For decades, now, many among that ever-shrinking group of centrist and conservative academics have engaged in sometimes acrimonious debates over the sources and nature of our constitutional order. The debate centers on the question whether the United States is primarily liberal or conservative, founded in essence through promulgation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, or through a historical process stretching back centuries and punctuated by critical documents like the Mayflower Compact, Declaration, and Constitution, and by development of institutions and practices such as the common law. More simply, it often devolves into the question: “Locke or Burke?” The debate is misguided for several reasons: it creates needless division (and the occasional purge in foundations and academic departments) at a time when many conservatives have concluded America’s very existence is under attack; the leftward lunge of “never Trumpers” has made a key point of contention, the supposed duty to make over the world in our own image, obsolete; and it overlooks the fact that both Locke and Burke expounded and helped embed in America the essential elements of natural rights, ordered liberty, and the rule of law central to our constitutional order.
Unfortunately, while Locke’s influence is all-but-universally recognized, with arguments focused on the extent of his originality and the centrality of his thought for the founding generation,[1] there is a determination in some quarters to deny all but completely the relevance of Burkean understandings within our tradition. The result is an impoverished vision of American constitutionalism with little grounding in the character of our people, rendering it too weak to withstand the onslaught of resentment and totalitarian ideology fostered for decades in our educational institutions and lately set loose on our streets.
Much of the hostility toward Burke—a defender of ordered liberty in America, India, Ireland, and the Caribbean against British imperialism and the slave trade, and in France against totalitarian democracy—is rooted in a common but narrow academic reading of the final chapter of Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History. But, as Steven Lenzner has pointed out,[2] Strauss himself noted, in that very chapter, Burke’s recognition of natural rights that must be respected by any legitimate law and regime. Contrary to the common portrait of Burke as an enemy of human rights and of any opposition to inherited authority, Burke expounded a natural law philosophy that undergirds rights in the same manner as our own Constitution—as protections of human dignity and self-government rooted in our God-given nature.
Interpretations of Burke too often are shaped by isolated readings of his most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Here he excoriated the radical French revolutionary Jacobins (along with their English followers) who would soon launch a campaign of mass murder carried out in the name of The Rights of Man. Burke recognized the grounding of such hypocritical violence in the abstract theorizing of the Jacobins’ patron saint, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose fantasy of an idyllic state of nature placed the blame for all human miseries on the imperfections of social and political institutions impinging on absolute rights—rights that could be made real only by an overawing, total state.
Seeing such totalitarian logic for what it was, Burke rejected the grounding of natural rights in human will, noting that “Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.” Some today read this statement as a denial of natural rights. But Burke clearly defended what he termed the real right of man. Most famously, he stated that men have “a right to do justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in life, and to consolation in death.” Equal justice, the pursuit and enjoyment of property, family, and religious practice; Burke recognized all these as universal rights. More generally, he recognized the natural right to be left alone to pursue one’s own good: “Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself.”[3]
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