Burke’s sovereign does not exert power or dictate legislation instead, he or she creates political affect. Burke’s monarch is given a singular task: “to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment” and thereby to bind the political body together. But even while predicting that a Cromwell-like dictator would fill the vacuum left by a deposed monarchy, Reflections never depicts sovereignty in these traditional terms of suspending the constitution or declaring war. From Machiavelli to Carl Schmitt, the often-reactionary traditions of political realism have continually insisted that sovereignty be concentrated in an individual who, in times of crisis, can declare war, martial law, or the state of exception. Īt first blush, the demand for an embodied sovereign may appear an obvious position for a political conservative such as Burke. in persons so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.” Against mere abstraction and empty juridical formalism, political sovereignty, in a very literal sense, must have a body.

Burke’s 1791 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs claims that England’s mixed constitution, in order to exist at all, must have a “real, not nominal monarchy, as its essential basis.” More decisively still, Reflections insists that, without a concrete sovereign, “our institutions can never be embodied. What ultimately distinguishes these two revolutions, however, is a point that will remain a central tenet of Burke’s later counterrevolutionary work: sovereignty, in order to be concrete, needs a monarch. While the Glorious Revolution of 1689 was a mere “deviation” within an otherwise normal historical continuity, France was in the midst of a “complete revolution,” trying to remake the nation in conformity with such newly fashioned concepts as the universal rights of man. Opposing these abstractions, especially the new political theories outlined in La déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, Burke insists that politics must ground itself on concrete historical realities. For Burke and his inheritors, such as Joseph de Maistre and Novalis, the driving force behind the “t he most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle” was not the biological needs of the Parisian multitudes but what Burke calls the “naked reason” of Enlightenment rationality. Following Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France, counterrevolutionary writing of the late eighteenth century entrenched itself in opposition to the speculative political programs emanating from revolutionary France.

Burke reflections