Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

• WHILE THE SEEDS of German race-thinking were planted during the Napoleonic wars, the beginnings of the later English development appeared during the French Revolution and may be traced back to the man who violently denounced it as the "most astonishing [crisis] that has hitherto happened in the world" said to Edmund Burke. The tremendous influence his work has exercised not only on English but also on German political thought is well known. The fact, however, must be stressed because of re- semblances between German and English race-thinking as contrasted with the French brand. These resemblances stem from the fact that both countries had defeated the Tricolor and therefore showed a certain tendency to discriminate against the ideas of Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite as foreign inventions. Social inequality being the basis of English society, British Conservatives felt not a little uncomfortable when it came to the "rights of men." According to opinions widely held by nineteenth-century Tories, in- equality belonged to the English national character. Disraeli found "some- thing better than the Rights of Men in the rights of Englishmen" and to Sir James Stephen "few things in history [seemed] so beggarly as the degree to which the French allowed themselves to be excited about such things." " This is one of the reasons why they could afford to develop race-thinking along national lines until the end of the nineteenth century, whereas the same opinions in France showed their true antinational face from the very beginning.

• Burke's main argument against the "abstract principles" of the French Revolution is contained in the following sentence: "It has been the uni- form policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right." The concept of inheritance, applied to the very nature of liberty, has been the ideological basis from which English nationalism received its curious touch of race-feeling ever since the French Revolution. Formulated by a middle-class writer, it signified the direct acceptance of the feudal con- ceptof liberty as the sum total of privileges inherited together with title and land. Without encroaching upon the rights of the privileged class within the English nation, Burke enlarged the principle of these privileges to include the whole English people, establishing them as a kind of nobility among nations. Hence he drew his contempt for those who claimed their franchise as the rights of men, rights which he saw fit to claim only as "the rights of Englishmen." (ca. 175-176 pages)

• These facts and reflections offer what seems an ironical, bitter, and be- lated confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke opposed the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man. They appear to buttress his assertion that human rights were an "abstraction," that it was much wiser to rely on an "entailed inheritance" of rights which one transmits to one's children like life itself, and to claim one's rights to be the "rights of an Englishman" rather than the inalienable rights of man.^^ According to Burke, the rights which we enjoy spring "from within the nation," so that neither natural law, nor divine command, nor any concept of mankind such as Robespierre's "human race," "the sovereign of the earth," are needed as a source of law. (ca. 299 pages)

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, edited by E. J. Payne, Everyman's Library.

Edmund Burke in Ardent's "The Origins of Totalitarianism "
http://www.cscd.osaka-u.ac.jp/user/rosaldo/101010OTHA.htm