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Patronage and Revolution: Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and His Theory of Legislative Corruption

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

William Selinger
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Abstract

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is most famous and controversial for Burke's opposition to the philosophy behind the Revolution. This essay examines Burke's more practical criticisms of the French National Assembly which pervade the pamphlet, and shows their connection to his earlier arguments about corruption in the House of Commons. Burke's insight into the future course of the French Revolution is based in his distinctive approach to thinking about the pathologies of legislative assemblies, which he initially developed in the House of Commons, and later applied to the French National Assembly.

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Research Article
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The Review of Politics , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , Winter 2014, pp. 43 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2014 

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is generally read as a text of great philosophical confrontation.Footnote 1 Yet while emphasizing Burke's stern opposition to the ideas behind the French Revolution tends to elevate Reflections to world-historical significance, juxtaposing Burke against Rousseau, Paine, and Marx, it also tends to gloss over what is most incontrovertibly persuasive about Reflections: Burke's prescient prediction that the French National Assembly would be destroyed through civil conflict and military coup, and would fail at the task of creating a stable, lasting constitution.Footnote 2 Intertwined with his attack on “the rights of man,” Burke also lays out a much more tangible line of argument: that despite being formally sovereign, the French National Assembly was mired in corruption and essentially powerless; that its members lacked either a common ethos or sufficient political experience; and that their proposed constitution would exacerbate rather than solve all these challenges.Footnote 3 Burke's practical criticisms of the National Assembly do not simply flow out of his disagreement with the Revolution's ideology. He delights in pointing out the Assembly's mistakes and corruption even when they are flagrantly at odds with “the rights of man.”Footnote 4 However, Burke's criticisms of the National Assembly are also not disconnected from his broader political thinking. They are remarkably parallel to arguments he first made two decades earlier in Britain about the House of Commons, and which reverberate throughout his speeches in the 1770s and 1780s.

This paper shows how Burke applied his earlier reasoning about corruption and dysfunction in the House of Commons to the French Revolution. It reveals an important dimension of Burke's most influential work, and of its historical genesis, which has generally been overlooked. But to do that demands taking a fresh look at what exactly Burke thought the challenges facing the House of Commons were in the decades prior to the French Revolution. In the first half of the paper I review Burke's arguments about patronage and corruption in the House of Commons, before turning to Reflections on the Revolution in France in the second half. My aim in the first half of the paper is to bring out the breadth of Burke's thinking about legislative corruption. Burke's characterization of the nature of corrupt legislative activity, as well as his account of its necessary conditions and likely consequences over time, form a more coherent and comprehensive theory than scholars have generally recognized. Burke's argument about the character, sources, and consequences of legislative corruption stands as an important innovation in the long eighteen-century debate on this topic—which he would later apply to the situation in France.

What most concerned Burke about patronage in the House of Commons was that it was threatening to replace traditional party relationships and connections with ties based solely on monetary interest. France in 1790 did not have long-standing quasi-aristocratic parties like there were in Britain, and royal patronage was of little consequence in the post-Revolutionary political environment. Nonetheless Burke's attack on the National Assembly resembles his earlier discussion of patronage within the House of Commons. He claims on the one hand that new systems of regional and municipal governments have created tremendous economic spoilage for members of the National Assembly; and on the other hand he shows that stable political relationships and hierarchies are unlikely to form within the Assembly. Burke not only applies a similar characterization of legislative corruption to both England and France, in which corrupt representatives, “knots or cabals of men who have got together, avowedly without any public principle, in order to sell their conjunct iniquity at the higher rate,” are contrasted against political relationships that do rest to a degree upon public principle.Footnote 5 In both cases he also explains the sources and consequences of this sort of legislative corruption by locating it within a remarkably parallel process of political decay over time. In first England, and later France, Burke suggests that increasing legislative corruption actually has its source in the increasingly powerful and important role being played by elected legislative assemblies. And in first England, and then France, Burke foresees violent civil conflict arising out of legislative corruption, as soon as the public awakens to what is transpiring behind the scenes.

Throughout this paper I acknowledge important differences not only between the House of Commons and the National Assembly, but also between Burke's very different rhetorical treatments of these two institutions. Burke's aim in describing French legislative corruption is not to identify and marshal opposition against the particular interest which is at fault, as he does with respect to legislative corruption in England. It is rather to discredit the entire project of the French Revolution, and the whole institution of the National Assembly. He depicts legislative corruption in France as far more severe and pervasive. But despite the different political circumstances and Burke's contrasting rhetorical intentions, his views on the character, sources, and consequences of legislative corruption are strikingly parallel in both England and France.

Although in this paper I largely treat Burke's account of legislative corruption as an independent line of argument, it cannot ultimately be disentangled from his more famous ideological opposition to the “the Rights of Man.” Despite his belief that Parliament was compromised by patronage, Burke opposed electoral reform as far back as 1770, and in doing so drew on the very same contrast between radical theory and moderate practice which he draws on throughout Reflections. Burke's famous arguments for “prudence” and against radical institutional change in Reflections parallel his earliest diagnosis of corruption in Parliament, where he argued that the solution to corruption was to cultivate the character and judgment of Members and voters, rather than to open up the House of Commons to more popular involvement. The corruption that Reflections documents in newly democratic France was in Burke's mind simply a confirmation of his longstanding view that greater popular involvement would not cure the pathologies of legislative assemblies, and that prudence was the proper means of legislative reform and guidance.

Parliament

The debate over parliamentary corruption had been going on for approximately ninety years in Britain when Burke made his signal contribution—the 1770 pamphlet Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. Although historians of political thought have paid a great deal of attention to that larger debate, the character of Burke's contribution has not been fully appreciated. In order to demonstrate that Burke's criticisms of a corrupt and dysfunctional House of Commons indeed parallel his criticisms of the French National Assembly, it is necessary to spend some time examining Thoughts, as well as Burke's many surrounding writings and letters on the topic, in detail. Scholars have emphasized Burke's distinctive political position when he wrote the pamphlet.Footnote 6 In 1770 the Rockingham Whigs had been out of power for nearly half a decade, and Burke hoped that Thoughts would achieve support for their resurgence.Footnote 7 In contrast to the pervasive antiparty rhetoric among earlier critics of royal patronage, Burke's attack on the court of George III was combined with a defense of the Whig party—even of regular party government.Footnote 8 Burke made a comprehensive critique of royal patronage, while continuing to support economic dependence in political parties.Footnote 9 Indeed his central concern in Thoughts is that royal patronage was upending party relationships within the House of Commons.Footnote 10 Scholars have engaged in a long-running series of arguments over the character and originality of Burke's defense of party.Footnote 11 My aim is rather to bring out Burke's whole unique theory of legislative corruption. Burke's praise for principled party connections within the House of Commons is an important part of that theory, since he initially describes legislative corruption in contradistinction to party government, but it is not the whole of that theory. Burke's arguments about the sources and consequences of such corruption over time concern the position and role of the House of Commons itself in British politics, and they have been less frequently commented upon by scholars.

