Seven Myths About Edmund Burke That His Fans and Critics Both Repeat

Every movement has a patron saint it has never actually read, and for conservatives that saint is Edmund Burke. He is quoted on bumper stickers, cited at think-tank dinners, and credited with a famous sentence about good men and evil that, I regret to report, appears nowhere in his writings. His enemies are no better. They call him a cranky Tory who wanted the world frozen in 1688, which would be news to the man who spent a good part of his career battling the Crown, the East India Company and the slave trade.

So let us do what Burke himself did and examine the evidence. Seven claims follow. For each I will state what people say, give it the best case I can, test it against the record, and give a verdict. The record, as usual, is more interesting than the legend.

A short life, for orientation

Burke was born in Dublin in 1729, the son of a Protestant attorney and a Catholic mother, was educated at Trinity College Dublin, and came to London to study law, which he abandoned for writing. His early book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful appeared in 1757. He entered the House of Commons in 1765 as a follower of the Marquess of Rockingham, and he sat in Parliament for almost thirty years, representing Wendover, Bristol and Malton in turn. He retired in 1794 and died in 1797.

That biography matters. Burke was an Irish outsider with no estate, no title and no family connections to rely on. Whatever else he was, he was not the pampered aristocrat of the cartoon.

Myth one: Burke was a Tory

The claim: Burke is the founder of Toryism and the intellectual voice of the landed establishment.

The best case: the Tories, later the Conservative Party, have claimed him for two centuries, and his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) defends the aristocracy and the established church.

The record: Burke was a Whig all his life. The Whigs were the party of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had deposed James II and settled the Crown on terms that Parliament set. Burke served Rockingham, the Whig leader, as his secretary and chief pen. In the 1770s he fought the Crown's attempts to govern through favorites; his pamphlet Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) charges that the King's friends had formed a hidden faction to rule behind the ministers. That is not a Tory complaint. When the Reflections came out, Burke described himself as defending the Whig principles of 1688 against the French innovators, and in 1791 he published his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs to say so in plain words. The verdict: false. Burke is a Whig who conserved Whig principles, and American conservatives, who inherit the Whig side of the argument, are his rightful heirs.

Myth two: Burke opposed all change

The claim: Burke is the philosopher of "leave it alone."

The best case: he was suspicious of abstract plans and loved inherited institutions.

The record: the line most often missed in the Reflections is this one: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." He meant it. He supported reform of the Crown's patronage and fought for the economic reform bill of 1780, which would have trimmed the royal household. He supported the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766. He backed relief for Catholics and Protestant dissenters, and he drafted in 1780 a "Sketch of a Negro Code" for regulating the slave trade and slavery in the West Indies, with the aim of eventually ending both. What he opposed was a kind of change: reform driven by theory and carried out by destroying existing institutions all at once. A surgeon who amputates to cure a headache is not a reformer. The verdict: false. Burke was a reformer with a method. The method was to repair a house while living in it. See Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing for the legal idea he built around it, prescription, which means that long-standing institutions earn a presumption in their favor.

Myth three: Burke was against the American cause

The claim: because he condemned the French Revolution, he must have condemned the American one.

The best case: both revolutions overthrew a government, and Burke feared revolutionary violence.

The record: Burke was one of the best friends the colonies had in Parliament. He served as the paid London agent of the colony of New York in the 1770s. On March 22, 1775, a few weeks before Lexington and Concord, he delivered his great speech on conciliation with the colonies, urging Parliament to stop trying to tax and coerce them and to return to the practice that had made the empire thrive. His reasons were practical and moral. The colonists, he argued, were Englishmen who had inherited the English love of liberty and would not give it up. He told the House that a plan built on force would produce a country governed by fear. He added a line modern conservatives ought to frame: "A great empire and little minds go ill together."

He did not support independence, and he did not live to see the American Constitution tested. But he drew the distinction the Founders drew: the colonists were defending English liberties that the ministry had violated, in the name of precedent and charter. That was nothing like a movement to erase the past. The verdict: false. Burke defended the American position on the ground of English constitutional right, which was the Americans' own ground. The Founders' political thought is steeped in the same commitments; Burke Versus Paine, the Argument That Defined Left and Right for Good traces the split between the two traditions that followed.

Myth four: Burke had no sympathy for the oppressed

The claim: Burke defended hierarchy and so cared nothing for the powerless.

The best case: the Reflections is full of praise for rank and inheritance, and he sneered at "the swinish multitude" in one passage, a phrase his critics have been using ever since.

The record: his deeds cut the other way. In Ireland, he was a lifelong critic of the Penal Laws that barred Catholics from owning land, holding office or sitting in Parliament. He supported the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, and his support for Irish trade concessions and Catholic relief angered Bristol voters and cost him his seat there in 1780. His son Richard served as an agent for the Catholic committee. He also spent years of his life attacking the British East India Company's rule in India, a fight that deserves its own paragraph.

