Why the Past Votes. Two Men, Two Revolutions, and the Birth of Conservatism as a Way of Knowing

London, autumn 1789. The mail coaches from Dover bring the newspapers, and every reading room in England is drunk on one story. In Paris the Bastille has fallen, the King has bowed to a National Assembly, and a Declaration of the Rights of Man has been proclaimed to the world. The poets are ecstatic. The young Wordsworth will later write that to be alive that dawn was very heaven. The dissenting preachers compare Paris to the New Jerusalem – none more warmly than Richard Price, who tells a London society that he has lived to see millions of people spurning slavery, and recasts England's own revolution of 1688 as a right to choose our governors and to cashier them for misconduct. It is to Price's sermon that Burke first sits down to reply. In the middle of the applause one member of the House of Commons, an Irishman of sixty, is writing against the whole tide of his age.

You need to know who he was before you dismiss him. Edmund Burke had spent his career on the side of the governed against the powerful. He had defended the American colonists against his own King and his own party. For fourteen years he prosecuted Warren Hastings and the East India Company for the plunder of Bengal, insisting that an Englishman's justice did not stop at the colour of an Indian's skin. This is no courtier defending thrones. When such a man looks at a revolution and grows cold, it is worth asking what he saw. Two summers earlier, in 1788, this same Burke had dined in easy friendship with “the great American Paine” at the Duke of Portland's table; the two men who were about to become the founding poles of left and right broke bread as allies before the Revolution set them at each other's throats.

What he wrote was the most unfashionable book of the decade – Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790. His friends thought he had lost his mind. And then the calendar answered him. In 1793 the guillotine took the King, and the Terror began to eat its own children. The revolutionary paper money, the assignats, inflated into worthlessness and ruined the very people it was printed to free. And in 1799 a general named Bonaparte stepped over the wreckage and made himself master of France. Burke had named it in advance. First the confiscations, then the scaffold; and at the end, exactly on cue, the general who would gather the ruins into a crown. He died in 1797, two years too early to be proved right by an emperor.

What was the single insight behind the prophecy? Burke thought the revolutionaries had made one mistake, and that everything followed from it. They believed a society could be designed. They had swept away the inherited constitution of France and resolved to build a new one out of pure reason, out of the rights of man as a geometer draws a figure, owing nothing to the past. Behind them stood Rousseau, whose Social Contract had taught that a legitimate society rests on a pact the living make among themselves, and whose books the revolutionaries carried like amulets. Burke's answer was to widen the contract until it no longer fit in a single generation's hands.

Against the abstraction he set two words that he used in a technical sense, and you have to hear them as he meant them. The first is prescription: the authority a thing earns simply by having lasted, by having been used and trusted across generations until it has proved that it works. The second is prejudice – and he did not mean bigotry. He meant the settled judgements a people carries without re-deriving them each morning, the deposited reason of the species, the wisdom that has gone latent in a custom precisely so that you need not be wise on your own. A man who must reason out every institution from scratch is as helpless as a man who must invent language before he can speak.

From this comes the sentence that founds modern conservatism. The state, Burke wrote, is not to be thought of as a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, taken up for a little temporary interest and dissolved at the fancy of the parties. It is a contract of a graver kind, whose ends cannot be reached within a single lifetime, and so it becomes a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. The dead have votes. They cast them in the institutions they built and left to you in trust, and the generation that burns that inheritance because an abstraction told it to has robbed the unborn of their share.

Paine gave the other side its finest answer. To let the dead bind the living, he wrote, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies: “Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.” It is the living, and not the dead, who are to be accommodated. Their quarrel is the whole quarrel of left and right pressed into a single question – whether we owe most to the ancestors who made us or to the living who must go on without them. This lecture takes Burke's side, and takes it only after granting that Paine's is the harder objection to answer.

Turn back to the third lecture, to Plato building his perfect city in the Republic. Plato reasons the just city into being out of first principles, brick by argued brick, and where the real world resists the design he is willing to move whatever must be moved to make the plan fit. Burke is the anti-Plato. He agreed that you could draw a perfect city on paper. He denied that you could ever build one, because a society is not a machine that an engineer assembles from a blueprint. It is closer to a living growth, an oak that has taken centuries to reach its shape, and the reformer who tears it up by the roots to replant it by geometry does not get a better tree. He gets a dead one.

This is why Burke feared the abstract rights of man so much more than the concrete liberties of an Englishman. A concrete liberty is housed. It lives inside a court that will enforce it and a habit of the country that expects it. Strip the right of its house – proclaim a naked right to liberty owing nothing to any institution – and you have not made men freer. You have handed the definition of liberty to whoever holds the most force, because an abstraction cannot defend itself.

