Edmund Burke
gigatos | February 11, 2022
Summary
Edmund Burke, known as the British Cicero (Dublin, 12 January 1729 – Beaconsfield, 9 July 1797), was an Irish-born British politician, philosopher and writer, and one of the main ideological precursors of English Romanticism.
For more than twenty years he sat in the House of Commons as a member of the Whig party (the liberals), opponents of the Tories (conservatives). He is best remembered for his support of the claims of the American colonies against King George III, although he opposed their independence, a dispute that led to the American War of Independence, as well as for his vehement opposition to the French Revolution, expressed in Reflections on the Revolution in France. The debate over the revolution made Burke a major figure in the conservative current of the Whig party (which he dubbed the Old Whig) in opposition to the pro-revolutionary New Whigs, led by Charles James Fox.
Burke”s polemic on the French Revolution stimulated debate in England. For example, the Anglo-American Thomas Paine responded to the Reflections with The Rights of Man, while William Godwin wrote the Inquiry into Political Justice, condemning the bloody outcome of the revolt, but without repudiating the principles that had inspired it, as did Burke, who also published philosophical works on aesthetics and founded the Annual Register.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Edmund Burke was the son of a Protestant lawyer and a Catholic woman, whose last name before marriage was Nagle. Burke was educated in his father”s faith and remained a practicing Anglican throughout his life. After attending the Quaker school in Ballitore (County Kildare), in 1744 he entered Trinity College in Dublin. In 1747 he founded his own debating club, Edmund Burke”s Club. He graduated from Trinity College in 1748 (the famous institution honored him by erecting a statue of him). Burke senior wanted his son to enter the world of lawyering, so he sent him to London in 1750. In the English capital Burke began the practice of law at Middle Temple, one of the four English professional associations of which every lawyer must be a member, but left almost immediately.
Burke”s first work to be published was A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind from every species of Artificial Society, which appeared anonymously in 1756. Designed perhaps to attack the “anarchic” principles of the Enlightenment philosophers who claimed to base the State on the theorems of reason, without taking into account the complexity of human nature, in addition to and against its satirical intent, it turned into a denunciation of the evils of mercantile society, which represent the dark side, not eliminable, of civil progress.
In 1757 he published a treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (tit. or. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful), which attracted the attention of leading European thinkers, such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant, and was inspired in part by the aesthetics he derived from his reading of John Milton”s Paradise Lost.
In 1758, together with the publisher Robert Dodsley, he founded the influential Annual Register, a magazine in which various authors commented on the major international political events of the previous year. In London Burke became part of the most important cultural and artistic circles, establishing relationships with personalities such as Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Giuseppe Baretti, David Garrick and Oliver Goldsmith.
At the same time, Burke met William Gerard Hamilton. When Hamilton was appointed Minister for Ireland, Burke became his secretary – a position he would hold for three years – and followed him to Dublin. In 1765 Burke became private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, a leading Whig politician, who had become prime minister in that year. Lord Rockingham and Burke would remain friends and allies until the premature death of the first, which occurred in 1782.
Also read, biographies – Otto Dix
Political Commitment
In 1765 Burke entered the British Parliament, elected to the House of Commons. The electoral constituency, in which he stood as a candidate, belonged to the category of “rotten boroughs”, that is the territories that, because of a small population, were actually under the control of a notable, usually the largest landowner in the area. The constituency in question was Wendover, “fief” of Lord Fermanagh, an ally of Rockingham. In Parliament, Burke played a fundamental role in the debate on the constitutional limits of royal authority. He argued strongly against an unrestricted royal power, supporting the role of political parties in maintaining a principle of opposition, able to curb abuses of the king or lobbies within the government. His most important publication on the subject was Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents (tit. or. Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents) in 1770. Burke supported the claims of the American colonies against the government of King George III and his representatives. He also made his voice heard against the persecution of Catholics in Ireland and denounced the abuses and corruption operated by the British East India Company.
