Burke’s endless reaction: 1789 & feudalism’s end creates modern conservatism

By Ramin Mazaheri

Itwould be rote to defend the French Revolution by showing the moral and intellectual worth of its left spectrum - of Robespierre and Danton, Marat and Babeuf. What’s far more interesting is to fully examine the right’s assessment and criticisms of 1789. If we do so we will be exceptionally rewarded - after all, we unearth the very foundation of Western conservatism.

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is the Bible of modern conservatism, with Burke regarded as that ideology’s indisputable philosophical founder. It is no exaggeration to call him the “Marx of conservatism” in Western Liberal Democracy.

Edmund Burke: revered defender of political reaction and unapologetic enemy of egalitarianism.

It’s not only Burke’s political philosophy which has become dominant in the West, but his economic philosophy prevailed as well. Read Adam Smith’s evaluation of Burke: “…the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us.”

Additionally, just as conservatives today despise the “fake money” of Bitcoin - which is creating a new class (both a class of monied persons and a class of investment type) - so Burke railed against the French Revolution’s creation of paper “fake money”, which also spawned powerful new classes. The assignats were paper bonds created by the projected bonanza which would be reaped from the sales of the newly confiscated estates of the Roman Catholic Church in France, and thus Burke’s condemnation of this - and his promotion of wealth based in land, gold and commerce - has become adored by people who distrust going off the gold standard in 1971, Quantitative Easting, Modern Monetary Policy and cryptocurrency. Burke was a member of the Whig Party, which established the Bank of England and were thus the first central bankers, giving him even more economic relevance to our era of Bankocracy.

As Burke fears how the new money from a newly monied class will reduce the power of the established upper classes, Reflections is full of apparently tolerant concerns (Burke was a Protestant) for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. Burke’s concerns are nothing but false piety masking his class interests, but Reflections is considered by today’s conservatives to be a righteous and modern call to defend your true Church. Burke defends Christian monarchy as being free from despotism, it being Christian. As for the aristocracy beneath the holy autocrat, Burke simultaneously insists that aristocrats in Christendom have always practiced the true faith, although they have been converted to atheism en masse in France over the last century. This mix of multicultural tolerance (as long as that culture is Christian) and loyalty to establishment religion (no matter how infested with nobility and disregard for the poor) is quite similar to the religious stance of modern Western conservatives.

Burke also rails against calls for subverting the aristocratic world - a world full of hard-won merit, he insists - by a new media-political-intellectual class which has become divorced from the longtime forces of traditional wealth and the church. In the 21st century technocrats and meritocracy’s allegedly-deserving victors denounce a new intelligentsia - that of the masses, found on Facebook, social media, blogs, etc. - for subverting the mainstream media of sacred Western Liberal Democracy, which is - in fact - actually being run ever so well by the establishment’s elite.

Burke writes little about the abolition of seigneurial rights, mainly because it’s such an indefensible position - in typical English fashion it was certainly bad “manners” to talk of such things openly, or rather, it had just become bad manners. Burke’s insistence of a truly noble nobility which justifiably rules and oppresses because of the English triumph of social “manners” over mere Greek “virtue” became translated culturally into the alliance between culture and aristocracy which is sounded all over the art of the subsequent Victorian Era. Again, Burke’s importance resonates with Marxian reach. The Western condemnation of “deplorable” Yellow Vests, Trumpers and Brexiteers for their lack of respect and awe is above all a continuation of Victorian repugnance for the “ill-mannered” and ill-bred masses - i.e., its own fight to continue aristocratic domination.

But wait, there’s more! It’s said that much of Burke’s modern appeal is that he allegedly discovered the roots of modern totalitarianism: He was first to be spooked by the “spectre of 1789”, which is synonymous with the spectre of socialism, which modern conservatives falsely conflated with totalitarianism. What’s obvious to all is that the accusations against socialism as “totalitarian” from a class of hyper-privileged persons who fear losing their privileges - even if these privileges are revoked by legal, democratic revolution - are intellectual invalid barring extraordinary proofs of intellectual objectivity. Burke fails that test all over. Therefore the true base of Burke’s appeal here to modern conservatism is so hard to categorise that we can only call it psychological: A desire to privilege illogic and inefficiency - the role of an “invisible hand” - in both economic and social affairs, something rejected by socialism’s central planning and demands for equality. Logic, science and mathematical reasoning must always appear terribly totalitarian to those, like Burke, who invariably resort to using an “invisible hand” in their equations which explain and order societal affairs - not an “invisible hand” that is Godly, but the unplanned order of hereditary right, the unplanned order of unregulated markets, the unplanned order of slavishly following an unchangeable tradition/past, and the unplanned order of the unpredictable eccentricities produced by a totally unchecked individuality/libertarianism. Modern conservatives agree: an “invisible hand” ultimately rules and all humans can do is work around it; planning against the “invisible hand” is for mainly psychological reasons, personally anathema to modern conservatism.

