CRITICISM OF IMMODERATE SPEECH: PRESENT AND PAST

What the “rhetoric revivalists” are to deliberative democrats, Burke was to the eighteenth-century critics of immoderate speech. But Burke's defense of rhetoric is more forceful and comprehensive than that of his analogues in the present—and that makes his defense worthy of renewed consideration. To support this claim, I consider first the dispute between deliberative democrats and rhetoric revivalists, addressing three points at which the rhetoric revivalists’ response might be strengthened; these points, I argue, should motivate us to turn to Burke for a stronger defense of rhetoric. Then I consider some examples of the eighteenth-century case for deliberative civility, clearing the way for a discussion of the Burkean response in the subsequent sections.

Deliberative democrats have tended to portray rhetoric and deliberation as antagonistic concepts, or at least as concepts in tension.Footnote ² In developing “maxims of fairness to regulate and define the process of deliberation itself” (Garsten Reference Garsten2006, 189), they have stressed a mode of deliberative communication closer to conversation than to oratory (Remer Reference Remer2000). Like an ideal conversation, this mode of communication ought to be characterized by directness and mutual sincerity (Chambers Reference Chambers1996, 99); it ought to be cooperative rather than agonistic (Benhabib Reference Benhabib1996a, 7); and it ought to require participants to “state their reasons,” (Cohen Reference Cohen, Bohman and Rehg1997, 74), appealing not to the passions but only to “the force of the better argument” (Habermas Reference Habermas2001, 89). Many deliberative democrats allow that rhetoric “does have roles to play” in deliberation (Dryzek Reference Dryzek2010, 322), such as calling attention to issues of grave injustice. But these roles are generally conceived of as limited in scope. To the extent that it is stylized rather than sincere, agonistic rather than cooperative, and often impassioned rather than dispassionate, rhetoric runs afoul of deliberative maxims of fairness—especially rhetoric in its most immoderate and injudicious forms.

More fundamentally, this view predicates legitimacy-conferring deliberation on the existence of “universally acceptable procedures of argumentation.” If this is the case, then the trouble with rhetoric is that “it seems to require more flexibility in choosing types of argumentation,” because it begins not from universalizable procedures, but rather from a more direct engagement with the preconceptions, emotions, and even biases of the particular audience at hand (Garsten Reference Garsten2006, 189–90).

Much of the response of the rhetoric revivalists to this line of argument centers on problems of alienation and exclusion. It holds that a major cost of deliberative procedures that aim for universal acceptability, or of a strong standard of public reason, is the alienation from the deliberative process of those who find their worldviews written off as excessively “comprehensive.” In Garsten's terms (Reference Garsten2006, 185), such exclusion, even as it aims to preserve liberal consensus, reliably produces backlash, “forms of opinion more dogmatic and less prone to deliberative engagement than those they initially sought to replace.” For Allen (Reference Allen2004, 86), the valorization of universalizable arguments leads to the problematic “suppression of phenomena like disappointment and distrust.”

Similarly, Young's critique of deliberative democrats (Reference Young2000, 38, 48), which helped prompt the more recent “systemic turn” in deliberative theory, points to a related problem of exclusion: the ways in which norms of “articulateness,” “dispassionateness,” and “orderliness” can effectively silence those whose speech a dominant group treats as aberrant (see also Roberts-Miller Reference Roberts-Miller2005, 460).

Despite their disagreements, both deliberative democrats and their critics often agree in prioritizing a common set of questions. For instance: what sorts of reasons and arguments ought to be admissible? Does pursuing the goal of universally acceptable procedures compromise the goal of inclusion? Perhaps it is because of this residual overlap with deliberative democrats that the case for the rhetoric revival is, on three counts, not as forceful as it might be.

For one, reading Burke suggests a different, and perhaps logically prior, conception of the basic deliberative problem: not determining the kinds of admissible reasons, but overcoming our aversions to exercising judgment. In other words, what if we are not inclined to deliberate at all? It is possible that both deliberative democrats and rhetoric revivalists are overly sanguine about our willingness to do the work of deliberation. The literature on deliberation has a great deal to say about the Rawlsian “burdens of judgment” (Rawls Reference Rawls2005, 54)—but much less to say about the pain of judgment, or the experience of judging and its subjective costs.

Second, the rhetoric revivalists’ arguments can lead us to conclude that exclusion from deliberation is generally a zero-sum game, which those responsible for the exclusion “win” at the expense of the marginalized. At issue, on this model, is not dominant groups’ ability to effectively pursue their aims through deliberation, but the ability of marginalized groups to secure a hearing for their own aims. But the case against deliberative exclusion would be strengthened if we could accurately characterize it as a negative-sum game: one in which the exclusion from debate of marginal arguments, images, and modes of expression would turn out to have a soporific effect on deliberators, and so could become self-defeating even for those who might appear at first glance to benefit.

