‘the superior Power of Religion towards a Moral Life’.5 For the second Burke assumed that the arts and virtue went together, as ‘the morals of a Nation have so great Dependence on their taste… that the fixing the latter, seems the first and surest Method of establishing the former’.6 In January, 1748 he asked, ‘who…is so audacious as to affirm Knowledge begets Vice?’. Wealth and power entered into a debate on the merits of the lord lieutenant of Ireland, in which Burke observed that ‘the opportunity a man can have of promoting ye good of his Fellow creatures, is proportionate to his wisdom, his wealth, or his power’. He dwelt later on the necessity of property—‘a man’s property’s his life’—and on how the gentry of Ireland could improve their estates and so benefit the whole community. In March 1748 he descanted on the example of ‘a Gentleman of Fortune’ who had used his wealth for the good of his dependants through improvement. He had introduced manufacturing onto his estate, so that ‘his Tenants grew rich, and his Estate increased daily in Beauty and Value’. Burke looked to the propertied order for the good of his country, moral and economic (though lamenting on occasion that they usually did not provide it).7 These concerns, diverse as they seem, came to be related in one theory. Burke embraced these three into a single understanding through the idea of inequality. Let us start with the revealed word. How could revelation—of all things, one might ask— fit this description? The answer lies in deism. Deism may be defined as the view that the information mankind requires as a condition of salvation is obtained from natural means alone. By natural was meant what could be collected through human faculties, especially reason, as distinct from revelation. It was revelation, in fact, about which the deists had qualms. For they assumed that God willed that everyone in principle could be saved. This implied that each person had the minimum means needed for salvation. This could not include revelation, for the Bible had not been available to all people at all times. It followed that the revealed word was at the very least superfluous to salvation and at worst not actually of divine authorship. The deists considered that mankind’s own faculties, especially his reason, could supply him with the information he needed. Burke found deism obnoxious. His observations on the Sermon on the Mount8 declared a preference for revelation, arguing that it was superior to reason as a means of salvation. Shortly afterwards he suggested that Dublin’s deists were really enemies to morality.9 For if revelation was integral to God’s design of saving man, to deny its authenticity was a denial of His plan.10 To deny God’s providence might in itself be held to signify atheism, or scepticism about revelation might be felt to reflect a complete unbelief. At any rate whilst Burke could later distinguish deists from atheists,11 he was not ultimately much concerned about the difference.12 To uphold revelation in the face of deism implicitly was to prefer a pattern of divine conduct involving inequality. To make revelation necessary to salvation is to found it on a form of inequality, for historically revelation was diffused over only a limited part of the globe: God’s favour was not extended equally to all. As such, revelation implies the concession that at least one part of God’s government was conducted on unequal lines. Since that part, the business of salvation, was obviously the most important to man and God was held to work in a constant fashion, we might expect that others would conform to the same pattern. So we find in Burke’s views on the social order. Before turning to them, it is as well to turn to what Burke rejected. Again deism figures, this time not merely for itself but in the logic Burke read into it. Deism, in his view, opened up unpleasant implications for society. One deist in particular might be read in this way. The posthumous publication of Bolingbroke’s works was a literary event and one especially interesting to Burke. For to provide deism with a conceptual guarantee one had to reject God’s particular Providence—His concern with individual destinies—for that obviously embraced revelation. Most deists were not so thorough: but Bolingbroke was.13 His view was objectionable on wider grounds. Besides discounting revelation it implied that God exercised no direction over specific cases. Individual events and institutions would not reflect His intentions. The social order, on this reading, need not answer to any beneficial purpose. Such a view would be unlikely to appeal to Burke, who at Trinity had sensed benevolent possibilities in the unequal order of his day. Yet to understand the form taken by Burke’s argument about the social order, we need to consider another thinker. For shortly after Bolingbroke’s Works were issued there appeared a work which attributed a range of miseries to just the form of social order that Burke approved. This was Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality amongst Men, a work of cardinal importance for understanding both Burke and Rousseau. II Jean-Jacques Rousseau had been born at Geneva in 1712. His early life was marked not least by dependence and by the practice of the fine arts. Dependence appeared first in his being apprenticed to an engraver, Rousseau’s father having come down in the world; next, in a more agreeable but ultimately unsatisfactory manner, in the bounty of Madame de Warens; and then in a role as secretary to the Comte de Montaigu, France’s ambassador to Venice, who ultimately dismissed Rousseau and refused to pay his salary. Thereafter he enjoyed success as a man of letters, writing musical criticism and composing operas. If it were necessary to seek a biographical reference for his doctrines, we could say that his dislike of dependence outweighed his desire to be applauded for his artistic and intellectual prowess. For the central assumption of Rousseau’s thought in the earlier 1750s was that the supposed correlation between knowledge and virtue was mistaken. Accordingly the view of things that followed from it was mistaken too. Rousseau’s Discourse…on…the Arts and Sciences studied the moral effect of knowledge and was submitted in a competition for an essay prize sponsored by the Academy of Dijon in 1750.14 Rousseau argued that virtue and ignorance were correlated and so were vice and knowledge: that ‘our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have been improved’. He considered that knowledge had been deployed to make people behave pleasingly rather than virtuously. He assumed that the disposition of a human being, as it came from the hand of nature, would be read in its behaviour. Here he assumed that a condition of an action’s being good was that it manifested the disposition of the agent, preferably a disposition to do good. But knowledge, Rousseau continued, showed us how to mould our actions in order to hide our dispositions. Thus knowledge concealed the truth. In effect natural people were truthful and sophisticated ones were deceivers. Rousseau went on to suggest that knowledge was encouraged by vice. It was not merely that knowledge concerned vice (legal science was parasitic on crime, for instance), but more especially that those forms of knowledge that pandered to vice (or were unconnected with virtue at any rate) were favoured and those that encouraged virtue were discountenanced. The accomplishments for which people were rewarded were not devoted to any good end, so the ‘question is no longer whether a man is honest, but whether he