ABSTRACT
To appreciate the importance of the principle of simplicity and of the consequent antithesis of "art" and "nature" in the thought of Burke's "rights of man" opponents, one must examine some of the replies provoked by his Reflections. This chapter examines Edmund Burke's consistent appeals to the traditional Natural Law, and presents his objections to false claims to abstract "rights." The main thesis of Burke's satire was the Rousseauist paradox that a simple society, close to "nature," was morally superior to the complex and refined "artificial" civil society of eighteenth-century Europe. Burke did not believe that man was intrinsically morally sound and became corrupted by the external refinements and demands of his civil institutions. In Stone's antithesis of the natural and artificial, the state of nature is the norm for man, and life in civil society is just and free in proportion to its approximation of the state of nature.
