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Edmund Burke’s ‘commonwealth’: an alternative modernity
05 March 2025
In his early work A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), Edmund Burke wrote of the political imaginings of ‘old Hobbes’ that ‘War was the State of Nature’ (Burke 1981-2015, I, 142), and that the ‘artificial Division of Mankind, into separate Societies, is a perpetual Source in itself of Hatred and Dissension among them’ (Burke 1981-2015, I, 153). Burke comprehensively refuted Hobbes as antithetical to any notion of ‘the commonwealth’, as he called it, or the common good, for old Hobbes imagined each independent state, or autonomous individual, at war with all else, in competition for resources, and above all, for power. Burke looked back beyond Hobbes to Christian Platonist traditions that drew on classical and mediaeval thought, including Aristotle, Cicero, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and Hooker, to champion constitutionalism as the best defence against manifestations of autocratic and arbitrary power in civil, social, political and international spheres (see McIlwain). For Burke, ‘power’ is conceived, not as a competitive possession, but as a divinely ordained gift, dispersed through human constitutions, institutions and associations, to be used in public service to promote the common good.
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