It is in his attack on the abstract and individualistic doctrine of the “rights of man” that Burke develops most fully this philosophy of society, and breaks most decisively with the mechanical and atomic political theory which, inherited from Locke, had dominated the thought of the eighteenth century. Over against the view of the state as the product of a “contract” among individuals, whose “rights” exist prior to that contract, and constitute the standard by which at every stage the just claim of society on the individual is to be tested, he develops the conception of the individual as himself the product of society, born to an inheritance of rights (which are “all the advantages” for which civil society is made) and of reciprocal duties, and, in the last resort, owing these concrete rights (actual rights which fall short in perfection of those ideal rights “whose abstract perfection is their practical defect”) to convention and prescription.
Society originates not in a free contract but in necessity, and the shaping factor in its institutions has not been the consideration of any code of abstract pre-existent rights (“the inherent rights of the people”) but “convenience.” And, of these conveniences or rights, two are supreme, government and prescription, the existence of “a power out of themselves by which the will of individuals may be controlled,” and the recognition of the sacred character of prescription. In whatever way a particular society may have originated—conquest, usurpation, revolution (“there is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all government”)—in process of time, its institutions and rights come to rest upon prescription. In any ancient community such as that of France or Britain, every constituent factor, including what we choose to call the people, is the product of convention. The privileges ......