Third, rhetoric has historically been characterized not only in terms of appeal to the particular audience, or in terms of the management of disagreement—but also in terms of “stylistic abundance” (Remer Reference Remer1999, 63), or a quality of language in excess of argument. Rhetoric is an art of argument, but it has also long been an art of elocutio, of verbal style. This facet of rhetoric is central to the difference between oratory and conversation as distinctive modes of communication; words that sound reasonable in oratory often sound laughable in conversation, and vice versa. The rhetoric revival literature has generally minimized this aspect of the rhetorical tradition. I will argue, however, that stylistic abundance is of more than aesthetic value—and that we rationalize it away to our detriment.

Is it possible to develop a stronger reply to the anti-rhetorical strand of deliberative theory—one that takes more seriously the possibility of aversions to judgment, and, as a result, more thoroughly accounts for the costs of deliberative exclusion and defends a more richly conceived notion of rhetorical speech? We do find grounds for such a reply in Burke's theory and practice of the sublime. But first we need to situate that reply in its context by considering the arguments of the eighteenth-century critics of rhetoric.

Their arguments will likely sound eerily resonant. The eighteenth-century critics of rhetoric certainly worked from a far less formalized notion of appropriate deliberative procedures—whether these were the procedures of the courtroom or the norms of politeness—but, like their present-day counterparts, they too presumed that rule-bound deliberation would minimize the need for rhetoric, and they too imagined politics as aspiring to the mode of conversation, not oratory. These writers explicitly opposed rhetorical eloquence to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and sound deliberation. They insisted that, while rhetorical excess may have been appropriate to a less enlightened age, regularity and predictability in government generate their own model of speech: calm, restrained, and solidly mediocre. The contrasting model of speech (frequently embodied in the image of a Greek or Roman demagogue) was treated as outmoded and ridiculous, or as actively dangerous.

We find an early example of this argumentative tack in “Of Eloquence, Considered Politically,” a 1722 entry in Cato's Letters by John Trenchard. Here, Trenchard celebrates the English legal and political institutions that have largely rendered classical eloquence impossible: “the rules of proceeding being strict and ascertained, there is no room for haranguing. . . .[A]n address to [the judge's] passions would be ridiculous and offensive.” By contrast, the proper audience for an unrestrained oratory is “an assembly that acts by discretion, or. . .an absolute prince”: here is an important analogy between model of speech and model of polity, the mutually reinforcing restraint of oratory and the lawfulness of the sovereign to which it is directed (Trenchard Reference Trenchard and Hamowy1995, 732). In Parliament and the English courts, by contrast, “a speech of this [ancient] sort would be waste language” (733). Eloquence is at best a necessary evil, a mildly noxious byproduct of liberty that is simply impossible to “destroy” at an acceptable price. (This line of argument would become commonplace by midcentury: see Blair Reference Blair, Ferreira-Buckley and Halloran2005, 283 and Smith Reference Smith and Bryce1985, 198–9.)

As a late example of this line of thought, we can turn to James Madison's “Federalist No. 58,” which concludes by proposing a kind of theorem of the inverse relationship between the size of deliberative bodies and their security from demagogues: “in all legislative assemblies the greater the number composing them may be, the fewer will be the men who will in fact direct their proceedings.” Madison's chief point of evidence is the experience of unruly rhetoric in the classical world: “the more numerous an assembly may be. . .the greater is known to be the ascendency of passion over reason. . . .In the ancient republics, where the whole body of the people assembled in person, a single orator, or an artful statesman, was generally seen to rule.” And yet Madison is convinced that “sophistry and declamation” can be engineered out of the machinery by rendering deliberative bodies as small as possible (consistent with the need for “diffuse sympathy”). Expand them, and “the machine will be enlarged, but the fewer, and often the more secret, will be the springs by which its motions are directed” (1987, 251). From the size of the assembly to the proportion of deliberators with “weak capacities” to the majority threshold for oratorical entrepreneurs capitalizing on their weakness: the production of eloquence is as predictable as that, and its restriction is equally mechanical.

Through such arguments, we see constitutionalism working to set itself apart from its troubled precedents in the republics of the ancient world. The line of argument that I have sampled here characterizes a constitutional polity as one in which classical eloquence on the model of a Demosthenes or a Cicero is impossible, or at least treated as aberrant. Factually speaking, such speech was not impossible; deliberative civility or “politeness” was never so much a description of how things were as it was an ideological claim about how things, under an enlightened government, ought to be (Pocock Reference Pocock1985, 236, 248; Potkay Reference Potkay1994). That claim is perhaps best summed up in David Hume's famous observation (Reference Hume and Miller1985a, 101) that a passionate passage of the kind that marked the high point of Cicero's achievement—“Should I lift up my voice in the most desolate solitude, to the rocks and mountains, yet should I surely see those rude and inanimate parts of nature moved with horror and indignation at the recital of so enormous an action”—would only appear “monstrous” in the mouth of a modern politician.

