Edmund Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) is the most notable among his early political pamphlets, and perhaps his most famous overall alongside the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). While the Reflections has become a classic of conservatism, it was the Present Discontents that let Burke keep his hero status among Whigs and liberals in the nineteenth century. Liberal Prime Minister John Lord Russell called it “one of the few standard works on the science of government which the world possesses.” In the Present Discontents, Burke laid out his constitutional theory, including his famous defense of political parties.

The text must be understood in the context of party politics after the accession of George III in 1760. The new king had one major objective: to break the Whig oligarchy’s grip on power by allowing the Tories, who had been proscribed from office since the Hanoverian Succession in 1714, back into the fold. As the Whigs ceased being the natural party of government, the Tories, now welcome at court, lost much of their cohesion and identity as an opposition party. Instead of Whig and Tory, parliamentary competition morphed into a struggle between different Whig factions.

Burke’s Present Discontents was written in support of the Rockingham Whig parliamentary connection, a party that had grown out of the “Old Corps of Whigs” under the leadership of the Duke of Newcastle. After Newcastle’s fall from office in 1762 and the dismissal of many of his followers, the leadership of the remnants of the “Old Corps” gradually shifted to a younger generation, chiefly Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham.

The Rockingham party formed the mainstay of a short-lived administration in 1765–66, and among its achievements was the repeal of the Stamp Act. Burke became Rockingham’s private secretary in 1765, and he was elected to Parliament the same year. In this role, Burke emerged as a leading spokesman for the Rockingham Whigs in the House of Commons, and in due course also their chief publicist.

“Wilkes and Liberty” and Secret Influence

The “present discontents” in the pamphlet’s title refers to the Middlesex election dispute, which had given the Whig opposition a great cause to rally around. John Wilkes had become a hero for the London crowd as a populist critic of George III and the king’s favorite Lord Bute in the early 1760s, but he was forced into exile in 1763 after government prosecution. Because of his indebtedness, Wilkes returned to England permanently in 1768, and he sought a seat in Parliament as a member of Middlesex in order to obtain immunity. As he was an indebted outlaw, however, Wilkes was sent to prison, which only increased his popularity. The House of Commons expelled Wilkes, though the electors continued to vote for him in a series of by-elections in 1769. The crowd rioted in response to the treatment of Wilkes, and the parliamentary opposition to which Burke belonged viewed the expulsion of Wilkes as a plainly unconstitutional act.

Burke’s main focus was the cause of the present discontents, which he identified as the Crown’s “secret influence.” The greatest part of the Present Discontents is made up of an analysis of the corrupt court system and exposure of the “double cabinet,” according to which government policy was allegedly made by the king in collusion with an informal group of advisers, known as the “king’s friends,” as opposed to the appointed ministers. Explaining what this was and why it was pernicious meant that Burke could not confine his discussion to contemporary politics but had to embark on constitutional theorizing.

Burke viewed the “double cabinet” as nefarious because of its unaccountability and potential to increase the power of the Crown at the expense of the other parts of the mixed and balanced constitution. Protection of the constitution was key for Burke, who understood it as delicately and precariously balanced. As he wrote in the Present Discontents: “Our constitution stands on a nice equipoise, with steep precipices, and deep waters upon all sides of it.”

Although Burke’s attack on the “double cabinet” as a conspiracy against the constitution may have been hyperbolic, it represented a genuine attempt to grapple with the implications of George III’s accession, and the meaning of Britain’s uncodified constitution. For Burke, the system of Court favoritism and influence suggested that “neither office, nor authority, nor property, nor ability, eloquence, council, skill, or union, are of the least importance.” All that mattered was subservience to the Court. In this way, the “double cabinet”—the separation between the actual administration and an unofficial and unaccountable “interior cabinet” of royal advisors—had created a confused and feeble government which had sullied Britain’s reputation abroad, created discontent at home, without benefiting the monarch himself. What was worse, the system seriously risked disturbing the balance of the constitution, which Burke believed had been protected by the Whigs since the Glorious Revolution in 1688–89.

Principled Political Parties

According to Burke, all parts of the constitution held office as a trust of the people and represented them. But it was only the House of Commons that was “the express image of the feelings of the nation.” As such, it was intended as a body that would check and control the government. Against the backdrop of the expulsion of Wilkes, however, Burke thought that Parliament had started to turn into an instrument of government rather than an assembly holding the executive to account. In this milieu, several thinkers and politicians put forward political reforms to make the House of Commons more responsive to the people.

