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Edmund Burke and the Case Against Ideology

By Walter Donway

January 10, 2026

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This is Part III of a three-part article on traditionalism, ideology, and political reaction.

 

The origin of “conservatism” in politics goes back to the Age of Reason (1765 to 1815).

The origin of “conservatism” in politics goes back to the Age of Reason or Enlightenment (1765 to 1815). Centuries before “conservatives” and “Objectivists” crossed swords, the Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke, had articulated a philosophy that would define one side of this enduring debate. Burke’s ideas arose in direct opposition to the Enlightenment ideas and ideals that inspired Ayn Rand: reason, secularism, the “universalism” of man’s nature, the primacy of the individual, a focus on individual happiness, human rights, limited government, and capitalism.

Burke’s worldview clashed with the convictions of his Enlightenment contemporaries.

Burke’s worldview clashed with the convictions of his Enlightenment contemporaries such as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin. Indeed, the word “conservative” entered political discourse with the French Revolution (1789–1815). The upheaval in France could be said to have begun with the declaration of the “Rights of Man.” That declaration and the ruthless battle for its ideals enthralled Enlightenment intellectuals until the gradual and then accelerating escalation into the appalling Terror of the 1790s. That crystallized the conservative reaction of Burke into a philosophy in his 1790 publication, Reflections on the Revolution in France. By far the era’s most famous critique of the Revolution’s fundamental principles, the pamphlet became an immediate bestseller in both English and French and in it Burke asserted a credo sharply at odds with the Enlightenment’s ideas and ideals. His target was the claim of British radicals and French revolutionaries alike that society could and must be rebuilt on the basis of “abstract” principles of reason and natural rights. Burke instead champions continuity, caution, and the accumulated wisdom of history. It is fair, I think, to label Burke a founder of the anti-ideological approach to politics. He distrusted, even anathematizing, politics proceeding from views of man’s nature and their logical implications for morality and politics and advocated instead organic social evolution. He summed it all up, saying that change should “come as the consequence of a need generally felt, not inspired by fine-spun abstractions.”

 

Edmund Burke’s Conservative Reaction to the Terror

The context is well known. The Revolution initially inspired ecstasy at its rapid, no-holds-barred implementation of lofty Enlightenment ideals: liberty, reason, equality, secularism. Burke himself began sympathetic to calls for reform when the Revolution began in 1789. Events soon spiraled into “the old Paris madness” with collapse of the monarchy, destruction of churches and clergy alike, the rise of mob rule, execution of the king and queen, and the exaltation of the guillotine. In 1790, a shocked Burke warned that the French were becoming “the ablest architects of ruin,” dismantling the pillars of their society with reckless zealotry. Then came Reflections, written to rebut a pro-Revolution sermon by Richard Price and pour scorn on the notion that political constitutions could be designed by mere reasoning. Burke famously wrote that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England (which had affirmed Englishmen’s traditional rights against a tyrannical king) was nothing like the French endeavor to erect a brand-new society on the rubble of the ancien regime. The English Revolution, he argued, was made “to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty”—not to spin a new social order out of abstract philosophy. In a memorable line, he groaned: “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.” Burke urged reverence for the “inheritance” of civilization. “Whatever we have, whatever rights we enjoy, we hold and claim as an inheritance from our forefathers,” not as something bestowed by our own theoretical reasoning.

Rights, in his view, were not universal abstractions but specific historic liberties that had been established over time.