The rights of man, cut loose from the slow institutions that once carried them, arrive at the guillotine. Reason without inheritance ends in the executioner, because when every old restraint has been declared irrational, only power is left to decide. This is no quarrel with liberty, and no plea to endure any wrong for the sake of quiet; the same Burke fought abuses of power all his life. It is a quarrel with one way of winning liberty – inventing it overnight from first principles and then wondering why it runs with blood.

Forty years later the argument gets a second author, and this one had felt the blade in his own family. Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an old Norman aristocracy that the Revolution had nearly erased. His maternal great-grandfather was Malesherbes, the one man brave enough to stand up in court and defend Louis XVI to his face; for that loyalty the Revolution sent Malesherbes to the guillotine, and his grandparents with him. Stumbling on the threshold on the way to the tumbril, the old man said only, “A bad omen. A Roman would travel no further.” Tocqueville's own parents were imprisoned under the Terror and lived; his father came out of Port-Libre with his hair gone white at twenty-one. He grew up among people the Terror had orphaned, raised by a mother whose nerves it had broken.

And yet he did not become Burke. In 1831, at twenty-five, he sailed to the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, on a modest government commission to study American prisons, and used it as a pretext to study the American future. In Washington he shook hands with Andrew Jackson, who kept no guards at his door and poured his visitors each a glass of Madeira himself; it was, Tocqueville thought, a long way from the Tuileries. He came home and wrote Democracy in America, and its method is the thing to grasp first. Tocqueville refused to argue for democracy or against it. The levelling of ranks, the steady erasure of the old distances between lord and commoner, he treated as a providential fact – a tide that had been rising in the West for eight hundred years, which no throne and no clever argument would turn back.

To be for it or against it was to argue with geology. The only question a serious mind could ask was what kind of equality was coming: an equality lived in freedom, or an equality lived in servitude. Both are equal alike, and that is exactly why it is naïve to rejoice in mere equality; it is the soil, and out of it grows either a free people or a flock. His whole book is an attempt to keep the first and escape the second.

What, then, kept the Americans free? Not their Constitution on paper, Tocqueville decided, because paper alone has never held any people. What held them was a set of habits so deep they had stopped noticing them.

The first was the New England township. Long before anyone in Washington governed them, ordinary men in a Massachusetts town governed themselves – voted the school, mended the road, argued the budget in a hall where every voter could see the result of his vote by the next winter. The institutions of a township, Tocqueville wrote, are to freedom what primary schools are to science: they put it within reach of the people and habituate them to making use of it. It taught liberty the only way liberty can be learned, by being practised at a scale small enough to fail safely. A people that has never run anything cannot be handed a republic and told to keep it.

The second habit was the association. Where a Frenchman would petition the state and an Englishman would ask a great lord, Tocqueville watched Americans simply combine. Ten citizens who wanted a hospital or a temperance league formed a society and built the thing themselves. Every one of these voluntary bodies was another small school of self-rule, another place where a man learned that his own effort moved the world. These are Burke's little platoons, seen across the ocean at work. “To love the little platoon we belong to in society,” Burke had written, “is the first principle of public affections – the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”

And beneath it all he found religion, which he called the first of their political institutions. This is his sharpest paradox. Faith governed the American where the law could not reach – inside his home and his private honesty, where no statute could follow – and by ruling the mores it left the law free to be light. A people that disciplines itself needs less discipline from above. Religion made freedom workable by keeping it from rotting into licence.

Then Tocqueville turned the same clear eye on the dangers, and wrote the two warnings we are still living inside.

The first is the tyranny of the majority. A king can imprison your body, but he leaves your mind its freedom to despise him. Under the old monarchies, Tocqueville wrote, despotism struck the body crudely so as to reach the soul, and the soul often rose gloriously above the blow; the democratic kind leaves the body and goes straight for the soul. A democratic majority reaches further. When everyone around you already agrees, dissent dies without a single arrest – it dies of the slow cold of disapproval, the dropped invitation, the sense that no respectable person thinks what you think. The majority need not raise a hand. It says: you are free not to think as I do, your life and your goods all remain to you, but from this day you are a stranger among us; go in peace, I leave you your life, and I leave it to you worse than death. Tocqueville judged that the mind of a citizen in a democracy could be more enslaved than the mind of a subject under a prince, because there is no visible tyrant to hate and no scaffold to make a martyr. There is only the soft, total pressure of everyone, and most people fall silent under it long before they are made to.

The second warning is darker and quieter. Tocqueville imagined a future democracy sunk into what he called a soft despotism. Picture an immense tutelary power, gentle and provident, that takes every hard thing off your hands – that foresees your needs and supplies them, and asks in return only that you never quite grow up. It does not break your will; it softens it. It keeps a whole nation in a perpetual childhood, and the periodic election becomes the ritual that consoles men for their servitude: once every few years they rouse themselves to choose their guardians, and then sink back under the guardianship they chose.