Burke would spend much of his career testing that proposition. Compared with Madison, for instance, he held that sound institutional design was less likely to obviate questions of political and rhetorical conduct. He did not question the value of rule-bound government; he did, however, dispute the value to such government of moderate speech. As reasonable as the case for moderate speech appears on its face—who, in the end, is in favor of “sophistry and declamation”?—Burke offered a sophisticated and forceful account of its shortcomings. In the next section, I consider how this account informed his rhetorical practice.

BURKE'S RHETORIC AND ITS RECEPTION

When we read Burke describing Parliament in his 1774 speech to the Electors of Bristol, as “a deliberative assembly,” he does not at first glance appear to be so distant from the critics of immoderate speech I considered in the previous section. His argument against binding mandates for representatives depends on the claim that “government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination precedes the discussion. . .?” (Reference Burke1887k, 96). Lines like these, along with the image of Burke as the ur-conservative, might lead us to assume that Burke's notion of deliberation was as staid as that of any of his contemporaries, and that he conceived of a deliberative assembly as a forum for measured debate among elite representatives according to clear rules of decorum. Yet Burke's rhetorical conduct clearly belies that assumption.

To be sure, Burke was hardly the only one of his contemporaries to practice an especially impassioned form of oratory: we need only consider his parliamentary colleague Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who concluded his 1788 speech in the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings by theatrically collapsing into Burke's arms. Nevertheless, Burke's rhetorical practice remains distinctive. For one, Burke is notable not just for a handful of impassioned performances, but for a career-spanning degree of vehemence. He did not employ the rhetorical sublime simply to inspire fear of revolution (Frank Reference Frank and Kompridis2014, 22–3). Rather, he conceived of disruptive speech as serving a far more fundamental purpose: countering deficiencies of deliberation and provoking the exercise of judgment across a wide range of cases. Further, contemporaries found in Burke's words not only heightened passion, but a consistent quality of strangeness: invocations of the immense, the obscure, the alien, the paradoxical, and the powers of nature—all of which, as I will argue, build on the theory of the sublime developed in the Enquiry.

Before reconstructing that theoretical basis in the following two sections, I will discuss a range of examples of Burkean sublimity in practice. I will consider how we can derive from Burke an account of the ways in which disruptive and immoderate speech can serve deliberation, as well as the ways in which the obscure and the uncanny can in fact help us to see political problems more clearly. As I will argue, the notion of deliberation implicit in Burke's practice runs counter to the ideals of both present-day deliberative theorists and his own contemporaries.

First, consider Burke's 1775 speech, “On Conciliation with the Colonies.” Here, he aims to show that his colleagues’ emphasis on Parliament's legal right to tax the American colonies ignores the high costs of enforcing that right. But after attempting to carry his point through a litany of statistics demonstrating the colonies’ economic heft, Burke breaks off from the argument in favor of a much more vertiginous image. He asks his listeners to imagine that an angel had traveled 68 years into the past to prophesy to a young boy—now an aged lord—the immense transformations that his lifetime would witness. Suppose that the angel

Here Burke conjures the awe of a divine apparition, a thought that the Enquiry calls “amazingly sublime” (Reference Burke1887a, 137). Awesome as well is the presumed position of the listener, peering down on the globe from a dizzying height that turns a continent into “a little speck,” as 1,700 years of development are compressed into the span of a single life. In another unsettling note, Burke reminds us that the subject of his extended conceit, who has been briefly restored to youth, is in truth on the verge of death. On reflection, in fact, this is the kind of image that can be spoken but not stably envisioned or held in the mind. Not only is the view of the earth impossible (in 1775), but it is imposed on a protagonist whose position in time will not stop shifting: first we imagine him old (“my Lord Bathurst might remember. . .”), then young (“Young man. . .”), then old (“before you taste of death. . .”), then young again (“the sanguine credulity of youth. . .”), then dying (“. . .the setting of his day”).

To substantiate his claims on the scale of American commerce, Burke leaves the planetary prospect and projects his listeners into the midst of a New England whaling expedition:

Here again, we are among the monumental: crumbling glaciers, piercing cold, and the violent death of “gigantic game” (117). These are the tenuous landmarks on another spatially disorienting journey, an instantaneous passage from Greenland to Antarctica. Even the traditional markers of navigation are distorted: rather than the southern constellation of Hydra, we look up to see an immense “frozen Serpent” in the sky.

Burke casts his American speeches as an effort to drive his listeners away from abstract considerations and into a confrontation with circumstances: away from the “metaphysical distinctions” surrounding the mere right to taxation and toward “the arguments of states and kingdoms,” the prudential considerations surrounding the exercise of that right (Reference Burke1887g, 73). For Burke, engagement with the latter demands that the contingent, specific circumstances of America—the scale of its trade, the political culture of its colonies—be made powerfully present to the deliberators, a strategy served by arresting passages like the above.

