The Little Platoons Passage From 1790 and What It Asks of Us Now

There is a kind of person who loves humanity and cannot stand his neighbors. He signs every petition for the welfare of distant millions and has never once shoveled the widow's walk next door. Charles Dickens gave him a permanent home in Bleak House in the person of Mrs. Jellyby, who devotes herself to a philanthropic scheme in Africa while her own children fall down the stairs. Dickens called it telescopic philanthropy: love that can only see things very far away.

Sixty years before Dickens, Edmund Burke wrote the sentence that answers Mrs. Jellyby, and it has become one of the most quoted lines in the English conservative tradition. It is about little platoons. Most people who quote it have never read the paragraph around it, and fewer know the French law, passed a few months after Burke wrote, that showed exactly what he was warning against. Let us read it closely, the way it deserves.

The passage

Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in November 1790. Deep in its long examination of the National Assembly and the men who composed it, Burke pauses on a question of loyalty. The old France had been divided into orders and corporations: clergy, nobility, provinces, guilds, parishes, each with its own rights and its own sense of itself. Should a man's attachment to his own part of society be treated as narrow selfishness, to be dissolved in a larger loyalty to the nation? Burke says no, and gives the reason:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

He continues that the interest of that portion of the social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all who compose it, and that only bad men would abuse it and only traitors would barter it away for personal advantage.

Read the passage phrase by phrase.

"To be attached to the subdivision"

Burke starts with attachment, not with argument. He is describing a feeling, and he is not embarrassed by it. People are attached first to what is near: the family, the neighborhood, the trade, the congregation. The word "subdivision" is telling. Society is not a heap of identical individuals. It is divided, and the divisions are where people live.

The revolutionaries in Paris wanted to abolish exactly those subdivisions. In early 1790 the Assembly replaced the historic provinces of France, Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy and the rest, each with centuries of law and custom, with new administrative departments drawn for administrative convenience. Burke mocked the geometric spirit of the plan elsewhere in the Reflections, the idea that a country could be cut into squares like a chessboard and its people would transfer their loyalty to the squares. The provinces were platoons. The departments were filing cabinets.

"To love the little platoon we belong to in society"

The military image matters. A platoon is a small unit whose members know each other by name. Soldiers do not, in the moment of danger, fight for abstractions. They fight for the man beside them. Every serious account of combat says so. Burke is making the same observation about civil life: people learn loyalty, sacrifice and duty in small groups where they are known.

Notice the verb. Not "to belong to" or "to be registered in", but "to love". The little platoon is not a political unit assigned by the state. It is a community that commands affection, and affection cannot be legislated.

And notice "we belong to". The platoon is not chosen like a gym membership. Much of it is given: the family you were born into, the town you grew up in, the faith you were raised in. Burke's view of society as a partnership between the living, the dead and those who are to be born begins here, in attachments that precede our choices.

"Is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections"

This is the argument. Public affection, love of country, concern for fellow citizens, willingness to serve, does not arise from nowhere. It grows from a seed, and the seed is planted in the small group. A child who learns to share at the family table, to keep promises to friends, to sacrifice for a team, to sit through a church service, to help clean up after the town fair, is learning the habits that, later, make him a citizen.

Burke's parenthesis, "the germ as it were", is a gardener's image. You cannot plant a full-grown oak. You plant an acorn and give it soil. Public virtue is the oak; the platoon is the soil.

"The first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind"

This is the line that answers the most common misreading of Burke. Critics say the little platoon is parochial: love your own and forget everyone else. But read what Burke actually wrote. The platoon is the first link in a series. It leads somewhere, to the country, and then to mankind. Burke is not against loving humanity. He is explaining how human beings come to love humanity: from the inside out, starting with the people they can see.

Mrs. Jellyby skipped the first links. That is why her love of mankind was useless to her own children. Burke's order is not narrow. It is the only order that works.

What France did next: the Le Chapelier law of 1791

Burke wrote in 1790. What happened in 1791 reads like a deliberate refutation of his sentence, carried out by statute.

The Assembly had already moved against the Church. In November 1789 it placed the Church's property at the disposal of the nation. In February 1790 it suppressed monastic vows and dissolved the contemplative orders. In July 1790 it passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, making priests salaried officials of the state, elected like civil servants and required to swear an oath to the constitution. The parish, the oldest platoon in France after the family, was being turned into a department of government.

Then came the trades. In March 1791 a decree associated with the deputy Pierre d'Allarde abolished the guilds, the corporations of masters and journeymen that had governed crafts for centuries. And on June 14, 1791, the Assembly passed the law named after the deputy Isaac Le Chapelier. It forbade citizens of the same trade or profession, workers and employers alike, to assemble, to elect officers, to keep registers, or to deliberate about what the law called their supposed common interests. Le Chapelier explained the principle in his report: there were to be no more corporations in the state, only the particular interest of each individual and the general interest, and no one was permitted to inspire in citizens an intermediate interest that would separate them from the public thing.

Read that principle beside Burke's sentence and the contrast could not be sharper. Burke: the intermediate attachment is the first principle of public affection. Le Chapelier: the intermediate attachment is forbidden. Between the individual and the state, nothing.

The guilds had real faults: they restricted entry, protected incumbents and slowed innovation. A conservative who values free markets can see why reformers wanted them opened. But the Le Chapelier law did not merely open the trades. It outlawed the act of association itself. French workers were not legally free to form trade unions until a law of 1884. A revolution made in the name of liberty had made it a crime for bakers to meet as bakers.