A. Corruption and Party

Burke primarily characterizes corrupt legislative activity within the House of Commons through distinguishing it from party connections. This is a fairly subtle distinction, since Burke was not naïve about the importance of monetary support, and “favors given and received” within Whig circles. However he claimed that whereas traditional parties also share general principles of governing, and support each other on grounds of character and ability, followers of a corrupt court faction, which he believed was coming to dominate Parliament, were almost solely motivated by monetary gain.Footnote 12 Burke identifies two distinct dilemmas that emerge when representatives are primarily motivated by their own monetary aggrandizement. First, a legislative body organized around purely monetary interests yields neither the personal nor intellectual consistency required for leadership on broad questions of the day. Without common principles and personal loyalties, a system of patronage will initially be highly unstable rather than tyrannical. Political competition becomes the equivalent of a never-ending auction, with offices, positions, and alliances changing according to the highest bidder and patron at a given moment. Second, such representatives will be far less motivated by the people's interests and sentiments than by whichever particular power controls the greatest monetary resources. An administration bought by the court, or by any other monetary power, is thus irreconcilable with the people at large. This is not to say that the Whig party was wholly aligned with public opinion—the contrast between Chatham and Rockingham exemplifies for Burke their divergence.Footnote 13 However because party government can be based in publicly justifiable and defensible standards of personal ability and political principle, it is not wholly irreconcilable with popular opinion, as a purely monetary influence exercised within the House of Commons would be.Footnote 14 Burke's description of the effects of patronage in Thoughts radiates out from the undoing of traditional party combinations. The immediate consequence is a destruction of consistent administration and stable leadership; the culmination will likely be popular uprising against a Parliament determined wholly by the Crown's monetary influence.

Burke's emphasis on the breakdown of traditional ties and connections within the House of Commons marks a subtle shift in the language used to attack parliamentary corruption. Scholars have shown how the country party, as well as disaffected Whigs, attacked Whig patronage in the first half of the eighteenth century through classical theories of the mixed regime. Corruption was taken to be virtually synonymous with constitutional imbalance, and the growing power of the Crown.Footnote 15 Not only did opponents of patronage appeal to the theory of the mixed regime, the dominant Whig party appealed to that very same theory in their defense of patronage.Footnote 16 They argued that patronage was a necessary check against the people and their representatives, that without it the king would be entirely overrun.Footnote 17 Burke's position is difficult to fit into this older debate over patronage. On the one hand, the premise of Thoughts is that the court of George III had secretly created a behind-the-scenes leadership, or “double cabinet,” infiltrating its favorites into ministries and other administrative offices.Footnote 18 Members of Parliament were brought into acquiescence through gifts, pensions, and positions in a multitude of lower offices associated with the Crown.Footnote 19 This seems similar to traditional country-party fears of constitutional imbalance.Footnote 20 On the other hand, Burke's most pressing concern, and the central claim of the pamphlet, is that the court's pecuniary power and use of offices were overwhelming traditional “connections and dependencies” within Parliament. During earlier debates over corruption, party government was defended by supporters of Walpole, against the antipartisanship of Bolingbroke and the country party.Footnote 21

By drawing so many members to its favorites, according to Burke, the court was able “to disunite every party, and even every family”; the consequence was that “an administration without any connexion with the people, or with one another was first put in possession of government.”Footnote 22 The ties within Parliament being undermined were personal and informal: “where men are not acquainted with each other's principles, nor experienced in each other's talents, nor at all practiced in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy.”Footnote 23 Page after page, Burke details efforts by the court to break up the traditional Whig connections.Footnote 24 Here, for instance, is his description of the short-lived Rockingham administration, and how it was undermined by the court's influence over Rockingham's traditional followers:

The ministers of the day appear in all the pomp and pride of power … in a short time they find, they know not how, a current, which sets directly against them; which prevents all progress; and even drives them backwards. They grow ashamed and mortified in a situation, which, by its vicinity to power, only serves to remind them more strongly of their insignificance. They are obliged either to exercise the orders of their inferiors, or to see themselves opposed by the natural instruments of their office. With the loss of their dignity, they lose their temper. … By this means the party goes out much thinner than it came in.Footnote 25

The most immediate consequence of the court's influence within the ministries, and the overturning of traditional parties, is not the domination of Parliament by the Crown, but rather a stunning lack of consistent policy. “The scheme depending entirely upon distrust, disconnection, on mutability by principle, on systematic weakness in every member; it is impossible that the total result should be substantial strength of any kind.”Footnote 26 According to Burke, the most devastating example of a missing stable party-majority was Parliament's continually shifting policy toward America. There may seem to be little connection between the dispute over taxing the colonies and parliamentary corruption. However, in Thoughts, Burke connects the loss of consistent party government with “the futility, the weakness, the rashness, the timidity, the perpetual contradiction in the management of our affairs in that part of the world.”Footnote 27 These accusations are expanded upon in one of Burke's great speeches about America, “The Speech on American Taxation,” where a crucial theme is Parliament's inconsistency. Burke shows how the conflict literally ebbed and flowed in conjunction with changes in parliamentary leadership. Peace returns when the Rockingham administration comes to power and repeals the Stamp Act; the conflict is then renewed when Parliament passes a new plan of taxes during Chatham's ministry; during the North ministry Parliament only partially repeals the taxes, allowing for the conflict to continue and escalate.Footnote 28 Burke distinguishes the century between 1660 and 1764, in which “no less than twenty-nine Acts of Parliament” supported and sustained a consistent British policy, from the following decade, in which no such consistency was displayed.Footnote 29 There is not only a complete lack of consistency between each successive ministry, but also within each ministry: statements by the ministers to Parliament are contradicted by letters from the ministry to America; the policy of taxes for America is contradicted entirely by the policy of taxes for the Isle of Man; Chatham's vision of relations with America is contradicted by the act that his own Chancellor of the Exchequer moves through Parliament.Footnote 30 Such lack of consistency and stability in the House of Commons was exactly Burke's central diagnosis of the effects brought about by corruption in Thoughts—which analyzes Parliament during the very same period as “The Speech on American Taxation.”

Although Burke's most immediate concern is turmoil and inconsistency in the House of Commons, as his argument proceeds in Thoughts he ultimately goes beyond that diagnosis, to the point of suggesting that the court is perhaps on the verge of controlling a majority, and can ram through any sort of legislation it likes. It is striking that the two examples which Burke provides of this continue to emphasize a loss of traditional party bonds within the House of Commons, and their replacement by purely self-serving monetary interests. The first example is Parliament's approval of the Crown's larger than expected civil list debt, an act which is significant, according to Burke, because this is the very source of the Crown's influence in Parliament to begin with.Footnote 31 It is an act, in other words, which only presages more of the same patronage. The second example is Parliament's refusal to sit John Wilkes after his election in Middlesex. Although Burke claims that the intention behind this act is one of monarchical absolutism, his description of its effects again concerns informal relations within the House. He argues is that it will make public opinion even less important within Parliament. “A precedent should be gained, tending to show, that the favour of the People was not so sure a road as the favour of the Court even to popular honors and popular trusts.”Footnote 32 Burke had already claimed that second only to bringing down the traditional Whig connections, the court's other great project had been to undermine the influence that Chatham exercised in Parliament—which was based in public opinion.Footnote 33 Just like Parliament's failure to regulate the civil list, what is significant about the denial of Wilkes's seat is that it ultimately contributes to the further power of patronage within the House of Commons. Burke is gesturing at a vicious cycle whereby the essential purpose of the House of Commons becomes its own enrichment, not merely through the increasing power of particular interests, but through the replacement within the House of Commons of principled interests by wholly unprincipled ones.