Burke returned to this framing in his Indian speeches in the subsequent decade. He claims that the colonial abuses of Warren Hastings and the East India Company are abetted by Parliament's tendency, once again, to evade circumstances—to perceive only the usual topics of politics, or “the petty intrigue of a faction at court,” in lieu of India itself. A deliberation conducted in the customary and deadening register of legalisms is an abdication of responsibility. It represents the intrusion “of such company as Quo Warranto, and Mandamus, and Certiorari; as if we were on a trial about mayors and aldermen. . . .It is not right, it is not worthy of us, in this manner to depreciate the value, to degrade the majesty of this grave deliberation of policy and empire” (Reference Burke1887i, 434).

How, then, to make the scale of British misgovernment present to his listeners? In his 1785 speech, “On the Nabob of Arcot's Debts,” Burke's most telling illustration is not one of famine and rapine, but of objects unheard of in Britain. They are some 1,100 massive stone and earthen irrigation reservoirs in the Carnatic state of south India, now destroyed by war:

No sooner are we confronted with immense earthworks built to endure “through generations of generations” (68) than we discover that something unseen has universally wrecked them. Even intact, the reservoirs are both life-giving public works and “sepulchres,” a uncanny instance of death-in-life. They are, moreover, the products of impossible ambition: they were dug by “an insatiable benevolence” (paradoxical in itself—benevolence is supposed to be giving, not all-consuming) and aimed to extend “beyond the limits of Nature,” that is, to achieve the physically impossible. What might be a civil engineering project in other hands becomes, in Burke's, one of those sublime “ideas not presentable but by language” (Reference Burke1887a, 260).

Finally, as another instance of such ideas, consider the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, which Burke concluded in 1794 with an appeal to apocalyptic justice:

Here, the fear pervading the passages above is literalized—and it is Burke's preeminent fear, divine judgment. But even as his listeners are asked explicitly to imagine their own deaths, Burke draws out all the physical queerness of a Christian commonplace. What would it mean for the fabric of the world to be destroyed? If the world were burned to ash, where would all of the ashes go? Of course, these are impossible questions, just as “insatiable benevolence” is an impossible concept. For our purposes, the more important question is: how, if at all, does this kind of impossibility contribute to deliberation?

In answering that question, we could draw out three common properties of the range of passages I have considered. First, each has a semantic content that is obvious enough—America is very big; India's local rulers are worthy of respect; judges will be held accountable for their judgments—but the distance between that content and the means used to express it is almost laughably large. This distance itself suggests that such passages do not exactly function as arguments. All of these passages could, in fact, be plausibly excised from propositional summaries of Burke's arguments. To the extent that contemporary theorists conceive of deliberation as an exchange of reasons or a “sequence of propositions” (Manin Reference Manin1987, 353), these passages are arguably not deliberative at all.

Second, however, they are deliberative in Burke's conception of the term. A guide to this conception is the biblical allusion with which Burke introduces the passage on the angel in “Conciliation”: “I cannot prevail on myself to hurry over this great consideration. It is good for us to be here” (Burke Reference Burke1887h, 114). The words were spoken by Peter on witnessing the Transfiguration, the best candidate in the Gospels for the Burkean sublime. In that context, “it is good for us to be here” is not a bland statement of fact, but an instance of the kind of clarified realization that prototypically follows an encounter with sublimity. Here is in immediate and unmediated confrontation with circumstances. Having been alarmed by the immensity of America, by the grandeur of India's kings, and by the prospect of divine justice, we might then exercise our judgment; we might reflect more clearly on the difficulty of holding America by force, on the wrongs done to India, and on the fate of Warren Hastings. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke put this notion more succinctly: we must be “alarmed into reflection” (Reference Burke1887l, 338). Even if the object that provokes such alarm is strange and obscure, it may yet make it possible—as the sublime object is encompassed by the mind and the alarm recedes—for us to judge more clearly. Burke holds that deliberators will be disinclined to perform the second step, the step of painful judgment, unless they have been confronted by the first.

Third, if these passages, to the extent that they intend to disturb and disorient, would arguably run afoul of present-day notions of civility, they also transgressed notions of civility current in Burke's own time. If we perceive such passages as particularly heated, florid, emotive, or superabundant, we are not simply reading eighteenth-century prose with twenty-first-century eyes—we are echoing the opinion of many of Burke's contemporaries. Burke's conduct in debate was frequently likened to a force of nature: he was “a wolf” (Dowe Reference Dowe1857, 9), or “foaming like Niagara” (Reid 2012, 46). Journalists often observed something archaic in Burke's eloquence. In 1773, the Evening Post attributed to him a “vehemence uncommon amongst our modern Orators.” In a 1776 report from the Gazetteer, we read that Burke cast a debate on the American colonies into the Miltonic terms of epic poetry: “the House of Commons he likened to Chaos. . .its hallowed inhabitants to the host of Satan; and himself to the poet” (citations in Bullard Reference Bullard2011, 1–2 and Reid 2012, 45–48).

