“A small and a temporary deviation”: Edmund Burke’s Reflections on exception in Reflections on the Revolution in France

Abstract

By insisting that the change of monarch as a result of the Glorious Revolution was no more than “a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession,” Edmund Burke was promoting an interpretation of the Glorious Revolution in terms of an exception that simply confirmed the rule. With the French Revolution in full swing across the Channel, this was meant to defuse the potentially revolutionary alternative reading of Richard Price, for whom the principle of popular sovereignty had been asserted in 1688-1689. Yet as Burke himself had to admit, the statesmen of the time had had to deploy considerable legal inventiveness to sustain the case for dynastic continuity, and to smooth over the uncomfortable fact that the constitution had actually broken down. This at least cast doubt on the merely exceptional nature of the Glorious Revolution, suggesting that the case for popular sovereignty was stronger than Burke had cared to admit.

Keywords

• Burke
• Locke
• Révolution française
• Révolution glorieuse
• exception