Defending Political Theory After Burke: Stewart's Intellectual Disciplines and the Demotion of Practice Ryan Walter Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 80, Number 3, July 2019, pp. 387-408 (Article) Published by University of Pennsylvania Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2019.0028 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/729724 Access provided at 16 Aug 2019 00:08 GMT from University of Queensland Defending Political Theory After Burke: Stewart’s Intellectual Disciplines and the Demotion of Practice Ryan Walter Perhaps therefore it is a fault of Mr. Burke, that he is ever checking this disposition of the mind to soar to original principles, and detaining you midway amongst combinations of private feelings, usage, prudence or convenience; whilst Mr Paine on the contrary is continually assisting you to throw out ballast, till you are lifted out of sight of all fabricks of human contrivance, and having brought you to those sublime heights, he keeps you out of reach of all useful and practical inference. —William Cusac Smith1 Burke established a rhetoric of prescriptive conservatism with such intellectual power and religious conviction . that he bade fair to displace Scottish social theory from its role as the chief ideological support of the Whig order. —J. G. A. Pocock2 I would like to thank the referees, Anna Plassart, and the late Barry Hindess for comments and suggestions. 1 [William Cusac Smith], The Rights of Citizens: Being an Examination of Mr. Paine’s Principles Touching Government. By a Barrister (Dublin, 1791), 4. 2 J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and His- tory, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 280. Copyright ᭧ by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 80, Number 3 (July 2019) 387 PAGE 387 ................. 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:42 PS JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019 By linking philosophy’s role in recreating French society with England’s painful memories of government innovation during the previous century, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) derived much of its rhetorical force by exploiting the period’s fear of enthusiasm.3 The aim was to portray as destructive the idea of remodeling society using notions of natural right, and the tactic might be judged to have been as successful as the publication.4 As a consequence of Burke’s intervention, the latitudinarian intellectual culture that had flourished since at least mid- century gave way to loyalism and attempts to portray even moderate reformers as Jacobins.5 In this context, the act of producing abstract and metaphysical accounts of politics and society came to be viewed suspi- ciously. Burke’s counsel was for the legislator to revere custom, prescription, and inheritance. He tied all three concepts together in his creative rework- ing of English common law for anti-revolutionary purposes.6 The key point was to understand that political life mimicked the natural life of the human species in using time to transmit knowledge to ensure perpetuity. It was in this regard that Burke described society as a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. A legislator with this view of society would not embrace purely theoretical plans for sudden change.7 The effect on political debate was severe. Consider William Pitt’s response in Parliament to the petition from the Society of the Friends of the 3 J. G. A. Pocock and Gordon J. Schochet, “Interregnum and Restoration,” in The Varie- ties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Gordon J. Schochet, and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 177. For enthusi- asm more generally see Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995), chap. 1. 4 William B. Todd, A Bibliography of Edmund Burke (London: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1982), 150. Note the contemporary Francis Plowden’s comment that Burke’s principles came to be widely adopted in the following years: Francis Plowden, A Short History of the British Empire in the Last Twenty Months (London, 1794), 19. 5 Mark Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 119–20. 6 See Paul Lucas, “On Edmund Burke’s Doctrine of Prescription: Or, an Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers,” The Historical Journal 11, no. 1 (1968): 57–58. 7 Edmund Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. L. G. Mitchell and William B. Todd (1790; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8:53–293, at 82–84, 147. Iain Hampsher-Monk has noted that Burke’s language here is surely drawn from Francis Bacon. See Burke, “Reflec- tions on the Revolution in France,” in Burke: Revolutionary Writings, ed. Iain Hampsher- Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 35n72. For the passage of Bacon noted by Hampsher-Monk, see Francis Bacon, “Of Innovations,” in The Essays or Coun- sels, Civil and Moral of Francis Bacon, ed. Henry Morley (London, 1883), 114. 388 ................. 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:43 PS PAGE 388 Walter ✦ Defending Political Theory After Burke People, which proposed reform to address irregular representation and the distorting role of patronage.8 Pitt equated the proposed reforms with French principles of individual suffrage and an equal right to representa- tion, warning that if they were implemented then the British Constitution would be destroyed by an “equalising anarchy.”9 In any case, Pitt insisted, the whole business of reforming with abstract principles was disastrously misplaced: “The merit of the British Constitution is to be estimated, not by metaphysical ideas, not by vague theories, but by analysing it in practice. Its benefits are confirmed by the sure and infallible test of experience.”10 Such intellectual caution was exactly what Burke had mandated. So much is conveyed in the pamphlet written by Burke’s friend William Smith, quoted in the first epigraph above. Yet Smith favored a greater role for “original principles” in the legislator’s repertoire than did Burke, but less than needed to reach Paine’s “sublime heights.”11 Smith’s intervention reminds us that, until they had become suspect, there were several forms of speculative thinking that had supported the Hanoverian regime. One such form was the “philosophic Whiggism” of William Paley, developed in The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), which elevated utility over rights and counseled subjection to the existing order.12 Another species was the “sceptical Whiggism” of Adam Smith and David Hume, as labeled by Duncan Forbes,13 which provided a conjectural-historical defense of commercial society against its republican or civic-humanist detractors by revealing how virtue changed over time, such that a “commercial human- ism” was appropriate for the age at hand.14 The political status of both forms of speculation changed after the French Revolution. For example, a review of Smith’s Wealth of Nations published in the Annual Register in 1776, hence likely by Burke, merely referred to it as “rational theory,”15 8 “Debate on Mr. Grey’s Motion for a Reform in Parliament,” in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London, 1817), 30:787– 925, at 795–96. 9 William Pitt, “May 7, 1793,” in The Speeches of the Right Honourable William Pitt, in the House of Commons (London, 1806), 2:143–56, at 155. 10 Pitt, 154. 11 For Smith see R. B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 1750–1800 (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 164–66. 12 Sergio Cremaschi, Utilitarianism and Malthus’s Virtue Ethics: Respectable, Virtuous, and Happy (New York: Routledge, 2014), 28. 13 Duncan Forbes, “Sceptical Whiggism, Commerce, and Liberty,” in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 179–201. 14 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 50. 15 The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1776, vol. 19 (London, 1776), 241. 389 ................. 19332$ $CH3 06-25-19 15:30:43 PS PAGE 389 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JULY 2019 but by 1793 it was dangerous to extol Smithian principles, which have been described as “virtually seditious” by one commentator.16 Similarly, Paley’s Principles was quickly incorporated into Cambridge curricula after initial publication in 1785, but in 1802 the Anti-Jacobin Review was worrying over the text’s potential to sanction Jacobin principles.17 These facts are established in the historiography and well known. What is less well known, however, is the means by which those who were committed to political speculation attempted to defend themselves. Or, to put the question in narrower terms, how could one reject the allegation of “enthusiasm” and maintain a positive account of one’s intellectual activi- ties? The current paper takes up this issue by examining Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), in which Stewart was prepared to speak variously of a field of inquiry called “the theory of politics” and “political philosophy,” and of figures such as the “political theorist” and “speculative philosopher” who had mastered a vocabulary— including the terms “government” and “power”—that referenced the com- plex ideas needed to understand this field and enlighten the conduct of statesmen. This exercise is intended to reveal two neglected dynamics of Britain’s intellectual culture following the French Revolution. First, those sympa- thetic to political speculation were not sitting ducks but defended them- selves by pointing to elaborate intellectual disciplines that could prevent abstract arts of reasoning from falling into enthusiasm.