Burke wrote and said much, but one can distill the core principles of his conservative mindset. First, a suspicion of abstract philosophy in politics. Burke rejected the Enlightenment idea that one could derive political rights and systems by (as he saw it) sheer reason. He saw such a priori reasoning as dangerously disconnected from reality. Rights, in his view, were not universal abstractions but specific historic liberties that had been established over time (for example, the rights of Englishmen enshrined in Magna Carta and the common law). Second, an emphasis on tradition and continuity: legitimate social order grows out of the experience of generations. Institutions like the rule of law, the church, property rights, and the “ancient constitution” of England were valued because they had stood the test of time and provided stability. He likened society to a living organism or a partnership among “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” as he wrote elsewhere—an ongoing contract across ages. Third, a preference for incremental reform over radical change: when change is necessary, it must be rooted in what already works, preserving as much continuity as possible. He did not oppose incremental reforms, supporting some measures in Britain, and he notably sympathized with the American colonists’ demands for their traditional rights. The bright line he drew was at revolution, which he saw as arrogantly severing links to the past and unleashing chaos. It was not only hubris but a formula for fanatical destruction implemented by violence. He predicted (accurately) that the attempt to realize abstract “rights of man” without any regard for inherited social norms would degenerate into tyranny and terror.

Opposing Burke were articulate and equally impassioned advocates of the Enlightenment vision, who viewed Burke as an apologist for monarchy, social hierarchy, and the Catholic church.

His treatise did not go unchallenged. It ignited one of history’s great intellectual duels, a “pamphlet war” that defined the fault lines of modern politics. Opposing Burke were articulate and equally impassioned advocates of the Enlightenment vision, who viewed Burke as an apologist for monarchy, social hierarchy, and the Catholic church. The first rejoinder came from Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist writer, who in 1790 published A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet ably defended the French Revolution, attacking Burke’s reverence for tradition. She accused Burke of forgetting the plight of the living in his worship of the dead; she championed reason and equality against his attachment to rank and custom. Hot on her heels, in 1791, came Thomas Paine (already famous for Common Sense) with The Rights of Man. It aimed directly at Burke, celebrating the Revolution as what it took to win the ideals of reason against centuries of oppression and injustice. “We do not inherit rights like some piece of property,” Paine insisted; each generation has the right to shape its government according to its own understanding of the natural rights of man. To Paine, the “rights of Englishmen” that Burke lionized were parochial and antiquated: Why not the rights of all men? These exchanges laid bare the new philosophical collision of rational design with inherited rights and evolved order.

Most radical was William Godwin, initially a supporter of Burke’s Whig circle, who broke with him over the Revolution. In 1793, Godwin published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice that took Enlightenment rationalism to its extremes (and well beyond). He argued that human society could eventually be perfected by reason; he envisioned the gradual abolition of government coercion, private property, and even traditional institutions like marriage in favor of voluntary, rational arrangements. This makes Godwin one of the founders of philosophical anarchism. He described his treatise as born of the revolutionary zeitgeist, “the child of the French Revolution.” Like Paine and Wollstonecraft, he saw Burke’s creed of tradition as an obstacle to human liberation. Where Burke warned that society’s wisdom is too complex for any one mind to redesign, Godwin retorted that society’s evils are too great to leave intact. By the mid-1790s, Europe had thus witnessed the prototype of a debate that continues in various forms today: whether to view inherited social order as a treasure or a strait jacket and whether to view reason as the justified architect of social and political arrangements or the hubris of intellectuals pretending godlike powers to recreate the world.

 

The Burkean Mistrust of Philosophical Visions

What endures of Burkean conservatism? The conviction that the blueprint for a free society cannot be drawn by “pure reason.” The blueprint already has been drawn by cultural norms, precedents, and gradual adjustments made through trial and error over perhaps centuries. “The individual is foolish, but the species is wise,” Burke wrote, suggesting that the collective experience of humanity (the “wisdom of our ancestors”) deserves far more credit than the isolated rationality of a single theorist or school. Later conservative thinkers systematized this idea. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that in its Burkean form, conservatism “mistrusts a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested arrangements.”

Few conservatives, of course, would explicitly oppose reason; they would skeptically scrutinize reason’s power to foresee and dictate complex human affairs. Abstract plans for society—utopias, as critics call them—tend to go awry, because they cannot encompass the infinite, subtle interactions that define real social life. As Burke observed of the Revolution, when unchecked “philosophical speculation” drives politics, it often shreds the very fabric that makes civil society possible at all (laws, traditions, moral habits), yielding not a rational paradise but disillusionment and bloodshed.

