The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790-1837

Katey Castellano

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137354204
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Analyzing Romantic conservative critiques of modernity found in literature, philosophy, natural history, and agricultural periodicals, this book finds a common theme in the 'intergenerational imagination.' This impels an environmental ethic in which obligations to past and future generations shape decisions about inherited culture and land.

Part I

Imagination

1

Intergenerational Imagination in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France

Although many scholars have discussed Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary argument in favor of the aristocracy and church in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the way in which his conservative, organic view is further associated with a concern for the health of the environment remains largely unexplored. Yet the preservation of land through inheritance is a cornerstone of the Burkean political position. For instance, he writes, “the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement” (R 119–20). Admittedly Burke intends to reinforce social hierarchies; however, he also articulates a tension in the debates about land use during the Romantic period – that is, the virtues of inheritance, which is a conservative valuation of land as an estate, versus that of improvement, which is a liberal, free-market approach that views land as a commodity, or as real estate. In the eighteenth century, Raymond Williams argues, “An estate passed from being regarded as an inheritance, carrying such and such income, to being calculated as an opportunity for investment, carrying greatly increased returns.”1 The principle of improvement sought progressively to make the land more profitable, and thus precipitated the enclosure and privatization of the commons in England. The Reflections and the other Romantic conservative texts explored in this book assert that land should be protected from unregulated privatization and industrial expansion. Inheritance becomes a means by which the ideology of “improvement” could be countered.

This chapter explores the neglected connection between Romantic political conservatism and environmental conservation. I suggest that Burke’s “principle of conservation” amounts to a resistance to modernity by rejecting liberal, rational individualism and by emphasizing human vulnerability and dependence on both local communities and the lived environment. Anthony Quinton describes British conservatism as a “politics of imperfection” with three major tenets: organicism, traditionalism, and skepticism.2 Conservative skepticism insists that punctual, individual rationality can and will err without the guiding ethos of history encoded in tradition and organic local communities. Therefore, rational, utilitarian decisions about land use that are severed from any consultation with history, tradition, and community will lead to unanticipated, unintended negative consequences. There is more at stake, then, in the conservative tenets of traditionalism and organicism than a mere reinforcement of the status quo. Burkean conservatism articulates a social ecology that views the human place in the natural world as embedded and reciprocal rather than as rational and dominant.

In the first part of this chapter, I argue that Burke’s traditionalism aspires to prevent humans from being “unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors.” It is therefore a theory of relations with the dead that seeks to inculcate humility and moderation when people make decisions about altering current environmental or social structures. While Burke’s traditionalism is central to the conservative, conservationist position, studying it without also considering his organicism neglects the way that he collapses time from both ends, so in the second part of the chapter I explore how organicism emerges as a theory of intergenerational connection: the dead influence the living, while the living plan for future generations. I conclude by arguing the active conservation of what Burke calls “the whole original fabric of their society” contains an ecological dimension that conceptualizes the human relationship with the non-human environment as a mode of “habitation.” Here human cultural habits reciprocally interact with the non-human environment, shaping and in turn being shaped by the distinctive features of their particular bioregion. Together traditionalism and organicism create and reinforce the guiding conservationist ethos of the intergenerational imagination. Burke insists that a properly moral imagination views land and culture as inherited gifts from past generations that must be transmitted intact to future generations.

Traditionalism and the intergenerational imagination

Scholars of Burke’s work agree that Burke’s conservatism espouses a political predisposition towards history and tradition as a way of countering modernity, empire, and liberal individualism. Burke advocates a “practice of establishing the rules of political behavior by an appeal to history,” according to J.G.A. Pocock. More recently, F.R. Ankersmit argues, “it is for Burke only in history that human nature can articulate itself.”3 Yet traditionalism in the Reflections differs from the antiquarianism, historicism, and overall penchant for a “revival of the past” that Hans-Georg Gadamer claims are “the great achievements of romanticism.”4 A specifically Burkean conservative traditionalism developed in reference to generations past arises out of acute anxiety about future change and progress. Early in the Reflections, Burke states, “Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security” (R 92). His anxiety about the potentially irreversible consequences of abrupt political or environmental change is revealed in his advocacy for maintaining imaginary relationships with the dead that might serve to moderate change. It is not surprising then that the battle over what the human relationship should be to the dead is fundamental to the distinction between the political liberalism of Thomas Paine and the conservatism of Burke. Paine puts it succinctly: “I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript authority of the dead; and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living” (TPR 204). Paine’s negative conception of rights espouses the removal of all barriers to individual initiative and industry, whereas the diachronic, intergenerational temporality of Burke’s conservative traditionalism refuses liberalism’s separation of the present from the past.

Inheritance counteracts spatial and social mobility, advocating instead for connections between past, present, and future generations. While this view is problematically hierarchical, at the same time the conservative ethical conception of the telos of property looks to obligations beyond the production of wealth; this ethical aspect of conservatism foreshadows an ecological view that the land has intrinsic value as a habitat for all life. Most scholars understandably focus on the ways in which inheritance perpetuates structures of social hierarchy, yet Burke’s Reflections also clearly argues for a consideration of intergenerational responsibility in land use:

But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation – and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. (R 192)

When Burke describes the people who own land as “life-renters” and “temporary possessors,” he advocates for a conception of inheritance that is tinged with the humility of a worldview that imagines the individual life span within the broader continuity of generations. He recognizes, prophetically, that liberal individualism’s short-term view, which posits the individual as the “entire master” of a piece of land, allows us to become “unmindful” of our obligation to conserve the land for future generations. Burke’s Reflections, according to Terence Ball, argues for an ethos of “intergenerational symmetry,” which entails utilizing natural resources in a way that considers the memory of what has been inherited from past generations and a projection of what inheritance will be left for future generations.5 As the aristocracy become “life-renters,” Burke flattens the social hierarchy, comparing those who are wealthy to the tenant farmers who only rent and work the land.