Burke ultimately rejected the reform proposals available, including more frequent elections and the exclusion of all officeholders from Parliament. He viewed the “horrible disorders among the people attending frequent elections” as too high a price to pay for shortening the duration of Parliaments. But his more substantial objection was that more frequent elections with their expenses would impoverish the landholders before it drained the Court, and thus contribute to reducing their strength and independence vis-à-vis the Crown. His opposition to parliamentary reform must thus be understood as part of his concern that the Whig party must be an effective check on the power of the Crown. Moreover, though Burke was not against excluding certain officeholders from Parliament in principle, he did not think that all of them should be excluded. For him, the transparency of the influence of officeholders was less pernicious than “clandestine corruption.”

Burke’s panacea was the return to power of the Rockingham Whigs, held together and able to challenge the monarch on the basis of the principle of party, which he influentially defined as “a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” Burke was convinced that party connection was necessary for the fulfillment of public duty. Without concert and bonds of friendship, political action would lack “uniformity, perseverance, [and] efficacy.” “When bad men combine, the good must associate,” he famously wrote in the Present Discontents, “else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” Politics was not about having a clean conscience but making a difference.

The genius of the Present Discontents was to explain the necessity of political parties to the workings of Britain’s mixed and balanced constitution. This was far from being the established wisdom at the time. Indeed, George III had come to the throne in 1760 with the intention to break the parties, and he was cheered on by large parts of the political nation. For Burke, however, destroying party was a way for the Court to control Parliament, and effectively the aristocratic and democratic branches of the constitution.

Burke’s most significant intervention in the Present Discontents was to argue that party connection was required for effective politics and that it could restore the balance in the constitution. For him, what was needed was an administration “composed of those who recommend themselves to their Sovereign through the opinion of their country,” in other words, through their parliamentary strength.

According to Burke, legitimate parties are devoted to promoting an understanding of the national interest, and they are united by publicly proclaimed principles, not exclusively by interest. This made them different from factions, which only compete for power and the spoils of office. For this reason, it was vital for Burke that the Rockingham Whigs would be “attached in office to every principle they had maintained in opposition.” A comparable distinction between parties and factions remains central to modern political theory.

By celebrating the legacy of the Whig supremacy, Burke has sometimes been accused of behaving obsequiously toward aristocracy, to which he, as an Irish novus homo, did not belong. In a classic treatment, Alfred Cobban called Burke’s conception of government “oligarchic.” The core of Burke’s party was indeed made up of major Whig aristocratic families such as the Cavendishes and the Devonshires. In the Present Discontents, however, Burke pre-empted criticisms on this score by stating that he was “no friend to aristocracy, in the sense at least in which that word is usually understood,” that is to say, as “austere and insolent domination.” But the Whig aristocrats possessed property, rank, and quality, which gave them independence and the ability to stand up to the Court. The Whig cause—the preservation of the parliamentary settlement following the Glorious Revolution—had united them in defense of the common good rather than any specific branch of the constitution. In this sense, Burke’s conception of party was indeed aristocratic, but it was not aristocracy for its own benefit but for the sake of the whole. Moreover, the idea of party enabled the aristocracy to make common cause with the people’s representatives, among whom he numbered.

Active citizenship

Burke presented a second lesser-known solution to the problem of the influence of the Crown in the Present Discontents. This centered on what he termed “the interposition of the body of the people itself,” by which he meant a more politically active citizenry and especially electorate. This might come as a surprise to some of his readers, since he has, ever since his famous speech in Bristol in 1774 in opposition to constituency instructions, become known as the chief representative of the trustee theory of representation. But it must be emphasized that Burke, in his Bristol speech and elsewhere, argued that representatives must be attentive to the concerns of their constituents. In his Speech on Enforcement of the Stamp Act (1766), he said, “Nothing can hurt a popular assembly so much as being unconnected with its constituents.” In 1769, he told Parliament: “When they [constituents] come to us upon constitutional ground, the sense of the people without doors is to be listened to with great attention, with great care.”

The Present Discontents laid out Burke’s vision for how the relationship between MPs and constituents could be strengthened by organizational means. He stressed the responsibility of voters to pay attention to the conduct of their representatives. To this end, they should arrange meetings and establish “standards, for judging more systematically upon their [Members of Parliaments’] conduct.” In order to be able to do this properly, the public needed access to division lists to see how their MPs voted. In a word, Burke believed that the relationship between voters and representatives should be a close one, and that politics needed to be transparent for this to be possible.

In short, Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents put forward a vision of a transparent parliamentary system in which political parties compete for power based on their support from an engaged and informed electorate, as an alternative to a reinvigorated personal monarchy, bolstered by surreptitious and unaccountable advisors. Its status as a Liberty Classic is undeniable, and rather than the archnemesis of political modernity, its author was one of its prophets.