Did history bear out some of Burke’s fears? The French Revolution’s early idealism did give way to the Reign of Terror by 1793–94, vindicating Burke’s dire warnings about “a world of monsters” unleashed in France. He did not live to see it, but the 20th century would go on to provide even more catastrophic examples of utopian social engineering. Revolutions in Russia, China, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere attempted to remake entire societies according to ideological blueprints—Marxist-Leninist in those instances. The result was totalitarian dictatorship, mass murder, and often economic collapse on an unprecedented scale. In the aftermath of World War II, Western intellectuals across the spectrum became far more conscious of “the terrors of ideological warfare.” The word ideology now often carries a negative connotation, suggesting closed-minded dogma that justifies terrible means for utopian ends that are as terrible. Burke’s conservative heirs might well say, we told you so. As one modern conservative commentator put it, “ideologies are not only dangerous, but deadly in their attempts to forcibly reduce reality into a set of inflexible ideas wholly unsuited to their application…. The violence to truth and human souls is incalculable when rulers try to impose the unreality of ideology onto its populace.

The conservative traditionalist Russell Kirk, a great admirer of Burke, wrote that conservatism is not an ideology but the negation of ideology. “Conservatism values what has grown up over time…in the form of traditions, customs and habits. Ideology, in contrast, says that on the basis of some philosophy, certain things must be true—and when reality contradicts that deduction, reality must be suppressed.” Here is Burke’s legacy filtered through 20th-century lenses. By contrast, the conservative trusts the “spontaneous order” of society—the evolved patterns of behavior and institutions not consciously designed that have proven their worth by enabling communities to survive and thrive over time. This inclination to “first, do no harm” to society explains why conservatives often stress the unintended consequences of well-intentioned reforms, and why they prize continuity even amid change.

When neoconservatism sprouted in the 1970s, it was ideological so far as it was born out of reaction of the founders to their earlier devotion to communism (mostly Trotskyist). But for the most part, it is fair to characterize them as “traditionalists with a difference.” Neoconservatism was and is a decidedly intellectual not a popular movement and tended to be scholarly in making its case for “standards,” “decency,” and respect for authority—in reaction to decay of all three into cultural nihilism in the 1960s. And yet, in neoconservatism there is undeniably a “rationalist element at which Burke might bristle. In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom, the most famous student of neocon icon Leo Strauss, writes that America “is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature,” a “regime” guaranteeing “untrammeled freedom to reason.” Culture became a concern because American “values” were a concern. Neocon “capitalism” was and is more a matter of tradition than ideology, but without an animus toward capitalism they could recognize its social and political virtues for what they were—and acknowledge the realities of what the welfare state had wrought. Too little emphasized, though, is the stark realization that hit its Jewish founders like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz in the early 1970s: Only in a world where America was politically stable, committed to the Western cultural heritage, and prepared to use military force in “good” causes would the State of Israel be safe.

 

Objectivism in the Shadow of Burke

How, then, does Rand’s vision look when seen against the backdrop of Burkean conservatism? Well, first, there is an obvious retort to the supposed horrors of ideology. Ideology postulates principles intended to guide successful social change; it is neither good nor bad in itself. The critical question is its content, the truth or falsity of a given ideology. Is it rooted in accurate perception of reality, logical, and cognizant of the full context of its challenge? Or is it a dogma proceeding from false premises—often from a deep well of human resentment, envy, and hostility toward the success of others?

Rand was heir to Enlightenment ideals that Burke resisted.

Rand was heir to Enlightenment ideals that Burke resisted. She defiantly characterized herself as a “radical for capitalism,” rooting her politics in the nature of man, the role of reason in human life, the volitional nature of consciousness, and consequently a code of values serving the purpose of the individual’s survival and its emotional concomitant of fulfillment and happiness. The political imperative: that the individual be free to exercise his judgment free from force, which requires a government dedicated to protecting individual rights, including property, with safeguards against itself becoming the violator-in-chief of those rights.