For others, though, Burke was merely an ethnic caricature: Thomas Erskine, a member of Parliament, complained that Burke had the manner “of an Irish chairman,” or sedan-porter, and John Wilkes claimed that Burke's “wild Irish eloquence” was the product of “potatoes and whiskey” (Prior Reference Prior1878, 508; Sainsbury Reference Sainsbury2006, 60). Burke was well aware that he spoke not only (for the bulk of his career) as a member of the political opposition, but also from the position of an ethnic and social outsider. In a 1770 outburst in the House of Commons, Burke referred to himself as a “novus homo,” borrowing Cicero's term for a self-made man in politics. He continued: “He knew the envy attending that character. Novorum Hominum Industriam odisti [You hate the industry of self-made men]” (Reference Burke and Sutherland1960, 128; see Lock Reference Lock1998, 10). Near the close of his career, he complained with some justification that “at every step of my progress in life. . .I was obliged to show my passport” (Reference Burke1887d, 193). And it seems that Burke's marginal origins, not to mention his family ties to the minority religion of Catholicism, were never so salient as when he spoke with vehemence.

But perhaps most striking is the fact that contemporaries who perceived Burke's rhetoric as indecorously excessive often pointed to the Enquiry itself as incriminating evidence (De Bruyn Reference De Bruyn, Vermeir and Deckard2012, 274). Following their lead, I turn to the Enquiry for a Burkean account of the trouble with moderate speech. The trouble is that moderate speech does little to lift deliberators out of the recurring round of procedures and situations characteristic of constitutional government—and that, immersed in this round, deliberators will tend toward the neglect of shifting and contingent particulars that we have seen Burke criticize repeatedly. For this reason, sound deliberation demands a degree of novelty and excess, qualities that characterize the sublime.

LANGUAGE AND SUBLIMITY IN BURKE'S ENQUIRY

Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is, I argue, a key basis of his critique of the anti-rhetorical tradition. The sublime, of course, is an aesthetic of excess: it designates experience that proceeds up to and beyond the limen, the margin or brink (Doran Reference Doran2015, 39). Its study originated in the classical analysis of oratory's grand style, and Burke's Enquiry (1757; revised edition, 1759) retains that preoccupation with rhetoric.Footnote ³ It stands as the conceptual foundation for Burke's oratorical project. Like Burke's rhetoric—“It is good for us to be here”—it is concerned with the singular and irregular moment in time. And it is a rhetorically inspired text precisely because it prioritizes language itself as the preeminent site of sublimity.

The Enquiry begins from a distinction between beauty and sublimity. If beauty is “pleasurable,” sublimity is “delightful”: it excites and relieves us of sensations of pain (Reference Burke1887a, 115). Among other things, it is the passion of ambition—a drive toward the singular and the unaccustomed—that pushes us in the direction of the sublime. Ambition is the progressive force that impels one toward “excelling his fellows;” crucially, it operates even more forcefully in the contemplation of the strange and terrible.Footnote ⁴ In such cases, “the mind [is] always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates. Hence proceeds what Longinus has observed of that glorying sense of inward greatness, that always fills the reader of such passages in poets and orators as are sublime” (124-5). In this way, ambition drives us to play with our self-preservation: sublimity has the power of simulating the danger that tenses and arrests the mind, as well as the “inward greatness” that occurs when the mind emerges from the confrontation intact. The process that Burke posits—the triumphant assimilation of danger—implies that temporal limits are intrinsic to the sublime. Because the perception of danger fades with familiarity, the glory of claiming it to oneself also fades (on novelty in the Enquiry, see Bourke Reference Bourke2015, 123; Bromwich Reference Bromwich2014, 81–2; Frank Reference Frank and Kompridis2014, 10–1). Burke links sublimity to a host of threatening qualities, but underlying all of them is the rupture sublimity effects in ordinary experience.

Still, we would be making a common mistake if we treated Burke as a partisan of the sublime (or beautiful) at the expense of custom. As in his political thought, he recognizes the value of the customary and the exceptional (179). Yet Burke does exceed his classical precedents in one particular claim: his sublime is life-saving. For Burke, overimmersion in custom, habit, and regularity means depression and even death: “Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body” (215). Questionable physiology aside, this is a prescient account of the depressive stupor of ennui.

The Burkean sublime is, above all, evident in language: “eloquence and poetry are as capable, nay indeed much more capable, of making deep and lively impressions than any other arts, and even than nature itself” (251). This is the case not because language offers clarity of impressions, but because the obscurity and strangeness that characterize the sublime are most purely present in words. Language alone can convey the impossibly sublime, as in Milton's survey of Hell:

The lines are sublime because they are permanently obscure—obscure because they are just beyond our mental grasp. What could it possibly mean for rocks, caves, etc. to be “of death”—an idea “which nothing but a word could annex to the others”? What could “a universe of death” possibly entail? “Here are again two ideas not presentable but by language; and an union of them great and amazing beyond conception” (259-60).