is clever’. The Academy awarded the prize to Rousseau, perhaps intimidated by his asservation that ‘there are a thousand prizes for fancy discourses and none for virtuous conduct’.15 Rousseau’s inverse correlation between virtue and knowledge, however, lacked something. It lacked an explanation of how this situation had arisen. In order to produce one, Rousseau took himself to the resources of natural law thinking and transformed them. Natural law thinking had emphasized not only reason but interdependence, whether in the form of sociability or weakness. That is to say it had considered the human agent in abstraction from society and government and made two sorts of judgement. One of these was that man was a rational creature, capable of deciding what conduced to certain ends, what was right and how to act. The end that the agent had in mind, primarily, was selfpreservation. The other judgement was that reason adverted to the dependent character of the species. This might take the form of suggesting that people were dependent on God, as in Locke. More generally it suggested that they were not constituted to subsist independently of each other, for instance because they were too weak to subsist individually in the face of their physical environment.16 An instinct for the company of other human beings produced a similar inference: that if each agent was to obtain the ends he required other people were necessary. Hence the dependent nature of man suggested society. The same line of reasoning suggested that government was needed, in order to secure the benefits of society. For despite their needs for others, people tended to conflict, largely over the possession of resources. They were sociable but not peaceable: and this was part of what Kant intended by describing the human condition as a social sociability.17 Hence government was required to restrain human aggression. Rousseau proceeded to stand these judgements on their head in the interest of explaining his inverse correlation of virtue and knowledge. He asserted that by nature mankind was neither sociable nor weak, but rather asocial and strong; not dependent but independent. Neither was man given to aggression, but rather peace,18 If these assertions were made out it followed that society and government did not arise as the products of rational reflection on the human condition. They might be the outcome of something rather more unacceptable. To make out his case, Rousseau evolved a dramatic sequence of history, running from mankind’s natural condition to civil society. Rousseau needed to conduct two stories to achieve his ends. He wished to link virtue with ignorance and vice with knowledge. So he had to explain both the transition from virtue to vice and the growth of knowledge. To achieve these goals he needed to posit a figure of virtue and ignorance, to show the loss of virtue and to explain how knowledge accompanied that loss. The first requisite was achieved in the exemplary figure of the savage, who also provided a way of pointing to the effects of knowledge. The savage embodied at once virtue and ignorance. He was virtuous in that he gave full rein to his natural sentiments and ‘all’ that comes from nature ‘will be true’19 Rousseau said. These comprised powerful instincts for self-preservation and for compassion. We should note in particular that from compassion flowed the ‘social virtues’ and that the savage’s compassion was very strong. So he had the seeds of virtue. On the other hand he lacked the characteristics which would lead him to develop a knowledge that would encourage vice. The savage did not reason. Why? The savage, who was strong, had no need of others to assist him in self-preservation. Besides, he had no instinct for the society of other humans. He was therefore solitary. But if a man was weaker he would need others. Needing them he would have to combine with them; and being constantly exposed to their company he could not but compare himself with them. This, of course, was an act of reason. Reasoning thus cultivated in each individual a sense of his distinctness from others. Under these conditions, if a man prospered, he would have little regard for others, whom he would see as significantly different from himself. So reasoning was a condition of the weakening of compassion. To compare one’s situation with that of the pitiable, Rousseau thought, dried up mercy and led a man to say ‘Perish if you will, for I am secure’.20 So where there was ignorance there was virtue: and knowledge was a condition of the reverse of virtue, a regard only for oneself.21 How did Rousseau fill out the condition under which the latter would flourish, namely the prosperity of one and the inferiority of another? Obviously he required people to enter society, which made comparison possible. He also needed to make one person inferior or, more exactly, dependent on another. The first was a condition of the second, for ‘it is impossible to make any man a slave’, he noted, ‘unless he be first reduced to a state in which he cannot do without the help of others’.22 The transition was accompanied through a loophole in the savage’s independent isolation. Rousseau supposed that the species faced difficulties that encouraged thought and with thought co-operation and enmity. The savage was soporific and unreflective by nature, living off the fruits of the earth. But competition for those resources from other animals or from other people (for Rousseau mysteriously assumed an increase in population) encouraged reflection on how to overcome his circumstances. In part this meant inventing tools and in part associating with other humans to gain benefits unobtainable individually. But, at any rate, human society became established. Now Rousseau did not suggest that society as such was reprehensible or that the acquisition of knowledge was itself vicious. He did indicate, however, that society soon assumed an unequal, indeed hierarchical form in which knowledge became the instrument of vice and misery. Once in society, comparison made one person eager to excel another. Soon human intelligence devised instruments by which a man could outstrip others in accumulating property. This was achieved through the discovery of agriculture and iron, for the art of iron working facilitated extensive cultivation. This required many hands: and it precipitated a state of inequality and, thereby, dependence. ‘From the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another’, Rousseau wrote, from that moment if appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow and where slavery and misery were soon to germinate and grow up with the crops.23 Slavery and misery grew up because there were, on the one hand, those who had acquired property, and on the other those who had not and, of course, here was the condition under which a knowledge of one’s own prosperity dried up one’s compassion for others: ‘the privileged few…gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life’. So the poor, in the face of a lack of compassion, lacked the necessities of life. The rich, however, were also miserable. The withering of compassion and the triumph of self-regard made a man ask, not what it was right for him to do, but what should he do to impress others with his importance. Thus he became dependent on the opinion of others and was only happy when he captured their attention; in which, since they were as much absorbed by their self-regard as he was by his, was a search for happiness in vain. Meanwhile, in order to show their magnificence, the rich multiplied their trinkets, contrivances and