Edmund Burke and Reason of State

Etude de la conception de la raison d'Etat developpee par Burke dans le cadre de sa theorie politique internationale. S'inscrivant dans la tradition moderne du droit naturel heritee de Grotius et Vattel, l'A. montre que Burke reste un defenseur de l'anglicanisme contre l'atheisme de la Revolution francaise.

Rationalist or a Revolutionist, has concluded variously that he was a "conservative crusader" or an "historical empiricist," a belated dualist or a Cold Warrior before the fact, or, most egregiously, "a proto-Marxist, or more precisely proto-Gramscian" theorist of hegemony.5 The fact that Burke so obviously eludes definition may put in doubt the analytical utility of closely-defined "traditions" of international theory. 6 Burke's relationship to conceptions of reason of state provides a more precise example of the confusion within such taxonomies. According to one recent historian of international theory, Burke "laid the foundations" of the "conservative approach to International Relations informed by the two moder notions of state interest and necessity, by raison d 'etat"; however, in the words of another, "Burke ... was vehemently opposed to the idea of Reason of State and did not subscribe to the view that national interests override moral laws."7 The assumptions on which each of these judgments rests are clearly incompatible: on the one hand that a "conservative approach" in the realm of foreign affairs implies an espousal of reason of state defined as the primacy of "state interest and necessity," that Burke did indeed acknowledge; on the other hand that reason of state is defined more exactly as "the view that national interests override moral laws" and that Burke did not hold such a view, so could not be defined as a reason-ofstate theorist. It might of course be possible that Burke  calculations of competing goods according to consequentialist criteria." This was true no less for bodies politic and their rulers than it was for private persons. In the political realm the fundamental determining factor in any calculation of outcomes would be necessity. In the case of the respublica necessity, as a principle of political action, could only be justified by an appeal to that salus populi which was the suprema lex, in Cicero's famous words (De Legibus, III, 3). Cicero placed severe constraints upon such calculations in the municipal sphere, and restricted them to the ends of self-defense, security, or the protection of liberty; any actions taken in pursuit of such ends had also to avoid infamy and to be in accordance with the republican constitution.'2 In their later recensions -shorn of the specifically Roman and republican legal context within which Cicero wrote-such theories could reconcile the principles of natural law with strictly limited appeals to necessity in the interests of the common good; they could also be extended beyond the municipal to the international realm.13 This "moder" tradition of natural jurisprudence, which rested upon the arguments of Stoic ethics, was utilitarian to the extent that it depended upon the calibration of competing goods in relation to specific ends. To place Burke within the theory of reason of state derived from this tradition implies no inconsistency in his thought. The opponent of "Machiavellian" expediency could equally well be the proponent of Ciceronian "necessity": the difference between the two depended upon the criteria deployed, the circumstances that could be appealed to, and the consequences that were desired or imagined. To situate Burke within this strain of early modem reason of state theory also makes it possible to appreciate just "how much weight [he] attaches to considerations based on expediency, treated simply as a practical regard for consequences."'4 Moreover, since reason of state within this tradition was consequentialist precisely because it was grounded in a neo-Stoic conception of natural law, to see Burke as a reason-ofstate theorist in this context neatly avoids the sterile dispute about the true character of his political thought as either utilitarian or natural jurisprudential.'5 It could be described as both, so long as the tradition of natural jurisprudence in question was the "moder" one initiated by Grotius and so long as the utilitari-anism in question was of this consequentialist kind. The assertion that "the natural-law tradition and consequentialism are opposed at a very deep level" is therefore not true of all forms of natural jurisprudence or even of consequentialism;16 nor is it necessary to choose between them to characterize Burke's political or international thought.
Burke's reason-of-state theory could be applied equally to the internal constitution and the external relations of a state. In this way its scope extended beyond the internal political determinations laid down by Cicero to the international realm treated by the "moder" theorists of natural law like Grotius. Reason of state was thus Janus-faced like its conceptual near-neighbors in early moder political thought, sovereignty, and the balance of power. 7 Like them, reason of state crossed the boundary between political theory, defined as the theory of legitimacy and distribution of power within the state, and international theory. In both spheres reason of state acknowledged the compulsions of necessity; its particular theoretical concern was therefore with the contingent, the extraordinary, and the unforeseeable. "A high degree of causal necessity," argued Meinecke, "which the agent himself is accustomed to conceive as absolute and inescapable, and to feel most profoundly, is part of the very essence of all action prompted by raison d 'etat."'8 Since necessity has no law (necessitas non habet legem), reason of state could not be codified or legislated. Reason of state alone could not determine which circumstances were truly cases of extreme necessity and hence which precise occasions could permit the overriding of custom and law. It could only lay down norms from which such exceptions could be derived, and more generally it provided a consequentialist means of applying the norms of natural law. In these regards reason of state was close to resistance theory which also dealt with extremity and overwhelming necessity. Resistance theory did, however, lay down stringent conditions under which rebellion might be justified, even if only in retrospect, and offered a wider range of agents the possibility of making judgments of necessity, even to the point of democratic agency. The compulsion of necessity demanded in reason of state theory was assumed to be universally recognizable but only under particular circumstances by specific, usually sovereign, agents. The conditions which would make necessity both evident and compelling could never be defined with any precision; it therefore demanded princely or consiliar discretion for its application. These charge (especially from those who were excluded from judging) that it was merely subjective, arbitrary, and unconstrainable.