Myth five: the Hastings impeachment was a witch hunt

The claim: Burke pursued Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, out of a personal vendetta and a prejudice against empire, and the failed trial proves it was hollow.

The best case: the trial dragged on for years, ended in acquittal, and Hastings was ruined financially.

The record: Burke brought charges against Hastings in the House of Commons in 1786, the Commons impeached him, and the trial in the House of Lords opened in February 1788 and ran until the verdict of April 1795, more than seven years. Burke led the managers for the Commons. His case was not about Hastings alone. It was an argument that a government which holds power over people must answer to the moral law, that no governor may excuse cruelty by pleading that the people he governs are distant, different or in his charge. He argued that arbitrary power is the same wrong whether exercised in Westminster or Calcutta.

The acquittal tells us something about the House of Lords and the politics of the day, and it does not prove the charges were frivolous. Hastings's defenders had power and friends. Historians still dispute some of the specific accusations. But the principle Burke put on the table, that British officials abroad were bound by law and conscience and not just by the Company's profits, was among the most important in the history of the empire, and it has echoes in the American principle that no official is above the law. The verdict: false in its harshest form. It was the longest and most serious attempt at the time to hold imperial power accountable.

Myth six: Burke wrote that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"

The claim: this sentence is Burke's, and it sits on the plaque, the poster and the opening slide of a thousand speeches.

The record: nobody has found it in Burke. Scholars of quotation have looked for it for decades in his speeches, letters and published works and have found nothing. The closest real passage comes from Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), where Burke wrote: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Note what the real sentence says. It is not a general sermon about passivity. It is a warning that the good lose when they act alone and the bad act together, and a call to build parties, associations and alliances. That is a very different thing, and in my judgment a better one. It is an argument for organizing. The verdict: the famous line is a misattribution. Use the real one, and you will have a better quotation and a more accurate one. The lesson for anyone who quotes online: if a line sounds too perfect, check the source.

Myth seven: Burke hated reason

The claim: he was an enemy of the Enlightenment and of thinking itself, a prophet of mere sentiment.

The best case: he wrote that "prejudice" is useful, and he praised "the wisdom of our ancestors" against the conceits of the philosophers.

The record: when Burke used the word prejudice he meant a settled, inherited disposition that carries the experience of many generations, and he said clearly that the wise man looks inside it for the reason. He was himself a first-rate student of law, economics and history, and in his 1795 paper on scarcity he argued for free trade in grain. He argued from natural law: in the Reflections he defended the rights of men, not the French Declaration's list of rights, but "the real rights of men," which he said were found in the practical working of society and not in a metaphysical formula.

His quarrel with the French radicals was not that they used reason. It was that they used one kind of reason, speculative, abstract and indifferent to circumstance, as a razor against everything else. That is just the distinction the Scottish philosophers drew between the moral sense, which sees, and the rationalist's system, which reasons from definitions. See The Little Platoons Passage From 1790 and What It Asks of Us Now, which shows how his idea of the small local institutions that shape a person's loyalties underlies a good deal of conservative social thought. The verdict: false. Burke defended a richer account of reason, one that includes experience.

The strongest objection, answered

A critic will say: you have rescued Burke from his friends only to make him sound like a progressive. If he was a reformer, a friend of Catholics and an enemy of empire's abuses, why do conservatives claim him?

Four points answer it.

1. A conservative is not a person who opposes every change. He is a person who asks what a change will break before he makes it. Burke asked that question of the Crown, the Company and the revolution alike, and he was consistent.
2. His principle that power must answer to a moral order is conservative in the deepest sense. It is the same principle the Founders put in the Declaration. See Oakeshott Said Being Conservative Is a Temperament Before It Is a Program for a modern statement of the temperament.
3. His reforms were repairs. He sought to restore the constitution to its proper working, not to build another.
4. His fear of the French Revolution, which began with a Declaration and ended with a Terror, proved right on the facts. The Reign of Terror began in 1793, three years after the Reflections warned that a revolution built on abstractions would end in blood.

The case in brief

1. Burke was a Whig throughout his career, defending the 1688 settlement, not a Tory apologist.
2. He favored reform, but of a particular kind: repair of institutions, not their destruction.
3. He stood with the American colonists on English constitutional grounds, and with Irish Catholics against the Penal Laws.
4. He pressed the Hastings impeachment as a test of whether imperial power answers to law and conscience.
5. The line about good men doing nothing is not his; his real sentence, about the good needing to associate, is the better one.

What you can do: look up Burke's 1775 speech on conciliation in a library or a reputable online archive and read the passages on how Americans came to love liberty; then check the quotation before you share the next famous line on your timeline.