all the apparatus of living far beyond their real needs. It was to satisfy these superfluous wants, of course, that the arts and sciences laboured.24 We need hardly insist that the bad effects of the arts and sciences were now obvious, for ‘from society and the luxury to which it gives birth arise the liberal and mechanical arts, commerce, letters, and all those superfluities which make industry flourish, and enrich and ruin nations’.25 The essential point was that man ran sharply away from his natural sentiments and moral conduct to unnatural affections and that these unnatural feelings fed on social inequality, particularly in property. Thus we have Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality amongst Mankind (1755). This piece, like its predecessor, was occasioned by the Dijon Academy. The subject prescribed was whether natural law authorized inequality. Rousseau took over self-preservation from established thinking about natural law: but hadaltered much else in order to show that society had developed as the violation rather than the product of human nature. This time he did not win the prize. III Rousseau did not impress Burke during his visit to England in 1766. Burke, who ‘had good opportunity of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day’, was sure that ‘he entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or to guide his understanding but vanity’, and in fact described him as ‘the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity’.26 This was a distaste conditioned by an intellectual origin. For the references to vanity suggest that Burke thought Rousseau knew that what he was saying was wrong, as in the declaration of Burke’s friend Dr Johnson that ‘a man who talks nonsense so well, must know that he is talking nonsense’.27 Burke had good reason to remark upon Rousseau. The Genevan’s arguments inverted his own assumptions. With Rousseau knowledge accompanied vice and the growth of property produced neither ‘Beauty’ nor ‘Improvements’. When Burke had asked who would affirm knowledge begot vice he could hardly have guessed that someone would be ‘senseless’ enough to assert ‘its Opposite Quality’ that ‘Ignorance should be the Parent of Virtue’.28 No doubt he attributed vanity to Rousseau because this seemed the only explanation for the paradoxical denial of what he took to be unexceptional truths. Certainly Burke attributed views of the ‘Opposite Quality’ to Rousseau. A Vindication of Natural Society illustrated the logic of Bolingbroke’s deism, which had asserted the sufficiency for salvation of the truths which man could learn from his natural faculties, by pushing its position to the Rousseauvian extreme. If man’s natural endowments sufficed for that purpose, why not every other? If revelation was needed, why was civilized learning necessary? And if it were superfluous perhaps it was positively evil? Burke’s parody takes Rousseau’s course: man’s great error in association, the establishment of inequality by the ambitious, and the miseries it brought on everyone are all present. The pseudo-Bolingbroke was made to observe that ‘the original Children of Earth lived with their Brethren…in much Equality’ and that the ‘evils’ of society were ‘not accidental’ for ‘whoever will take pains to consider the Nature of Society, will find that they result directly from its Constitution’ because ‘as Subordination…is requisite to support these Societies’, there result ‘the worst and blackest Purposes’.29 Whilst Burke was mistaken in thinking that Rousseau decried all society, as opposed merely to the course which modern society had taken, he was right in seeing that Rousseau’s views were radically incompatible with his own. An answer was obviously required. Rousseau’s Discourse in effect embodied two claims about modern European society. One was that its hierarchical form implied a perversion of man’s moral feeling. That feeling, which by nature took the form of compassion, the regard for those less fortunate than ourselves, would be stifled by the regard for those above us engendered in the social order. The compassion which man had by nature would be lost in the emulation he assumed in society. Rousseau’s second claim was that a society so constituted, because unnatural, produced a range of economic and social miseries. Both claims condemned social inequality in the name of nature. A mere denial of all this would not do. Burke could not be unimpressed by Rousseau’s case, disagreeable though it was. After all his own view that the rich ought to work for the common benefit sprang from the common assumption that property existed for that end. With Locke, for instance, property existed to increase the fruits of the earth so that it could support people, just as political authority did not exist for the benefit of kings alone. ‘Our modern Systems hold, that the Riches and Power of Kings are by no means their Property, but a Depositum in their Hands, for the Use of the People’, Burke wrote, adding, ‘And if we consider the natural Equality of Mankind, we shall believe the same of the Estates of Gentlemen, bestowed on them at the first distribution of Properties, for prompting the Public Good’. But that, in fact, was just what ‘Gentlemen’ in Ireland had omitted. Despite Burke’s hopes, instead of making the people happy they seemed rather to have impoverished them. So much was this so that civilization wore a strange countenance, for ‘it is no uncommon Sight [Burke wrote] to see half a dozen Children run quite naked out of a Cabin, scarcely distinguishable from a Dunghill, to the great Disgrace of our Country with Foreigners, who’, Burke thought, ‘would doubtless report them Savages’. Here, at the least, was a disturbing resonance in Rousseau’s paradox of the misery of civil society. Indeed the indifference of the gentry seemed to bear out his psychological analysis. Burke asked, Is it not natural for a Man, who rides in his Coach on a bitter Day, or lies on his Velvet Couch, secured from all the Inclemencies of the Weather, to reflect with Pity on those who suffer Calamities equal to his Enjoyments? but their indifference seemed to say it was natural no longer.30 A Philosophical Enquiry showed how nature gave rise to inequality. Burke did not dispute the standard view that men were by nature equal, though he did little to illuminate it. He indicated instead how passions that were entirely natural would give rise to a graduated social order. For Burke divided the passions which ‘served the great chain of society’ under three heads—sympathy, imitation and ambition. These linked men in society and linked them so as to make inequality natural. Sympathy was a ‘bond’ which made men never ‘indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer’. Sympathy by itself did not make for inequality, but it concurred with the passions which did. ‘For as sympathy makes us take a concern in whatever men feel’, Burke wrote, so imitation ‘prompts us to copy whatever they do’; and imitation was complemented by ambition, which gave ‘a satisfaction arising from the contemplation of excelling his fellows’ to a person.31 So it was natural for the ambitious to lead and for the imitative to follow. Hence inequality in society would be established. The bonds of civil society were the causes of inequality: and inequality arose from nature. An unequal society in Burke’s view was not only natural but also progressive. If men were devoted to imitation alone, ‘it is easy to see that there never could be any improvement amongst them’ and it was ‘to prevent this’ that God instilled ambition into man.32 ‘Improvement’ implies human artifice, and Burke was quick to show how human invention lay in the pattern of nature. Nature could extend to artifice and to a specific form of artifice. For ‘nature’ in Burke’s hands included the best adaptation of the artificial to the ends that man’s nature suggested. The content of ‘nature’ would be presented to best advantage not in a primitive condition, as Rousseau had seemed to suggest, but in the perfection of artifice. ‘Art is man’s nature’, Burke wrote, because ‘man is by nature reasonable; and he is never perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best cultivated’.34 At one level this view enlarged upon the view that man required society to flourish, for ‘without which civil society man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it’.33 At another, it authorized the distinct version of civil society Burke intended. For the author of A Philosophical Enquiry believed that society could produce ‘a true natural aristocracy’. Nature culminated in artifice. In Burke’s own words, ‘the state of civil society, which necessarily generates this aristocracy, is a state of nature’.34 Thus, Burke found no reason to think that modern society necessarily involved moral perversion. He wrote of humanity, without deliberation, that ‘we love these beings and have a Sympathy with them’.35 But did society involve the misery of man? We may assume that social inequality could involve an unequal distribution of benefits. But the point is less a state of affairs than how it is considered. We have seen that Burke could be scarcely more restrained about contemporary conditions than Rousseau: but he viewed society in a different light. He would argue that society depended for its prosperity on inequality: so that to undermine the latter was to strike at whatever benefits the poor might receive.36 We have seen that for Burke the divine worked through inequality. Revelation was an unequal mode of distributing information. It involved a further inequality, because God issued it, who was man’s superior: and this superior directed man through his passions. ‘Religion’ showed that God was also the author of a morality discoverable by reason, just as A Philosophical Enquiry had emphasized the passions which tended to establish a social inequality. We need not suppose that Burke’s general stance implies an indiscriminate approval of all graduated dispensations. He could say that ‘all who administer in the government of men…stand in the person of God himself’:37 but this scarcely implies that those who were like God in power were like Him also in goodness. To put the matter another way, some modes on inequality might be better than others. In order to distinguish which, Burke’s focus had to move from the general to the particular. Most of his writings after A Philosophical Enquiry assess individual regimes. He turned first from his native Ireland in his Abridgement of English History. When the undergraduate Burke discussed the possibilities of wealth for good, he had not forgotten power. In fact he thought that power might be more important for good than wealth. Power too required vindication, for among the inversions Burke attributed to the pseudo-Bolingbroke was the claim that any government, in its nature, was an instrument of evil. For just as Rousseau had told a story in which man was corrupted by society, Bolingbroke’s account of history suggested that the liberty found amongst the Saxons in England was subsequently under threat from government and that one of its other enemies was the church. The accounts of Rousseau and Bolingbroke in their different ways suggested that the motif of European and English history was decline, whether in the loss of virtue through society or in the problems of liberty after the Saxons. A writer offering an antidote might prefer to place his accent on progress. Where Bolingbroke’s account questioned whether English liberties had grown since the Saxons and implied with a deistic sneer that the church was against political liberty,38 an alternative would suggest that liberty had grown, not diminished, and that the church had assisted it. Since Bolingbroke argued that the early Middle Ages had seen a virtual extinction of political liberty, it would also be fitting to suggest that it was then that it was established. Burke’s Abridgement did not suggest the direct intervention of God, save at one point, but showed how desirable results occurred gradually without any human having insight into His plans. By the same token the results did not reflect deliberate human activity. Burke emphasized the themes of inequality, improvement and liberty. Fundamentally, he thought, the structure of Saxon and Norman society was sound in that it reflected nature by instancing inequality. Further, whether under the indistinct forms of Saxon society or under the feudalism of the Normans, the subordination of one man to another, reaching to the king, was uncoerced. Therefore kings felt sufficiently secure, on the whole, to govern through laws rather than by force. These monarchs, too, favoured Christianity, which secured the benefits of improvement. Literacy and good manners were nurtured. So Burke could see the Middle Ages as the period in which the bearers of religious and social inequality secured blessings to England. These reflections formed the basis of Burke’s view of how government by opinion arose. Government by force ceased to be necessary when the ruler and the ruled could trust each other. This happened under the feudal system, which embodied the loyalty of subject to sovereign and which Burke would describe eventually as ‘the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty, which by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny’.39 Under this condition force would be replaced by opinion as a mode of government. This feudalism both necessitated and provided. It was necessary because leaders were followed freely (the sovereign ‘was only a greater lord among great lords’)40 and supplied by the code of honour feudalism embodied (‘the soft collar of social esteem’).41 Improvement flourished under the same conditions. Burke thought that ‘the rudeness of the world was very favourable for the establishment of an empire of opinion’ and the body most fitted to form opinion was the Church. As ‘the asylum of what learning had escaped the general desolation’42 she imparted knowledge to the world. Hence the ‘ground-work’ of intellectual improvement was a ‘Gothic and monkish education’, because the Church had been the agent ‘preserving the accessions of science and literature, as the order of Providence should successively produce them’.43 Thus the agents of revelation complemented the beneficiaries of social hierarchy in God’s design. This story was common to Europe and England, for both had been feudal, but there was one feature peculiar to England. Political liberty arose through the coincidence of the growth of order, the church, and the precise structure of Norman society. Executive government extended its power. But it was balanced when the aristocracy was encouraged by the church to resist. Since the aristocracy was not sufficiently strong on its own to prevail, it sought to enlist popular support by claiming liberty for all. In this fashion it was ensured that liberty was not merely won but won on a general basis.44 We could perhaps say that because Burke’s story gives out at Magna Carta it is that unclear what would happen next; and that his story concerned chiefly England. But a passage in Reflections made it clear that to his mind the civilization and