Edmund Burke on natural aristocracy

A voice from a vanished age.

To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found—to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity, and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences—to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man—to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind—to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous art—to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice—these are the circumstances of men, that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

("Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs", Works, III, 85–86; cited by Harvey Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government, University of Chicago, 1965.)

Mansfield points out that Burke's aristocrats, for all their antique flavour, are not Platonic or Aristotelian rulers, imposing their conceptions of the Good on society, but rather leaders who take the existing values of their society and set about advancing them. They are essentially united with their society. Burke's conception of a perfected constitution—as he believed the British constitution of his own day to be—allows for the representation of popular feelings in a lower parliamentary chamber, even if the people should be infected with some "epidemical phrensy" (Mansfield, p. 140). The people, as distinct from their governing class, are incapable of originating or choosing policies which give successful effect to their feelings, and so should not participate in government: the House of Commons should be a check on government, not take part in it. But the popular feelings themselves are to a great extent reliable, and (it seems) politically sacrosanct even if they should be mistaken in some more absolute sense.

This is a key idea in English-speaking conservatism. Present-day conservatives, too, are strongly inclined to look to popular feelings as a reservoir of common sense and decency, and the only available bulwark against disastrous, though perhaps well-intentioned, political theories advanced by idealistic intellectuals who are disconnected from reality. Mansfield's reading of Burke indicates that this is not merely a desperate recourse of contemporary conservatism to populism, resulting from the corruption of the élites, but something older.

This reader is, however, unsure how far he would be prepared to follow popular feeling where it seemed to be conflicting with universal values. The columnist "Spengler" a while ago gave an interesting example of where English-speaking popular feeling might lead: the Southern Confederacy, he claims, was fighting essentially in order to establish an enlarged slave empire in the Americas, where even the poor whites (who formed a large majority in the South) could become wealthy enough to acquire their own black slaves. This kind of concrete collective interest is quite capable of driving a nation to feats of self-sacrifice such as those displayed by the South, which lost a large proportion of its manhood in the Civil War. In practice, few will choose to betray their own people when it is in a fight for its existence, even if that people represents the wrong side in a world-historical struggle, as seems to have been the case for the Confederacy. (If a nation cannot command such loyalty from its members, it probably is not a real nation.) The moral position of someone who does betray his people is deeply ambiguous, even if that people should represent a force for evil in the world. Is a debt cancelled by the bad use to which one's repayment might be put? The liberal believes that he would have no hesitation in choosing universal values above national loyalty, but one suspects that his allegiance to universal values might prove to be somewhat tenuous if it was put to the test.