Because reason of state, whether municipal or international, was morally ambivalent, two types might legitimately be inferred, one natural and hence justifiable, the other merely putative and hence reprehensible.19 The English Whig tradition which preceded Burke and upon which he drew contained examples of these two strains of reason of state. For example, the Marquis of Halifax argued in 1684 that "there is a natural reason of State, an undefinable thing grounded upon the Common good of mankind, which is immortall, and in all changes and Revolutions still preserveth its Originall right of saving a Nation, when the Letter of the Law perhaps would destroy it."20 "Reall Necessity," he later affirmed, "is not to bee resisted, and pretended necessity is not to bee alleadged."21 Since politicians still alleged necessity nonetheless, it would be distrusted as simply one of the "Arcana Imperii," complained John Toland in 1701, "when in reality Reason of State is nothing else but the right reason of managing the affairs of the State at home and abroad, according to the Constitution of the Government, and with regard to the Interest or Power of other Nations."22 The difficulty of judging whether reason of state was natural and directed legitimately towards the interest of the community, or contrived for the benefit of the rulers alone, made it both contestable and open to apparently opposing constructions, even within the thought of a single theorist. As Burke himself noted in his Third Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796-97), "Necessity, as it has no law, so it has no shame; but moral necessity is not like metaphysical, or even physical. In that category, it is a word of loose signification, and conveys different ideas to different minds." 23 Burke's engagement with the language of reason of state ran from his first published political work, the Vindication of Natural Society (1756), to the last, the Third Letter on a Regicide Peace. In this he remarked in passing that "reason of state and common-sense are two things";24 thirty years earlier, in the Vindication, he had satirized contemporary consequentialism along the same lines: All Writers on the Science of Policy are agreed, and they agree with Experience, that all Governments must frequently infringe the Rules of Justice to support themselves; that Truth must give way to Dissimulation; Honesty to Convenience; and Humanity itself to the reigning Interest. The Whole of this Mystery of Iniquity is called the Reason of State. It is a Reason, which I own I cannot penetrate. What Sort of a Protection is this of the general Right, that is maintained by infringing the Rights of Particulars? What sort of Justice is this, which is inforced by The observance ofjustice, though useful among [nations], is not guarded by so strong a necessity as it is among individuals; and the moral obligation holds proportion with the usefulness. All politicians will allow, and most philosophers, that REASON OF STATE may, in particular emergencies, dispense with the rules ofjustice, and invalidate any treaty or alliance, where the strict observance of it would be prejudicial, in a considerable degree, to either of the contracting parties. But nothing less than the most extreme necessity, it is confessed, can justify individuals in a breach of promise, or an invasion of the properties of others. 28 Burke's ironic recension of Hume left the theoretical foundations of this argument for acting in accordance with reason of state unscathed. Only if civil society itself were illegitimate would such reason of state be unconscionable. If, as Burke later argued in the Reflections, government was a necessary "contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants" and if "men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom," it followed that government was empowered to provide for those wants by any necessary means: the individual members of civil society had already resigned to the government their "right of self-defense, the first law of nature," and had therefore ceded adjudications of necessity to their governors.29 Even within the municipal sphere, Burke argued, any law might be suspended, though only under the compulsion of extreme necessity and in the interest of the preservation of the political community. Conor Cruise O'Brien has taken such an admission to be "one of those distressing matters, abounding in the Burkean universe, for which some arrangement of veils was normally appropriate."30 However, the principle seems to have caused Burke little distress and would hardly have been a revelation to him. As he told the House of Commons in 1780, the great patent offices in the Exchequer could not be swept away in the name of Economical Reform because, as offices held for life, they were a species of property and only necessity could override the principle of legitimate possession. "There are occasions ofpublick necessity, so vast, so clear, so evident," he nevertheless admitted, "that they supersede all laws. Law being made only for the benefit of the community, no law can set itself up against the cause and

Bohun and Thomas Long, as well as by the Whig Charles Blount, who had all relied upon Grotius to justify a limited right of resistance, as had defacto theorists like Anthony Ascham earlier in the seventeenth century.36 In Book I of De lure Belli ac Pacis (1625) Grotius admitted that even some of the laws of God carried a tacit exception in cases of extreme and imminent peril, though in no
case would this be defensible if consideration of the common good were to be abandoned. On such minimalist grounds resistance would be justified against a ruler who had renounced his governmental authority, alienated his kingdom, or otherwise made himself an enemy to the people.37 Stripped of its explicitly Grotian roots, though maintaining the appeal to self-preservation, this argument provided the Whig managers of Sacheverell's impeachment with just the weapon they needed to combat the doctrine of non-resistance without raising the specter of a general and unrestricted right of rebellion.38 Burke quoted the transcript of the Sacheverell trial at length in the Appealfrom the New to the Old Whigs (1791) to show (in Robert Walpole's words) that only "the utmost necessity ought ... to engage a nation, in its own defense, for the preservation of the whole."39

tion would be "the most clearly just and necessary war, that this or any other nation ever carried on,"40 in accordance with the principles of the law of nations laid down by the Swiss jurist Emerich de Vattel. For Burke the crucial distinction was that England before 1688 was like France after and not before 1789.