And the void the law created did not stay empty. A society with nothing between the individual and the state is a society in which the state is the only community left, and the state was, within two years, the Committee of Public Safety. That pattern, the destruction of intermediate bodies followed by the swelling of central power, is the subject of Robert Nisbet Saw Lonely People Turn to the State for Belonging, and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century followed it with grim consistency, as Every Totalitarian Regime Went After the Family First, and Not by Accident documents.

The American contrast: a nation of platoons

Now cross the Atlantic. When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the United States in 1831 and 1832, the thing that struck him most was the opposite of the Le Chapelier law. In the second volume of Democracy in America (1840) he wrote that Americans of all ages, all conditions and all dispositions constantly form associations: religious, moral, serious, trivial, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Where in France you would see the government at the head of a new undertaking, and in England a great lord, in the United States you would be sure to find an association.

Those associations were America's little platoons, and they did the work Burke described. They taught self-government by practice. A man who has chaired a church committee, kept the books for a volunteer fire company, or organized a barn raising knows how to run a meeting, keep a budget and persuade his neighbors. Tocqueville called associations the remedy for the isolation that equality breeds, and the story of how American comebacks have been built on them is told in Tocqueville Saw It in 1831, Comebacks Are Built in Associations, Not Ads.

They did material work too. Before the welfare state, millions of Americans insured each other against sickness, injury and death through fraternal lodges and mutual aid societies, an achievement described in Before the welfare state, Americans insured each other through lodges. The platoon was a safety net woven by its own members.

And the First Amendment protects the platoon in constitutional law. It guarantees "the free exercise" of religion and "the right of the people peaceably to assemble". The Supreme Court has long recognized a freedom of association implied by those guarantees. No American legislature may pass a Le Chapelier law.

The strongest objection: platoons breed tribes

Now the best case against Burke's sentence. It is not frivolous.

"Little platoons sound charming, but history is full of platoons that were closed, cruel and exclusionary. Guilds kept out competitors. Country clubs kept out Jews and Black Americans. Small towns enforced conformity and punished dissenters. Loyalty to one's own group is the root of tribalism, and tribalism is the root of discrimination and war. A modern society should cultivate universal moral concern, equal regard for every person, and should rely on a neutral, impartial state rather than on the partial loyalties of local communities. Burke's sentence is nostalgia for a world of insiders and outsiders."

Here is the answer.

1. Burke's sentence points outward. The passage itself says that love of the platoon is the first link in a series that ends in love of country and of mankind. The tribalism objection describes a platoon that stops at the first link. Burke describes one that leads somewhere. The cure for a closed platoon is a platoon that does its proper work, not the abolition of platoons.

1. Universal concern without particular love is empty. Mrs. Jellyby is the proof. People who are taught to care equally about everyone in the abstract usually end up caring effectively about no one in particular. Real sacrifice, the kind that sits up at a sickbed or adopts a child or gives a tenth of an income, is learned in particular relationships. Remove the platoons and you do not get universal love. You get isolated individuals with strong opinions.

1. The impartial state is not impartial and not neutral. When the state becomes the only community, it does not become a referee. It becomes the most powerful platoon of all, the one with the police. Le Chapelier's France and the twentieth century's totalitarian states show what happens when every loyalty except loyalty to the state is suppressed.

1. The injustices of particular platoons were often corrected by other platoons. The movement that ended segregation in the American South was organized in Black churches, those little platoons of faith and fellowship that local governments could not control. The abolition movement before it grew from congregations and voluntary societies. The answer to a bad platoon has usually been a better one.

1. The principle has a name in Catholic social teaching. Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in 1931 set out the principle of subsidiarity: it is an injustice and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher body to take over what smaller and lower bodies can do. That is the little platoon turned into a rule of governance, as Pius XI Put Subsidiarity in Writing in 1931, and Washington Should Read It explains.

What the passage asks of us now

So what does a sentence from 1790 ask of an American family now? Four things, at least.

• Belong to something small. Join a congregation, a civic club, a volunteer company, a parent association. Not as a consumer, as a member who shows up and carries part of the load.
• Guard the family as the first platoon. Every other platoon depends on it. A child who has never learned to belong to a family will struggle to belong to anything else.
• Defend the legal freedom of association. When governments try to dictate how churches choose leaders, how charities choose partners, or how clubs define their missions, they are passing small versions of the Le Chapelier law. Watch for it.
• Let the series run outward. The point of the platoon is to grow citizens. Love of home, the theme of Roger Scruton Made the Love of Home a Serious Political Philosophy, is the beginning of patriotism, not its rival.

Burke wrote one sentence. France answered with a law. America answered with a nation of associations. We are still choosing between those answers every time a local institution closes or opens its doors.

The case in brief

1. Burke's sentence in the Reflections (1790) makes love of the little platoon the first principle of public affection and the first link in a series that leads to love of country and of mankind.
2. Revolutionary France did the opposite, seizing the Church's property, abolishing the provinces and the guilds, and in the Le Chapelier law of June 14, 1791, forbidding citizens of a trade to associate at all.
3. America became a nation of voluntary associations that taught self-government and insured their own members, protected by the First Amendment's guarantees of free exercise and peaceable assembly.
4. The charge that platoons breed tribalism fails, because the passage points outward and because the alternative, a state that is the only community, is worse.
5. The passage asks us to belong to something small, guard the family, and defend freedom of association.

What you can do: this month, join one local association you are not already part of, a congregation, a service club, a volunteer fire company or a parent group, and attend its next meeting in person.