James Boyd White’s study of the relationship between the ‘law’ and the language is fascinating and revelatory in the first part, and meaningless and misleading in the second. The dividing line between the two seems to be the jump from the ancient to the modern; I have written previously here of White’s astute understanding of the roles of the philosopher, historian, and poet — of Socrates, Thucydides, and Homer. But the modern world seems to perplex him, for it is here that language for him seems to truly lose its meaning, and a fealty to reading and comprehension’s basic principles rather evasive. It is his essay on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolutions of France that causes the greatest pain, and reduces Burke’s mastery of the English language to a debased sophistry.

White’s thesis is that Burke uses the Reflections to “create the objects of its persuasion,” namely the British Constitution and the French Revolution.¹ The former is fashioned as the ideal, the latter as its corrupted form. White claims that “in this text Burke makes a language in which his inventions can become real, and he teaches it to his reader.”² Furthermore, the ultimate purpose of the text is to “persuade its reader not to a set of propositions but to a language — a language of belief and action.”³ Burke is presented here as a masterful orator who translates his work into words, relying on the strength of his oratory and not on the basis of his Ciceronian and Thomist standards of natural law, and Burke is presented in the same terms as what White feels Burke is doing: “in such caricatured form that they cannot in any ordinary sense be true.”⁴ These are White’s elementary misunderstandings, of which more shall be said soon, in turn.

The first charge, that Burke ‘constructs’ the British constitution, is neatly dealt with by J. G. A. Pocock.⁵ I must preface this by mentioning that for any resident of a nation which still holds law on the books from English common law, such naive assertions about the nature of law are second nature, even for the civic-minded citizen. Pocock goes even further than Burke does in the Revolutions in tracing back the history of the Ancient Constitution: that the “Magna Carta confirmed a charter of Henry I, which confirmed a charter of William I, which confirmed the laws of Edward the Confessor, which were themselves a codification of laws already ancient.”⁶ The British Isles had been granted the gift of Roman Civil Law in the late years of the Republic, and despite the usual trials and tribulations of a medieval period where unification was neither the norm nor the practice, it exerted a remarkable effect on the customs and traditions of Englishmen south of Hadrian’s Wall. Peter Stanlis shows in his study of Burke and natural law that Burke, without doubt, was proficient in the Corpus Iuris Civilis.⁷ One can go so far as to say that without a sound knowledge of Roman law, a natural law theory of the size and scope that Burke possessed would be impossible, or merely a castle in the sky.

If White had made the effort of going through the first few pages of the Reflections, he would have come across the anomaly that King William of Orange’s accession to the English crown during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was. Burke, noting that this was an anomaly, a deviation from norm authorised by necessity and the law, and that at any rate, “privilegium non transit in exemplum.”⁸ Privilege, Burke points out, did not automatically translate into precedent: because a deviation had been authorised once, that did not imply that it became grounds for precedent in a common law system. White goes so far as to skirt around this reference to Roman jurisprudence, ending his quotation and study of the curious case of King William abruptly and rather incompletely at the sentence before the Latin phrase above.⁹ He does not see the phrase; it disappears in front of his eyes, vanishing from the paper without a trace and certainly without the strange italicisation that accompanies Latin words and phrases. It is callousness and clumsiness in reading that produces such an error, I hope, and not a willing and conscious ignorance of an essential aspect of Burke‘s thought. What of the endless quotations from Cicero, Juvenal, Horace, and references to Marius, Sulla, and of Rome in general, can White avoid?

It is White’s claim, referenced above, that Burke engaged in the wanton manufacture of the “Ancient Constitution”, that Burke was solely responsible for this, and that his view of the common law and liberties of the English was a figment of Burke’s imagination. It must be noted in turn that Burke’s identification of the common law with tradition and with time immemorial was neither unique nor particularly remarkable as a legal innovation: “the habit of mind denoted by the term ‘ancient constitution’,” Pocock notes, “had already — during the seventeenth century — produced and given expression to ideas very like those of Burke’s traditionalism, and (though this is of less importance), that Burke had some opportunity of knowing this.”¹⁰ Neither is this some awful sort of sentimental romanticism that forms the nostalgic outlook of the unphilosophical conservative, but an active school of jurisprudence with clearly articulated principles and a significant intellectual thrust in usage and application, from Coke to Blackstone, and with the sanction of the Stuarts. Burke’s philosophical jurisprudence and its extension to the realm of politics was an affirmation of strong current of thought that had received prior application in the realm of politics, and it was part of a discourse that strongly articulated their applicability to more than mere matters of the court. Where is the invention in this, a language that Burke seeks to make intelligent for his reader? White’s contention appears to be on a foundation that has been swept under the rug from the claim he seems to make, but such a sight may only occur to him if he would be so kind as to read Burke’s multiple other works.

