The Evils of Revolution
Edmund Burke wrote an extraordinary book titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful which I was quite taken by, and which I will discuss sometime in the future. Burke wrote it at nineteen years of age. I found this book looking for his seminal Reflections On The French Revolution. I'm slowly working my way through this, but just before I set off on my trip, I found Penguin’s 84-page selection from Reflections On The French Revolution which is titled: The Evils of Revolution. The longer title on this booklet includes this prescient phrase: "What is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils," which is a quote from Reflections.
There is much to quote from this tiny book, which is just a preliminary for getting into the real thing. Here are just a few:
About the wrong, and destructive, types of leaders:
Compute your gains: see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous speculations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their contemporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment in which they became truly despicable.On leaders:
There is no qualification for government, but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place and honour.On revolutions:
The worst of these politics of revolution is this; they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions...This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature.On religion and Christianity:
We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason but our instincts; that it cannot prevail long.
