Edmund Burke Lecture, Trinity College, Dublin, October 6,2022
Michael Ignatieff’s latest book is On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.
Many democracies trace their origins back to moments of revolutionary upheaval and violence. The United Kingdom’s modern history of constitutional monarchy began with the revolution of 1688, when Parliament deposed James II and put William and Mary on the throne. The American republic began with an armed uprising against the British empire in 1776, followed by an internal civil war that ended with loyalist Americans stripped of their property and sent into exile. France begins its democratic history with the storming of the Bastille, followed by revolutionary terror, a war that exported revolution across Europe and ended with the autocracy of Napoleon. Irish democracy traces its beginnings back to the insurrection of the United Irishmen in the 1790’s, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the war of independence that ended with the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. To this day, Ireland’s national anthem—The Soldier’s Song—commemorates this tradition. In Africa and Asia, likewise, revolutionary anti-colonialist uprisings gave birth to democracy in India, Indonesia, Kenya, Ghana and many other states in Africa and Asia.
Once founded in a moment of revolutionary upheaval, democracies must manage their legacy: to ensure that revolutionary violence, sanctioned as a sacred necessity at the beginning, does not legitimize violence when democracy faces a moment of crisis, deadlock or extreme polarization.
The problem is basic to the theory of democracy itself. If revolution’s very purpose is to anchor the sovereignty of the people at the base of the new democratic constitution how then to prevent the people from taking up arms to defend it when they believe it is in danger? How to prevent the democratic principle from becoming an enemy to the institutions that democracy uses to stabilize the exercise of power in the people’s name?
The Irish nationalist tradition has faced this problem from the beginning. While most nationalists in Ireland have always promoted peaceful means towards the goal of a united Ireland, there have been more radical strands prepared to defend, support or actively fund insurrectionary or terrorist methods to achieve the same goal. Which side you take, what you believe the Irish revolutionary tradition authorizes today, has divided Irish politics since independence.
In the United States, the debate about what a revolutionary tradition meant began with the founding itself. Thomas Jefferson did say, in 1787, that he thought an uprising every 20 years might be necessary to prevent democratic freedom being strangled by corrupt elites. His friend, James Madison, on the other hand, hoped for the opposite. In the Federalist Papers—he argued for a new Constitution that would balance the majoritarian principle with counter-majoritarian checks to ensure that popular sovereignty would never pose a threat to the stability of democratic institutions.
Yet the insurrectionary traditions in American beginnings have had a stubborn and sturdy after-life, right up to the present day. There are two ways to interpret what happened at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Either you believe a wild and reactionary mob, egged on by a populist demagogue, sacked the seat of American democracy; or you maintain that an assembly of righteous patriots, inspired by Sam Adams and Tom Paine, rallied to defend the constitution against an attempt by a corrupt elite to certify a stolen election. If you are a Democrat, you believe the first story. If you’re a Republican, you may well believe the second, and if you do, you are, in effect, appealing to the American revolutionary tradition.
We all know how it turned out: the siege failed, the election was certified, by a Republican Vice President, America’s institutional guard rails held fast, and those responsible for the siege are facing justice. So far so good, except that some elected officials, including a former President, who had taken an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, continue to argue that an election was stolen, and in doing so, continue to legitimize the use of extra-legal means to, in their words, defend democracy.
As the saga of Weimar Germany in 1932-3 teaches us, it was not violence itself that did democracy in, but the duly elected conservatives failing to condemn Nazi street violence and failing to quarantine Nazi representatives in the Reichstag. Non-violence is the existential rule for any democracy. When elected officials fail to defend non-violence, democracy’s days may be numbered.
While democracies have often been forced to use repressive means to defend constitutional order against insurrection—suspension of habeas corpus, preventive detention of suspects, forcible dispersal of disorderly crowds and so on—democracies are bound, by their very constitutions, to re-establish public liberty as soon as an insurrectionary challenge has been surmounted.