Burke might be appalled; Rand’s is a blueprint from a capitalist/libertarian utopia, the polar opposite of the socialist utopias that wreaked havoc in the 20th century. She did not duck the utopian label; she named her ideal community (“Galt’s Gulch” in Atlas Shrugged), “the Utopia of Greed”—a deliberate reclaiming of the word greed to mean rational self-interest. She insisted that a society based on self-interest and wholly voluntary exchange would be both moral and practical (rational self-interest made them commensurate.) She claimed that U.S. history itself provided the evidence. America’s founders were Enlightenment intellectuals, embracing its ideology, and, to the extent that they did, America became prosperous and free: “the last best hope of mankind” in the words of Abraham Lincoln. The great challenge was to complete that project by purging the changes wrought by the interventionist-welfare state. In those terms, Objectivism was a rigorously logical next step in the “American experiment.” All that was needed was the courage to follow reason to its final conclusions.

Conservative admirers of free-market economics who had read Rand’s novels balked at her “extreme” vision and program. Few would embrace her atheism, rejection of tradition valued only for tradition’s sake, or principled ethical egoism. Too extreme, too abstract, too unmoored from reality. Russell Kirk dismissed Objectivists (and libertarians) as “chirping sectaries” and accused Rand of being a kind of fanatic. Whittaker Chambers, in that notorious review, warned that Rand’s individualism had a totalitarian flavor—hence his grotesque “gas chamber” line, suggesting that her logic might justify eliminating the weak. (This was a gross misinterpretation of Rand’s actual views, but it reflected the visceral Burkean distrust that Chamber felt of the ideological purism that once had seduced him into communism.)

More measured conservatives argued that human nature and society are not as simple as Rand’s rational principles (“rationalistic schema”?) imply. They pointed out that Rand’s ideal political economy—no state welfare, public education, or economic regulations, purely voluntary charity, and, as the last reform of a drastically downsized government, even uncoercive taxation (e.g., state lotteries)—had never existed and they doubted it could be implemented without revolutionary upheaval. A Burkean might say: We, too, value freedom and free markets—but we must respect the “wisdom of the species” and not throw away every inherited institution overnight. Churches, families, local communities, and even some government programs might serve purposes not immediately visible to abstract reason, but essential for social cohesion (and are precisely the kind of private, voluntary institutions upon which Ayn Rand counted). Could a nation really eliminate, say, all public (government) schools or all social insurance and remain stable? Or would the sudden vacuum lead to social breakdown? Conservatives quietly posed these questions to Rand’s adherents who championed an ideal laissez-faire republic. It was easy to caricaturize Objectivism as a well-intended dream floating above the real world.

 

“The Utopia of Greed”

Rand did not spill much ink on the practical process of moving from the interventionist-welfare state of today to the laissez faire ideal of tomorrow. She provided her philosophical justification for the goal, confident that if people accepted those ideas, the details would sort themselves out through individual initiative. In a private conversation, Rand reportedly did outline a step-by-step plan to dismantle big government over some 50 years—but publicly, she said, “I am not a utopia builder,” and offered limited plans for political gradualism. (She did devote an essay to the most shocking proposal, voluntary taxation.) This silence on means reinforced conservatives’ suspicions that Objectivism was just another revolutionary creed, a rationalist castle in the air.

Burke opposed the “metaphysically designed” social order and Rand’s system falls into that latter category, starting from a single moral principle derived from her metaphysics and epistemology—the moral sovereignty of each individual’s reason, judgment, and rights—and deducing a whole political and therefore economic structure from it. In Objectivism, it is a fundamental principle that no person (and no government) may initiate force against another; from this principle, one can map out the legitimate functions of government’s retaliatory use of force (police, courts, military) and identify everything else as a violation. In Rand’s ideal, all that the state does beyond protecting rights—e.g., running schools, redistributing wealth, managing industries, providing public infrastructure—is illegitimate and must be phased out.

