Reflections on "Reflections"

Reflections on the Revolution in France was brilliant, far-seeing, incisive, brave, and ― most importantly ― true. This was The Big One for Sir Edmund Burke, the pamphlet heard round the world.

One of its important lessons is that society, comprised of people, can't be controlled as if made of machines.

Society should be handled like a living organism. ― Sir Edmund Burke

Simply said...

People aren’t machines. ― David Burkean

Scroll down for some Burkean commentary on Reflections.

First, some Wikipedia observations.

Wikipedia on Burke's masterpiece

I bolded the key words and statements most germane to 21st century Burkeans.

1. Reflections on the Revolution in France is a political pamphlet written by the British statesman Edmund Burke and published in November 1790.

2. Reflections is a defining tract of modern conservatism.

3. It has been one of the defining efforts of Edmund Burke's transformation of "traditionalism into a self-conscious and fully conceived political philosophy of conservatism”.

4. Burke argued in Reflections that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing: "What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics”. [See 1st Burkean Commentary]

5. Burke said that society should be handled like a living organism and that people and society are limitlessly complicated. [See 2nd Burkean Commentary]

6. In the 19th century, positivist French historian Hippolyte Taine repeated Burke's arguments in Origins of Contemporary France (1876–1885), namely that centralization of power is the essential fault of the Revolutionary French government system; that it does not promote democratic control; and that the Revolution transferred power from the divinely chosen aristocracy to an "enlightened" heartless elite more incompetent and tyrannical than the aristocrats. [See 3rd Burkean Commentary]

7. Friedrich Hayek, a noted Austrian economist, acknowledged an intellectual debt to Burke. Christopher Hitchens wrote that the "tremendous power of the Reflections lies" in being "the first serious argument that revolutions devour their own children and turn into their own opposites”.

Burkean Commentary 

1.Burke focused on the practicality of solutions, not metaphysics.

“The question is upon the method of producing and administering” food & medicine, not abstract rights. IOW, he focused on what Burkeans today call Mechanisms.

2.Burke said that people and society are limitlessly complicated.

Truer words were never spoken. That’s why cCon fails. cCon requires that people do as they’re told, machine like. They won't. They're people, not machines.

3.Burke called out both the Ancien Régime and the French Revolutionaries as cCon disasters.

The Revolution transferred power from the "divinely chosen" aristocracy to an "enlightened" heartless elite, more incompetent and tyrannical than the aristocrats.

Some 150 years later, another cCon-to-cCon power transfer occurred. It led to the death of 100 million people. This was the transfer from Nazi Germany to International Communism. The Soviet Union & Communist China made Hitler’s ravages look modest.