B. The Public's Discontents

Burke was generally skeptical, however, that the cycle of corruption he believed the court was unleashing would go unchecked. Throughout the late 1760s he was becoming increasingly worried not only about parliamentary corruption, but also about mounting public anger against parliamentary corruption. In February of 1768, a year before the expulsion of John Wilkes from the House of Commons triggered riots across the country, Burke was already issuing dire warnings that parliamentary corruption could lead to revolution:

The long Patience, amounting almost to Tameness, with which the People of England have borne the Outrages of evil Ministers, has only been equalled by the irresistible Force by which they attacked, and the unrelenting Severity with which they finally punished the authors of their great Grievances. I wish with all my Heart that our Time may furnish no such Examples: and yet I confess my Fears are excited by Appearances that are sufficiently alarming. The People of England have seen an Administration formed, almost avowedly, under the Direction of a dangerous, because private and unresponsible, Influence.Footnote 34

The public, Burke argued before the House of Commons, “see that there is a dark, secret, influence which deranges, and makes perpetual changes in Administration, disabling them from doing any good, but not from doing anything bad: and that this House takes no note of it.”Footnote 35 This perception of corruption, Burke claimed, was the actual source of the widespread popular revolts supporting John Wilkes against the House of Commons.Footnote 36

The mounting public anger against the House of Commons put Burke in a delicate position, both politically and theoretically. Burke supported Parliament's right to act in the face of popular opinion, and he opposed the rhetoric of more frequent elections and popular sovereignty being deployed by Wilkes's supporters.Footnote 37 But he also hoped that this discontent, if properly led, could help bring a change in parliamentary leadership, and an end to the power of a court faction; he obviously sympathized with the public belief that corruption was creating a legislature excessively unresponsive to the people.Footnote 38 In the second half of Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, Burke offers a fearful prediction that the increasing power of a corrupt interest in the House of Commons, when combined with the increasing anger of the people, will culminate in factionalism and revolt throughout the country, and he explicitly compares the political moment following Wilkes's expulsion to the English Civil War.Footnote 39 Burke maintains that if, as a result of the court's monetary influence within the House of Commons, that body comes to “lose all the confidence, love, and veneration, which it has ever enjoyed,” then civil war and revolt by the people are just as likely as a new tyranny emanating from the royal court.Footnote 40

Burke thus situates his characterization of parliamentary corruption, and the effects of Members excessively pursuing their own aggrandizement, within a larger process that expands beyond the halls of the House of Commons, and threatens to take down the entire British political system. Like Burke's view of the effects of corruption within the House of Commons, the consequences of corruption outside that body also unfold through several distinct stages. They exemplify Burke's vision of the role to be played by an elected legislative assembly. Burke argues that it is the unique and indispensable duty of the House of Commons to act as a mediating agent between the people at large and other parts of government, especially the ministers and Crown.Footnote 41 Although the House of Commons is in no sense obligated to follow the popular will, it should be close enough to the people to ensure that their sentiments are at least taken into account by government, and this role requires that both “popularity” and principled party connection predominate within the House of Commons, since both have some basis in public opinion: “those knots or cabals of men who have got together, avowedly without any public principle, in order to sell their conjunct iniquity at the higher rate, and are therefore universally odious, ought never to be suffered to domineer in the State; because they have no connexion with the sentiments and opinions of the people.”Footnote 42 As the people begin to sense that the path to honor and office in the House of Commons no longer has anything whatsoever to do with their opinions or interests, revolt threatens. The effect of unraveling traditional political connections within the House of Commons is to trap that institution in something like a powerful vise, pressed on the one side by the corrupting influence of the court, and on the other side by the uncontrolled anger of the people. The consequences that Burke sees emanating from legislative corruption go beyond inconsistent and poorly executed policy, and beyond even the threat of royal domination over the House of Commons. Just as corruption leads to an unraveling of stable ties within the House of Commons, it culminates in an unraveling of the bonds that tie the people of Britain to their government.

C. Constitutional Balance

In Reflections on the Revolution in France, I will argue, Burke also identifies a debilitating pattern of monetary influence within the National Assembly, and a process of civil conflict and dissolution radiating out of it. Although there are a number of obvious differences between the political settings of Britain and revolutionary France, there is also one unexpected and important similarity. Paradoxical as it may sound, given the powerlessness that eventually results from legislative corruption, in a speech delivered shortly before the publication of Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents Burke actually traces legislative corruption to the increasing power of the House of Commons:

Since the Revolution at least—the power of the Nation has all flowed with a full tide into the House of Commons. The power of the state nearly melted down into this house—abuse in this house means the abuse of the whole. Because the House of Commons … is the most powerful, [it] is the most corruptible part of the whole constitution. The public does think we are a corrupt body. The house itself is unanimous. … Therefore the greatness of our power, and the great and just opinion of our corruptibility, and our corruption, render it necessary to fix some bound, to plant some landmark which we are never to exceed.Footnote 43

Over the course of his political career Burke offers two distinct arguments, both relevant to his later interpretation of the even more powerful French National Assembly, about why an increasingly powerful House of Commons would also be increasingly corrupt. First, the increased power of the House of Commons made it the obvious victim for any conniving interest to latch onto. With the king's veto fallen into disuse, and the House of Lords generally unwilling to oppose measures undertaken by ministers who had the support of the king, any policy which could be successfully pushed through the House of Commons was almost guaranteed to become law. “Those who will not conform their conduct to the public good,” Burke declares, “if they have any evil design to which there is no ordinary legal power commensurate, they bring it into Parliament. In Parliament the whole is executed from the beginning to the end.”Footnote 44 Burke argues that with the decline of its prerogatives, the Crown too was forced to turn to the deployment of monetary influence within the House of Commons: echoing Bolingbroke, Burke attributes the Crown's increasing use of office and patronage in large part to the stronger constitutional position of the House of Commons following 1689.Footnote 45