In 1769 Burke published, in response to George Grenville, the pamphlet The Present State of the Nation. In the same year he purchased the small estate of Gregories, near Beaconsfield. The price was paid for the most part with borrowed money. Although this six-hundred-acre estate contained an art collection, including works by Titian, it would prove to be a heavy financial burden in the following decades. Also in the same year he was initiated into Freemasonry in London, in Jerusalem Lodge No. 44. His speeches and his writings had made him famous and, among other things, had led to suspicions that he was the author of the Letters of Junius, violent attacks against the government, which will prove later autograph works of the essayist Philip Francis.
In 1774 he was elected to represent Bristol, at the time the second largest city in England and, therefore, a constituency where electoral contention was fairly free. His speech to the electors, held after his victory, was noted for defending the principles of representative democracy against the idea that elected representatives should act exclusively in defense of the interests of their constituents. Burke”s support for free trade with Ireland and his support for the emancipation of Catholics, unpopular arguments among his constituents, caused him to lose his seat in 1780. For the rest of his parliamentary career, Burke represented Malton, another Rockingham-controlled constituency.
Under Lord North”s Tory government, the war in America got worse and worse. It was also thanks to Burke”s speeches that the war ended. To this period belong two of his most brilliant works: the speech Conciliation with America (1775) and the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777). The fall of the Tory North brought the Whig Rockingham back to power. Burke became Paymaster of the Forces and private advisor to the king, but Rockingham”s unexpected death in July 1782 ended his mandate after a few months.
Burke then supported the new government formed by the Duke of Portland, in which the Whigs and Tories cohabited, a decision that many will later consider his worst political mistake. During this brief coalition government he continued to serve as Paymaster. The coalition fell in 1783 and was followed by the long Tory government of William Pitt the Younger, which lasted until 1801. Burke remained in opposition until 1793, the year in which he broke definitively with the Whig leader Charles James Fox and passed, along with other exponents of the party, such as William Windham and the nephew of Rockingham, with Pitt”s Tories. In 1785 he delivered Arcott”s famous Debt Speech of the Nabob. His attack on the Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, resulted in the impeachment of Hastings. The process, of which Burke was the main promoter, lasted from 1787 until the final acquittal of Hastings in 1794.The following years were characterized instead by the strenuous struggle against the principles of the French Revolution, in particular with the work Reflections on the Revolution in France, a work of conservative inspiration, counterrevolutionary and historicist.
Last years and death
In 1794 Burke suffered a hard blow, caused by the death of his son Richard, to whom he was very close. In that same year ended the trial against Hastings with a sentence of acquittal. Burke felt he had done his time and, tired, decided to leave the Parliament. The King, who had appreciated his positions on the French Revolution, wanted to appoint him Earl of Beaconsfield, but after the death of his son, Burke was no longer interested in noble titles. He accepted only a pension of 2,500 pounds. While modest, the annuity was contested by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale. To them Burke gave a scorching reply in Letter to a Noble Lord (Letter to a Noble Lord, 1796). In that same year came out his last writings: the Letters on a Regicide Peace, in which Burke argued against peace negotiations with France.
He died at Beaconsfield on July 9, 1797. Although many had proposed to inter him in Westminster Abbey with a state funeral, Parliament preferred to stick to the will left by Burke himself, who asked to be buried in Beaconsfield Cathedral.
Also read, biographies – Denis Diderot
Aesthetics: the Beautiful and the Sublime
Burke”s aesthetic was a precursor to the Romanticism of the many decades that followed.
The Beautiful, according to Burke, is that which is well formed and aesthetically pleasing, thus possessing beauty, while the Sublime is that which has the power to compel us to do something and to destroy us. In Burke”s idea, the sublime is “everything that can arouse ideas of pain and danger, that is, everything that is in some sense terrible or concerns terrible objects, or acts in a way analogous to terror”; the sublime can also be defined as “the delightful horror”. Nature, in its most terrifying aspects, such as stormy seas, snowy peaks, twilight landscapes or volcanic eruptions, becomes the source of the Sublime because it “produces the strongest emotion that the soul is capable of feeling”, but a negative emotion, not produced by the contemplation of the fact itself, but by the awareness of the insuperable distance that separates the subject from the object.
The preference of the Sublime over the Beautiful represents the sign of the transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism via the pre-Romantic taste already present in the eighteenth century, e.g., with cemetery poetry (e.g., Edward Young and Thomas Gray) and Oxyanism.