Authoritarian regimes, of course, are under no such obligation. They too may have revolutionary origins. Think Russia 1917. Think China 1949. Each solved the problem of revolutionary legacies in their own unique way. Lenin and Mao put in place successor regimes that exercised a ruthless monopoly on the levers of political violence. When that was challenged within their parties, the dictators of the 20th century—Hitler, Stalin and Mao– did not hesitate to unleash counter revolutionary violence: Hitler in the night of the long knives in 1934; Stalin in the purges of 1937-8 and Mao in the cultural revolution of 1964-72. Those who survived these purges resolved to suppress all revolutionary tendencies within and beyond the party itself. China’s current leader, Xi Jing Ping, was one of the party princelings sent into rural exile by Mao. He may now imitate Mao, but judging from the way he has ruled since taking power, exile seems to have taught him that all experiences of popular power, all insurrectionary impulses, whether from the bottom up or top down, are to be ruthlessly suppressed. Vladimir Putin may have dissociated himself from the Bolshevik tradition, which he blames for conceding Ukrainian statehood in 1922, but he remains a Bolshevik in his exercise of political authority. Indeed, one could think of contemporary Russian and Chinese politics as comprehensive and consistent attempts, since 1917 and 1949, to liquidate the challenge to single party rule posed by the revolutionary traditions that brought these parties to power.
Democracies can’t solve their revolutionary problem this way. Once a society allows liberty in any form it must try to channel insurrectionary impulses into institutional channels. French history offers a particularly relevant example of the instability that recurs when democracies fail to do so. The absolute monarchy restored in 1815, after Waterloo, was overthrown in 1830; the constitutional monarch, Louis Philippe, put on the throne in 1830 was overthrown by a Parisian uprising in 1848; the republic created in 1848, was replaced by Napoleon III’s autocracy in 1851. In 1870, Napoleon was deposed after military defeat; after the Paris Commune was suppressed in 1871, the Third Republic survived until it succumbed to military defeat in 1940. The post-war history of France witnessed the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958, the peaceful coup which brought De Gaulle to power and inaugurated the 5th Republic. Revolutionary and insurrectionary traditions are not the only reason for chronic French political instability, but they continue to legitimize popular challenges to democratic stability and elite rule to this day. When President Macron joins in the singing of the Marseillaise—with its famous lines “Aux armes citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!”—he, like all French Presidents, has to pray that his fellow citizens, especially those wearing gilets jaunes—don’t take the words literally.
Throughout the 19th century conservative writers—De Maistre, De Bonald and Gobineau, as well as conservative statesmen, Metternich and Talleyrand—believed the only solution to the problem of the revolutionary tradition was to suppress it utterly. These counterrevolutionaries believed that repression and indoctrination in the values of God, Throne and Altar were the only way to return Europe to order.
While the conservatives took a frankly counter-revolutionary position, the liberals of the 19th century—Benjamin Constant, Alexis De Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill– took an anti-revolutionary stance, seeking to channel aspirations for liberty, equality and fraternity into a reform process that would enfranchise the respectable working class and put an end to the revolutionary challenge.
Modern liberalism has remained an anti-revolutionary politics ever since. For the liberal tradition, the essential task of a democratic politics is to channel an unruly popular will into an institutional process of incremental reform. Judith Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear,’ includes fear of revolution, fear of what can ensue if a democracy allows its revolutionary beginnings to tempt its citizens to resort to the bullet rather than the ballot box.
Managing revolutionary heritages remained a central problem of politics throughout the 20th century. Communism and Fascism were movements seeking to realize the core dream of all revolutions: to redeem a corrupt and fallen society, to empower the powerless and to rid society of its enemies foreign and domestic. Once fascism and Communism had been definitively defeated, the first in 1945 and the second in 1989, an anti-revolutionary liberalism seemed the only unsullied political path left open. In Fukuyama’s words, liberalism’s triumph represented ‘the end of history’, the definitive solution to the vital problem of how to reconcile popular sovereignty with liberty and order.
Now, with January 6, 2021, we’re reminded, once again, that history never ends. We’ve returned to a problem that the great thinkers of the 18th century regarded as a central issue of politics.
