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EDMUND BURKE
The first important thing to say about Burke is that he was firstly a politician, and then also a philosopher. Of the two schools of thought that have been identified in that period, traditionalism and libertarianism, Burke is very much with the former. If there's one recurrent theme in Burke's letters, speeches and writings, it's his emphasis on the moral and political evils that follow upon the intrusion of theory into political practice.
In a speech given in 1785, Burke was already denouncing the “speculatists of our speculating age”, but it was in the French revolution that the evils of speculation in politics became visible in their full extent and as a whole. These evils, as Burke sees them, can be summarized in four points:
- First, the french revolutionaries went to the extreme of destroying the old regime and of defeating every moderate reform short of destruction because, as theorists, they based their reasoning on the extreme case.
- Second, theorists wrongly supposed that politics is predictable.
- Third, theory is simple; for the extreme and the universal case with which it is concerned is also the simple case, uncomplicated by accidents and confusions.
- Next, theoretical questions are timeless and reversible; practical questions are for decision here and now and can't be reversed.
Burke's political philosophy emerges from the elaboration of two things, prudence and the British constitution. “Prudence” says Burke, is the “god of this lower world, the first of all the virtues”. The reason for the sovereignty of prudence is in the power of circumstances to alter every regularity and principle. Burke emphasizes that the prudence he speaks of is a “moral prudence” or a “public and enlarged prudence” as opposed to selfish prudence. This distinction within prudence corresponds to a distinction he draws between presumptive virtue and actual virtue. Presumptive virtue and wisdom is the lesser.
Of modern political philosophers, Montesquieu is Burke's inspiration in praise of the British constitution as the model of liberty, but Montesquieu wasn't so hostile to theory as Burke was. Tocqueville shared Burke's opinion of the influence of theorists in the French Revolution, but the two diverge in a manner that will help introduce Burke's thoughts on the British constitution. Making a constitution or founding a society was the goal for classical political science, but for such modern thinkers, the crux of politics is where theory and practice met. When prudence becomes comprehensive and makes its determinations for good, then it must cooperate with theory and perhaps even subordinate itself.
Burke does not consider that democracy is a possible regime. People can't rule. Fundamentally, government is not ruling: it's changing, reforming, balancing, or adjusting. According to Burke, the rights of man do not include the right to rule. He states that “manners are more important than laws”. Laws, which are formal decisions by government because they have been made in accordance with its forms, depend on informal manners rather than the reverse. “In all forms of government the people is the true legislator, since the people make its manners. The British constitution doesn't have a kind of order corresponding to one of the
several forms of constitutions; rather, it has order that is of no particular kind because its parts have
This author can be described as a political and legal philosopher, a social reformer, the founder of utilitarianism and a philosophe. “Utilitarianism” indicates the view that whether an act is right or wrong depends on whether one believes its consequences to be good or bad. For Bentham, good and bad refer to pleasures or pains produced in the experiences of individual human beings. Bentham dramatizes the difference between a socratic philosopher and a philosophe. He combines the frame of mind of the philosophe with utilitarianism, arriving at what he takes to be the simple key that will unlock the complexities of the social universe. To be a theoretician in Bentham's sense was to seek to supersede, once and for all, political philosophy in the socratic sense, to turn unresolved mysteries into simple problems with legislative solutions.
Bentham saw himself crusading to destroy prejudice, so as to install the critical spirit in society. He saw the contemporary state of affairs as a conglomeration of conflicting, undefended principles and practices in which there was no distinguishing the irrational from the rational. Burke found beauty where Bentham saw ugliness: the beauty of an elaborated, conventional order, reflecting generations of trial and error and accomplishments legitimated by long standing.
Legislation requires judgment as to how the principles of morals and legislation fit particular historical conditions. The ability to make judgments, Bentham conceded, was an art as well as a science. For a Benthemite, progress in the material sphere will go a long way toward producing conditions in which spiritual anxiety will dissipate. Human happiness, for Bentham, could not be determined by reference to an objective good or to natural rights such as were proclaimed in the America Declaration of Independence or in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The aim to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number, does not mean that anybody's particular happiness is privileged.
The common understanding of politics, since the times of Hobbes and Locke, has taken the balancing of liberty and authority as the central issue. Bentham thought his political science would make it possible to create a permanent symbiotic relationship between the two. On one hand, laws are to be scientifically designed commands of a sovereign power not restrained by a doctrine of natural rights. On the other, such commands are to be disinterested aids to help individuals find the way to their own happiness. Bentham's passion, from beginning to end, was to found “that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law”. It's important to note that the sovereign masters, pleasure and pain, not only determine what we actually do; they also show us what we ought to do. If part of felicity consists in living in peace, security and tranquility of mind in the midst of others, then there has to be agreement, by no means automatic, on what we shall all accept as what we ought to do.