Do not comfort yourself that he was describing someone else. You already live near the tutelary power – in the feed that decides what you should see before you have wondered what to look for, and in the vast administrative machine that provides for everything and would rather you did not govern yourself at all. Tocqueville drew it in 1840, before any of the machinery existed to make it real.

Late in life Tocqueville went back into the archives of the monarchy his family had served and died for, and wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution. What he found there overturned the story everyone told about 1789.

The common story says the French rose because their misery had become unbearable. Tocqueville found the opposite. The peasants of France were freer and less wretched in 1789 than almost anywhere else in Europe, and their condition had been improving for a generation. Revolutions, he concluded, arrive on the rising slope of relief, when a long-borne evil at last begins to lift, hope outruns the pace of reform, and every surviving injustice, until yesterday accepted as the order of nature, becomes intolerable the moment men can imagine it gone.

His second finding was more subversive still. The Revolutionaries believed they had destroyed the old regime and built something wholly new. Tocqueville showed that the thing they were proudest of – the centralised state that governed every commune from Paris and dissolved every local liberty into one national will – was not their invention at all. The kings had been building it for two hundred years, patiently gathering every thread of power into the capital. The Revolution did not reverse that work. It inherited it, completed it, and handed the finished machine to Napoleon. The men who thought they had beheaded the past were in fact its most faithful heirs.

Tocqueville lived to be caught in the machine he had described. In December 1851, Louis Napoleon – nephew of the very general Burke had foretold – seized the state; his soldiers surrounded the Assembly, and the anatomist of soft despotism was arrested with two hundred deputies and marched to the fortress of Vincennes. He was released within days, and never returned to public life. The general on horseback had come back wearing a second face.

In this house we do not show our people combed and tidy, so here is the dark part, and there is enough of it for both men.

Burke's Reflections contains a famous purple lament for Marie Antoinette – he had glimpsed her once as a dauphine, glittering, and he mourns her fall in prose so lush that it embarrassed even his allies. Yet the same book has almost nothing warm to say about the French peasants whose real and ancient grievances had helped light the fire. His pity flowed freely toward a queen and ran dry before the poor, and his enemy Thomas Paine said so at the time: Burke pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird. The charge cuts deeper than sentiment. Picturing learning trampled underfoot, Burke called the common people a “swinish multitude” – and those peasants he could not warm to were in truth the Terror's largest single body of victims, sent to the guillotine in far greater numbers than the aristocrats he wept for. There is a second shadow. This lifelong preacher of independence, who taught that a man's judgement should never be for sale, accepted in his last years a large royal pension – and turned his pen on those who dared to point out the contradiction.

Tocqueville's blindness lay elsewhere, and it was worse. The great anatomist of liberty, who taught Europe to dread the soft crushing of the weak, sat in the French parliament and championed the conquest of Algeria. In his official reports he defended the razzia – the burning of villages and crops to starve a people into submission – and endorsed the seizure of Muslim land for French settlers. The man who could feel the faintest chill of coming servitude in a Massachusetts town felt almost nothing for the Arabs being dispossessed by his own state. Neither man's sight reached all the way to everyone. Keep both the insight and the blindness; the blindness is part of what the insight cost.

Bring the two men together now, because tonight they meet in one place.

Burke said a nation is a contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn. In peaceful times that can sound like a decoration, a phrase for a graduation speech. Cross the nearest border and it stops being a decoration. A people under invasion is defending exactly what Burke described – the graves of its dead and the possibility of its unborn, the inheritance it holds in trust and has no right to surrender because it happens to be the generation currently alive. The empire on the other side makes Burke's point from the wrong end: it insists that the past is whatever the present strongman declares it to be, that a nation's dead can be reassigned by decree, that the trust can be broken by anyone with tanks enough. To defend the contract of the generations against that is not nostalgia. It is the oldest political duty there is.

And Tocqueville is standing in the same place. The thing the invader offers, once the guns fall silent, is precisely his soft despotism raised to the scale of empire – a tutelary power that will feed you and watch over you and keep you forever a child, asking only that you surrender the self-rule you were learning in your own townships. Burke's contract and Tocqueville's warning turn out to be one argument, seen from two ends of a life. Tocqueville closed his great book on exactly this fork: nations cannot undo the equality that has come upon them, “but it depends on them whether equality leads them to servitude or freedom.” A free people governs itself and keeps faith with its dead, and it hands on to the unborn an estate larger than the one its dead left in trust. Everything else is guardianship, however gentle its voice. The past gets a vote. In Ukraine, this year, it is voting to stay free.