Which brings us to Edmund Burke. No 18th century thinker gave more careful thought to the question of how a free society manages a revolutionary heritage; no one thought more carefully about the instability introduced into society once popular sovereignty became its operative principle of legitimacy.
He’s frequently lumped with the conservative counter-revolutionaries, de Maistre, de Bonald and Gobineau, but that forgets that he was a reforming Whig, who spent his entire political life in opposition to the Tory ascendancy; as a Whig he claimed proud descent from the revolution of 1688; he supported the creation of an Irish Parliament and Catholic emancipation as solutions to the perennial imperial problem of governing Ireland; he denounced the East India Company for tarnishing British principles of rule of law and fair play; he lent support in Parliament to the American Revolutionaries. He cannot be lumped with the conservative counter revolutionaries for he was quite clear that there were circumstances, a moment beyond law and right, when a responsible politician faced with intolerable abuse, chaos or misgovernment must support the forcible overthrow of a regime. As he wrote,
“The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is a not a single act or a single event which determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past. . . . Times and occasions and provocations will teach their own lessons. . . . but with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.”
The American revolution was, in Burke’s mind, just such ‘a last resource’. The British government’s failure to understand American grievances and its violation of the colonists’ liberties had left independence by force of arms the only possible outcome. As Richard Bourke argues in Empire and Revolution, Burke understood the American Revolution, not as revolution but as restoration, as a just struggle to reclaim the rights of free born Englishmen, endangered by an imperial administration’s blind folly.[1]
In supporting the Americans, Burke was adopting the same argument the British patriots of 1688 had used to justify the Glorious Revolution. Revolution was not a voyage out into the open sea, but a return to a safe harbor, a restoration of endangered liberties.
This reading, of course, was not at all how radical Whigs and Dissenters, a century later, understood 1688. When the French Revolution dawned in 1789, dissenters like Richard Price and the Constitution Society in England claimed that the French were merely seeking what the British had already achieved a century earlier, viz, in Price’s words:
First; The right to liberty of conscience in religious matters. Secondly; The right to resist power when abused. And, Thirdly; The right to chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves.
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, of 1790, is a root and branch attack on this radical reading of Britain’s revolutionary traditions. Far from establishing popular sovereignty, 1688 merely restored ancient liberties. The radicals of 1790, Burke tartly insisted, had confused 1688 with 1649, when an English revolution had deposed and executed a king. 1688 re-established hereditary monarchy and parliamentary authority, and the entire stability of the British constitution rested on shared understanding of this fact.
As for the French Revolution, Burke maintained, it was not a restoration, but a coup to bring down a king. A reforming monarchy had reached out to the populace by convening an Estates General to resolve the perennial problem of financing the French state. Far from a majestic popular uprising to demand liberty and equality and fraternity from a despotic state, the French Revolution, Burke insisted, was nothing more than a cabal of Parisian intellectuals and discontented French aristocrats, backed by the Paris mob, seizing on the summoning of the Estates General to grab power for their own sakes. Revolution, he conceded, might have been necessary, if reform had become impossible, but reform was underway, and it was revolution that swept this path away. Revolution was, in Burke’s words, an ‘unforced choice”, a fond, that is, a mad, “election of evil.’ The result, he predicted in 1790, would be violence, chaos and economic calamity.
For Burke, the problem with revolution was not just the the fatal tendency of popular sovereignty to legitimize violence against ‘enemies of the people’, but the very idea that political authority could be founded on rational consent and withdrawn at pleasure. Submission to authority, he argued, is never a strictly rational, consensual matter. You submit to what you can be persuaded to love, to fear, to respect, and this process of persuasion begins when we are children and is coterminous with our socialization into our families, schools, communities, and institutions. Through a gradual socialization in obedience, we come to take it for granted that we will respect both elected and ceremonial authorities: we know what we get in return—stability, order and continuity—but Burke insisted that this is not a contract, calculated on the basis of self-interest, but rather a result of the cultural construction of affection and emotion. As the recent funeral of Elizabeth II brings home, even to convinced republicans, when authority has legitimacy, we see ourselves reflected in its symbols and rituals; we are approving our best versions of ourselves; as royal families mourn, we mourn our own losses. These symbolic exchanges between citizens and their highest authorities are constitutive of consent itself. On the other hand, in societies where constituted authority gives us very little of what we need—little order, less justice, not much continuity, and very little pride or recognition—our obedience may cease to be a matter of affection or respect and may come to rest on little more than the fear that things could be still worse, and that revolutionary change offers us little hope of better.
