Burke and Tocqueville: New Worlds, New Beings

1. Revolutionaries

Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville agreed in their analyses of some of the causes of the French Revolution, most particularly on the role of the "men of letters," and the prestige and influence they gained as the traditional political elites lost power. This new intellectual class became what Daniel Roche has called "a substitute government, at once omnipotent and powerless,"¹ the product of a state that was an unhappy mixture of modern and archaic elements, in which those who once had power lost legitimacy, and those who gained legitimacy failed to win power. Burke famously contrasted this situation with that in England, where men of letters, particularly those who scoffed at traditional pieties and beliefs, were rewarded with little notice in their lifetimes and near oblivion thereafter. For Burke, this new grouping had the further disadvantage that it substituted the real world with the world of its imaginings, and then was shocked (or would have been so) to see these imaginings realized in actual practice. After the first year of the Revolution this charge was routinely leveled against the philosophes. They had indulged in visionary dreams that had become nightmarishly real.² This was a pathology that derived from a fundamentally corrupt position that began in the powerlessness of the literary clique and ended in Jacobin dictatorship. As with the colonial predators in India and the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, these new intellectuals and/or revolutionaries had come to regard themselves as the true representatives of the state and believed its interests were their own. Quarantined within the worlds they dominated, they became criminal or protocriminal formations who practiced violence and injustice and called it civilization. They represented a threat to the French or British states that foolishly nurtured them by policy or allowed them to flourish by default. Of the three groups, the intellectuals were the most serious threat, since they were the creators of the new modern spirit that was to topple France and threaten Europe; the colonists were unwitting conspirators in this process, since they disgraced the name and retarded the development of the institutions—the famous "British Constitution"—that made Britain the benign alternative to French modernity.

Tocqueville's reading of the ancien régime as itself being the first revolution (and 1789 the second) initially makes a glaring contrast with Burke's view of 1688, since Burke argued that the Glorious Revolution was as unrevolutionary as it was possible for a revolution to be. In France, the battle between the nobility and the centralization of administrative power by the Crown, the replacement of society by the state, constituted a revolution that began with Louis XIV rather than with Louis XVI.³ The absolutist state created a caste system in its readiness to exchange power for a commodified version of status without function; titles were sold like fake antiques, and intellectual systems and opinions had the glamour of novelties traded in the salons and journals by writers innocent of the practicalities of political life. If the British ancien régime, ushered in by 1688, was, in Tocqueville's terms, wholly unlike the centralizing French system, it did nevertheless mark a real advance in the achievement of liberty, if not of equality.

Ireland, with its bad aristocracy and its peculiarly decayed version of society, was excepted from this benign analysis. In this respect, Tocqueville's views chimed with those of Burke, although there were important differences. Tocqueville did not contrast the emergent modern society with a venerable and traditional order that must, by every rhetorical resource available, be rendered sacrosanct and timeless. On the contrary, he claimed that the centralized administrative state had concealed its operations behind an increasingly venal facade of traditional codes. His famous disagreement with Burke's analysis of the Revolution is rooted in this. "Burke does not realize that what stands before his eyes is the revolution which will abolish the old common law of Europe; he does not understand...