Second, the House of Commons was creating an increasingly vast bureaucracy, especially overseas, which supplemented what Burke believed were the already bloated offices of the king's court, and entangled the House of Commons in a vast and lucrative web of commerce, contracts, trade, and jobs. During the 1760s and into the 1770s Burke's great concern with the East India Company was not yet mismanagement abroad, but rather that it would come under control of the Crown, and its offices be used to further bribe Parliament.Footnote 46 By the 1780s he had decided it was more than wealthy and powerful enough on its own to capture the Parliament which was attempting to regulate it.Footnote 47 He credited its monetary influence throughout England with bringing down the Fox-North government in 1784.Footnote 48 As part of his efforts at budgetary reform in 1780, which were directed in large part at corruption in the House of Commons, Burke proposed not only a reform of the king's court, but also the elimination of a series of colonial offices created by the House of Commons, including the third secretary of state and the Board of Plantations, which he believed served little political purpose, and were created solely so that Ministers could gain the acquiescence of members through purely monetary means.Footnote 49

Burke's belief that the House of Commons had become the most powerful part of the British constitution, and that this was creating new possibilities for influence and corruption, was shared by earlier commentators such as Bolingbroke and Hume. Yet in contrast to both Hume and Bolingbroke, Burke was far less sure that it would be possible, or desirable, to engineer a better constitutional balance. Hume, for instance, believed that the king's seemingly corrupt involvement in the House of Commons was in fact a source of balance, and that without such an influence the House of Commons would become utterly omnipotent.Footnote 50 Bolingbroke also thought that a greater royal influence was necessary within the House of Commons, in order to eliminate corruption, but only when emanating from a supremely virtuous “Patriot King.”Footnote 51 On the other side, a number of opposition writers claimed that a more active involvement by the people in British politics would bring an end to parliamentary corruption. Burke's time in office saw heated debates over fairer and frequenter elections, as well as the first prominent movement for an expansion of the suffrage since the English Civil War.Footnote 52 Authors such as Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and John Cartwright argued that the solution to legislative corruption was to give the people greater ability to monitor, evaluate, and control their representatives.Footnote 53

Burke disagreed with both sides. He thought that a “Patriot King” or increased popular participation would only lead to expanded possibilities for corruption. On the one side, however patriotic the king's initial objectives, as soon as he attempted the substantial royal involvement called for by Bolingbroke in the legislative process, and in selecting the leadership of the House of Commons without turning to existing parties, he would face an almost unavoidable incentive to draw on the great financial resources of the Crown to accomplish his objectives. Because it eschews the friendships, personal connections, and principled ties which parties draw on, “patriotism” is actually a recipe for more rather than less corruption. There is no way a disconnected group of patriots hand-picked by the king could actually run the House of Common except with an even greater reliance on the Crown's offices and money.Footnote 54 On the other side, frequenter elections or an increase in the suffrage entailed far higher election costs, and thus a greater incentive for representatives to behave in a self-aggrandizing manner, selling their votes in order to have the money to be reelected.Footnote 55 Despite being one of the eighteenth century's firmest critics of parliamentary corruption, Burke did not believe that constitutional reform would eliminate that corruption.Footnote 56 This was an important reason for his emphasis on economic reform, and on the character, prudence, and judgment of Parliament's members and leaders.Footnote 57

In the passage I cited above, about the growing power of the House of Commons, Burke ends by claiming, “the greatness of our power, and the great and just opinion of our corruptibility, and our corruption, render it necessary to fix some bound, to plant some landmark which we are never to exceed.” The two “landmarks” Burke ends up proposing are first that the House of Commons not take on executive and judicial, as well as legislative, functions, and second that the House of Commons not take over the entirety of legislative sovereignty, but continue to include the House of Lords and king as coauthors of legislation.Footnote 58 Both of these “landmarks” are motivated by particular circumstances surrounding Wilkes's expulsion. Footnote 59 But it is striking that in each instance Burke merely insists that the House of Commons keep from aggrandizing further powers.Footnote 60 He in no way believed that all the strength which had “flowed full tide” into the House since 1688 should be undone. However these two “landmarks” are still quite meaningful, since they mark almost the entire difference between the powers of the House of Commons and the powers of the French National Assembly which was formed in 1789. Well before the French Revolution, and while explaining the deepest source of increasing legislative corruption, Burke had already confronted the possibility that an exceedingly powerful elected legislature might become omnipotent, through seizing the whole of legislative sovereignty as well as executive and judicial functions.

The French National Assembly

I have shown that in debates over parliamentary corruption and reform Edmund Burke articulated both a novel characterization of legislative corruption, in which corruption is a deviation away from traditional party connection, and a sophisticated theory of the sources and consequences of corruption over time: corruption becomes widespread owing to the increasing power and independence of the House of Commons, but can culminate in that body's powerlessness, as the House of Commons loses the principled internal political connections which are required to exercise its newfound power in a coherent manner, and the external ties of sympathy and trust which allow it to mediate between the people and other powerful interests of government. Although Burke argued these conclusions most powerfully in his 1770 pamphlet Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, and he was brought to them in part by the unusual political circumstances of the late 1760s, they influenced his analysis of the American Revolution, his arguments for economic reform, and his successive concerns about the East India Company. My further claim is that Burke's expansive and flexible understanding of legislative corruption also exercised a decisive influence on his response to the French Revolution. This is because to a remarkable degree, Reflections on the Revolution in France is structured around an analysis of the French National Assembly.

The French National Assembly was formed on July 9, 1789, when the three different chambers that made up the Estates-General abolished themselves and reconvened as a single legislative body. Although Reflections is famous—and infamous—for Burke's panegyrics to Marie-Antoinette and classical chivalry, as well as his polemics against abstract right and egalitarianism, in many ways the fate of that new legislative body is Burke's central preoccupation in the pamphlet. His very first discussion of France in Reflections is an attack on the National Assembly's makeup and structure. There he makes this dramatic claim about the source of the Revolution's troubles:

This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would appear perfectly unaccountable if we did not consider the composition of the National Assembly. I do not mean its formal constitution, which, as it now stands, is exceptionable enough, but the materials of which, in a great measure, it is composed, which is of ten thousand times greater consequence than all the formalities in the world. … After I had read over the list of the persons and descriptions elected into the Tiers Etat, nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing.Footnote 61

The stunning implication is that what enabled Burke to make sense of the whole revolution was an understanding of the membership of the National Assembly. The importance of the National Assembly is confirmed throughout the subsequent pages. Burke's analysis of the events of the Revolution is almost entirely centered on two discrete moments: the attack by a Parisian mob on the royal family at Versailles, and the decision by the National Assembly to confiscate church land in order to pay off France's debt. One reason that Burke homed in on these two moments is straightforwardly ideological, since they together constitute an assault on landed property, hereditary monarchy, and established religion.Footnote 62 Another reason is more complex: taken together they paint a powerful picture of the untenable political position of the National Assembly.Footnote 63 The final third of Reflections is entirely an attack on the Assembly's proposed constitution, which Burke accurately predicted would not survive. Before beginning that discussion, Burke again states how central the National Assembly is to his purpose:

THIS LETTER HAS GROWN to a great length, though it is, indeed, short with regard to the infinite extent of the subject. Various avocations have from time to time called my mind from the subject. I was not sorry to give myself leisure to observe whether, in the proceedings of the National Assembly, I might not find reasons to change or to qualify some of my first sentiments. Everything has confirmed me more strongly in my first opinions. It was my original purpose to take a view of the principles of the National Assembly with regard to the great and fundamental establishments, and to compare the whole of what you have substituted in the place of what you have destroyed with the several members of our British constitution.Footnote 64

The centrality of the National Assembly is evident not only from the number of pages devoted to it, but also from the very sequence and structure of Burke's argument about France. He begins with a criticism of the National Assembly's theoretical outlook and composition; he proceeds through the National Assembly's two most important and telling actions; he concludes with the National Assembly's failure to establish a constitution. Everything builds up to Burke's prediction that the National Assembly would fail at the task of constitutional founding.