In a passage in Reflections, lamenting the Paris mob’s storming into the bedroom of the Queen in October 1789, Burke exclaimed that the mob’s actions were a violation of the bonds of obedience, at once sexual and sacrilegious. “Never, never more”, he wrote,” shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.”
Proud submission, dignified obedience, subordination as exalted freedom: these paradoxical phrases are the crux of Burke’s vision of how rulers secure the obedience of the ruled: by incarnating the values and dreams of their subjects. In this process of deep emotional identification, rulers secure the submission of their subjects without degrading their pride.
To suppose that political order could be maintained by consent alone—as the English radicals and French revolutionaries supposed—was to make the error of believing, he said, that the state was “nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco.” On the contrary, it was “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Monarchy preserved this partnership with the dead and the unborn; a republic dissolved it. The living had no right to dissolve a political order simply because they were discontented; they had an obligation to consider both what their ancestors would have said and what their children and grandchildren would say, and together this sense of politics as a partnership across the ages should, at the very least, make revolution in the here and now an ultimate, and reluctantly chosen last resort.
The genius at work in Reflections consists in Burke’s awareness that the French Revolution represented the dawn of a new age—of ‘sophisters, oeconomists and calculators’—and of a new calculus of obedience, based in what they believed was rational consent—while furiously and desperately warning that such a calculus would drain the sacred springs of ‘proud obedience’.
Burke’s response to the rise of the United Irishmen in the 1790’s and Wolf Tone’s insurrection, with French help in 1796 followed consistently from this position. Since the 1780’s, as an Irish Whig he had preached the necessity of Catholic emancipation and the creation of an Irish Parliament, as the only ways to reconcile the Irish to imperial rule. As he wrote in a letter in 1792, Catholic exclusion threatened the constitution itself: “Our constitution is not made for great, general, proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later, it will destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution.” When Pitt and the Tories ignored Burke’s warnings, and Wolf Tone and the United Irishmen launched their ill-fated uprising, Burke confessed, as he mourned the premature death of his son, that he was now no more than an old oak, struck down by the storm, lying broken in the fields. He died a year later, believing his life’s work in defending conciliation and reform in the face of revolutionary threats, lay in ruins.
Catholic counterrevolutionaries of the 19th century—especially Joseph De Maistre—carried on Burke’s polemic against popular sovereignty, but they argued, as Burke never did, that if authority was not based on consent, and if faith had lost its hold on power’s subjects, power and authority would have to be maintained by the hangman.
The 19th century liberals—Tocqueville, Mill and Constant—accepted, as the Catholic counterrevolutionaries could not, that modern political authority had lost, with the revolution, its sacred anchorage in the alliance between throne and altar. This was a legacy of revolution that could not be undone. Liberals understood that the hangman, celebrated in de Maistre’s terrifyingly enthusiastic encomium, as the only remaining support for a counter-revolutionary order, could not hope to prevail against the aspirations unleashed by the French revolution. The future of political legitimacy would be democratic, and neither theocratic nor authoritarian. Consent could indeed reconcile popular sovereignty and political order. This was Tocqueville’s conclusion from his visits to America in the 1830’s: that a vast country could be held together by a secular religion of shared democratic consent, that a revolutionary beginning did not menace the stability of the political system it called into being, and most surprising of all, that a society ordered by a purely secular principle of consent could also be religious. Religion was everywhere in America, Tocqueville discovered, but it was a private matter, separated, by a constitutional wall, from affairs of state.