manners of modern Europe as a whole were the children of church and hierarchy: Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization, have… depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.45 Inequality in society, in short, was the bearer of the fruits of civilization. Thus Burke’s view of the social order began not merely from a position opposed to Rousseau’s, but also developed in a diametrically different direction. Where for Rousseau inequality in society was unnatural, it was natural for Burke; where history showed a declension for one, for the other it showed a providential improvement. Rousseau was not the only piece of grit in the Burkean oyster: but neither was he insignificant. At any rate, whatever the causation, the result was two irreconcilable theories of the social order. IV It would be wrong to present Burke as an uncritical admirer of contemporary institutions. His middle life (let us say 1760 to 1789) was preoccupied with the abuses of English government and politics, whether at home or in the colonies. Neither did he suppose that the European order was without serious defects.46 But essentially these were criticisms of policy and a recognition of problems rather than a call for wholesale reconstruction. Burke’s view that inequality was the pattern of nature suggested that the hierarchical social order he contemplated had within it the fundamental ingredients of rightness. Rousseau’s attitude, of course, was quite different. To insist that inequality was a moral perversion in the context of an hierarchically constructed society was a radical criticism. Rousseau proposed quite a different standard.47 It has come down to us as The Social Contract.48 This embraced two central items, the general will and the means establishing it institutionally. Both of these transcended inequality. The general will implied an equality of treatment for all citizens ceteris paribus and Rousseau’s means of instantiating it excluded the dependence of one person on another. The concept of the general will has a transparent meaning and an unusual institutional form. By ‘general will’ Rousseau meant a measure which ‘tends always to the preservation and welfare of the whole and of every part’.49 More specifically he had in mind a measure implying the same treatment for all members of a community. In his own words, each person ‘submits…to the conditions he imposes on others’.50 This, no doubt, explains why Rousseau referred to it as justice,51 for justice implies that each person be treated in the same manner as the next, unless there is some reason in their nature or circumstances that requires a difference should be made. In the words of his Letters from the Mountain under the general will ‘all want conditions to be equal for all, and justice is only this equality’.52 The general will stood in contrast with the particular will. Where the general will prescribed an identical treatment for all persons under consideration, the particular preferred the interests of one agent alone. Rousseau assumed that each agent would seek his or her own advantage, writing of ‘the individual’s own will, which tends only to his particular advantage’.53 To illustrate the difference very simply, suppose one were faced with the task of distributing 200 sweets amongst 100 persons (including oneself). The solution fitting the particular will would be to allot all 200 to oneself and none to the others, whilst that matching the general will would distribute two sweets to each person in the group. Rousseau, in effect, proposed that each individual should regard himself or herself in precisely the same manner as others, other things being equal. This principle that one should pay a significant regard to others is embodied deeply in almost all European moral thinking. Those who hold a different view, such as Nietzsche, are in defiant isolation. It appears as a form close to Rousseau’s in the Christian precept to ‘love they neighbour as thyself’.54 Whilst in Rousseau’s time this principle would have found general acceptance, most would have restricted its application. No one would have doubted that some principle of this kind applied to moral conduct. Rousseau, in a like mood, conceived that acting according to the general will was virtuous:55 but it was his application of the concept to politics that was striking. For Rousseau meant to transpose his attitude to inequality from a critical to a constructive key. He had diagnosed inequality as a central constituent in the malaise of modern society. He meant to show how a rather better society could be constructed, one which avoided what he took to be the core of inequality, namely undue distinctions between persons and the dependence of one person upon another. That is to say, Rousseau sought a situation in which people would be treated in an identical manner and one in which personal dependence was not possible. Let us look first at identity of treatment. Beginning with matters of institutional form, we find that the political body that Rousseau conceived to bear the general will had an unusual character. To understand that character we should adduce the requirements for fulfilling the general will. If we take it that each person should be treated in the same manner as the next, ceteris paribus, and wish to move to Rousseau’s position that people are to be treated in the same manner, we must fill out the ceteris paribus clause in a way that admits of no difference amongst the people under consideration. This implies, amongst other things, that they must be juridically equal. How as Rousseau to satisfy this condition? He thought that people were not equal in terms of strength and other natural endowments, and was painfully aware that they did not all have the same status in modern society. Neither of these could provide the means of satisfying Rousseau’s requirements. Hence people would have to acquire equality of standing. This acquisition was provided for through Rousseau’s conception of the political body. Rousseau supposed that people would place themselves upon a footing of equality. This was achieved by each agent totally alienating his person and his rights. A total renunciation was necessary, for prior to it people were unequal in various ways and to reserve something might perpetuate that condition. Hence the foundation of a body capable of bearing the general will was ‘the total alienation of each associate and all his rights’, ‘for…each giving himself entirely, the condition is the same for all’.56 That is to say, people set themselves all on the same footing. But to what did they alienate themselves and their rights? It may sound as if people created a body, rather like Hobbes’s, which was endowed with all of their attributes. So it was, but the crucial question was the composition of this body. With Hobbes the sovereign was juridically distinct from the agents that created it: they transferred rights to it. With Rousseau the sovereign body was composed of those who created it.57 They alienated their persons and rights to a body whose members they became. Indeed it is in precisely this act that we can locate their equal standing: people placed themselves on the same footing as members of the body, as citizens. To put the matter another way, Rousseau conceived people as equal because he identified sovereignty with citizenship. This may seem an excessively simple move, but great intellectual innovation is often distinguished by a masterly simplicity. Thus people obtained an equal status. But we may ask how they were able to do so? Rousseau assumed that nature did not imply