Burke might ask how we can predict what happens when we “subtract” government’s pervasive presence so drastically? Society is not a machine with interchangeable parts; it is a web of interdependence formed over generations. Even if one believes the government should not have taken on certain roles, simply removing those functions in a short span of time might cause chaos that no one intended. Burke would remind us that the French revolutionaries set out to abolish feudal privileges, the state church, and aristocracy in the name of liberty—laudable Enlightenment aims—but the breakneck pace, reliance on unchecked force, and contempt for existing institutions led to social collapse and tyranny. A Burkean conservative might caution that dismantling, say, the modern welfare state in one fell swoop could unleash destabilizing forces. People build their lives, families, and expectations around the framework they know; if that framework is rapidly upended (even replaced by something freer), the transition may not be smooth.

In economic terms, one might draw an analogy between a society and a market ecosystem of billions of individual decisions. No central planner can predict or dictate a complex market’s outcomes—a classic argument for laissez-faire. But doesn’t that apply to society as a whole—only more so? No individual, school, or movement can foresee how deliberately reconstructing a social order will play out, because social traditions and institutions carry tacit knowledge and perform functions too complex to fully understand. Conservatives worry that even well-meant utopias can share the fatal weaknesses of central economic planning, too remote from real life and too rigid to adjust to it.

Rand’s ideal society would come about by education and persuasion.

Rand’s retort was that her “utopia” is nothing like the coercive utopias of socialists, theocrats, or other authoritarians. She did not advocate imposing any blueprint on anyone; rather, she advocated cancellation of a century of unjust laws and regulations to progressively eliminate coercion, freeing individuals to pursue a truly “spontaneous order” and thereby flourish. Rand’s ideal society would come about by education and persuasion. “People would be forced to do nothing,” as one commentator wryly put it. The only “force” required would be that of the electorate to roll back the multifarious coercive programs of leviathan (though we recently have seen the panicked and outraged response). To the Objectivist, this is the ultimate nonutopian utopia: a society with no central plan but freedom, where order arises organically from free individuals cooperating (as in the capitalist economy). Isn’t that precisely what Burkeans should celebrate?

Here we arrive at a subtle point. The Burkean conservative might respond that process matters. How we get from Point A (a semi-statist status quo) to Point B (laissez-faire capitalism) could determine whether or not Point B is workable. If the transformation is “organic” and gradual, guided by evolving public mores and incremental policy changes, it might succeed and be conservative of social peace. But driven by ideological fervor, “enthusiasm,” its pace might resemble the pattern Burke condemned.

Ayn Rand’s tone and rhetoric were uncompromising. In everything she advocated the virtue of consistency. Anything short of full consistency of principles was, to her mind, a dangerous concession. This all-or-nothing stance is exhilarating to some and disquieting to others. Today, any demand for full consistency of principles is characterized as “extremism” and has been since the term was recruited to cudgel Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. And “extremism” now connotes (by intention) violence, the KKK or Nazi brutality. It is the scare word of a political culture so committed to “pragmatism”—opposition in principle to principles—that refusal to compromise a principle is a profound threat. When Barry Goldwater (an ardent fan of Ayn Rand) in his acceptance of the nomination responded to the charge of extremism with the rejoinder “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” his liberal-left critics ran screaming. He would stop at nothing!

To Burkeans, Rand’s conviction in advocating her ideal society could come across as hubris, the intellectual’s fatal conceit that centuries-old political questions can be resolved with a few fresh premises, a little logic, and the old world made anew. After all, the Left’s social engineers, national socialist (Nazi) or Soviet socialist (communistic) also believed they were building a brave new world, claiming science was on their side, and were proved catastrophically wrong. Why should any ideology, even one that speaks the language of liberty, be trusted not to have similar blind spots? Against the backdrop of the 20th century, and what historian Paul Johnson characterized in Modern Times (Ch. 8) as “The Devils,” the questions must not be dismissed. They speak to a profound philosophical divide.