In this brief survey of the Enquiry, we can observe the foundation of a Burkean response to the anti-rhetorical tradition that cast sublimity as too dangerous for a constitutional polity: it replies that the absence of danger is itself threatening. Important rhetorical tasks arguably remain off limits to the Burkean sublime: it is rendered less remarkable whenever it is, through the act of persuasion, yoked to a comprehensible human purpose (Bromwich Reference Bromwich2014, 79). Recognizing that limit, however, does not mean casting the Enquiry as a work with no bearing on politics. For Burke, the sublime has the salutary power of stimulating the imagination—and of disrupting ordinary time and the round of custom and procedure.

Politically speaking, this is not nothing. To appreciate why, it is necessary to consider what might be wrong with deliberation in the absence of sublimity. We have already seen Burke criticizing his fellow deliberators for their inattention to circumstances. In the Burkean understanding of deliberation, this neglect is deeply rooted, but it is also corrigible through the cultivation of “imaginative judgment.”

DEFECTIVE DELIBERATION AND IMAGINATIVE JUDGMENT

Burke's speeches and political writings are full of criticism of allegedly defective deliberation—and his notion of its defining feature is remarkably consistent across his career. As Hampsher-Monk (Reference Hampsher-Monk1988, 475, 477) puts it, Burke is a relentless opponent of political abstractions that are “dissociated from the circumstances which alone. . .can enable us to make judgments.” Such abstractions are destructive of the necessary “accommodation to circumstances which must constitute all actual political systems.” Burke is often recognized to have taken this view of radical revolutionaries. But it is equally his view of ordinary parliamentary politics gone wrong: a mode of politics that prides itself on stability can, he insists, give rise to a mode of deliberation that is altogether too static, smoothing over circumstantial complexities and repetitively applying general maxims. He consistently urges his audiences to attend to the singular political moment, a challenge for which rules, procedures, and nostrums offer little help. The faculty Burke sees as absent from bad deliberation is a kind of “imaginative judgment;” I will argue that it shares important affinities with the notion of sublimity developed in the Enquiry, and that the disruptive impact of the sublime can provoke its exercise.

We have already observed the tension between abstractions and circumstances in Burke's American speeches: a fixation on the legal right to tax the colonies, at the expense of prudential judgment, sparked the colonial crisis and stands in the way of its resolution. That point is pressed most vividly in Burke's critical character sketch of George Grenville, the prime minister responsible for the Stamp Act. In Burke's depiction, he is a lawyer's lawyer whose professional training has atrophied his political judgment:

Stable “methods and forms,” it seems, can dupe us into perceiving the political occasion as exaggeratedly stable (38). In this way, Grenville read the mercantilist Act of Navigation as a legal precedent for the permissible degree of colonial taxation, not as a policy adapted to its moment and bound to alter with the occasion. In reality, Burke argues, “if the act be suffered to run the full length of its principle, and is not changed and modified according to the change of times and the fluctuation of circumstances, it must do great mischief” (39).

This habitual fixture of Burke's thought is evident again in the Hastings impeachment, which Burke cast as an inherently more just form of proceeding than an ordinary trial: “It is here that those who by the abuse of power have violated the spirit of law, can never hope for protection from any of its forms.” Burke praises impeachment as the least judicial of trials, uniquely open to the prudential claims that characterize deliberative rhetoric (Reference Burke1887f, 333).

With these precedents in mind, Burke's writing on the French Revolution appears not as a deviation from a long-established pattern, but an intensification of it. In Reflections, the Jacobins of 1790 seem just as prone as the parliamentarians of 1774 to conduct politics in terms of “metaphysical distinctions.” But the abstract soundness of their principles is not at issue: “Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour. . . .[Politics] is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught à priori” (Reference Burke1887l, 240, 311).

Finally, this theme is brought to bear in his 1791 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, a defense of Burke's political conduct against those of his party who sympathized with the revolution. Again, his criticism of English and French radicals restates his indictment of those who attempt to “build their politics, not on convenience but on truth.” Truth is too rarefied a category to apply to politics: “nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral, or any political subject. . . .The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics” (Reference Burke1887c, 79–80).

In this light, Burke's famous attack (Reference Burke1887l, 331) on the “calculators” of Paris is the direct descendant of his critique of his parliamentary opponents in relatively more ordinary conditions. It was no ad hoc reaction to crisis; it was the development of stable, deeply rooted features of Burke's thought. His analysis of deliberative failure remained consistent through such a long succession of issues and antagonists that it is difficult to assign it an obvious ideological valence at all.