Burke's focus on the National Assembly is striking—and has been largely overlooked by commentators on Reflections.Footnote 65 But what is even more striking is that Burke's sequence of attacks against the National Assembly echoes his earlier analysis of the House of Commons. Burke identifies in the National Assembly the very same problem which was posed in Britain by an increasing royal budget. The difference is that the offices and economic opportunities in France are scattered throughout regional and municipal governments, rather than held by the Crown. Pointing to the ambitious country lawyers who made up the majority of the Assembly, Burke predicts that these lower members “must join (if their capacity did not permit them to lead) in any project … which could lay open to them those innumerable lucrative jobs which follow in the train of all great convulsions and revolutions.”Footnote 66 In a pamphlet written the year after Reflections, Burke would accuse the Assembly of this even more dramatically: “the rota which the French have established for their National Assembly holds out the highest object of ambition to vast multitudes as, in an unexampled measure, to widen the bottom of a new species of interest merely political, and wholly unconnected with birth or property.”Footnote 67 The constitution of 1790's limit on running for reelection—which Burke refers to above as a “rota”—had created dreams of legislative enrichment across all of France.Footnote 68 He suggests that the corruption of the Assembly will subsequently spread throughout the entire French government:

Whilst they sit in the Assembly they are denied offices of trust and profit—but their short duration makes this no restraint—during their probation and apprenticeship they are salaried with an income to the greatest part of them immense; and after they have passed the novitiate, those who take any sort of lead are placed in very lucrative offices, according to their influence and credit, or appoint those who divide their profits. … These, however, will be as nothing in comparison to the multitude of municipal officers, and officers of district and department of all sorts. … To these needy agitators, the glory of the state, the general wealth and prosperity of the nation, and the rise or fall of public credit, are as of dreams; nor have arguments deduced from these topics any sort of weight with them.Footnote 69

Burke's language here displays his more general political-economic opposition to the Revolution, namely that it was led by “moneyed men, merchants, principal tradesman, and men of letters,” and against traditional landed interests.Footnote 70 But that does not detract from his specific concern about legislative corruption. He decries “the composition of the present Assembly … in which Assembly there are not quite fifty persons possessed of an income amounting to 100£ sterling yearly.”Footnote 71 This highlights Burke's particular concern about the potential for undiluted monetary forces, and a lack of representation for landed interests within a legislative body. And Burke's attack on the makeup of the Assembly is not limited to the representatives being eager to take advantage of every individual economic opportunity available. He further claims that they are utterly disconnected by geography and profession from associating with one another. In the House of Commons, Burke had feared the dissolution of stable political bonds and hierarchies between members as a result of monetary influence. His argument about the National Assembly in Reflections is that such bonds and hierarchies are wholly absent from the beginning, and unlikely to ever form. Burke provides multiple reasons for this even beyond logic of individual economic aggrandizement. He describes the prominence of three different professions—doctors, lawyers, and tradesman—who are “too much confined to professional and faculty habits,” and “inveterate in the recurrent employment of that narrow circle” which constitutes their particular profession, to effectively relate to each other.Footnote 72 The overwhelming majority, he claims, are from obscure towns and provinces, thus having even less common ground on which to interact and combine.Footnote 73 In part Burke blames the previous French monarchy for curtailing the nobility's political role: “no man in France exists, whose power, credit or consequence extends to two districts, or who is capable of uniting them in any design.”Footnote 74 Burke sees in the leadership of the Assembly a complete lack of political experience. He predicts continual chaos, with one faction succeeding another. Like Parliament during the 1760s, but to an even greater degree, “in this political traffic the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders.”Footnote 75

It is important to recognize how different Burke's intention is in these passages than it was in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. In Thoughts Burke's argument identifies the particular interest which was corrupting Parliament. He exhorts members to avoid joining the court faction and to stay united in traditional party connections, in order to save a struggling political institution. Burke's intention in Reflections is far more polemical. He hoped to completely discredit the French Revolution from becoming any sort of model for England, through emphasizing its disastrous consequences. From almost the very beginning of the French Revolution, as his letters attest, Burke was sure that it stood no hope of success, and could not be salvaged: the National Assembly was far too formally powerful and unchecked, the number of profit-seeking actors gaming to take advantage of it far too numerous, and its leaders far too inexperienced.Footnote 76 Although the Revolution was far from over in 1790, Reflections already resembles a postmortem.Footnote 77 Even more important than the different sources of corruption in Thoughts and Reflections, that representatives in England were seeking royal pensions and offices while representatives in France were seeking regional and local offices, is the greater number and variety of competing economic interests and agendas which Burke depicts as seeking to influence and control the French government. They range from “societies in the towns formed of directors of assignats and trustees,” to “attorneys, agents, money jobbers, speculators, and adventurers.”Footnote 78 The colossal political power of the National Assembly meant opportunity, according to Burke, for anyone with economic ambition. The whole rising French middle class saw possibilities, both political and pecuniary, in the emerging political order that the National Assembly was crafting. This is a landscape of corrupt (and potentially corrupt) actors which is far more difficult to navigate than Thoughts on the Present Discontents, or even Burke's attacks on the East India Company. In those earlier cases the source of corruption was identifiable, and Parliament could potentially still be salvaged. By contrast, the financial speculators whose influence Burke highlights in the Assembly are less a discrete actor than the tip of an iceberg, which he believes will be fully revealed once the Assembly's new constitution is put into place. Burke's depiction of such vaster possibilities for corruption in France aligns with his intention, which was not to identify how to salvage the French National Assembly, but rather to completely discredit it as any sort of model.

Despite Burke's more polemical intention and more foreboding conclusion, there is still a clear parallel between his description of the dynamics within the National Assembly and trends he had earlier feared developing within the House of Commons. In both cases he foresees growing monetary influence coinciding with, and contributing to, the absence of stable political bonds and hierarchies, even if this trend is far more out of control in France. However, the parallel does not end there. Burke's attack on the membership of the National Assembly is only the first part of his attack on that legislative body. In the remainder of the pamphlet he places the corruption of the Assembly within the broader political context of France, and predicts the unraveling and collapse of the whole French government. While the process of civil unrest he foresees taking down the new French constitution is not identical to what he had foreshadowed in Thoughts, it is again strikingly parallel.