Therefore, in political structure, economics, culture, religion, intellectualism and psychology you should see why I am starting off this book with Burke - he combines to become the absolute cornerstone of Western conservatism, and Reflections on the Revolution in France distills what reasoning is used to oppose every modern, progressive revolution. He’s the man who stood up to the Yellow Vests of 1789 and shouted them down as people who were too stupid to govern, who were trashing and upending the economy, who were disrespectful boors, who were godless demons that respected nothing, who were too stupid to be listened to, who failed to comprehend that incomprehensibility must predominate, and who must become silent on pain of being sent to a new Bastille.

Marx had Burke’s number: In a single word - “sycophant”.

Burke hated 1789, but few realise he wrote just as poorly of nascent Western Liberal Democracy

However, it would be unfair and incorrect to say that conservatism in Western Liberal Democracy can be reduced to encouragements to become a slavish sycophant to the status quo because “conservatism” has universal values like family cohesion, respect for religion, thrift, hard work and modest pride in a modest amount of property. Such traditntal concepts are easily also found in Confucianism, Hinduism, the Islamic World and even nomadic life. Therefore to pin all the West’s faults on their version of “conservatism” is illogical, foolish and doomed to failure.

Of course, many Western fake-leftists do exactly that - in the US, for example, the constant claim is that the Republican Party is the sole party responsible for all the evils at home and abroad, which totally ignores the failures of the Democratic Party and of American Western Liberal Democracy itself. It’s easier to blame conservatism than to refine and enlighten your leftism.

But read Burke’s master work and it’s truly impossible not to be struck by what a tremendous toady this Irishman was to English royalty! If the noble class were one-tenth as noble, blameless and competent as he repeatedly claims then nobody would have ever had the slightest notion to overthrow them. If the revolutionary class in France - which is to say, millions of people - were as vile, clueless and without merit as he claimed then they could not even have had the intelligence to tie their shoes much less envision an unprecedentedly democratic and egalitarian type of society.

Examples of his toadying are legion, so I will not waste time listing giving examples. Simply open Reflections on the Revolution in France to any page, stick your finger on a sentence and it will likely be describing the noble class as nothing but people who make Marcus Aurelius look unwise, every small-town cleric as improvers upon the philosophy of Jesus son of Mary, and the king as - per the writing of one similar Hindu toady (whose name I forget) - being a being of such cosmic goodness that lighting bolts of pure enlightenment shoot out of his big toenail.

Burke’s book has become a manifesto because Western conservatives want to be affirmed in the idea that slow reformism of the status quo - which is English parliamentarian monarchy - is the only sociopolitical solution. “Keep calm and carry on” - as opposed to abrupt and daring revolutions which aim to institute equality immediately. He’s wrong: oligarchy disguised as ineffectual parliamentarism (with a monarch or a prime minister or a president) is a less democratic and egalitarian system than those proposed by Socialist Democracy, and this was precisely the cry and proposed solution way from the French Revolution up to the Yellow Vests.

But what few read Burke for is this: His book is the ultimate takedown of modern Western Liberal Democracy at its very conception.

Therefore, we can read him and - unbeknownst to many modern conservatives - find some very just and salient criticisms of Western Liberal Democracy precisely when the child has first been placed in the cradle. As I will discuss in the next chapter, the 1688 Glorious Revolution - the birth of English parliamentarianism - is not the birth of modern democracy but merely the first limitation on European absolute autocracy, which was usually also an absolute theocratic autocracy as well, thus creating England’s oligarchy.

It is vital to realise that Burke’s masterwork was not written after “the Terror” or after the rise of Napoleon or - shockingly - even after capital punishment was pronounced for Louis XVI. It was written at the very start of the revolution, in 1790. Burke is writing merely after the fall of the Bastille and the declaration of the end of feudalism!

This change in the nature of society is enough to shock Burke the Whig, who is a proto-Western Liberal Democrat despite his refusal to sanction anything but monarchical oligarchy; he’s an aristocrat shocked at losing his privileges over the property of his workers and his status as being a DNA cut above the common rabble.

This shock at the very start of the French Revolution form the completely counter-revolutionary basis of his passionate reflections, which are sent in letter form to a fellow aristocrat in France, and which become history’s best example of intellectual opposition to the French Revolution from the point of view of both monarchy and early Western Liberal Democracy. By examining the text which first criticised the actions of the obvious forebears of the Yellow Vests, we can see how the criticism of the Yellow Vests’ demands is not recent, but goes back over 230 years.