the subordination of one to another. His account here, as in his second discourse, transformed the resources of preceding speculation, this time those of absolutism. Neither parentage nor force provided a title to direct others, he thought, thus bypassing Filmer and Hobbes respectively.58 On the contrary, the make of nature suggested that each agent was concerned for selfpreservation and therefore that it was appropriate to exercise his or her capacity for selfdirection, including free will. Of course, the quest for self-protection might be supposed to lead to subordinating oneself to another person without reservation. Grotius (amongst others) had -conceived this. Rousseau rejected the suggestion, like Locke before him, but for a different reason. Where Locke had supposed that people were bound to do God’s will, Rousseau argued that to be free was integral to being a moral agent and therefore freedom could not be surrendered.59 At any rate, it is evident that people would be free to create a body politic. Rousseau’s suggestion that freedom could not be surrendered raises questions about the advantages of his political exercise. Did not setting up a sovereign involve a total surrender of person and rights? It did, but the process produced corresponding advantages, including a freedom more extensive than the one enjoyed previously. Rousseau continued to argue through self-preservation. He supposed that people’s chief means to this goal lay with their force and their freedom. Agreeing with preceding thought for once, Rousseau saw co-operation as a means of increasing the force on which each individual could call. But what of liberty? Rousseau indicated that the question was how to reconcile the advantages of co-operation with the continuance of self-direction. His answer was that in his political body the latter would continue through what he termed conventional liberty, notwithstanding that natural liberty would be surrendered.60 This requires some explanation. Had each agent not surrendered his or her means of independence to the sovereign? They had; and freedom in the sense of independence, therefore, was gone. But in a body answering to the general will there arose conventional or civil liberty. This was a condition in which no agent was dependent on another. For the direction of such a community came from rules that accorded with the general will: that is to say from rules treating each person’s interests with the same consideration as the next’s. It follows that under this scheme of justice or equal dealing no agent’s liberty would be defined in a way that conflicted with another’s or with another’s interests. But why should liberty on this model be an advantageous exchange for the independence given to people by their natural powers? The answer is that Rousseau supposed that people by nature were entitled to whatever they could get. This neo-Hobbesian supposition, it scarcely needs saying, rather suggests that in this condition life would not be very tolerable and it was rational to institute political order—a point Rousseau himself made.61 Hence it was worthwhile to exchange an insecure independence for a protected liberty. Rousseau suggested in his Letters from the Mountain that it was misleading to ‘confuse independence and liberty. These two things are so different that they exclude each other’, he continued: that was to say that, ‘liberty consists less in doing one’s own will than in not being subject to another’s’ and that ‘in the shared liberty no one has a right to do what the liberty of another forbids him to do’. Hence liberty implied the presence of the general will, ‘liberty without justice is a veritable contradiction’.62 Civil liberty meant a liberty prescribed by the measure of justice contained in the general will. In Rousseau’s political body the possibility of personal dependence was removed. For man became more fully master of himself in a political condition. In the first place he was released from direction by his appetites. For though not directed by another people, natural man was dependent on nature, being moved by appetites and instincts. Another direction succeeded, for, in the second place, though no longer independent, he was dependent on laws prescribed by the general will. Third, to depend on such laws was preferable to depending on other people. Rousseau believed that dependence on persons was dangerous. For it was not regulated by any moral norm and so admitted vagaries of conduct. As he put the matter in Emile: There are two kinds of dependence: dependence on things, which belongs to nature; dependence of men, which belongs to society. Dependence on things, having no morality, is not harmful to freedom and does not engender vices; dependence on men, being uncontrolled, engenders them all, and it is through this dependence that master and slave become mutually depraved. If there is some means of curing this evil in society, it is through substituting law for men, and more precisely by substituting laws founded on the general will.63 Fourth, direction by the general will to Rousseau’s mind meant direction by self-legislated measures. Thus, guided by the general will the agent was directed by morality and by himself, rather than by nature and by other people. As master of himself in this way, he was genuinely free. Much else could be said about The Social Contract which only considerations of space prevent. But one matter requires attention. That is Rousseau’s civil religion. This cult would propound a doctrine which, without prejudicing other beliefs consistent with it, was meant to reinforce the political body by teaching congruent with the activity and the regard for others implied in the general will. This was to be contrasted with Christian doctrine, which for Rousseau preached patience and indifference to the world, as well as drawing people’s allegiance away from their proper loyalty to the state.64 If Rousseau had studied Burke as Burke had studied him he would have discovered that Christian belief might match the sort of unequal order that The Social Contract was meant to supersede. V Burke’s views had dwelt on inequality in manifold forms. He had begun by emphasizing the importance of revelation, which was a message distributed unevenly. He had developed a view of man which stated that the inequality between leaders and followers was natural. Social hierarchy, property and government too stood on an unequal basis. The bearers of social and religious inequality, aristocracy and church, had achieved liberty and improvement for England in the Middle Ages. After nearly twenty-five years in Parliament Burke held that good government was still secured by some of the bearers of inequality. So when the French Revolution came it touched a live nerve. For Burke a movement which made égalité its watchword implied the destruction of the conditions on which society existed and prospered. To his mind it would involve not merely the destruction of legal privilege but the destruction of inequality in society and everything which went with it. Burke believed that ‘the true actuating spirit’ of ‘the whole’ of the initial policies of the Revolution belonged to ‘a cabal’. The character of the cabal, that it had the pretension of ‘calling itself philosophic’,65 is a hint to what he thought he saw was the spirit of the revolutionaries, namely that they were deists or, as Burke preferred to insinuate, atheists: It is not with you composed of those men, is it? whom the vulgar, in their blunt, homely style, commonly call Atheists and Infidels? If it be, I admit that we too have had writers