The origins of our ideas of the beautiful and sublime, according to Burke, can be defined by understanding their structures and causes. In accordance with Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, causation can be divided into formal, material, effective, and final causes. The formal cause of beauty is the passion of love; the material cause concerns the characteristics of objects, such as the size, softness, or delicacy of the object; the effective cause is, for example, the calmness that the object causes in us; and the final cause is divine providence. Burke gives literary examples, citing John Milton”s Paradise Lost as an example.
Also read, biographies – Egon Schiele
Criticism of the French Revolution
Burke”s last cultural battle was against the French Revolution. Given his support for American independence and campaign against royal prerogative, surprise was great in British political and cultural circles when Burke printed Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. The Anglo-Irish politician became one of the earliest critics of the French Revolution, which he saw not as a movement aimed at creating a constitutional and representative democracy, but rather as a violent revolt against tradition and legitimate authority, an experiment disconnected from the complex realities of civil society that, he predicted, would end in disaster.
Great admirers of Burke, such as Thomas Jefferson and Charles James Fox, accused him of becoming reactionary and an enemy of democracy. Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man in 1791 as a response to Burke. However, other supporters of democracy, such as John Adams, and a few decades later even well-known liberals, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, agreed with Burke, as did the Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri, a contemporary of Burke, who had always been a fierce critic of monarchical regimes.
Moreover, many of Burke”s predictions about the development of the revolution were confirmed, with the execution of King Louis XVI (January 21, 1793), the Terror (1793-July 1794), and the establishment of the autocratic regime of Napoleon Bonaparte (1799-1814). Burke, although a naturalist, does not recognize the rational basis of human rights enshrined in the revolution. Burke writes in his work:
Burke then attacked the French Constitution of 1791, approved by the National Assembly on the basis of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789: according to him, the new constitution prepared the ground for political disasters, also denying any comparison between it and the English Bill of Rights of 1689 (glorious revolution), the recent American Bill of Rights or even the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. Burke recognized the paternity on the English revolution of empiricists such as Locke and on the change of sensibility to Newton and Hobbes (unlike conservatives such as James Casanova who will disavow the Enlightenment origin of the French Revolution), while belonging to the anti-utilitarian current. However he draws a clear division between the English and American events and the French ones, seeing the latter as destructive and to be deprecated. However Burke does not take into account the link that the expulsion and flight of the Catholic king James II Stuart, abandoned by his army in 1689 in favor of the Protestants William III and Mary II has however historically with the English revolution of Cromwell (1649) in which Charles I was beheaded as will happen to Louis XVI, and that in Ireland there were still armed clashes. At the same time, however, both revolutions were implemented by the legitimate British Parliament and not by a popular uprising. He mentions the regicide cromwellians only as a comparison to the pro-Jacobin radicals deputies of his time.
Burke”s tight criticism of the French Revolution in his Reflections starts from a fundamental knot and assumption. According to the Anglo-Irish statesman, the French Revolution is hopelessly doomed to catastrophe, because it rests its ideological foundations on abstract notions, which claim to be rationally based, but which on the contrary ignore the complexity of human nature and society. Burke considered politics from a pragmatic point of view, and rejected the ideas and abstract rationalism of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as the Marquis of Condorcet, according to whom politics could be reduced to a mere system based on mathematics and a rigid deductive logic.
Educated on the writings of Cicero, Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine as well as the Enlightenment jurist Montesquieu, Burke believed in a government based on the “feeling of men” rather than on cold reasoning. For this reason, in the Reflections, negative judgments and open condemnation often recur against all those exponents of the Enlightenment, especially French, such as Voltaire (of whom he ignores, since he is considered a proto-ideological revolutionary, the antipopular and monarchical conception), Rousseau, Helvétius, Turgot, who denied or distorted the concepts of Original Sin and Divine Providence, and the action of the latter within human society (although many of his admirers will also partial prescind from this, such as Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Nolte, secularizing the thought).