Beyond his support for hereditary monarchy and a state church, another reason that Burke expends such energy discussing the confiscation of church property and the assault on the French royal family is because of what these two events taken together say about the broader situation in which the National Assembly acted. The National Assembly may have been formally sovereign—and in the process of writing a constitution which would make itself even more sovereign—but Burke gleans from the two central events of Reflections that in fact the National Assembly was largely powerless. What Burke finds so telling about the decision to confiscate church property to pay down the national debt is that based on the rhetoric of the National Assembly, the debt should have simply been declared void. All the treaties made under the Bourbon monarchy were voided because the Assembly claimed the monarchy was essentially illegitimate.Footnote 79 There is no reason that the national debt from the old regime, a similar series of binding legal engagements, should not have also been declared void. Nor, according to their public ideology, should the Assembly have batted an eye over the blow that would have dealt financial speculators.Footnote 80 The fact that the debt from the old regime was not only maintained, but that ten percent of the land in France was confiscated to pay it, indicated a great deal, to Burke, about where power actually lay at that moment in France. This confiscation was surely driven, Burke argues, by the “moneyed interest” of the nation.Footnote 81 Burke's case that the financial elite was the moving force behind the decision to confiscate property is further confirmed by the manner in which the Assembly planned to go about auctioning off the church lands: the extensive period allowed to buyers to pay for the lands meant that most of the lands would be bought on speculation.Footnote 82 In short the confiscation of church land not only unnecessarily rescued the elite financial class in France, they would be the greatest beneficiaries of it.

Burke gives the financial interests in France a weight that the East India Company only dreamed of attaining.Footnote 83 They are the natural allies of the petty Assembly members who longed to enrich to themselves by acquiring local and regional offices, since both would profit through an immense public debt—the one group through the offices created by it, the other through the debt issued to fund it.Footnote 84 Just as in Thoughts, however, Burke makes clear that such a degree of legislative corruption is unlikely to go unchallenged by the mass of the people. If the confiscation of church land reveals the power of financial interests within the National Assembly, the assault on the royal family reveals the National Assembly's deep political dependence on impoverished lower classes. Here the telling facts are that the Assembly moved with the royal family to Paris after the attack on Versailles, and was deeply divided over whether to condemn or support the attack.Footnote 85 The issue that Burke highlights with this example is not only the series of popular revolts then spreading throughout all of France, but the particular independent agency being exerted by popular clubs in Paris. The Assembly is no less beholden to the sans-cullottes than to financial speculators: “It is beyond doubt that under the terror of the bayonet and the lamp-post, and the torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures of clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations.”Footnote 86

Reflections on the Revolution in France reveals a National Assembly which on the one hand has acquired the entirety of legislative sovereignty, as well as deep control over judicial and executive functions. Formally speaking it is omnipotent, and yet Burke claimed that because of the absence of stable political connections within it, and the predominance of self-interested motivations on the part of representatives, it was on the verge of becoming completely powerless. Its two most significant actions show it to be entirely determined by two outside, conflicting powers. The position of the National Assembly is considerably worse than Burke ever depicted the House of Commons becoming. Not only have financial interests effectively captured the legislative process, according to Burke, but popular radicals also exercise a tremendous influence within that body. The Assembly is not only unable to mediate between two outside, opposing powers, as he feared the House of Commons would be unable to mediate between court and people, it is itself, from the inside, pulled in opposite directions by them. Just as Burke had foreshadowed in Thoughts that the loss of the House of Commons’ effectiveness and legitimacy would bring violent unrest to Britain, he predicts the same consequence in France as the legitimacy of the National Assembly even more quickly fades.

Burke outlines this process in the final third of Reflections. There he provides a lengthy deconstruction of the National Assembly's proposed constitution. However, it is a critique which cannot be separated from his earlier analysis of the Assembly's membership and political context. According to Burke, the constitution will fail to satisfy the demands of the people. It disenfranchises a third of the population through property requirements, introduces a gradated system of election, and further cements the power of the moneyed interest. Its financial basis will be in paper currency; the measurement of contributory taxation, which will determine the political representation of each district, decisively favors large cities such as Paris and Bordeaux over the countryside; the meetings of each provincial assembly (which elect members to the National Assembly) will be held in the major towns of each province where they will be influenced by the urban elite.Footnote 87 It is in Burke's description of the French constitution that we see how vast and variegated the economic interests seeking to take over the French government are, in his mind. Their corrupt control over the French government will never be acceptable to the revolting peasants and popular clubs, who will turn in anger against the National Assembly.Footnote 88 Caught between rival powers, the National Assembly will ultimately be forced to draw on the army.Footnote 89 But the Assembly will no more be able to ensure the army's loyalty than anyone else's. Burke foresaw that the Revolution would end in a military coup.Footnote 90

Burke attacks the National Assembly's proposed constitution on more formal grounds also. He derides the lack of a senate, or an independent executive branch. But most of Burke's accusations here reach back to the beginning of Reflections. Despite its complete sovereignty, the National Assembly did not have the shared ethos or legitimacy to mediate between and exercise influence over the people on the one hand, and powerful financial interests on the other hand. Burke's conclusion was that it would be pulled apart by these two opposed powers along with the rest of the nation. It is the continuing and unreconciled power of the people and financial interests which dooms the constitution that the National Assembly has designed. Burke's explanation for why the National Assembly so eagerly contributes to this doom, and his prediction that the Assembly would be unable to intervene and stop it, is a story of petty lust for office and emolument—no less than great revolutionary fervor.

Conclusion

In the course of this paper I have demonstrated that a major element of Burke's argument in Reflections on the Revolution in France is his analysis of the corrupt membership and fraught political position of the French National Assembly. I have further shown how that analysis is prefigured in his earlier theory of parliamentary corruption. In a purely logical sense, this line of argument in Reflections is separable from Burke's opposition to the whole ideology of the “Rights of Man,” which he saw behind the French Revolution. The entanglement between Burke's opposition to corruption and to greater political democracy, however, can be traced all the way back to the concurrence of parliamentary dysfunction and calls for electoral reform in the 1770s. Speaking against electoral reform in 1782, seven years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Burke already disparages “the supposed rights of man” invoked by electoral reformers.Footnote 91 In a speech against more frequent elections two years earlier he is dismissive of anyone who would resort “to the theory of your government,” rather than to the weighty prescription of what has worked over time.Footnote 92

Not only Burke's opposition to greater political democracy, but also his defense of “prudence” can be traced back to debates over corruption and parliamentary reform. The striking conclusion of Burke's analysis of parliamentary corruption, I have argued, in contrast to Hume, Bolingbroke, and the electoral reformers of his time, is that neither increased popular involvement, nor increased monarchical involvement, would help reform corruption in the House of Commons—indeed he is adamant that both are potentially productive of even worse corruption. In other words, Burke was brought by the logic of the situation to a position that no form of constitutional reconstruction would work. Along with limiting the size of the budget, cultivating the character and judgment of individual members and voters is what Burke has left.