On March 22, 1775 — almost a decade and a half before the start of the French Revolution — Burke delivered a speech in the House of Commons, advocating for a reconciliation with the American colonies. In it, he stated that their fierce spirit of liberty was inherited from the English:

“This fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth … [because] First, the people of the Colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation, which I still hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The Colonists emigrated from you, when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this biass [sic.] and direction the movement they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to Liberty, but to Liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. Abstract Liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.”¹¹

Burke’s ‘Ancient Constitution’ was contrasted with the chaos of the French Revolution, not constructed for it; similarly, Burke’s peculiar and distinct sense of a Liberty for Englishmen was not made intelligible by the French Revolution or by chaos on the continent. This is only one instance where White’s tacit characterisation of Burke as a mere reactionary who seeks to teach those who do not know any better can be challenged by reference to a more or less consistent and rigorous doctrine applied to the cases from the western shores of the Atlantic to Ireland and through to India. Burke is reacting to his times insofar as he is observing, thinking, and then philosophising about the application of principles of justice, and through that, of custom, tradition, and liberty.

White’s third thesis is perhaps the least contentious on the surface, but in essence is a disavowal of any philosophical potential in Burke: that the ultimate purpose of the text is to “persuade its reader not to a set of propositions but to a language — a language of belief and action.”¹² Burke is according to this caricature, in effect, no better than Dr. Price, against whom much is said in Reflections, and who finds subtle praise in White’s essay on Burke.¹³ Burke does not seek to inform the reader of anything, of no valuable propositions — perhaps, of the value of the aristocracy and of natural hierarchies, of English liberty, of an established religion of the state, all of which would be familiar to the readers of Reflections — “but of a language of belief and action.”¹⁴ By doing this, White necessarily supposes that Burke cannot be a philosopher, or have any wisdom, for the role of philosophy, properly understood, is to replace opinion with knowledge. The Reflections certainly have a degree of pathos in them, but strictly understood and shorn of its emotional elements, it has a degree of philosophical significance, of being able to converse not merely with the common Englishman but also the aristocracy and more educated public, which was Burke’s intended audience. Leo Strauss — whatever one may think of his readings of the ancients is immaterial here — noted that “political philosophy is the attempt to replace our opinions about political fundamentals by knowledge about them. Its first task consists therefore in making fully explicit our political ideas, so that they can be subjected to critical analysis.”¹⁵ It is this that White is refusing to acknowledge.

Understood properly, White does not intend to treat Burke with the level of consideration one may give a philosopher, but merely as a conversation partner: he says so as much in a response to his critics. White, in seeking to respond to “the various articles written about” When Words Lose Meaning, seeks to emphasise the “theme” that “my meaning can never be your meaning; all writing is a way of addressing, or avoiding, that fact.”¹⁶ It is of no material or intellectual consequence to White whether he has read the text with fealty to its meaning, its authorial intention. He seeks to insert himself into a ‘discussion’ with Burke and the others he seeks to engage with, but stops listening at the very beginning because he does not care for what they intend to say, or for the broader overtones of their work, but only for what he thinks they may mean. Sometimes, he is astute and lucid, but more often than not, he is lost. White denies that words have meaning, and that there is the sort of knowledge that may be objective at all, pulling off a vicious slight of hand that cons Edmund Burke of the care and serious attention he deserves as an individual whose thought is eminently worthy of study.

This middling sort of subjectivism tries to, without offering any substantial arguments in support of its advocacy of meaninglessness, replace the pursuit of knowledge with the pursuit of opinion, diminishing the life of study to a vapid life with no meaning. If Burke meant anything I wanted him to mean, perhaps I would have him say that SPQR was not the ‘Senile, Poor Quacks of Reykjavik’, as my post yesterday conjectured, but rather the ‘Shoddy Parasitic Quartet of Reims’. Who needs Senatus Populusque Romanus?