As an Anglican and a Whig, Burke does not share the notion of “divine right” typical of Catholic sovereigns, but, against Rousseau, he defends the central role of the right to private property, of tradition and of “prejudice” (the latter understood as the adherence of a people to a set of values without conscious rational justification), the guarantee of which turns men to the common interests of national prosperity and social order. He is in favor of moderate and gradual reforms, as long as they fall within a constitutional order.
Burke insists that a political doctrine based on abstract notions such as liberty, equality and human rights can easily be used by those who hold or compete for power to justify tyrannical and oppressive actions. In this way he seems to prophetically foretell the disasters and atrocities that will happen in France shortly thereafter under the dictatorship of Robespierre, during the Reign of Terror, arguing that even Rousseau himself would not have supported the Revolution.
According to Burke, humans” capacity for reasoning and discernment is limited and they therefore prefer to rely precisely on their prejudices. He defends human “prejudices” by virtue of their practical usefulness: through them the individual can quickly determine the decisions to be taken in uncertain situations; in short, in human beings “prejudices” can be common sense and “make a virtue out of habit”.
In a speech to Parliament on May 6, 1790 he attacked the French constituents and stated about the Constitution in preparation, still monarchical:
While acknowledging that the great uprising that followed the States-General had occurred because of previous political mistakes, Burke argued that there were hidden financial interests behind the Revolution. He also launched an accusation against the philosophers of the Parisian circles and those Jacobin ideologues of the National Assembly, such as the vicar Sieyès, who, as “architects of ruin, were trampling on every rule and tradition in the abstract and very dangerous intent of making a tabula rasa of the past”. Addressing himself moreover to all those who do not respect the tradition, rooted for centuries, he accuses them of pure presumption, condemning in this way the individualistic and rationalistic reason to defend the collective and religious one.
In fact, according to Burke, it was precisely against the Christian religion and the Church that the Revolution had moved its fiercest offensive from the beginning. He recognized in the first acts of the Assembly, dominated by the political dogma of Sieyès, an explicit attack on Christianity, concretized in the confiscation of Church property and the civil constitution of the clergy. But there was something more. Behind the secularization of ecclesiastical property as a guarantee for the issuance of a national loan and the assigned, he sensed the masking of a second attack, equally devastating, part of a double conspiracy with much more hidden designs.
Burke identified the first part of this conspiracy in the philosophes and idéologues like Sieyès who had dominated French culture since the beginning of the century. These “secular clerics” (as Burke defined them in Reflections) had initially been subject to the control of the academies, founded in the late seventeenth century by Louis XIV. During the following reigns, however, their emancipation had always increased, since on one hand the patronage of the Crown had disappeared with the distance of Louis XV from the encyclopedists (following the attack of Damiens and then the death of Pompadour) and of the Church, and on the other hand the patronage of the aristocracy, until it became a real ideological machine. Philosophes and idéologues were therefore reorganized around independent publishing companies, such as the one that had launched the vast project of the Encyclopédie, guided by subtle ideologists who aimed at the destruction of the Christian religion.
The danger that Burke saw in 1790 proved to be well-founded: not only did Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette end up being executed, but many ardent supporters of the revolution (not only the most extremists such as the Jacobins, the Hébertists, etc.) fell victim to it, such as those Girondins and leaflets who decided to distance themselves after the massacres of September 1792 and the proclamation of the Republic, thus fulfilling the predictions of the Republic. ) remained victims of it, as those who, Girondini and leaflets, decided to distance themselves after the massacres of September 1792 and the proclamation of the Republic, thus fulfilling the predictions of Burke; Among them the encyclopedists Condorcet (who committed suicide in prison) and Jean-Sylvain Bailly (almost lynched by the crowd and then guillotined), and the Girondins Jean-Marie Roland (who committed suicide during the escape) and his wife Manon Roland, the last ones almost all “guilty” of not having voted in favor of the death sentence of the king or of charges artfully created by the public inquisitor Fouquier-Tinville (later beheaded by the Thermidorians) or of being enemies of the Montagnards (Charlotte Corday, assassin of Marat).
However, according to Burke, behind many of these radical “clerics” lay more sinister and pragmatic figures, referred to, in Burke”s terminology, as “speculators” (“speculator”) or “agitators” (“stock-jobbers”).