But this, in turn, raises a different question: Why was deliberation, in Burke's terms, so consistently prone to failure? We might answer the question by more directly exploring the concept of political judgment. Judgment, in Beiner's definition (Reference Beiner1983, 2), is “a form of mental activity that is not bound to rules. . .and comes into play beyond the confines of rule-governed intelligence.” The move beyond such confines would seem to offer a strong prospect for fleshing out Burke's notion of “enlargement,” the quality so often missing from defective deliberation, and which I take to entail a broad engagement with the moment in all its complexities. Burke is especially preoccupied with the psychology and the experience of judgment—the conditions under which we are moved to exercise or, more likely, avoid it—along with the ways in which the inclination to judge can be provoked or suppressed by language.

Returning to the Enquiry, and especially its introduction “On Taste,” we find judgment characterized as a “reasoning faculty” that is called for where the aesthetic meets the ethical. Perhaps the most salient fact about this faculty is that its exercise is unpleasant. Calling on our judgment means “tying us down to the disagreeable yoke of our reason,” and we will naturally develop a repertoire of means for evading this yoke (Burke Reference Burke1887a, 94–95). Reading this discussion into Burke's more explicitly political works, it emerges as an etiology of faulty deliberation: we over-rely on maxims, legalisms, rules, and “metaphysical abstraction” (Burke Reference Burke1887c, 206) to avoid or minimize the pain of judgment. All these modes offer, in Burke's view, ready-made applications that save us full engagement with the matter at hand; they are all a delegation of responsibility. This is why the essential feature of the French radicals is, perhaps surprisingly, their laziness, their “degenerate fondness for tricking short-cuts. . . .Commencing their labours on a principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of slothful men.” It is hardly incidental that political actors of this kind do not really deliberate at all: “It is notorious, that all their measures are decided before they are debated” (Reference Burke1887l, 454, 321). Judgment, by contrast, is a labor-intensive mode of engaging with the world.

But for just this reason, there are, for Burke, important affinities between the experience of exercising judgment and the experience of the sublime. First, both share a tight bond with ambition. We exercise and cultivate our judgment to outdo our peers: “almost the only pleasure that men have in judging better than others, consists in a sort of conscious pride and superiority” (Reference Burke1887a, 97). And the same impulse that seeks preeminence in a deliberative assembly also enjoys “claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance” of sublime objects. In both cases, the drive to distinguish ourselves pushes us toward the unaccustomed.

Second, these two experiences share a similar structure of reward. In both cases, we deliberately encounter pain to experience delight in its removal. In one instance, encompassing the sublime object in one's perception provokes and then relieves fear. In the other, putting on “the yoke of our reason” provokes and then discharges mental strain.

Third, both the exercise of judgment and the sublime are characterized by their aversion to rules and regularities. Just as judgment is required when rules do not readily apply to concrete circumstances, irregularity is essential to the sublime. It is not only that the experience of triumphant assimilation described by Burke virtually demands that the sublime object be new and singular. It is also that, from Cicero and Longinus on, the experience of the sublime has been associated with strategic transgression of proprieties. In both the experience of judgment and the experience of the sublime, we are driven beyond the round of custom.

Fourth and finally, the experiences of judgment and of the sublime share a temporal structure. In his political works, Burke is consistently engaged in calling his audience back to the “here-and-now” of circumstances. If the “here-and-now” were not so valuable to Burke, he would be more content to rely on principles that aspire to a kind of timelessness. Yet, only if we attend to what makes this deliberative moment distinctive, he urges, can we begin to judge rightly. Of course, that goal might strike us as paradoxical in a writer so committed, simultaneously, to notions of age-old stability—but only if we have neglected to read our Cicero. Rhetorical decorum was never a notion of stable and static propriety, but of a dynamic moderation that appears stable because it is a permanent adaptation to flux; in Burke, I believe, we encounter a writer who deeply absorbed this lesson.

Similarly, the experience of sublimity is consistently portrayed in terms of a qualitative rupture in time, in which the perception of steady temporal progress is suddenly arrested. The sublime “is constantly understood via reference to the arrestation of movement.” For Burke, “this notion of suspension, of hanging in mid air” (Ashfield and de Bolla Reference Ashfield and de Bolla1996, 130) has a distinct political value: it is the frame of mind that best prepares us to render judgment.

And yet there are two important ways in which these two experiences are not analogous. For one, Burke (following Locke) claims that, unlike the imaginative “wit” required to think in metaphors, “the business of judgment is rather in finding differences” (Reference Burke1887a, 88). But the relationship between the sublime and the business of “finding differences” is not clear-cut. If the sublime experience is distinctive in time, it is far from distinct: for Burke, its attributes are obscurity, darkness, and uncertainty. To develop Burke's visual metaphor, in exercising judgment we ought to see clearly; when confronted with the sublime, we see darkly. But what can the obscure, the dark, and the terrible tell us about taxation and administration?

