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| Passions and Order: Burke’s Sublime Theory and the Establishment of Political Order |
| Zhu Xin |
| School of International Relations, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing 100029, China |
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Abstract “Hobbesian problem of order”, as the core issue of modern political philosophy, poses a severe challenge to the modern society: how to establish a stable and lasting normative order while enabling individuals to achieve self-preservation in a modern society where individual freedom is highly valued? Based on the relationship between passions and order, Edmund Burke’s political philosophy provides an inspiring perspective for a profound understanding of the malaise of political modernity and solving the Hobbesian problem of order. Burke’s scheme, while inheriting Hobbes, has made a great revision. On the one hand, similar to Hobbes, Burke also regards self-love as the most fundamental passion of human beings and social passions as the necessary means to satisfy self-love for the normative structure required by a stable social order. In order to make up for the deficits of social affection in a large-scale society, the most fundamental solution for Burke, like Hobbes, is to appeal to the fear imposed by the sublimity of political authority. Governments dispose over instruments of power, and the threat of their use evokes the passions associated with the sublime, which draws people back to their duties and thus guarantees the normative order of coexistence. On the other hand, Burke finds this sort of blanket answer to the problem of deficits of social affection to be inadequate, since external coercive forces alone could not form a positive social bond as well as integrate social life into an organic whole. Individuals are structurally isolated and antagonistic in economic life; there would seem nothing but abstract rights to link one subject to the other in the political arena. Therefore, Burke attempts to build a bridge between self and others through the reinterpretation of the notion of natural sociability, and thence revises Hobbes’ scheme to a large extent. The public value of beauty has been regarded as increasingly crucial for maintaining the strength of social affection in a large-scale society. Through the harmonizing effect of the beautiful on the sublime, the whole middle region of social life between individual and state is restored. Among the three elements of the notion of natural sociability—sympathy, imitation and ambition, Burke tries to restrain the destructive power released by the infinite expansion of ambition passion through sympathy and imitation passions, so that people can realize the return of human nature from self-esteem to self-love. First of all, sympathy, as the main social passion, partakes of the nature of those regarding self-preservation. Delight derived from pain then awakens people’s awareness of their own fragility and finitude, thus restraining the infinite expansion of ambition and establishing a link between self-love and social concern. However, Burke endorses the partiality of sympathy rather than universal sympathy. In order to balance the emotional difference between particular society and general society, Burke tries to utilize the moral imagination of sympathy to reshape the political order through familial affections, so that power is softened by love and beauty is gradually included within the sublimity of the masculine power. Secondly, imitation, another important social passion, is characterized by mutual compliance and serves as one of the strongest social bonds. Habits derived from imitation transform people’s “first nature” into “second nature”, thus bridging the gap between blind individualism and abstract universalism. At the political level, in virtue of the “beginningless” nature of habits, Burke attempts to tame the revolution by hiding the truth about the origin of authority behind the natural appearance of custom and prescription. On this basis, sublimity is less intimately connected with a spatial relation and more closely associated with a temporal one and agedness is no longer an imperfection that dilutes sublimity. Instead, agedness evokes people’s awareness of mortality, assisting them to acquire humble and prudent knowledge of the real world. Hence they become content with their limited possessions, and establish a boundary between himself and others. In summary, possessive individualism prevailing in the modern Western society abandons everyone to his own private space, dissolves all positive bonds between them and thrusts them into mutual conflicts. Faced with this dilemma, Burke realizes that relying on the coercive power of the state alone is unsatisfactory, therefore he regards social passions as the necessary complement to reshape the sense of unity of men, so as to bridge the gap between absolute individualism and abstract rationalism and integrate individuals into a cohesive whole without loss of individuality.
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Received: 25 November 2021
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2022, Vol. 52 