But Burke's argument for prudence in the context of legislative corruption is surprisingly sophisticated. Burke is both adamant that certain forms of personal dependence and connection in legislative bodies are essential to governing, such as traditional parties, and convinced that other combinations of dependence and connection ultimately threaten legislative bodies—such as a “court cabal.” For Burke there is no clear choice between a transparent public will on the one hand, and corruption on the other. There is rather a continuous, difficult deliberation about which instances of dependence and connection are useful and productive, and which are dangerous. “The instances are exceedingly rare of mens immediately passing over a clear marked line of virtue into declared vice and corruption. There are a sort of middle tints and shades between the two extremes; there is something uncertain on the confines of the two empires.”Footnote 93 Paddy Bullard has argued that judgments about character define Burke's political thought, and this is certainly true about his response to legislative corruption.Footnote 94 Burke's criticism of members of the court cabal is that they alternate between “the mean and interested struggle for place and emolument” and “a degree of servitude that no worthy man could bear the thought of submitting” to the will of their leaders.Footnote 95 It is therefore necessary for voters to choose representatives who display “a spirit of independence” and “an inquisitive character to discover, and a bold one to display, every corruption and every error of government”; it is necessary for kings to pick ministers who will not discontent the people; most importantly it is up to Members of Parliament to find other members whose “character, conduct, or disposition, would lead him to associate with them.”Footnote 96 Discriminating between worthy and unworthy connections is a judgment not only about character, but also about “general principles in government.”Footnote 97 Here too, though, the decision is in large part a prudential one, since principles are judged by their application—in which Members “model our principles to our duties and our situation.”Footnote 98 Burke's speeches on economic reform offer an equally practical and situated approach to corruption: although all political offices and pensions are a source of political dependence, which ones also fulfill important political functions, and which are merely a source of political dependence?Footnote 99 The prudent judgment required to identify and combat corruption, and to choose between worthy and unworthy instances of political dependence and combination, expands into a whole art of governing.

It is this whole art of governing which Burke repeatedly claims is missing among the French revolutionaries. While Burke defines their absence of prudence with ethical and psychological overtones, it is in a sense also determined by the political environment they have created, at least as Burke relates it. In Reflections on the Revolution in France the National Assembly's power is so extensive, and the multitude of popular and economic interests seeking to control it are so overwhelming, it is difficult to imagine anyone in such a context effectively making the delicate judgments which Burke claims are required in legislative bodies. It is from his previous depictions of legislative corruption in England that Burke draws the rhetorical materials with which he so effectively savages the National Assembly. But his depiction of France in turn can be read as Burke's confirmation of his earlier analysis of English corruption: here is a legislative assembly as democratic as anything the radicals could hope for in England, and Burke dramatically portrays it as far more dysfunctional and corrupt than Parliament—so corrupt that the reader does not even know where to begin in addressing its pathologies. For a generation scholars have recognized that many of the most radical democratic arguments in late eighteenth-century England, America, and France are based in anticorruption rhetoric from earlier that century. It is no small irony that the most influential opponent of radical democracy in the late eighteenth century found his way to vociferous opposition in no small part by also grappling with the question of how to reform a corrupt Parliament.

Footnotes

1 See for instance Bromwich, David, A Choice of Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 43–59; Bullard, Paddy, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 140–74; White, James Boyd, “Making a Public World: The Constitution of Language and Community in Burke's Reflections,” in When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 192–231; and Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 4–12. Readers less sympathetic to Burke also focus primarily on his opposition to the ideas behind the French Revolution. See Macpherson, C. B., Burke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 38–70; Robin, Corey, The Reactionary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), lst–50, 219–41; and Kramnick, Isaac, The Rage of Edmund Burke (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 143–69.

2 See Burke, Edmund, Writings and Speeches, vol. 7, ed. Mitchell, L. G. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 243–45, 266, 293. While his prophecy of a Napoleonic ending to the Revolution is most famous, Burke's argument about the corruption of the National Assembly would also be loosely confirmed by fall of the Girondin party, in large part owing to charges of corruption. Of course Burke was not entirely correct in every prediction. For instance he would later acknowledge his surprise at France's financial survival and military success (ibid., 499). However, as Lock, F. P. notes (Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France [London: Allen & Unwin, 1985], 18), in the years following his death Burke came to be considered a sage because he had articulated in broad outline the Revolution's practical failure.

3 See Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:91–104, 117–21, 166–92, 212–93.

4 Footnote Ibid., 174, 222–23, 238–43.

5 Burke, Edmund, Writings and Speeches, vol. 2, ed. Langford, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 280.

6 The political and ideological challenges that being in opposition posed to Rockingham Whigs are analyzed in Brewer, John, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Ascension of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 55–76; as well as Pares, Richard, King George III and the Politicians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); and Elofson, W. M., The Rockingham Connection and the Second Founding of the Whig Party (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996).

7 For an account of Burke's immediate political aims in writing the pamphlet, as well as his ultimate disappointment with its effects, see Brewer, John, “Party and the Double Cabinet: Two Facets of Burke's Thoughts,” Historical Journal 14, no. 3 (1971): 479–501.

8 The clearest example is Burke's outright glorification of the ruling Whig party under Queen Anne. See Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:258–59, 269, 316–17. Burke's argument for parties extends beyond the “regulated rivalry” which Nancy Rosenblum astutely attributes to him, and also includes the benefits of parties for governing which she associates with Hegel (Rosenblum, Nancy, On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008], 119–27).

9 Attempts to combine the traditional Whig position in favor of party government with a critique of royal patronage were clearly in the air in the late 1760s, although Burke's was far and away the most brilliantly achieved. See for instance A Letter to Duke of Grafton, on the Present Situation of Public Affairs (1768), and Considerations on the Times (1769). For a broad treatment of the opposition pamphlet literature of the 1760s see Brewer, John, “The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case-Study in Eighteenth Century Political Argument and Public Opinion,” Historical Journal 16, no. 1 (1973): 95–116.

10 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:261–76.

11 Harvey Mansfield offers the most forceful claim for the originality of Burke's defense of party (Mansfield, Harvey, Statesmanship and Party Government [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965]); as opposed to the more measured originality claimed by Frank O'Gorman (O'Gorman, Frank, Edmund Burke [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973], 22–45). Against Mansfield, Pat Rogers has argued that the earlier country-party rhetoric was not so much antiparty as antifaction—in favor of a broad-based opposition (Rogers, Pat, “Swift and Bolingbroke on Faction,” Journal of British Studies 9 [1970]: 71–101). Although Rogers is right on this point, she largely misses the degree to which Burke's argument is about regular party governing, and not merely opposition. Brewer has argued that none of Burke's readers or opponents in 1770 found anything disturbing or novel about his defense of party (John Brewer, “Party and the Double Cabinet,” 493–98).

12 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:264, 272, 280, 299, 318. At some points Burke suggests that fear of the Court's growing power is also an important motivation behind members’ acquiescence (ibid., 261). He envisions Members enriching not only themselves but also their constituents, in order to have an advantage in gaining reelection (ibid., 299).