Agreement on the principle implies the joint search for agreement on substance. The use of principle is in a way paradoxical: it's intended to produce legitimate substantial agreements and simultaneously to call all substantial agreements into question: the word “right” can't be meaningful apart from “utility”. Each of us must retain jurisdiction in defining our own happiness. One should act in a way that one would like to see others act too. This sounds rather like Kant's categorical imperative, but Bentham doesn't say that we must will such a rule apart from having personal interests in so doing. The tension
between self-interest and regard for others lies at the heart of utilitarianism. Bentham considered the
JAMES MILL
James Mill was Jeremy Bentham's principle disciple. He led the movement to put Bentham's ideas into practice. Mill's essay describes the “road we must travel” to transcend the aristocratic politics that prevailed. He invokes the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number in order to attach it to specific goals for the future. Government must be redesigned. Mill finds that the traditional forms of government all have problems. Government by the many requires the whole community to assemble, which is impractical; government by the few fails as well; the monarchical form has another problem because a few with power will always try to defeat the very end for which government exists. An absolute sovereign must always fear rebelliousness in his subjects, for they are not sheep but thinking, feeling beings. The absolute ruler will never be able to assume that the people are subservient enough. He will seek more and more assurance of control. An alternative proposed was a mixed government compromising all three of the simple forms. This supposes that the king, the aristocracy, and the people are three separate wills, each unified in pursuing its own interest. The remedy can only be to create a representative body. First, representatives must be members of the communities whom they represent. They must be exposed to the consequences that follow from misgovernment. Hereditary or life-appointment offices are to be rejected. Election of representatives must itself be representative of the community.
Mill is very clear in denying any dependency of the people on aristocratic guidance. Mill believes this political reformation can have all the salutary effects of the religious reformation which preceded it. The proportion of foolish to wise men is about the same, Mill asserts, in the aristocratic and in the democratic classes. The middle rank will mediate between poor and rich, providing the exemplary model of right personal and political conduct. Whether the natural laws of human competition, asserted without qualification by Mill, can be turned to advantage by means of this mechanical reform must be carefully considered. Whether the natural authority Mill claims for the middle rank will, by the logic of his own arguments, come to seem arbitrary to their constituents must also be considered.
JOHN STUART MILL
John Stuart Mill spent most of his life determining the proper method for the study of politics. Along as other Utilitarians, he accepted the deductive method of Bentham and James Mill as the proper one for political science. J. S. Mill believed that the Utilitarians were correct in the essentials of their theory, and that his father's error was one of form and not of content. His own conclusions concerning method rest on distinguishing three kinds of deduction: direct, concrete and inverse. He recognized four methods, all scientific, but applicable to different subject matters. Induction proper, the “chemical method”, establishes casual laws by comparing specifically observed causes using the canons of induction: methods of agreement, difference, concomitant variations, and residues. The directive deductive, “geometric method”, argues by syllogistic reasoning from first principles to less general laws. The concrete deductive, “physical method”, infers the laws of effects not from one casual law, but from a number of them taken together, considering all the causes which influence the effect and compounding their laws with one another. The inverse deductive, “historical method”, develops empirical laws of society on the basis of induction and the verifies those laws by deducing them from a priori laws of human nature.
J. S. Mill believed in the possibility and desirability of social progress, but not in its inevitability. The philosophy of history, understood as the philosophy of the progress of society, is basic for the practical science of politics. The gap in the philosophy of history is filled by the idea derived in a deductive fashion from a theory of human nature and a theory of ethics. Mill distinguished two basic states of society: the natural and the transitional. Natural state tends to be undermined by the rise of new leaders.
It's not easy to find a simple answer in Mill thoughts, about what is the efficient cause of social progress. At each stage of civilization certain conditions may be produced which make possible the next stage. Progress depends on the emergence of new ideas; new ideas emerge only as challenges to old and accepted ideas, and the only if there is freedom to challenge the existing beliefs and to suggest alternatives.
We should also ask what Mill thinks about the place of the existing society in the pattern of history. He had no doubt that the societies of western Europe and the United States were civilized. The signs of civilization are the existence of responsible government and the emergence of scientific knowledge.
What Mill arguments against Utilitarians is the claim that the distinction between right acts and wrong acts, or between correct moral principles and incorrect ones, could be known a priori. He rejected this view and claimed that the fundamental principle of morality is known by experience. Happiness would require not only a life of pleasure without pain, but the achievement of the superior pleasures even at the cost of pain and the sacrifice of inferior pleasures. This is connected with Mill's theory of human progress. The cultivation of the higher pleasures requires social freedom, so that only a free society can be truly civilized in Mill's sense. Men can live together more justly and with higher human achievements to the extent that they pursue the higher pleasures rather than the lower. Government dies not exist merely to produce the maximum of that kind of pleasure which the citizens happen to prefer. Mill sees the active life as morally superior to one of passive obedience at almost all levels of human achievement. The government which encourages active participation in its operation by all its citizens is better.
There are three conditions that people must satisfy in order that a particular system of government may
all persons complete independence and freedom of action”. By education in the self-regarding virtues
the individuals in society should be encouraged to use their freedom to advance themselves morally and intellectually. Most things tend to be done better when done by individuals than when done by the government; individual action promotes the mental education of the individual, which governmental action does not. Increased governmental action is a threat to liberty.