Though the English Jacobins wanted to see the French republicans as the equivalent of the Whigs, for Burke they were not only the equivalent of the Jacobites but were in fact more like Louis XIV in their desire for universal monarchy.
Burke's appeal to necessity revealed the conceptual difference between the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution. The former had been limited, strategic, and constrained precisely by the principle ofsaluspopuli; the latter set fair to unleash illimitable consequences as a result of its unprincipled and unre-  , Histories, IX. 1. 10). In De lure Belli ac Pacis Grotius had similarly argued that only the municipal laws of a particular community are "silent ... in the midst of arms" while the natural law remains in force. Grotius further argued that anyone who has given another just cause for war cannot claim to be acting defensively when they are attacked; just so the Samnites were justified in attacking the Romans after the battle of the Caudine Forks.42 When Roman implacability demanded extreme measures in response, war became a necessity, and arms became lawful for those who were deprived of all other hope. In just such terms, Burke concluded that the intransigence of James II had been a similar "case of war, and not of constitution," "an extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of law."43

External intervention, in this case by the Protestant Prince of Orange and his army, had been justified in England's internal affairs, as a civil war outside the bounds of municipal law became a public war between two princes under the principles of the ius gentium. In such a contest victory generated a legitimate appeal to conquest. On these grounds it was possible to see William's intervention in 1688 as an example of a just war and his victory over James as a legitimate act of conquest.44 It is possible that Burke here was thinking primarily as an Irishman: the Williamite War of 1689-91 that marked the Irish phase of the Glorious Revolution was indeed a war of conquest, as the bloodless standoff
between James II and the future William III had hardly been in England.45 However, more easily documented is Burke's debt here to Vattel. In Le Droit des Gens (1758) Vattel argued that every foreign power had a right to aid an oppressed people if insupportable tyranny had driven them to rebellion, just as "[t]he English justly complained of James II" in 1688. "Whenever matters are carried so far as to produce a civil war, foreign powers may assist that party which appears to them to have justice on its side," moreover, "every foreign power has a right to succour an oppressed people who implore their assistance." On these grounds system" of the French and upheld by Vattel. 56 Vattel's argument was partly the product of the opening phase of the Seven Years' War, and in it he assumed -as Bolingbroke, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon also did57-that the balance of power as enshrined in the Treaty of Utrecht was the basis of the international order. Burke returned to the same origin to argue that, "[i]fto prevent Louis the XIVth from imposing his religion was just, a war to prevent the murderers of Louis XVIth from imposing their irreligion upon us is just."58 The Revolutionary Wars would in due course shatter the European balance of power and, as Paul Schroeder has argued, thereby irreversibly transform European politics. 59 Burke was the prophet of the transformation, and he foresaw it with the help of Vattel, in accordance with post-Utrecht reason of state. In the Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793) he cited Vattel to show that the right to intervene became a duty in certain circumstances, according to "whether it be a bona fide charity to a party, and a prudent precaution with regard to yourself." As Burke showed with an appendix of extracts from Vattel, intervention against France would be a "prudent precaution" for all European states precisely because the French republic presented an unprecedented threat to their natural reasons of state -their interests, their security, and above all their shared political maxims as partners in the commonwealth of Europe.60 Proximity, vicinity, and legitimate apprehension of danger therefore justified intervention: as Burke crisply summarized this position in 1796, "I should certainly dread more from a wild cat in my bed-chamber, than from all the lions that roar in the deserts beyond Algiers."61 Burke argued in the Thoughts on French Affairs (1791) that, though there had been many internal revolutions within the governments of Europe, none (not even the Glorious Revolution) had effects beyond their own limited territories. However, he added: The present Revolution in France seems to me to be quite of another character and description; and to bear little resemblance or analogy to any of those which have been brought about in Europe, upon principles merely political. It is a Revolution of doctrine and theoretick dogma. It has a much greater resemblance to those changes which have been made upon religious grounds, in which a spirit of proselytism makes an essential part.