The second party in the conspiracy was in fact represented by the creditors of the French Crown, which Burke defined as a financial lobby. Its primary aim was to impose the assigned as the only legal currency in all sectors of the French economy. In the medium to long term, this group intended to impose a dictatorship on the state and on land ownership itself. Moreover, the imposition of the assigned as the only paper currency would soon generate a dramatic increase in the rate of inflation and a severe recession.
The Revolution was therefore provoked, according to this view, by the creditors of the State, ready to take possession of ecclesiastical lands in order to control all of society, and by a secularist intellectual class (atheist or deist), dominated by an anti-Christian sentiment, which had as its sole purpose the expropriation and overthrow of the clergy and the Church.
Burke believed that the understanding between these subversive groups was not at all accidental, in fact, in the twenty years preceding the Revolution, from the seeds sown by the culture of Enlightenment, had arisen large and dangerous conspiracies, such as that of the Illuminati of Bavaria, a group that had split from Freemasonry. In the meantime, throughout Europe, the States were sinking into an increasingly heavy debt, which would soon lead them to bankruptcy, thus becoming easy prey for their own creditors.
In Burke”s reconstruction, these bank and bourgeois creditors of the French Crown would have been the financial lobby behind the Revolution, which was identified in a similar way to the one that, according to the Tories, had made the Whigs set up the Bank of England during the reign of William III, founding the public debt instead of the debt of the British Crown. In a passage of the Reflections, Burke names the “Jewish stockbrokers”, but apart from that he never speaks of a “Jewish conspiracy”, as will happen in the following century with the anti-Semitic clichés centered on “Jewish finance” and the usury exercised by it.
The second crucial event of the Revolution, as Burke saw things in 1789-90, was represented by the events at Versailles on October 5-6, 1789, when the mob invaded the apartments of Louis XVI and his family, physically threatening the sovereign and forcing the court to leave the palace. He describes all the moral violence perpetrated against Marie Antoinette, foreseeing in a sense the brutal and humiliating end (which will happen three years later on the guillotine) ending up making her the symbol of the end of an age of chivalry, which he bitterly regretted, also contrasting the civilization of honor to that of money. Although at this point he seems to give way to pure sentimentality, Burke had the great merit of bringing to mind an important concept of historical sociology. The British and French philosophers of history, whose works were well known to Burke, all agreed on considering the development of chivalry in medieval times, and especially the attitude towards the idealized woman (see the concepts of amor cortese and dolce stil novo), as capital factors in the formation of that code of behavior of the “gentleman”, both aristocratic and of the rural and urban elites (think of the gentry), which had completely changed the customs of modern Europeans compared to that of the ancients.
This image of Marie Antoinette as a heroine of the counter-revolution and the last bulwark of the old civilization had a great influence on François-René de Chateaubriand (when he recalls in his Memoirs from beyond the grave his meeting with the queen and later the discovery of the remains of the sovereign) and on early French Romanticism, but also on Catholic personalities of decadentism as Léon Bloy (in the essay The Knight of Death), intellectuals who contributed after the Revolution to the construction of the myth of the “queen martyr”, and later on Stefan Zweig for his Marie Antoinette – An Unintentionally Heroic Life.
In the Letters on a Regicidal Peace (1795-96), predicting that France would attempt an invasion of the United Kingdom, he recalls that his predictions came true and, also warning the Austrian ambassador, that no peace negotiations could be initiated with the more moderate government of the Directory, born of Thermidorian reaction but led or supported by many of the same regicidal revolutionaries (reference to the various Barras, Sieyes, Tallien, Fouché, Fréron. ..) whose hands were still “exhaling with the blood of the daughter of Marie-Thérèse, whom they sent half-dead on a dung cart towards a cruel execution”.
In this vision of Burke”s angelic woman, Marie Antoinette is described as an intangible model of superior virtue, while the common women who led the march on Versailles assume instead bestial and material connotations, probably as a contrast to the ferocious satirical libels against the queen that circulated in the pre-revolutionary period, anticipating the accusations, even of a sexual nature, that were brought against her at the 1793 trial alongside the main charge of high treason.
