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Edmund Burke and the Quality of Honor*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Abraham D. Kriegel
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Extract

Whether Burke is placed in the tradition of natural law theorists or the school of historical utilitarians, scholars agree that his conception of liberty was inextricably linked to a belief in the inviolability of landed property, its salutary transmission through the ages, and a correspondingly acute historical consciousness. Perhaps the subsequent universalization of liberty and the gradual respectability of capital as an alternate form of property have obscured the significance of another principle which Burke invariably associated with liberty, but which could neither be universalized nor transformed. That principle was the aristocratic quality of honor, which, for Burke, as for generations of aristocratic spokesmen who succeeded him, remained a condition essential to liberty's preservation and transmission. The theme of honor has received some consideration from scholars in fields of literary criticism and, recently, social anthropology. But it has not attracted the attention it requires, particularly of modern historians, since Burckhardt, who characterized its presence in the Renaissance as “that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism.” This essay examines Burke's conception of honor and its affinity with his ideas of liberty.

Burke's concern for honor was hardly a novelty. In the eighteenth century, honor was taken seriously. It was a quality extolled by Addison, lauded by Pope. Moreover, honor had been analyzed by adherents of both the “selfish” and “moral sense” schools of thought among the British ethical philosophers, particularly in their disquisitions about self-love and benevolence. Hobbes had considered honor to be “the opinion of power.” It legitimized self-aggrandizement. Mandeville, similarly, conceived of honor as a worldly morality inconsistent with virtue which, after all, required self-denial. The man of honor was impelled by a pagan ethic to seek the rewards of approbation. He cherished posthumous fame rather than salvation. Consequently, he behaved according to a code that was superior to the laws of God and the laws of one's country.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , Winter 1980 , pp. 337 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1980

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Footnotes

*

This essay was written during the early stages of my tenure as a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, to which I am most grateful. I also wish to thank Cynthia Pitcock for her outstanding service as a graduate assistant.

References

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