The last Revolution of doctrine and theory which has happened in Europe, is the Reformation ... [the] effect [of which] was to introduce other interests into all countries, than those which arose from their locality and natural circumstances.62 To introduce alien interests, as the Reformation had done and as the Revolution threatened to do, and in particular to introduce alien interests which claimed universal applicability, such as justification by faith or the rights of man, dissolved the necessary connection between a state's natural situation and the idiomatic interests it generated. Thereby, "if they did not absolutely destroy, [they] at least weakened and distracted the locality of patriotism"63 and with it the determinative, organic reasons of state.
Throughout the 1790s and particularly during the opening years of the war against the Directory Burke maintained that Britain and its allies were engaged against France in a "religious war," "a moral war" against the "armed doctrine" of "a sect aiming at universal empire."64 Of course he was not alone in arguing that the war against the Directory was a war of religion; such arguments were a staple of Anglican polemic during the early years of the war. This "new and unheard-of scheme of conquest and aggrandizement ... the total subversion of every lawful government, of all order, of all property, and of all established religion" could only be resisted by a "just and necessary war," argued Walker King at Gray's Inn in 1793. "The nation with whom we are at war," Charles 62

Manners Sutton told the members of the House of Lords in the following year,
"is professedly a heathen nation; and unless it shall please God to spare his people, our laws, and liberty, and religion, are inevitably lost." Such "a war against all Religion, carried on in the very center of Christendom, by a people hitherto numbered among the most enlightened of nations," George Gordon informed his audience in Exeter on the same day, "is a novelty in history"; to oppose it would demand "a war of ster necessity, and consequently of the strictest justice."65 However, Burke's charge of universal empire hinted that the French republic was as great a threat to the common maxims of the great republic of Europe as Louis XIV had been almost a century earlier. In his international theory as in his political theory Burke remained true to the ideological inheritance of English Whiggism not least because he drew so heavily on Vattel, whose anglophilia was decidedly Whig in complexion66 and whose doctrines of the law of nations were directed to the same end as Burke's, that is, to the defense of the European balance of power and the new international reasons of state originally guaranteed by the Treaty of Utrecht.
Burke was more than just a conspiracy theorist of the Revolution (though he did sympathize with those, like the Abbe Barruel, who saw free-thinkers, Freemasons, and Jews behind the events of 1789 and thereafter);67 he was also more than simply the most frantic and prominent apologist for Anglicanism in the face of French revolutionary atheism (though there is truth in that view, too). He was in fact a classic early modem theorist of reason of state within the natural-law tradition revived by Grotius and revised by Vattel. Reason of state made the internal and external realms of state policy mutually intelligible for Burke; it provided him with an argument to ensure security in extremity without destroying security, property, or law; and it provided the most persuasive analysis of the collapse of the European state system, the failure of the balance of power, and the desperate need for self-preservation compelled by the French Revolution.68 This strain within Burke's political thought showed that reason of state had not lost its rational basis long before 1789 (pace Reinhard Koselleck);69 it also demonstrated that it was not a necessary consequence of reason-of-state theory that it should separate a state's domestic maxims from its foreign policies (pace Meinecke);70 and it proved, to Burke's satisfaction (as it no doubt would have been to Vattel's, too), that reason of state was not by definition the enemy of "law or innate moral principles" (pace almost everybody).71 However, Vattel and Burke stood at the end of this tradition of reason of state. After all, it was in the context of the same late eighteenth-century wars that Kant and Bentham produced their respective plans for perpetual peace, each of whom attempted to conceive cooperative, transparent international norms and institutions that would render such reason of state inoperable and obsolete.72 Both also questioned the Whiggishly self-congratulatory account of the Glorious Revolution on whose historical foundations Burke's theory rested, Kant because it exemplified both a "monstrous" appeal to "a right of necessity" (ius in casu necessitatis) and a tacit, standing right to rebellion without restriction, Bentham because he could not see it as beneficial for the interest of the nation (rather than to the "particular interest of the aristocratical leaders in the revolution").73 The Kantian categorical imperative and Bentham's greatest happiness principle provided competing but equally fatal alternatives to this tradition of reason of state; their anathematization of it opened up that gulf between morality and politics out of which Meinecke's instrumentalist account-and, consequently, almost everyone else's-emerged. To place Burke on one side or the other of this argument has always risked distorting historical accounts of his thought, whether in the political sphere or the international realm; it has also sharpened the distinction between these two arenas in ways which neither early moder theorists of reason of state nor Burke himself would have recognized. Burke's place in the history of international thought should therefore be assimilated more closely to his position in the traditions of political thought, as a standing reproach to procrustean taxonomies and overhasty appropriations.