of that description, who made some noise in their day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Colins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? The destruction of inequality would be a congenial task for the enemies of revelation to Burke’s way of thinking. To whom did Burke suppose the revolutionaries looked for inspiration, apart from deism? They were alleged to have taken for their ‘canon of holy writ’, ‘standard figure of perfection’ and ‘pattern’ Rousseau.65 In Rousseau Burke had early found a great challenge to social inequality and to society itself. The forces Burke had conceived early in life as the enemies of revealed religion and civil society respectively were now combined. Deism had no use for revealed theology. The civil society which Burke recognized revealed theology to need in order to perfect man’s condition was the object of Rousseau’s enmity. So Rousseau and the deists appeared to him as alike parts of a pattern of rejection of God’s will. With God’s will went the order of modern Europe which embodied the conditions on which progressive civilization was to be had. In other words revealed theology and social inequality or, as Burke said, ‘the spirit of religion’ and ‘the spirit of a gentleman’, stood or fell together. Reflections on the Revolution in France divides into two parts, arranged in dramatic contrast with one another. The first contains an account of a properly regulated society, interwoven with a description of the attack upon it. It displays a providential order. The succeeding part provides a sharp contrast, dwelling on the results of working by human foresight alone—inadequacy. The inadequate nature of the revolutionary institutions is underlined by an appreciation of British recognition of mankind’s limitations and proper reliance on God. The divine order and its opposite stand in pointed contrast. The French Revolution was the worst of nightmares for Burke. The programme he attributed to it implied the destruction of everything he thought valuable in society. Yet by the same token it was the greatest opportunity to expound his views. It had never before fallen to him to deploy his political opinions in concentrated form. Are those views eccentric? All interesting political theory makes connections others have overlooked. This prize is likely to fall to one whose stance is out of the ordinary. Burke’s point of view, formed, we have seen, out of an amalgam of inequalities, was the fruit of a particular origin and experience. No doubt Burke’s perspective is unusual, as is Rousseau’s in a different way, but one of the objects of historical study is to explain how unusual doctrines are natural enough to their creators. NOTES 1 Convenient but hard to translate into English. Whilst the latin mores is a good equivalent it has become a term of sociological art; manners has connotations of politeness; morals connotes ethical distinctions. Moeurs suggests something that is embodied in conduct and in institutions. 2 See [14.55] for a closely observed account of Hutcheson’s ethics and the place of reason in them. 3 [4.6], II.vi.58:324. 4 [4–36], 9. 5 See Burke’s ‘Extempore Commonplace on our Saviour’s Sermon on the Mount’ in [14.27], 3; The Reformer no. 11 (7 April 1748) in [14.26] p. 324. (Dates for British and Irish events before Lord Chesterfield’s Act are given according to the old style, but with the year beginning on 1 January). 6 The Reformer no.1 (28.1.1748), in [14.26], 297. 7 Minute Book (26.5.1747) of Trinity College debating society, [14.26], 248; Minute Book (2.6.1747), ibid. (3.7.1747), The Reformer no. 7 (10.3.1748) in [14.26], 263, 289, 317. 8 [14.27], 3. 9 The Reformer no. n (7.4.1748), [14.26], 323. 10 Cf. Speech on Toleration Bill, 17th March 1773, [14.18], ii: 387f 11 [14.18], ii: 389. 12 [14–25], 185f. 13 Bolingbroke, [14.31], v: 414, ‘The truth is that we have not in philosophical speculation, in any history except that of the Bible, nor in our own experience, sufficient grounds to establish the doctrine of particular providences’. 14 For the Dijon Academy and the circumstances of the 1750 competition, see [14–37]. 15 [14.2], pt i in [14.1], iii: 9. I have not relied implicitly on any particular translation of Rousseau and have made my own renderings where it seemed needful, but the reader will recognize an extensive debt to those listed in the bibliography (see [14.9–15]). 15 [14.2], pt i in [14.1], iii: 17, 25. 16 See for the whole line of thought the concise statement of [14.34], in [14.35]: the end for which men enter into society, is not barely to live… but to live happily; and a Life answerable to the dignity and excellency of their kind. Out of society, this happiness is not to be had, for singly we are impotent, and defective, unable to procure those things that are either of necessity, or Ornament for our lives, and so unable to defend and keep them when they are acquired. To remedy these defects, we Associate together that what we can neither joy nor keep, singly, by mutual benefits and assistances one of another, We may be able to do both… That…by which we accomplish the ends of a Sociable life, is our subjection, and submission to Laws, these are the Nerves and Sinews of every Society or Common-wealth. 17 Immanuel Kant, Ideas for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose, 4th proposition in [14.33], 44f. 18 [14.3], pt i in [14.1], iii: esp. 135–40. 19 [14–3], preamble to pt i, [14.1], iii: 132f. 20 [14.3], preface and pt i, [14.1], iii: 126, 155f. 21 amour propre in Rousseau’s vocabulary. 22 [14.3] dedication, pt i, pt ii; [14.1], iii: 111, 162, 171. 23 [14.3], pt ii, in [14.1],iii: 192f. 24 Ibid. 25 [14.3], i: ix n., [14.1], iii: 206. 26 [14.21] in [14.19], iv: 298. 27 For Johnson, see [14.32], 405, 30 September 1769. 28 The Reformer, [14.26], 298. 29 [14.20], [14.19], i: 8, 22. For a convincing array of parallels see [14.56], 97–114. 30 The Reformer, [14.26], 315, 316. 31 [14.24] (since the text is the same in both editions of [14.24], it is cited here only by book and chapter number), I.xii, xiii, xvi, xvii. 32 [14.24], I.xvii. 33 [14.25], 196f. 34 [14.22] in [14.19], v:101. 35 ‘Religion’, [14.27], p.82. 36 The Reformer (10 March 1748) in [14.26], 314–17; ‘Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’ (written 1795), [14.19], vi:4, 9, 11; [14.25], 372. BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works 37 [14.25], 189. 38 [14.31], especially A Dissertation on Parties, letter xvi; Remarks on the History of England, letter iv; Letters on the Study and Use of History, nos v and vi. 39 [14.23] esp. I.ii, II.i–ii, vii; III.iii, viii, [14.25], 172. 40 [14.23], III.i. 41 [14.25], 170. 42 [14.23], III.i. 43 [14.25], 199. 44 [14.23], III.viii. 45 [14.25], 173. 46 [14.25], 193, on the ‘defects, redundancies and errors’ of existing jurisprudence; p. 141 on ‘hereditary wealth, and the rank which goes with it, are too much idolized by creeping sycophants’; p. 197 on ‘the wealth and pride of individuals at every moment makes the man of humble rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority, and degrades and vilifies his condition’; p. 372 on the ‘body of the people’ who ‘must respect that property of which they cannot partake’. 47 That is a standard, see [14.6] in [14.1], iv:836f. 48 For Rousseau’s larger design, see [14.7], ch. x ([14.1], i:516) and [14.6], ch. v ([14.1], iv:836–49). 49 [14.4] [14.1], iii:245; cf. [14.5], II.iii ([14.1], iii:371); [14.5], IV.i ([14.1], iii: 437). 50 [14.5], II.iv, [14.1], iii:374. 51 [14.4], [14.1], iii:251. 52 [14.8], no. 9, [14.1], iii:891. 