A Vindication of Natural Society

Edmund Burke’s first work, originally issued anonymously in 1756 as a letter attributed to “a late noble writer.” The Vindication is a political and social satire ridiculing the popular enlightenment notion of a pre-civil “natural society.”

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Citation

A Vindication of Natural Society: or, a View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of Artificial Society. In a Letter to Lord ** by a Late Noble Writer, ed. Frank N. Pagano (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1982).

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David Hume (Author)

Hume was an acquaintance of Burke and their intellectual relationship has long been the source of lively debate. The two shared a broadly skeptical view of politics that has marked them both as proto-conservatives and Hume also had a low opinion of Bolingbroke. But Hume’s religious skepticism stands in stark contrast with the message of the Vindication.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Author)

Burke probably did not have Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality in mind when writing the Vindication. But the satirical political arguments he uses to attack Bolingbroke’s religion—that law and politics have made men worse—bear a resemblance to the more serious ones made in the Discourse the previous year.
Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (Author)

The Vindication made a satirical case for “natural society” mimicking the style and argumentation of Bolingbroke’s religious works.

Key Quotes

The State

I have defended Natural Religion against a Confederacy of Atheists and Divines. I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper than it is at present to hear Truth, or when I shall be more indifferent about its…

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