ABSTRACT

Everybody knows', Burke writes of the members of the French National Assembly, that there is a great dispute amongst their leaders, which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all resemble him. The nobility and the clergy, who were the custodians of these principles and of the symbols that embodied them and ministered to the moral imagination, had received in turn the support of the learned. Burke warns the learned that in deserting their natural protectors for Demos, they run the risk of being 'cast into the mire and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude'. The act of subordination to any earthly authority is justified only in case this authority is looking up to something still higher; so that genuine liberty is rooted in the virtue that also underlies genuine Christianity. Burke can scarcely be charged with the form of superficiality that consists in an attempt to mediate between incompatible first principles.