The root of these centuries of opposition is an opposition to monarchy/autocracy and a demand for an equitable redistribution of wealth and political power - this is the battle of modern politics, and just as Marx must be the cornerstone of any modern leftist so Burke is the cornerstone of the modern conservative. Whether or not the autocrat is Emmanuel Macron, ruling by executive order and smashing the Yellow Vest demonstrations, or Louis XVI makes no difference: both their means and their ends are the same - political autocracy - and from the Jacobins to the Yellow Vests the demands has always been the same, i.e. for more grassroots rights to political power and wealth for the masses than Western Liberal Democracy can ever offer its citizens.

The notion of ending aristocratic rule: As shocking to the elite of yesterday as it is for today’s Western elite

The great, galvanising crime for Burke was threefold, and I think only the last would be seriously debatable today, and only by a few: making the king finally answerable to a single parliament (no House of Lords) composed mainly of non-nobility, the abolition of feudal titles and rights and the nationalising of the Roman Catholic church.

Beginning with the last: It should be reminded that what we can call the “nationalisation” of the Roman Catholic church and the dissolution of the Roman Catholic monasteries occurred in England - via the creation of the Church of England - under Henry VIII, more than 250 years earlier than in France, “the daughter of the Roman Catholic Church”. The Whig Burke decried this for France even though the Whig Party’s early members came to economic prominence in a large part from royal land grants of former Roman Catholic Church lands! I am not going to debate the merits of Europe’s Protestant Revolution - I will simply take that revolution as a grassroots, honest desire for greater emancipation from the Vatican in many ways, economics included. Therefore, England had already profited from their spiritual independence for centuries, yet France should be faulted for doing the same so very much later? Cui bono - not monied Whigs invested in France, but a French nouveau riche and the French peasant - thus Burke’s opposition.

What 1789 demanded was not a complete separation between republic and church, but a pledge of allegiance of the church to the new republic to create a better, more locally-devoted clergy. Fifty-five percent of French clergy would accept to take this new Constitutional Oath (CHECK), which (again, I am not entering into religious discussions her) can be fairly viewed as a modern and progressive demand to serve your local laypeople well and firstly. Contrarily, the Church of England in 1789 was precisely the same as their aristocratic parliament: a hierarchy headed sycophants, largely limited to fellow nobles, who were engaged in maintaining the deeply embedded socio-economic class disparities created by English feudalism. Napoleon’s Concordat, which will be discussed in the next chapter, will make peace with the Vatican and also cement a new and more progressive clergy for France; a complete separation between church and state would not occur until the passage of the “1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and State”. This pledge from a clergy towards a national democratic revolution was frightening to Burke and exposed the alleged progressivism of England, which in 1788 had a claim to be perhaps the most progressive country in Europe, for what the nation still is today: an unmodern oligarchy with a rich, landowning church that refuses to engage in a serious questions of redistribution of wealth or political power.

Nationalising the church, attacking the social and economic privilege of the nobility via ending feudalism and constraining the king’s power with a parliament which doesn’t aim to collude in preserving an aristocratic oligarchy - these three crimes alone joined together to galvanise Burke to turn into a Cassandra regarding how the French Revolution heralded the slow death of the autocratic order of the oligarchy.

So the French Revolution has just begun and barely a drop of royal blood has been shed but Burke simply can’t believe his eyes - he thought that the era of aristocratic autocracy, supported by a clergy which looked the other way and an intelligentsia restricted to butt-kissing the first two estates (as Burke did) would go on for ever.

The Western Liberal Democrats who opposed the Yellow Vests are precisely the same: they are modern day aristocrats who support the autocracy of the French executive, the elite-only justice of the judicial branch, care not that the legislative branch is just for show, who are unhindered by any appeals from a politically-active clergy, and who either decide to join or bow down to the dictates of the 21st media mainstream media intelligentsia.

Why do you think like this, Burke?!

This is why reading Reflections is so important - to find his justifications for autocracy, faux-meritocracy, technocracy of the inept, spiritual guidance from unrighteous righteous and minds bent on subservience, i.e. a modern Western conservative whose conservatism exceeds just limits.

Natural law: We can do nothing about that which justifies every inequality

Burke’s ultimately rejoinder to attack the ideals of 1789 is that - and here we see the same justifications of Western Liberal Democratic leaders from the slave-trading time, to the start of Western imperialism in the Western hemisphere, to the eugenics movement to today’s false “the rich deserve to stay rich because of ‘meritocracy’” - : caste is “natural”.

Indeed, it’s that simple: logic, nor a study of history which aims to be as scientific as the subject allows, nor humanity’s finest emotions and desires are a basis for society but only an invisible hand of “natural” laws which dictate that a high and a low must be created and perpetually preserved.

This “natural” law is the basis of “conservatism” from India to England, to the very rigid hierarchical view of Confucius, to the frightened and xenophobic worldview of tribes and nomads, etc. It’s a “bad” conservatism, as it refuses to be compatible with equality.