Conservatism did not dissolve in the acid of its internal contradictions. It muddled through, adapting and surviving without ever purging its inconsistencies. To a Burkean, this is not a failure but a sign of pragmatic resilience. In Burke’s own time, after all, the British constitutional order he championed was full of inconsistencies and compromises (liberties for some, disenfranchisement for others; a powerful parliament but a hereditary monarchy; an established church yet growing tolerance of new sects). Burke did not see those as fatal flaws to be extirpated overnight; they were the price of continuity and gradual progress. Likewise, modern conservatism’s mix of free-market rhetoric with religious and national traditions may lack the logical purity Rand demanded, but arguably it has been politically durable. The conservative coalition at times has found ways to nudge policy in a free-market direction (deregulating industries, lowering taxes, challenging welfare programs) while retaining enough tradition to appeal to a broad public. Rand, on the other hand, alienated many potential allies with her atheism and intolerance for even minor disagreements. She knew it; but she thought a philosopher’s consistency and uncompromising insistence on principle spoke to the best within the most rational men and armed them to lead.

Has the conservative movement, then, “won the argument”? No. Leviathan grows apace to gargantuan dimensions with gargantuan spending, money creation, and debt. Most Americans have been co-opted into the welfare state (e.g., Social Security and Medicare) so that dismantling it seems unthinkable. Neither conservatives nor Objectivists can view this as progress. Yet, it has not spurred dialogue between them. Sixty-five years ago, Rand wrote the obituary of conservatism instead of seeking common ground with it. Conservatives, for their part, long shunned Rand as a morally unorthodox, atheistic extremist. It is true that in recent years a few conservative voices (often younger and more secular) have openly acknowledged Rand’s influence on their thinking. But Objectivists have not marketed their philosophy to conservatives as an obvious completion of the American experiment. By and large, a silo mentality persists. What has changed since the cleavage that goes back to Burke and his adversaries?

 

Between Utopia and Reality: Conservatism’s Ongoing Dilemma

“Conservatism: An Obituary” channeled the idealism that runs through Western thought. Rand and Burke would never speak the same language. One looks at a nation and asks,” Are we living up to our highest ideals? If not, let’s change, radically and with all due speed.” The other looks at a nation and asks, “What accumulated wisdom got us here? Are we sure change won’t destroy more than it creates?” The fusionist might ask if a healthy political philosophy and polity needs elements of both mindsets—respect for principle and an appreciation for precedent. America’s founding itself was a blend: a revolution rooted in English legal traditions and the “rights of Englishmen.” It was a new design based on a century of Enlightenment debate, yet one that its drafters argued was consistent with ancient liberties.

Notably, Thomas Jefferson can be quoted on both sides.

Notably, Thomas Jefferson can be quoted on both sides. When he received a copy of the new U.S. Constitution, he wrote to John Adams that the convention had overstepped and “I think all the good of this new constitution might have been couched in three or four new articles to be added to the good, old, and venerable fabric….” But he later commented in a letter to William Smith: “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” a reference to Shays’s Rebellion. (He went on, however, to become a strict constructionist.)

From that perspective, the United States was a fusionist project of principle and tradition—a balance continually tested.

From that perspective, the United States was a fusionist project of principle and tradition—a balance continually tested. Burke praised the Founders for their restraint and wisdom, even as he would caution later generations to revere the constitutional traditions they inherited.

In point of fact, Rand never denied the relevance of the “wisdom of mankind.” She made an enduring impact in part by exciting a new generation of young intellectuals at a pivotal time (the 1960s!) with the logical force, historic achievements, and humanistic glory of the Western philosophical heritage—and by raising the alarm that it was everywhere under attack. She referred to the record of the ideas she advocated or opposed, even as she sought to integrate every idea without contradiction. Perhaps her best-known motto was “Check your premises.”

To live and evolve, conservatism must make explicit the philosophical (especially the moral) foundations of liberty as well as the historical context and continuity of the challenges to workable change. In that synthesis, the obituary that Ayn Rand pronounced for conservatism might, ironically, be rewritten as a new birth announcement—one honoring the past and looking to the future with genuine idealism. For now, the dialogue should continue; the intellectual heirs of Rand and Burke still have much to say to one another, if they choose to listen.

 

 

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