13 Footnote Ibid., 264.

14 Footnote Ibid., 298–300.

15 This point echoes throughout the scholarly literature. Most prominent are Skinner, Quentin, “Bolingbroke vs. Walpole,” in Historical Perspectives, ed. McKendrick, Neil (London: Europa, 1974), 113–26 and Pocock, J. G. A., “The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 230–79. An older but still important rendition is Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 271–378. See also Nelson, Eric, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139–45.

16 See Kramnick, Isaac, Bolingbroke and His Circle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 122–28, 137–53.

17 Although David Hume was an uneven and idiosyncratic supporter of Walpole, he expressed that position quite well (Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political and Literary [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987], 44–45). For an analysis of similar arguments made by Walpole himself, see Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 121–24.

18 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:260–263, 265–272.

19 Footnote Ibid., 269–72.

20 Footnote Ibid., 265–66.

21 The most important Whig publication under Walpole in the 1730s was the London Journal, which featured numerous defenses of party government. See J. Gunn, A. W., Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth Century England (London: Cass, 1972), 112–18; as well as Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 119–22.

22 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:266.

23 Footnote Ibid., 314.

24 Footnote Ibid., 260–66, 270–76.

25 Footnote Ibid., 270.

26 Footnote Ibid.

27 Footnote Ibid., 285.

28 Footnote Ibid., 437–56.

29 Footnote Ibid., 427.

30 Footnote Ibid., 413–26, 450–54.

31 Footnote Ibid., 308.

32 Footnote Ibid., 296.

33 Footnote Ibid., 264.

34 Footnote Ibid., 77.

35 Footnote Ibid., 240.

36 Footnote Ibid., 240–41.

37 Footnote Ibid., 239.

38 Burke, Edmund, Correspondence, vol. 2, ed. Sutherland, Lucy (Cambridge and Chicago: Cambridge University Press and University of Chicago Press, 1965), 41, 44, 51–52, 57.

39 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:286.

40 Footnote Ibid., 294.

41 Footnote Ibid., 292–94.

42 Footnote Ibid., 280.

43 Footnote Ibid., 234.

44 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:294.

45 Footnote Ibid., 258–60. Compare with Bolingbroke, Political Writings, ed. Armitage, David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 172–73.

46 Edmund Burke, Correspondence, 2:351, 354–55, 399, 451, 490, 503.

47 Burke, Edmund, Writings and Speeches, vol. 5, ed. Marshall, P. J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 443–44. For an analysis of Burke's opposition to the East India Company's influence in Parliament, see Whelan, Frederick, Edmund Burke and India (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 104–22.

48 Burke, Edmund, Correspondence, vol. 5, ed. Furber, Holden and Marshall, P. J. (Cambridge and Chicago: Cambridge University Press and University of Chicago Press, 1965), 154, 196–99.

49 Burke, Edmund, Writings and Speeches, vol. 3, ed. Elofson, W. M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 533–39.

50 David Hume, Essays, 10–13, 44–45.

51 Bolingbroke, Political Writings, 252–94.

52 For a history of the struggle over electoral reform during Burke's political career, see Cannon, John, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 47–143.

53 See Cartwright, John, Take Your Choice! (London, 1776), 1–4, 37, 41; Price, Richard, Political Writings, ed. Thomas, D. O. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25–30, 99; Priestley, Joseph, Political Writings, ed. Miller, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16, 137, 139.

54 See Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:210–14.

55 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:309–11; 3:592–600.

56 On this point see especially Burke's letter to Joseph Harford, September 27, 1780, in Correspondence, vol. 4, ed. Copeland, Thomas and Woods, John (Cambridge and Chicago: Cambridge University Press and University of Chicago Press, 1963), 295–98.

57 Footnote Ibid., 296.

58 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:234–35.

59 It is important, however, that Burke expressed parallel concerns about the House of Commons seizing constitutional omnipotence during the Regency crisis, which ended in 1789 literally months before the French Revolution broke out. See Cobbett, William, Parliamentary History of England, vol. 27 (London: Hansard, 1816), 818–30, 1118–19.

60 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:234–35.

61 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:91.

62 For perceptive examinations of Burke's defenses of established religion and landed nobility, and their intellectual roots, see Boyd, Richard, “‘The Unsteady and Precarious Contribution of Individuals’: Edmund Burke's Defense of Civil Society,” Review of Politics 61, no. 3 (1999): 465–92; and O'Neil, Daniel, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 134–56.

63 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:118–21, 157–64, 286–91.

64 Footnote Ibid., 212.

65 Paddy Bullard perceptively observes Burke's criticisms of the members of the National Assembly, but connects them straightforwardly to Burke's ethical and psychological argument against radical intellectuals (Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric, 141–44, 174–77).

66 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:94.

67 Footnote Ibid., 365.

68 Burke's fears about more frequent elections in England were somewhat similar. See Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:308–10.

69 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:366.

70 Footnote Ibid., 346. For an account of Burke's political economy in Reflections (though which fails to bring up the centrality of legislative corruption) see Pocock, J. G. A., “The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution,” Historical Journal 25, no. 2 (1982): 331–49.

71 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:365.

72 Footnote Ibid., 95.

73 Footnote Ibid., 93–95.

74 Footnote Ibid., 367.

75 Footnote Ibid., 92.

76 See Edmund Burke, Correspondence, 5:25, 65, 43–55, 78–81, 105–6.

77 Burke's belief in the inevitable collapse of the National Assembly and its proposed constitution is clearly revealed by his conclusion: “I have told you candidly my sentiments … they may be of use to you in some future form which your commonwealth may take. In the present it can hardly remain” (Writings and Speeches, 7:293).

78 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 7:242.

79 Footnote Ibid., 157.

80 Footnote Ibid., 158.

81 Footnote Ibid., 158–62.

82 Footnote Ibid., 170–74.

83 Burke believed that East India Company did actually dream of attaining that sort of influence. He counts it among the groups which would eagerly support imitating the French “system” in England (ibid., 345).

84 Burke distinguishes the prosperous financial interests seeking to maintain a large French debt from the “needy agitators” and “presumptuous young clerks” who were eager to enrich themselves through offices created by it (ibid., 365–66).

85 Footnote Ibid., 118–21.

86 Footnote Ibid., 118.

87 Footnote Ibid., 221–24, 236–37, 224–27, 238–42.

88 Footnote Ibid., 268–72.

89 Footnote Ibid., 272–73.

90 “In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain some time mutinous and full of faction until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. … But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master … the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic” (ibid., 266). Of course, by the time that Napoleon seized command in 1799 the Assembly had long been superseded by the Directory.

91 Burke, Edmund, Works, vol. 7 (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1887).

92 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 3:589.

93 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:211.

94 Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric.

95 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 2:282, 296, 311–12, 318, 319.

96 Footnote Ibid., 296, 320, 282.

97 Footnote Ibid., 319.

98 Footnote Ibid., 320.

99 Edmund Burke, Writings and Speeches, 3:498, 501, 508–20.

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