David Brooks romanticizes Edmund Burke in an Atlantic essay, but is he really our hero for a bygone conservatism? Sure, Burke was happy to see Americans gain their independence; it allowed Britain to retain an unrepresentative system of government and avoid writing a constitution.

As a conservative, Burke preferred gradual change to institutions, more evolution than revolution. His critique of the French Revolution was therefore not surprising. Burke justly decried its violent turn. Plus, his own country had tried a republican form of government a century before, which failed miserably amidst a civil war.

Brooks rightly notes that Burke championed small government, but faults the Enlightenment for giving us the large, bureaucratic states that conservatives complain about today. Whatever beef one might have against government largesse today, the Enlightenment was hardly the time to look for evidence of it. Large, bureaucratic states emerged in Europe only after the Enlightenment and perhaps to Brooks’ chagrin, under conservative leaders. The administrative state, with multiple specialized ministries and departments, grew over the nineteenth century and spilled over into the twentieth. What coincided with the growth of those big nation-states? Nationalism and imperialism, with all the civil unrest and wars they seeded along with their costs to the taxpayer.

The Enlightenment was not about abject rationalism. It was about reason, which helped bring ideas like equal rights and representation to government. A compatriot of Burke, Tom Paine, had front row seats to these rights in action during the revolutions in both America and France. Paine famously rebukes Burke in The Rights of Man. In it, Paine likens representative government by election to Reason, and hereditary government of monarchy and aristocracy to Ignorance. “What is government more than management of the affairs of a Nation? It is not, and from its nature cannot be, the property of any particular man or family, but of the whole community…” (Paine, 259).

Paine also reminds us that the only countries of the late eighteenth century that had real liberty were America and France. Paine wasn’t just observing this as a philosopher. As an activist, he knew firsthand the value of freedom of expression. The British government felt differently and found him guilty of seditious libel for having written The Rights of Man. Paine fled to France never to return alive to his native Britain.

David Brooks can keep Edmund Burke, but Tom Paine is my hero.

References

Brooks, David. “I Remember Conservatism,” The Atlantic. January/February 2022, 94-98.

Paine, Thomas. “The Rights of Man (1791-2),” The Thomas Paine Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1987.