Second, Burke sees a persistent tension between judgment and imagination: “the judgment is for the greater part employed in throwing stumbling-blocks in the way of the imagination” (Burke Reference Burke1887a, 97). It is just this stern tendency to prevent our minds from running away with themselves that accounts for the pain of judgment.

Given these two dissimilarities, my argument would be at an impasse if Burke had not suggested that the tension between the judgment and the imagination can be highly productive. Where both of these faculties are well developed and operating in tandem, we are dealing with a master of good taste. In fact, Burke posits a causal relationship between them, in that the exercise of imagination can spur us to cultivate our judgment:

In other words, imagination is necessary but not sufficient to good judgment—and the exercise of the imagination combines with the exercise of judgment to constitute the compound faculty of taste (on Burke's efforts to restore imagination to “critical respectability, see De Bruyn Reference De Bruyn, Vermeir and Deckard2012, 275; on imagination as an aid to judgment, see Arendt Reference Arendt and Beiner1992, 65).

I prefer to use the term “imaginative judgment” when discussing this faculty in a political context—simply because “taste” is now so associated with aesthetic appreciation, and even snobbery, that the notion of “good political taste” would sound trivial. But it was not trivial for Burke, and it is reasonable to see it at the center of his rhetorical project. Burke's psychology insists that judgment is difficult and must be deliberately provoked—and that appeals to the imagination can affect this provocation. If the sublime constitutes the strongest possible appeal to the imagination, then it is also the strongest possible spur to judgment. This is not to claim that we are in a state of mind to render distinct and precise judgments when confronted with the sublime in its obscurity—only that the confrontation with the sublime, by disrupting ordinary time, clears the ground for judgment. For Burke, who stressed our aversion to judgment, clearing the ground was of primary importance. The process of “alarming into reflection” is a double movement: alarm (or our confrontation with the sublime) is not reflection (or the exercise of judgment), but it precedes and conditions reflection. And if this is the case, immoderation in language might turn out to serve moderation, or circumstantial prudence, in government.

It is little wonder, then, that Burke explicitly casts his political works as appeals to the imagination:

Passages like this one in Burke's political writing ought to be read not simply as appeals to their audiences, but as commentaries on the means by which the works themselves are intended to operate. Burke's object is not just to criticize the habits of parliamentary government for failing to “stretch and expand our minds”—but also that his own words might begin to affect the needed expansion (Reference Burke1887j, 16). Burke leads us to the counterintuitive position that the language best suited to judgment may not itself be judicious.

But what, finally, is to prevent such language from degenerating into illiberalism or demagoguery? Is Burke's defense of sublimity ultimately an invitation to hateful and bigoted speech, or is it consistent with a recognition of the harmfulness of such speech?

I would suggest that the latter is the case, especially because the analogy between political judgment and taste is a significant one. Burke shared with his contemporaries a notion of taste as inherently social (see also Hume Reference Hume and Miller1985b, 235). The principles of taste, on this view, are developed inductively and are subject to testing through discourse. “Good taste” can become a problematically exclusive concept when the circle of discourse is drawn too narrowly. But at the same time, the value of taste for deliberative politics lies in the fact that there is no final appeal to a “true” standard of taste, that any claim to have exercised good taste is inherently contestable, and that the category of “good taste” is continually revised by this contestation. As Burke put it in Reflections (Reference Burke1887l, 456), politics, “as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means.” If sublime rhetoric ultimately aims to strengthen imaginative judgment, and if that judgment is embedded in a context that is collaborative as well as competitive, then an orator acting on the Burkean model is considerably insulated from charges of demagoguery. Such an orator can provoke others to judge, and can display his or her own process of judgment, but will find it extremely difficult to compel a given judgment.

At the same time, while such an orator will not be burdened with an excessively strict notion of civility, he or she will also have to carefully balance the need to provoke with the need to preserve the social context that gives provocation its value—and so will have reason to avoid incivility conceived of as “rhetoric apt to sever relationships” (Strachan and Wolf Reference Strachan and Wolf2012, 402). Striking that balance also means bearing in mind that rhetoric ceases to be sublime when it ceases to simulate danger and begins to threaten or demean: “when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible” (Burke Reference Burke1887a, 111).

At this point, we can more fully formulate Burke's response to the critics of immoderate speech, who were discussed in the first section. We can also better appreciate the theoretical grounding for the practice of rhetorical excess we observed in the second section. The anti-rhetorical discourse of Burke's contemporaries celebrates the consistency of rule-bound government and argues that this consistency both entails, and is buttressed by, restrained norms of political speech. Burke argues, in response, that this model is ultimately self-undermining, because it produces public deliberation that is fatally lacking in imaginative judgment. Such judgment, under settled institutions, is prone to atrophy—unless it is revitalized by the sublime and its power to provoke deliberative ambition, to foster amazement and strain. Burke's rhetorical project is, among much else, a brief for the enduring rights of the uncanny.