Over and over in Reflections Burke justifies the privileges of the aristocracy based on some sort of “natural” superiority and the “natural” need for a subservient class in society in order to prevent proto-socialist “anarchy”, which a modern reader sees Burke confusing with the barest “equality”.

Absolutely crucially, he backs their theocratic right to rule - divinity is God-given via birth and bloodline. Burke believes that the highness is real and natural of “His and Her Royal Highness”. It’s always forgotten that until the bloodletting of World War I nearly all of Europe was not just feudal, police states but also theocracies: kings were the heads of churches - i.e. they were the high priest. England still is this way! This is something which appears staggeringly obvious to Muslim readers of modern European history, but this incredibly awful theocratic rule in Europe - one which extended until so recently! - seems to be totally unrecognised in Western descriptions of their political history and situation. Europeans act as if they are as many millennia removed from cavemanism as they are from being ardent supporters of the most irreligious type of theocracy.

Burke is not from the final era of total scoffers at the French Revolution’s Rights of Man, but merely the very first. Again, it is glossed over in the West how the modern, liberal rights are so very new in Europe - this upcoming chapters will remind how the entire 19th century was a victory of Anglo-Germanic monarchical repression of the upstart French Revolution. It is extremely comparable to the way the Yellow Vests spread across Europe - to over 30 countries around the world - and only lost because they were tremendously repressed.

Beyond this “natural law”, it’s clear that to Burke and conservatives that money matters, and it matters so much because the presence of money, to conservatives, bestows merit; papers over hypocrisies; make criticism easy to luxuriously ignore. The confiscations of the church estates in France began the rise of a revolutionary new “paper” assignat money, and as Burke scholar J.G.A. Peacock wrote: “This is the key to all his analyses of the Revolution, and is bound to remind us of earlier Tories who, in the reign of Queen Anne (reign: 1665-1714) had attacked the Whig ‘monied interest’ and declared that ‘the Church was in danger’.” What Peacock may or may not have understood is: 1789 was the first redistribution of wealth from the elite down to the peasant (thought not every French peasant), and the key to Burke’s analyses of the Revolution is that of a typical modern conservative to any socialist redistribution of wealth or political influence.

The Whigs were modern conservatives in their view that all money - whether landed, trade gained from imperialism or industrial wealth - were in harmony, unity and striving towards progress: money leads the way. Modern conservatism will, eventually, accept Bitcoin wealth because they eventually sanction any and all wealth. Both Burke and the modern conservative believe the class war is wrong - the only just war is to fight your way up in class.

Conclusion: A Whiggish clerisy to sanction monied nobility until the non-existent Judgment Day

Many Whigs of the 21st century are attached to the old religion, but there, too, has been a reconciliation; an accommodation just as significant as between monarch and president/prime minister in Western Liberal Democracy - that of secularism, the new Western state religion, which is also a new religion founded on the state itself. In modern conservatism secularism is the iron law, and it necessarily promotes the production of a spiritually-indifferent, neutered, class-unconscious clerisy; secularism doesn’t make every citizen this way, but it necessarily produces a class dedicated to preserving secularism. This new clerisy can be attached to an established religion, or public agnosticism, or outright atheism, or even bizarre polytheism - as long as a cleric does not promote mixing religion and politics/economics. Western society considers itself to be the apex of progress because it has deposed the clergy but not nobility - this is false, because while it declares humans radically equal irrespective of religion it declares humans radically unequal as concerns class.

Modern conservatism is Whiggish in that it conflates not just love of the nobility, or the neo-nobility, with patriotism, but religion with mere property: property is sacred, even though it is merely property, and to attack property is heresy in Western Liberal Democracy.

Burkean conservatism is not modern but ancient. As applicable to modern society as Marx is Burke is as inapplicable, despite Burke’s present-day proponents. He is not modern because he writes not to defend the average person’s home, goods and religion but only those of a hereditary aristocracy which any modern person must disavow. I am speaking of the vital difference between the right to personal conservatism and a political & economic conservatism which rejects society’s efforts to introduce humane equality.

Therefore it behooves the modern leftists to wrest justified conservatism (one which supports revolutionary political ideals - and egalitarianism has always been revolutionary in Europe - without undermining the basis of personal and filial calm) from the elitists like Burke. Conservative types of values are what anchor society, including revolutionary societies - the difference is in the bedrock on which your society is founded?

Ramin Mazaheri is a Paris-based journalist, columnist and author. He studied print journalism and history at the University of Missouri. Fluent in multiple languages, he has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, worked in French radio and reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt's Tahrir Square, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He has been the chief correspondent for PressTV in Paris for well over a decade. He is the author of Socialism's Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism, France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values (English and French versions) and I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China (English and Chinese versions, both simplified and traditional).

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France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values