The EconomistAugust 3rd 2019 Britain 49T
he closestthing the Tory party has had to an in-house philos-
opher is Edmund Burke, and the closest thing it has to an intel-
lectual bête noire is Burke’s French contemporary, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. Burke, a liberal conservative, believed fervently that
changing societies needed to be anchored by tradition and cus-
tom. Rousseau, the patron saint of revolutionaries from Robes-
pierre to Pol Pot and prime enabler of “democratic dictatorship”,
was the sworn enemy of the established order.
Yet over the past few years the party of Burke has become the
party of Rousseau. Boris Johnson’s bloody cabinet reshuffle com-
pleted the purge. Burkeans such as Philip Hammond and Rory
Stewart were out; revolutionaries such as Dominic Raab and Priti
Patel now hold all the great offices of state. Dominic Cummings,
appointed as Mr Johnson’s senior adviser, told staff that the gov-
ernment was committed to delivering Brexit “by any means neces-
sary”—a reference to a speech by Malcolm X on violence in the pur-
suit of justice. This is the British equivalent of the Chinese
Communist Party embracing capitalism.
Rousseau developed the idea of the “general will”: the opinion
of the majority, which should prevail, irrespective of the interests
of minorities. Burke believed that Parliament should interpret,
modify and sometimes ignore the people’s views. The job of an mp
was not to channel popular opinion, but to use his judgment.
The Conservative Party is now the party of the general will. It
not only made the fatal decision to call for a simple 50-50 referen-
dum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, but has re-
peatedly used the result to silence mps who have called for a soft
interpretation that would take into account the opinions of the
48% who voted to remain. Now that the general will has been re-
vealed, goes the line which Rousseauan Tories have successfully
peddled, those who question it must be crushed like so many
French aristocrats.
Attitudes towards institutions are particularly telling. Burke
saw them as the embodiment of collective wisdom and the bul-
warks of civilisation, standing between decency and anarchy.
Rousseau regarded them as fetters on the people’s freedoms. To-
day’s Tories are with Rousseau. Jacob Rees-Mogg has called the go-
vernor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, “an enemy of Brexit”.
James Slack, author of a notorious Daily Mailcover story describ-
ing the judges who had ruled that Parliament would need to con-
sent to Brexit as “Enemies of the People”, is now in Downing Street.
And the government has made it clear that it will “prorogue”—ie,
suspend—Parliament rather than allow it to prevent Britain from
leaving the euwithout a deal.
Rousseau, an early Eurosceptic who railed against the rise of a
pan-European ruling class, denounced intellectuals who claimed
to know better than ordinary people as having “reason without
wisdom”. His ideal society was Sparta, with its austere military
ethos and do-or-die defence of national sovereignty. Burke’s views
were far more nuanced. While supporting the established order,
he believed that it needed to be able to adapt: “A state without the
means of some change is without the means of conservation.”
Though he emphasised the importance of social roots, he recog-
nised that urbanisation was progress. His guiding principle was
“equipoise”—the need to balance reform with stability.
The modern Tory party’s cultural attitudes have more in com-
mon with Rousseau’s anti-metropolitan rage than with Burke’s ap-
peal to balance. Mr Johnson has attacked “the thousands of Davos
men and women who have their jaws firmly clamped around the
euro-teat”. Michael Gove has pooh-poohed experts. The most
hard-core Brexiteers call themselves the Spartans.
How to explain this extraordinary volte face? The obvious an-
swer is the referendum of 2016: once you promise the people that
their voice will be final it’s impossible to go back, even if it means
self-destruction—a possibility to which Mr Johnson gestured in
his “do or die” commitment to leave the euby October 31st. But why
did the Conservatives choose to hold a referendum in the first
place? And why did they choose to ignore the opinions of the 48%
in crafting Brexit? The referendum was a symptom as much as a
cause of the internal revolution: the Rousseauan palsy had already
entered the party’s central nervous system.
Social change may have played a role. In 1950 the Conservative
Party had almost 3m members and a demanding social round of
dinner dances, fetes and charity functions: not so much a Burkean
“little platoon” as a “big platoon”. With the decline of political par-
ties as social institutions it has become a much more ideological
outfit. Its 160,000 members are believers—above all, in Brexit.
Thatcherism is partly to blame. Margaret Thatcher, who com-
mitted the ultimate sin in the Burkean canon of pronouncing that
there is “no such thing as society”, injected a revolutionary strain
of anti-establishment libertarianism into her party. Euro-
scepticism bears more responsibility: Tory defenders of British
sovereignty are willing to burn down the village in order to save it.Burke against the berks
The Tory revolution, like all Rousseau-inspired movements, is be-
ginning to consume its own children: Steve Baker, one of the lead-
ing Spartans, rejected Mr Johnson’s offer of a job in the Brexit de-
partment on the ground that it would leave him “powerless”. But
resistance from outside the party of the revolution is also needed.
Burke once wrote that “when bad men combine, the good must
associate”, and there are some signs of that. Soft Brexiters are plot-
ting to block a hard Brexit in Parliament. Mr Stewart has drawn up
long-term plans for reviving the party in the country. But Mr John-
son has put together one of the most extreme cabinets in modern
history, and time is short. The good men and women need to get to-
gether not only with fellow Tories but also with people of goodwill
from all parties, if the ship of state is not to hit the rocks. 7Bagehot Long live the Tory revolution!
How the party of Burke became the party of Rousseau