53 [14.5], III.ii, [14.1], iii:400. cf. [14.5], I.vii, [14.1], iii:383 and [14.6], ch. v, [14.1], iv:843. 54 For Rousseau’s views on ethics, note his view that ‘La grande Société, la Société humaine en général, est fondée sur l’humanité,é, sur la bienfaisance universelle’, letter to Leonhard Usteri, 18 June 1763 no. 2825 in [14.16], xvii:63, and for a qualification see [14.8], no. 1, [14.1], iii:706. 55 [14.4], [14.1], iii:252. 56 [14.5], I.vi, [14.1], iii:361. The distinction of private and public will be found in [14.6], II.xiii.151:386. 57 [14.5], OC, iii:36if. 58 [14.5], I.ii-iii, 14.1 iii 352–5; for Hobbes and Filmer, see ‘Locke’s Political Theory’ ch. 4, supra, pp. 97, 117; [14.5], I.iv, [14.1], iii:352. 59 [14.5], I.iv, cf. [4.6], II.ii–iv; for all this see ‘Locke’s Political Theory’, pp. 106–8. 60 [14.5], I.vi, [14–1], iii:360. 61 [14.5], I.vi, [14.1], iii:360f. 62 [14.8], no. 8, [14.1], iii:841–2. 63 [14.6], ii, [14.1], iv:311. 64 [14.5], IV.viii, [14.1], iii:460–9; for Rousseau’s view of religion more generally, see the texts assembled in [14.13] and for commentaries see [14.34] and [14.37]’ 65 [14.25], 185, [14.21], in [14.19], iv:297. Cf. [14.25], 181. (i) Rousseau All Rousseau’s works cited here will be found in 14.1 Oeuvres Complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. B.Gagnebin and M.Raymond, 4 vols, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pleiade, 1959–69. The most important texts for our purposes are 14.2–14.8: 14.2 Discours sur les sciences et les arts 14.3 Discours sur…l’inégalité 14.4 Discours sur l’économie politique 14.5 Du contrat social 14.6 Emile 14.7 Confessions 14.8 Lettres écrites de la montagne. Helpful translations include. 14.9 The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H.Cole, London, Dent, 1913. revised J. H.Brumfitt and J.C.Hall, London, 1973. 14.10 First and Second Discourse, trans. V.Gourevitch, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1986. 14.11 The Social Contract, trans. M.Cranston, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968. Other relevant texts by Rousseau include: 14.12 Rousseau on International Affairs, ed. S.Hoffman, and D.Fidler, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991. 14.13 Religious Writings, ed. R.Grimsley, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970. 14.14 Reveries, trans. P.France, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982. 14.15 Lettre à D’Alembert, trans. A.Bloom as Politics and the Arts, Glencoe, Free Press, 1960. His letters have been printed as 14.16 Correspondence Complète, ed. R.A.Leigh et al., 50 vols, Geneva and Oxford, Institut et Musée Voltaire, the Voltaire Foundation, 1965–91. (ii) Burke 14.17 A Notebook of Edmund Burke, ed. H.V.F.Somerset, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1957. 14.18 The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. P.Langford, et al., 5 vols so far, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981–. For works yet to appear in this edition, see 14.19 Works, 6 vols, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1906–7. This includes 14.20– 14.22: 14.20 A Vindication of Natural Society 14.21 A Letter to a member of the National Assembly 14.22 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs 14.23 An Abridgement of English History. Helpful editions include 14.24 Boulton, J.T. (ed.) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958; 2nd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986. 14.25 O’Brien, C.C. (ed.) Reflections on the Revolution in France, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968. Burke’s early writings are printed in 14.26 Samuels, A.P. I. The Early Life, Correspondence and Writings of…Edmund Burke, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1923. See also 14.27 Harris, I. (ed.) Edmund Burke: Pre-Revolutionary Writings, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. Burke’s letters are printed in 14.28 Copeland, T.W. et al. (eds) The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1958–78. Bibliographies of Primary Works 14.29 Todd, W.B. Edmund Burke, London, Hart-Davis, 1964. 14.30 McEachern, J.-A.E. Bibliography of the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to 1800, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989. (iii) Other Primary Sources 14.31 St John, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke Works, 6 vols, London, 1754. 14.32 Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W.Chambers, rev. J.D.Fleeman, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970. 14.33 Kant, Immanuel Political Writings, trans. H.B.Nisbet, 2nd edn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. 14.34 [Sexby, Edward] Killing No Murder, n.p., 1657, published in: 14.35 Ward, A.C. (ed.) A miscellany of Tracts and Pamphlets, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1927. 14.36 Wallace, Robert, Ignorance and Superstition a Source of Violence and Cruelty, Edinburgh, 1746. Secondary Writings Helpful works about our subjects and related matters include: 14.37 Bouchard, M. L’Académie de Dijon et le premier Discours de Rousseau, Dijon, Université de Dijon, 1950. 14.38 Cameron, D.R. The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. 14.39 Canavan, F.P. The Political Reason of Edmund Burke, Durham, Duke University Press, 1963. 14.40 Chapman, G. Edmund Burke: the practical imagination, London, Harvard University Press, 1967. 14.41 Davy, G. Thomas Hobbes et Rousseau, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1952. 14.42 Dérathé, R. Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. 14.43 Dreyer, F.A. Burke: A study in Whig Orthodoxy, Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1979. 14.44 Grimsley, R. Rousseau and the Religious Quest, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1968. 14.45 Rousseau, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1983. 14.46 Leigh, R.A. ‘Liberté et autorité dans le Contrat social’ in Rousseau et son temps: Problèmes et recherches, Paris, Vrin, 1964, pp. 231–47. 14.47 Rousseau and the Problem of Toleration, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978. 14.48 MacCunn, J. The Political Philosophy of Burke, London, Edward Arnold, 1913. 14.49 Morley, J. Burke: a critical study, London, Macmillan, 1867. 14.50 Plamenatz, J.P. ‘ “Ce qui ne signifie pas autre chose, sinon qu’on le forcera d’être libre”. A commentary’, Annales de philosophie politique 5(1965): 137–52. 14.51 Pocock, J.G. A. Politics, Language and Time, London, Methuen, 1972. 14.52 Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985. 14.53 Riley, P. The General Will before Rousseau, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986. 14.54 Will and Political Legitimacy, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1982. 14.55 Scott, W.R. Francis Hutcheson, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1900. 14.56 Sewell jr, R.B. ‘Rousseau’s Second Discourse in England, 1755 to 1762’, Philological Quarterly 17(1938): 97–114. 14.57 Starobinski, J. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, London, Chicago University Press, 1988. 14.58 Talmon, J.L. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, London, Seeker & Warburg, 1952. 14.59 Tisserand, R. Les concurrents de J.J. Rousseau à l’Academie de Dijon pour le prix de 1754, Paris, Flammarion, 1936. 14.60 Toulmin, S. An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1950. 14.61 Annales de la societé Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 14.62 Studies in Burke and his Time (formerly The Burke Newsletter), as their titles suggest, have carried numerous essays on our subjects.