Richard Price

The ur-text of the radical response to Burke’s Reflections was Richard Price’s A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, which he delivered as a speech on 4 November 1789 to the Revolution Society in London. As a Dissenting minister, Price’s celebration of the French Revolution, and his comparison of it to the 1688 Revolution, was heavily influenced by the language and the principles of the new rhetoric. But Price’s was a resolutely political application, of this mostly scientific movement, and while his language set the parameters of the linguistic element of the ensuing controversy, it was Burke’s reaction to Price’s language that truly politicised the new rhetoric. Speaking of the traditional sources of conservative, aristocratical power, Price wrote in a typical passage that if he and his allies could ‘[r]emove the darkness in which they envelope the world… their usurpations will be exposed, their power will be subverted, and the world emancipated’.¹⁸ This association of the good and the clear is essential for the dissemination of truth and the energy of revolution: ‘[e]very degree of illumination which we can communicate must do the greatest good. It helps to prepare the minds of men for the recovery of their rights, and hastens the overthrow of priestcraft and tyranny’.¹⁹ The progression of revolution through progressive information reflects an Enlightenment belief William Godwin invoked in the first words of his influential first edition of Political Justice:

[f]ew works of literature are held in greater estimation, than those which treat in a methodical and elementary way of the principles of science. But the human mind in every enlightened age is progressive; and the best elementary treatises after a certain time are reduced in their value by the operation of subsequent discoveries. Hence it has always been desired by candid enquirers, that preceding works of this kind should from time to time be superseded, and that other productions including the larger views that have since offered themselves, should be substituted in their place.²⁰

Although Price’s relatively careful statement only refers to the preparation and possibility of revolution, and Godwin qualifies his progressive claims here by positing the possibility of unenlightened ages which are, by implication, stagnant if not actually regressive, another aspect of radical writing represented an illumination which would necessarily communicate the energy necessary for destruction of old orders. In the continuation of the section quoted above, Price states: ‘[i]n short, we may, in this instance, learn our duty from the oppressors of the world. They know that the light is hostile to them, and therefore they labour to keep men in the dark’.²¹

Price had long been involved in pamphlet provocations which critiqued forms of conservative government and religion in the terms of the political rhetoric of clarity, as one can see, for example, in his 1779 exchange with Robert Lowth, who had by then ascended the ranks of religious hierarchy to become Bishop of London. Price employs the figures of radical clarity to claim that ‘[i]t is a sad mistake to think that… there are mysteries in civil government of which they [private men] are not the judges’,²² and on the next page he associates constitutional mystery with the religious rhetoric of obscurity: ‘[i]t is thus, that in RELIGION, a set of holy usurpers have pretended that there are mysteries in religion of which the people are not judges, and into which they should not enquire; and that, for this reason, they ought to resign to them the direction of their faith and consciences’.²³ That Burke took issue with the rhetoric of Price’s incendiary work demonstrates not only the prevailing preoccupation with the influence of publication on the public – not on ‘the reader’ in some internal psylosophical encounter with hermeneutical boundaries and horizons of the self, or of the author’s prior reading on his writing – was a sign of a shared anxiety about the dangers of the public to act on information that was uncontrolled, or inspired by an indeterminately divine or demonic source.

What the ‘radicals’ and ‘reactionaries’ shared, and what grounded their interest in rhetoric, was a fear that misinformation meant misformation of the recipient of any public communication. It could just as well have been Burke who wrote ‘[c]ertain it is, indeed, that much greater evils are to be dreaded from the fury of a people, ignorant and blind, than from the resistance and jealousy of a people inquisitive and enlightened’.²⁴ The difference between them, of course, was the belief on the part of the radicals that all human individuals shared a universal nature which was susceptible to inevitable improvement, provided the right conditions, while their opponents believed that the practicalities of education and the reifications of hierarchical class division established hierarchies in mental capacity which required, in turn, hierarchies of communication. But the reaction to Burke’s reaction to Price could not be conducted in straightforward figurative and political battles. As Lowell T. Frye has remarked,

Burke was a master rhetorician, and - not to take away from his care with the sources at his disposal - the power of the Reflections does not rest solely or even primarily in the reliability of its facts. To displace the Burkean interpretation would require a rhetorical as well as a factual triumph.²⁵

With the rhetoric of obscurity labouring to keep men in the dark, it was the burden of the rhetoric of clarity to undertake a labour of inversive, metarhetorical transvaluations of Burke’s rhetoric of obscurity.