Some political opponents came to suspect that Burke was suffering from mental disorder, or that, given his strong upset over the anti-ecclesiastical measures taken by the French Assembly, he was actually secretly Catholic.
Burke also linked these events to his own aesthetic conception, later taken up by Romanticism (see the English Middle Ages, albeit idealized, of Walter Scott or the Pre-Raphaelites), which led him to deplore even the moderate concessions of the National Assembly, very similar to the limitations imposed on British monarchs by the English Parliament. For this aestheticism and chivalrous but anti-feminist sentiment, also shared by many women of the French nobility and bourgeoisie (for example, the court painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun who will say: “Then women reigned. The revolution has dethroned them”) is criticized by the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Burke”s image of Marie Antoinette threatened by power (almost a modern Antigone) and not defended by the knights, a consequence of the ideas already expressed in 1756 in the essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, is stigmatized by the British thinker in A Vindication of the Rights of Men: Burke in fact associated the idea of the Beautiful also with that of weakness and femininity, while he had identified the idea of the Sublime with that of strength (in the sense of virtue) and therefore of virility. Wollstonecraft turns those definitions against him, claiming that such “theatrical descriptions” make readers “weakened sissies” and accuses him of defending a non-equal society based also on the marginalization of women. Defending republican virtues, Wollstonecraft invokes the ethics of the middle class in opposition to the vicious codes of conduct of the aristocracy. Enlighteningly, she believes in progress and derides Burke for his attachment to old customs and traditions: if, in fact, one had always remained faithful to the oldest traditions, one should still be in favor of even the very ancient system of slavery (although Burke is not opposed to political progress and customs, but is opposed to its extremes and overwhelming speed, which would make him a conservative afraid of events, but not a true traditionalist reactionary like Joseph de Maistre). Wollstonecraft then contrasts Burke”s exaltation of feudal values with the bourgeois image of the idyllic country life (not too far from the English country bourgeoisie), in which each family developed its existence on a farm, satisfying its needs with simple and honest work. This vision of society appears to her as the expression of sincere feelings, in contrast to the fictitious feelings on which Burke”s reactionary vision would be based.
Finally, Burke highlighted how the instability and general disorder, which would accompany and follow the Revolution, would make the army, i.e. the French National Guard, prone to mutiny or to play a key role in the disputes between ideological and political factions. He asserted that a charismatic general, capable of making himself loved and obeyed by his soldiers, once the major fires of the revolutionary disaster had died down, could quickly become “master of the Assembly and of the entire nation”. He thus seemed to predict the advent of military dictatorship and the Napoleonic empire. The French historian Jean Jacques Chevallier later stated: “Burke, a bitter and frenzied Cassandra, denounced the future calamities that the Revolution would produce. The facts turned in the direction he predicted and gave him reason, more and more reason”.
These facts and opinions of Burke, and the disagreement on their interpretation, led to the breakup of the friendship between the thinker and Fox and, from a more general point of view, to the division of the Whig Party. In 1791 Burke published the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in which he renewed his criticism of the radical programs inspired by the French Revolution and attacked the Whigs who supported them. A large part of the party followed Burke and joined the Tory government of William Pitt the Younger (who also had reservations about the Reflections even though he admired their style), who declared war on revolutionary France in 1793. To Burke replied also Thomas Paine with The Rights of Men, the mentioned Mary Wollstonecraft with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and William Godwin with Inquiry into Political Justice, the latter condemned the most extreme Jacobin violence but fully justified the revolution.
To Burke is attributed a famous aphorism, in various formulations, actually never written or pronounced: “For evil to triumph it is sufficient that the good renounce action.” The phrase is not found in any of his works. The false attribution may have arisen from a famous book of quotations, Bartlett”s Familiar Quotations, published in 1905.
Its origin may go back to a similar quote by John Stuart Mill: “Evil men need but one thing to accomplish their ends, namely, that good men should look on and do nothing,” which in turn would have been inspired by a quote by Burke himself, contained in Thoughts on the Causes of Present Discontent (1770): “When the wicked unite, the good must associate. Otherwise they will fall one by one, a pitiless sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Formulations of a similar aphorism are already found in Plato, but it is also sometimes attributed to Lev Tolstoy, André Chénier, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and others.
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