Estado Sentido

 Peter Berkowitz, "Debate Club":

Burke’s thinking is informed by an opinion about nature very different from Paine’s conception of solitary and asocial man. For Burke, man is by nature a social animal: Human beings are always living in a complex web of relations to other human beings and bound by obligations that tie each individual not only to the living but also to the dead and those not yet born. Political society does not derive its legitimacy from consent but rather from its ability to satisfy human needs. Individual liberty may be the highest need satisfied by politics, but satisfying it does not consist primarily in the enumeration of rights but in respecting duties, exercising restraint, maintaining soundly structured institutions, and adjusting laws to the habits, sentiments, and passions of the people. Political analysis is led astray by the search for abstract principles of reason; it should rely instead on study of “the history and character of one’s own society.” Principles of justice are embedded in long-standing practices and traditions, discerned on the basis of experience, and implemented by prudence or practical judgment. Since “change is the most powerful law of nature,” statesmen must constantly adjust, balance, and calibrate, crafting reforms that proceed gradually, incrementally, and in keeping with the spirit of the people and the principles that have served them well. While Burke believed in human equality, he thought that preparation for the hard task of governing required the kind of leisure and education typical of a natural aristocracy within a free society. Because of the limits of human reason—both its inability to resolve the deepest philosophical issues and its weakness in directing the passions and disciplining the imagination—a large role in political life must be reserved for “prescription,” or the presumption in favor of the long-standing institutions of civil society, particularly family and faith, that mold morals. Political parties “must ever exist in a free country” since citizens uniting around their favored principles is the best way to nurture the variety of principles on which freedom depends. Revolution of the sort seen in France is always wrong; it undermines the freedom in whose name it is undertaken by destroying the manners, mores, and attachments that restrain the human lust for power.