Much else, besides the sturdy survival of religion in a supposedly secular age, would have surprised Burke if he had lived to see what the age of the ‘sophisters, oeconomists and calculators’ had brought into being. The recent funerals, not just of Queens but of Presidents, teach us that even in an age of secular consent, tradition, ritual, sentiment and feeling still play a decisive role in bonding rulers and ruled, and where these are absent, the stability of political rule may be fragile indeed.
The larger question is whether we are, once again, as Burke was in his lifetime, in an age of revolution. Certainly, we are in an age of revolutionary change: the geostrategic balance is being overthrown by the rise of China and the aggressive revanchism of Russia; new technologies of the digital era have upended our politics; the facts of climate change have upended our energy economy and may threaten life on earth; and most of all, the ‘creative’ and not so creative destruction of capitalism are spreading disruption around the global economy. New inequalities, not just of income or capital, but of race, gender, creed and region are putting enormous pressure on democratic and authoritarian systems of government alike.
A period of revolutionary change, however, is not always or necessarily a prelude to political revolution. When change benefits most people and when governments compensate those who lose out, change need not lead to revolution. But this time, at least since 2008, we appear to be edging towards a moment where revolution is suddenly on the cards again. On the left and the right of the political spectrum, there are populist appeals to overthrow largely liberal, cosmopolitan, well-educated elites. Right-wing populism, in Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Hungary and Brazil campaign against cosmopolitan elites for imposing a multicultural, liberal model of society that threatens the national identity and cohesion of majority communities. Left-wing populism in the UK, the US, Brazil, Peru and Argentina maintains that neo- liberal elites have sacrificed the poor and the marginal to the greed of global capitalism. Whether from the left or the right, populist movements are moving from the edges of the political spectrum into power, and the question is whether they continue to play by the constitutional rules or overturn them to consolidate authoritarian rule.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, in thinking about populism, whether of left or right, we should beware of adopting the anxious viewpoint of embattled liberal elites.[2] Populist challenges from below have a long history in our democracies and they can be a source of renewal, as they were in the Progressive era in the US. Populism becomes dangerous, first, if it gains office, as in Hungary, and then uses democratic mandates to undermine the counter-majoritarian institutions—courts, media, free universities—that help to keep citizens free. It becomes dangerous if populists fail to gain power at the ballot box, as in Trump’s failed election bid in 2020, and then adopt unconstitutional or violent means, first to discredit democratic institutions and then to gain power.
It is too early to tell whether the populist challenge to liberal elites will merely test the democratic system or bring about its downfall. It all depends whether liberal elites in power can remain in control of the forces of revolutionary change—economic, social and cultural– or whether they lose their nerve and succumb; and whether democratic electorates succumb to the populist siren song. One lesson from previous revolutionary ages surely is that you never know in advance whether a situation has reached a revolutionary moment. You only know when the moment is upon you.
Edmund Burke insisted that the French Revolution was not what later romantic historians like Michelet and revolutionary theorists like Marx and Engels believed, namely a vast ineluctible and inevitable historical necessity, but a political event, structured by human intentions and mistakes. If revolution was not a fatality, but a political event, it could be forestalled and contained, if enough people continued to believe in the democratic process and if leaders displayed the requisite prudence. Burke’s very fulminations against the leaders of the French revolution restores their responsibility and in doing so reminds us that we the people make revolutions; they do not make us.
A further lesson, from any serious reflection on revolutionary legacies in the history of democracies, surely, is to disabuse us of any nostalgia, euphoria or anticipation about revolutionary moments. Yes, revolutions have given us the democracies we cherish, but their birth was always bloody. Revolutions, then and now, may also be unavoidable, even necessary, a last resort when all else fails, especially when democratic leadership fails to respond to the challenges of change. But no one who takes seriously Burke, or Tocqueville’s lessons about revolutions past will greet revolutions to come with anything but deep concern, especially for the way in which democratic principles themselves, whether advanced by left or right, can be used to justify violence, cruelty and the destruction of democracy itself.
Footnotes
[1] Richard Bourke Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2015)
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[2] “Democracy versus Democracy: The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy” in Andres Velasco and Irene Bucelli (eds) Populism: Origins and Alternative Policy Responses (London: LSE Press, 2022), ps. 35-51
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