The Little Platoons

Burke against the Revolution's abstract citizen, attached simply to humanity in general. We learn love of the whole, he wrote, by first loving the little platoon – the family and the parish – we belong to; wider affections grow outward from that warm circle rather than descending from a philosopher's diagram. And the community itself is a contract not only among the living but with the dead who bequeathed it and the unborn to whom it must be handed on. From this descends a whole tradition of civil society and subsidiarity: a free people rests on a dense fabric of small loyalties, not on the state alone.