By reducing the landed class to “life-renters” while promoting a hierarchical system of familial land ownership, Burke introduces a paradoxical structure not unlike the religious, priestly asceticism in which one gains power through negating it because preserving the land for future generations means one cannot strip it of its fecundity. At the same time, Burke’s warning that liberal individualism and untethered economic growth might well leave the land “a ruin instead of an habitation” is uncannily prophetic. His tirade against the French Revolution takes place within the context of financial and industrial revolutions; he fears that the evolution of a capitalist economy, with its “paper-money despotism,” would force all Englishmen to bow to the “idol of public credit” that rendered fiscal and moral values unstable (R 126). While the liberal model of land ownership is certainly more democratic than Burke’s, he nevertheless accurately predicts that in a democracy based on the model of liberal individualism, humans would fail to recognize that they are the beneficiaries of a gift of land from past generations, and there would be, as a consequence, no consideration for later generations who will use the land.

Burke’s advocacy for maintaining an intergenerational imagination as a nascent land ethic emerges even more clearly when we read his views alongside Thomas Paine’s response to the Reflections: the Rights of Man (1791). Paine’s liberalism is built on the idea that humans are discrete individuals who have no obligation to the past or future. He argues:

Those who have quitted the world, and those who are not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each other, as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive: What possible obligation, then, can exist between them; what rule or principle can be laid down, that of the two non-entities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and who never can meet in this world, the one should control the other to the end of time? (TPR 204–5)

The notion of the liberal individual comes into being through a negative conception of freedom, a freedom from the moral obligations or political principles that might extend from one generation to the next. In Charles Taylor’s words, the “punctual” liberal individual emerges from “stance of detachment [that] generates the picture of ourselves as pure independent consciousness.”6 Although Paine is most interested in arguing that the present generation be freed from the “dead hand” of the past, his logic of liberal autonomy further severs any sense of obligation to future generations, since we cannot have tangible intercourse with them. But while Paine disregards the political and ethical possibilities of any relation to past or future generations, Romantic conservatives understand intergenerational imagination as a necessary prerequisite to sustainable habitation within the environment.

Although the full environmental implications of these opposing arguments were not apparent when the debate took place in the 1790s, it is now clear that Burke and Paine were debating conflicting environmental ethics. Burke’s principle of conservation argues that the current generation of human beings must not think of themselves alone because to do so would lead to the “ruin” of the environment. Instead, humans must understand their relationship to the land in terms of habitation, that is, as something that they own only because they belong to the continuity of generations. By contrast, Paine argues that the current generation has no responsibility to the generation to come, signaling a change in the way that humans understand their relationship to land under free-market liberalism.

If Romantic conservatism is defined by the conservation of tradition, then Romantic conservatism is far more indebted to notions of community, marked by both place and generational time, than has been previously acknowledged by scholars. Tradition, Anthony Giddens explains, “contributes in basic fashion to ontological security insofar as it sustains trust in the continuity of the past, present, and future, and connects such trust to routinised social practices.”7 Deference to the authority of the dead is one of the routinized social practices that liberalism seeks to sever. As Paine argues, “Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated” (TPR 204). If liberals define freedom in part as the ability to sever themselves from the influence and the power of the dead in law and culture, it is not surprising that anxiety about retaining the authority of the dead is found early in the Reflections. Like Walter Benjamin’s historian, Burke’s anxious traditionalist urgency reflects that he “is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy.”8 With this concern Burke questions the motives and sympathies of the British Revolution Society: “Do these theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors, who dragged the bodies of our ancient sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs?” (R 107). Drawing on the history of the English Civil War, Burke creates an image of Richard Price and the men of the Revolution Society dragging dead bodies out of tombs in order to desecrate decomposing bodies and to destroy the memorial site. This gothic image portrays liberal progressivism’s desire to disengage itself, at whatever cost, from the “manuscript authority of the dead.” “For Burke, the grave is a place of warning, not of mourning,” Esther Schor observes.9 Indeed Burke uses the ghastly image of the desecration of dead bodies to prepare his readers for his warning, “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” The principle of conservation, Burke goes on to argue, views subjects as “grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever” (R 119–20). Both images – the living dragging the dead from a tomb and the dead holding authoritatively on to the living – figuratively picture contact with dead bodies, either through dragging or grasping. The difference is whether the living or the dead control the contact.

These two images of the living in physical contact with the dead correspond with liberal and conservative views. The liberal view believes that humans have the agency and autonomy to drag the dead away from their perpetual enshrinement, and the conservative view envisions human society as grasped and held steady by the dusty hands of the dead forever. Mike Goode calls the first scene “Burke’s ‘tale from the crypt’ – those latter bodies are simultaneously dead enough to be dragged out of tombs and yet alive enough to have their power and office retroactively usurped by changes in the law.”10 While a liberal view imagines a majority vote can change any long-standing law, the inverse occurs in Burke’s vision of the mortmain, the dead hand, which connotes at once the gothic image of a moldering hand reaching out from the grave and controlling the behavior of the living. Burke’s dead bodies are thus powerful enough to grasp hold of the living, yet are also dead enough to be threatened by liberalism. In either case, the de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Imagination
• Part II: Habitation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index